If your wife resents you, there is a question that can drive you absolutely crazy.

How can she still be this angry about something when you've apologized for it, you've changed the behavior, and in some cases she will even admit that you're different now?

Well in this video today, I want to show you why her resentment can survive a sincere apology and even survive genuine change, why changing after the marriage reaches a crisis can create another painful question for your wife, and what real repair looks like if you want the two of you to eventually build something that isn't controlled by everything that happened before.

RESENTMENT IS MEANING 

I know that you are watching this and you have been in AT LEAST one situation where you and your wife are in a bit of a disagreement that may turn a bit heated, and she brings up something from a LONG time ago. 

She will mention something you did four years ago and your immediate reaction is probably something like, “why are you bringing that up,  I apologized for that so many times. I don't even do that anymore.”, whatever that is that you did that she is bringing up. 

When you are looking from your viewpoint, those are all relevant facts. 

You stopped doing whatever habit it was she said, or it was some one time event that happened which caused some feathers to be ruffled. 

The problem is that you are focused on talking about what happened, versus where she is really coming from, which is l carrying around what the meaning of what happened has meant to her emotionally.  

Unfortunately the facts of the events and what emotions or feelings it stirred up in your wife are not the same thing when it comes to sorting through them.

Let's say there was a period in your marriage when you were working long hours constantly, and you missed a lot of dinners with her or spent a lot of time answering emails all night. 

She may have started to tell you that she felt like you were never really there, and it started to happen more and more and the feelings continued to be brought up by her. 

And your answer to her was that you were building a career and trying to provide for the family.

This is very common, right?

But what is also common is years down the road you will probably reflect and realize that when you look back, you tell yourself yeah, I probably did work way too much. 

So maybe you genuinely fixed that now. You maybe switched jobs and was able to build better boundaries around work, and you are home much more often. 

But your wife’s experience of those years may not have been just, my husband worked way too much?

What if what settled into her emotionally was the thinking that, When I needed him, I was always going to come after something else?

You can see how the slight degree change of perspective starts to really overhaul what we are truly looking at deep down. 

You may have eventually corrected the work schedule, which is valuable for the time to spend more attentively at home.

But the schedule and the meaning she attached to years of living inside that previous schedule aren't necessarily repaired on the same day.

The same thing can happen in terms of communication.

You may remember that you USED to get much more defensive.

She may remember that same fact as years of trying to explain how she felt when you became defensive, and leaving those conversations with the sense that her experience only mattered if she could successfully convince you that she was right.

You can learn to stop being defensive now, and that is great progress. But there may still be conversations that never really got completed because every attempt to have them became another argument.

This is just another verifying reason why seemingly small events can carry a disproportionate amount of weight when resentment has been sitting around for a long time. 

The really frustrating part that happens to you on the fly is that when she brings it up all these years later, you think she is holding your feet to the fire almost as torture but it really boils down to the present incident often mattering seemingly much more to her because the larger unresolved significance is still present underneath everything. 

And the answer is not to tell yourself that nothing you do or say matters, because that is JUST the way she is and she will continue to harp on you. 

What I'm saying is that you can correct the actions or events that happened without ever addressing what living with it meant to her.

Which is an incredibly important distinction because a lot of guys are trying to solve the first problem (all the actions or events) but their wife is still reacting to whatever it meant emotionally to her living with those actions..

YOU MAY HAVE SOLVED THE BEHAVIOR WITHOUT REPAIRING THE INJURY

So let's look at what it really means beyond just the typical  “You need to rebuild trust,” or, “You need better communication.”

When we are talking about repairing your relationship that includes working past her resentment, it  tends to work a lot better when it has something to do with the thing that was damaged.

If you repeatedly made important financial decisions without consulting your wife at all, then the repair probably isn't taking her on more dates to make her feel good about it.

The repair is probably going to involve her experiencing that major decisions are actually shared now, and that you take her opinion seriously so she doesn’t find out after everything has already been decided.

If the old problem was that you disappeared emotionally whenever there was conflict, the repair isn't avoiding conflict because you've become “more peaceful.”

It's being able to stay in a difficult conversation without turning cold, turning it into an argument or forcing the conversation to end before anything meaningful has been said.

So one principle  for you to remember throughout this entire video is that:

The repair has to resemble the damage.

It isn't about doing whatever your wife demands forever, but it is about understanding that repair is specific.

Once you understand what is damaged underneath you can finally start properly repairing the right thing. 

And here is where it gets interesting with resentment...

You can identify what truly needs repairing and start that process, your wife can see it…

She can even acknowledge it…

And somehow that makes her emotional reaction more complicated rather than less.

THE “WHY NOW?” PARADOX

The reason for this is something I call the “Why Now” paradox.

