Codependence is the mans equivalent of having borderline personality disorder. I write often about men who have been raised to act like defective women. Codependency is the primary trait of these men. It’s a combination of validation seeking behavior, fears of abandonment, and pathological levels of conflict avoidance.
While borderline is a trait where someone develops their identity through a stronger identity, mirroring that identity for personal self worth, codependent men find their identity through care taking behaviors and covert contracts. It’s not that they define themselves based on the identities of their women, it’s that they define themselves based on saving her from imagined (in other words, he makes them up) deficiencies.
You may have heard of the terms I can save her, or she doesn’t want to be saved, so you may understand the dynamic. Codependency is a form of narcissistic fantasy. The difference between the typical NPD and this one is that the made up identity is of a martyr.
If you’ve ever had your wife nag you into doing something you know is wrong and you purposefully screw it up just to yell that you told her so, then you have this to some extent.
Dr. Robert Glover, author of No More Mr. Nice Guy talks about nice guy behaviors. These are functionally identical to the codependent ones I’m talking about. If you can see yourself in the following mental models, this is the first step in shedding these behaviors and becoming less unattractive.
Get out of your wife’s frame.
An exaggerated sense of responsibility for the actions of others
Women either have agency or they don’t, depending on which serves her best at the time. This is paraphrased by author Rollo Tomassi, describing the exaggerated sense of responsibility codependent men use with their wives and girlfriends. Sharia law may forbid women from driving, but the codependent man thinks he’s not a real man if his girl drives anywhere herself, or if he should ever sit in the passenger seat. It’s a way of fighting off neuroticism through control, except for expecting the woman to willingly submit to her infantilization because he’s unable to stand by his needs.
If you’ve derived your value from the identity of ‘father, husband, servant-leader’ or any other sort of caretaker archetype, then you may wonder whats wrong with leaning into the protector instinct we all have? And to a point, nothing. The problem comes when it becomes the identity, when it becomes pathological. If you don’t know the difference, wait until someone denies it. Your emotional response will give you certainty.
When I deployed in pirate hunting with the Canadian Royal Navy in 2008, we were given a brief on the various mental health concerns with a deployment. One thing that stood out was a caution for men that 6 weeks after returning home was when they were most likely to beat their wives. When a man returns home after a year and sees his wife handling the family business competently, he sees this as an attack on his identity. He is meant to be the protector and provider. By becoming a functional adult, his wife attacks his identity and the man takes a narcissistic injury. Sometimes that can come out in abusive behavior.
Being responsible for your family is a fine trait for a husband. Feeling threatened by your wife being competent is not.
Confusing love and pity. Loving people they can pity and rescue
Since I’m on the naval references, captain of the U.S.S. Saveaho is equally codependent. Men who have an exaggerated sense of morality with their women exemplify this. On one side of their mouth they shame women for tattoos, colored hair, single motherhood and promiscuity. On the other they are attracted to these exact type of women.
It’s an evil covert contract where they think that if they can find a deficient woman, and show her a better way, that she will love him forever and he will have a problem free life. The problem with this is, like with any covert contracts, she does not want to be saved.
Whores don’t wear a uniform.
The problem with this specific type of codependency is that it never correlates to a womans behavior. Guys always have to close their eyes and see no evil once the buy into the fantasy. No man wants to commit to a woman who isn’t faithful, but these identity symbols are no better than guesswork. They say they select for chastity but what they are actually selecting for is the ability to deceive.
This is detrimental for men as they stop looking at women with their eyes and start to see her with his misguided heart. They don’t pay attention as they are too busy thinking about the narcissistic fantasy. In a way, he’s begging the woman in front of him to save him from his delusions, and most women respond very negatively to this.
Like many codependent behaviors, the conflict they are trying to avoid is made more certain,
Doing more than more than you share
This is specifically a trait for the type 2 captain. The constantly working captain for his complaining passenger is a form of codependency. The problem isn’t that there is a lot of work to be done, the problem is why the guy is doing it.
It’s a thinly veiled attempt at getting validation. Choreplay, or doing the dishes because she would have more sex if she wasn’t so stressed is one common way this manifests. Selfish and demanding women will capitalize on this. If you’ve ever seen pregnant wives who demand to be coddled, say they must no longer be subject to anything physical etc, then you’ve seen how and why this dynamic hurts men.