Conventional wisdom would think that if your wife has held some resentment about something for years and you finally changed it, you would expect that she would be so happy about it and give you your flowers.

The paradox is that she is going to start thinking why are you only doing this now. 

Instead of the positive reaction you thought you would get, it actually becomes this painful realization for her that apparently you WERE capable of changing, but she just couldn't get your to care enough to do it while she was still begging for the marriage.

Whether that conclusion she makes is completely fair is up to you to decide, but to be honest it really doesn’t matter.

You have to understand why that conclusion she makes exists…

Because if your response to her is to immediately say that it should be good enough that I finally changed, you may technically be right but relationally you are missing the point completely. 

And this is where a lot of men get blindsided. They finally make some of the changes their wife has been asking for, and because those changes feel so significant from their side, they naturally expect some kind of relief on hers. 

Then instead of relief, they get anger, skepticism, or even more sadness. If you aren't prepared for that reaction, it's incredibly easy to get frustrated and think, ‘What was the point of changing if she's just going to hold it against me anyway?’” 

So it is very important for you to understand that as you are making these changes that you feel will help not only you, but your relationship, and you expect your wife to immediately be all grateful for them (especially if it is for things she has complained about forever), be prepared to face that resistance at first and understand how to respond to it. 

If you're prepared, you can understand why you are right to be doing your own transformation and still be aware that your wife may experience the same transformation but viewing it through a different emotional lens. 

Again, she can have thoughts about why her pain was not enough to make it important originally? Why did she have to be ready to leave before this became serious to you?

And also know that you can genuinely apologize,  but don’t apologize to her 50 times for the same thing.

WHY AN APOLOGY CAN BE TRUE AND STILL NOT BE ENOUGH

There is nothing wrong with apologizing, in fact you should give a genuine apology to her, not for her approval seeking, but because you genuinely want to tell her that it shouldn’t have taken this long to realize but you have and you’re committed to making the right changes.

Taking that approach to your apology, whether you believe it or not, makes a big difference in how it comes off.

If you’re coming off apologizing a bunch of times until she forgives you, then you’re just approval seeking and what that does is show her you don’t REALLY understand why she is feeling a certain way.

The right way to apologize is to take the ownership and go and make the changes because you want to, not for her approval. That will  demonstrate to her that you understand the impact. 

You need to have that understanding to tell her that you understand why that hurt her and what it came to mean to her. 

You can tell her that it wasn't what you wanted your marriage to be, and you can also see how your behavior gave you that experience.

Look how much more impactful and different that is than telling her: “Fine. I'm sorry again. What else do you want me to say?”

And I am guilty of doing that many times before during my decade of disaster with women, because I was frustrated myself thinking that trying to make the changes to please her should be enough for her.

And that is such a wrong mindset and approach to be in. 

So if you notice that your apologies have basically become admission tickets you keep purchasing in the hope that she will finally stop bringing something up, I would stop and ask whether you have ever actually understood the same problem as her.

Buying a bunch of sorry admission tickets fifty times doesn't make the apology fifty times more powerful.

And if watching this so far has given you a bit of a perspective shift as to why there can be several layers underneath the resentment in your own marriage that you've never really known how to work through, I would recommend  going and watching my free Relationship Rebuild Masterclass to really get the larger framework of turning your marriage around. I'll put the link in the description and the pinned comment below.

Now, there is another stage resentment can reach that makes all of this more difficult, because eventually the resentment can become bigger than the individual things that caused it.

It is almost like a synergy of resentment. 

WHEN RESENTMENT BECOMES A STORY ABOUT WHO YOU ARE

It almost starts becoming a story about who you are as a person, which is not good and clearly won’t play in your favor.

In the beginning, she might be angry about something you did. 

If the same kinds of experiences continue long enough for her, that conclusion can get even worse for you because it is going to slowly shift from her thinking “You did something selfish” to actually believing that you may be, or are a selfish person. 

Now the behavior isn’t just being judged on its own, it's starting to be interpreted though an established picture of you as a whole. 

You may not think that is fair, but that is human nature. 

And yes it is more difficult to deal with in your perspective because if the established picture of you has started to become negative enough over time, even the good things can be viewed suspiciously.

She may view it as you only doing good things because you wants something, and it is not going to last.

That is what makes deep resentment so frustrating.

You can start feeling as though every road you take to make things better leads back to the same conclusion for her.

Psychologically it is as she has developed a negative bias of everything now, where existing assumptions about the relationship because of all her experiences began changing what she sees to even your current changed behavior. 

You don't need a psychological label to understand that experience for her,  you have probably done this yourself in some area of life. I know I have.

If you've got a co-worker that you don’t like, let’s say it’s John in the office (I picked on Bob last video so to give him a break we wil pick on John today), but you’ve decided John at your office is freakin lazy.

So now when you see John walk by you to go to the washroom, you are judging him and assuming he is lazy. Or when you see him go to lunch you probably have that bias to say, yeah lazy John probably did absolutely nothing and now he is going to bugger off for an hour for lunch; well deserved John.

Right, suddenly every five-minute break looks like proof to you that he is a lazy (shhh) person..

So that's where I want you to be careful.

Because the most convincing answer to an old story that she is telling herself about you usually isn't a speech to her about proving your new character and getting forgiveness from her.

The answer to her old story about you is living long enough outside the old pattern that the old explanation about you gradually becomes less useful to her.

Which brings us to a very different question about change and your transformation journey to level up.

FORGIVENESS, TRUST AND CLOSENESS ARE DIFFERENT THINGS

Forgiveness, trust, and closeness are all different things that can all impact your efforts in trying to change and be a better man for yourself and your relationship. 

People often use those 3 words (forgiveness, trust, and closeness) as though they all mean the same thing, and they do not. 

There can be different levels associated with the words.

Your wife can forgive you and still not completely trust the relationship.

She can begin trusting you again and still not feel romantic closeness yet.

She can care deeply about you and still be uncertain whether she wants to remain married.

It does become an uncomfortable place to be in because it is in our nature to think that the sequence should be very simple.

We believe it should be sequential from: Apology → forgiveness → trust → affection → marriage fixed.

But unfortunately it is just not that neat and tidy in relationships.

And I think this helps explain something a lot of guys find confusing.

Your wife may say, “I forgive you.”, then two weeks later she doesn't want sex, or she still wants space.

And that will have you questioning the forgiveness she gave you, what did it even mean?

It might mean exactly what she said, she no longer wants to carry the same anger, but that doesn't automatically mean desire has returned.

Likewise, if she enjoys dinner with you, that doesn't automatically mean the resentment is gone.

Your relationship isn’t going to move through emotional states like you're clearing levels in Super Mario Brothers.

And this is one reason I don't like promises that tell men definitively, “Do these five things and she'll finally let go of the past.”

You can't make her forgive you or make synthetic trust in a factory. 

What you can do is become someone capable of participating in genuine repair of the relationship and invite your wife to participate in that as well.

That invitation is very important, because there is a point in this conversation where responsibility has to become mutual as well.

THERE IS A POINT WHERE RESENTMENT ITSELF BECOMES THE PROBLEM

Which brings us to something a lot of guys worry about, “how come I have to do all this work and she doesn’t have to do ANYTHING”.

Look, if you hurt your wife repeatedly for ten years (knowingly or unknowingly) and you've been behaving differently for eleven days, this probably isn't the moment to announce to her that HER resentment is becoming toxic now. 

But neither do I believe that a healthy marriage can be rebuilt around a permanent arrangement where you remain the guilty person forever. 

The resentment, at first, is going to tell you there is hurt that hasn’t been adequately addressed. 

It can point toward conversations you avoided, experiences you minimized and changes that genuinely needed to happen.

But what can also happen is that resentment can also become an identity. She may become so attached to what happened that letting go of the resentment may feel to them that it’s just validating the past. 

And it isn’t.

Moving forward doesn't mean what happened suddenly becomes acceptable.

Forgiveness doesn't retroactively make betrayal harmless.

Just like wanting to rebuild your relationship  doesn't require pretending the bad years were secretly good.

It’s none of that.

What it does require is her eventually making room for the person in front of her to be more than your previous mistakes.

Rebuilding the relationship can’t mean that you guys are together but you’ll always be on some level of probation.

And this applies to you too, which is why I mentioned it is so important to understand how the resentment for her to disappear isn’t going to be flicking off a light switch.

If you're carrying resentment toward her for the way she behaved during the worst period of your marriage, you eventually have to decide whether you are rebuilding or quietly storing ammunition for later.

SO CAN YOU SAVE A MARRIAGE FILLED WITH RESENTMENT?

So to put a bow on this video, yes, a marriage having resentment in it does not automatically mean it is over.

And again, check out my free Relationship Rebuild masterclass linked in the pinned comment and description below to really get the right path to make the changes that work. 

Your job is to become much clearer about who you want to be, and start rebuilding what you can repair by firstly stopping repeating the things you now understand were damaging.

Your wife gets to decide what she wants to do with that reality.

That doesn’t stop you from transforming into the leader that will change your life and your relationship, and understanding all the intricacies of communication with your wife. 

If you’re looking at your marriage right now and you can see how some of the resentment grew during a long period where the two of you became more like people running a household than husband and wife, watch this video next on Why Good Marriages Turn Into Roommate Relationships..