This isn’t to say you need to have a balanced, 50/50 set of household duties to have a strong relationship, but it does mean guys need to look at the reasons why they have committed to being the plow horse in this stable. The best plow horse doesn’t get the warm bed when he’s no longer useful. The best plow horse gets sent to the glue factory when he’s out of plow.
Becoming hurt when people don’t recognize their efforts
This is the mildest form of narcissistic injury to the codependent man. Everything he does is a covert contract. He does the chores because he wants his attaboy, he wants his validation. He coddles his wife because he wants that attaboy. He promises to save her from her life of sex and drugs and devotes his life to making a good woman out of her because he wants that attaboy.
He wants that attaboy, he wants that validation.
And when she doesn’t reciprocate all those sacrifices, he gets resentful. Conversations become long winded whiny rants about how she doesn’t love him anymore because she never shows him, or any number of passive aggressive victim rants. Men are never the victim because no one can make us do things. You cannot rape the willing.
The process is consistent: do something for the attaboy. Wait for validation. When it’s not received, get resentment. Have that resentment manifest as passive aggressive, whinny demands for more love.
An unhealthy dependence on relationships.
The co-dependent will do anything to hold on to a relationship; to avoid the feeling of abandonment
This is the saddest quality of codependent men. It’s so common everyone has at least one friend who is like this. She cheats on him but he wants to talk it out, communicate, and accepts the flimsiest apologies with the least amount of effort. She treats him like shit but the fear of divorce-rape (where the divorce proceedings leave a man destitute and a woman enriched) is ever present.
It’s Damocles sword with a set of tits.
The man is afraid to upset his wife, walks on eggshells, fears standing up to her in case she decides to go feral. It’s truly a pathetic thing to see in a man. If you have never uttered the words ‘shut the fuck up’ to your wife, no matter how crazed her rants, then this is closer than you may be comfortable with.
An extreme need for approval and recognition. A sense of guilt when asserting themselves
These go hand in hand. Men have been raised so poorly over the last 3 generations and it’s common for men to think of themselves as defective for having basic male qualities. Any anger is seen with shame. Any attempt at confident behavior is seen as selfish. Time with friends is juvenile. A nice car in your 40s is a middle aged crisis. The list is never ending.
This creates two codependent qualities: a low sense of self worth through shame, and constant need for validation to cope with that shame. This is unhealthy. Predatory types of women weaponize this and more stable women resent it.
Women aren’t capable of both loving a man and being his oak. The more your codependency craves her validation, the less her desire manifests, which is one of the key reasons these types of man seeks validation in the first place.
A compelling need to control others
The term men raised to be defective women comes out a lot. Neuroticism is predominantly a feminine quality. The way many women cope with high neuroticism is by being controlling. In the same way men see freedom as power, women see control. The reason is that control soothes anxiety.
Franco and David Claire talk about male jealousy in their book Practical Female Psychology. When men who are jealous at other men, they naturally fall into two camps of behavior: they either poke fun at her for having the gall to think she can do any better than him, or they become controlling.
In a way this is a litmus test into the type of wife you may be dealing with. If the wife is interested in the attention of other men (even if she won’t capitalize) she tends to respond with revulsion at her mans attempt to control her. She uses shame to get him to stop. If the wife is not generally interested, it reduces her attraction. While she may think highly of her codependent husband, he’s doing his best to talk her out of it. Subconsciously, and over time, it has an effect.
While this isn’t saying that a real man shouldn’t care, it is saying the way that you care matters more than you think.
Fear of being abandoned or alone
All of these can be boiled down to a fear of abandonment. In Volume 1, I talk about the failed parenting strategies and how men develop codependency because of them. To summarize: every codependent man is still that 2 year old boy that mom is threatening to abandon if he doesn’t act right for a constantly changing emotional set of needs.
All codependent behavior fills an emotional need. The need to placate their womans emotions so that she will not get angry and abandon him. The problem is this one more example of sexual diabetes. In prehistoric times making sure parents didn’t abandon us as infants was a selected trait. In the information age, the age of abundance, it doesn’t.
But in the same way simple carbohydrates used to be vital for survival and now kill us via diabetes, our codependent behavior creates resentment within our women. Thus ensuring the exact scenario we are attempting to avoid. The difficult part of this for men to understand is this is almost completely subconscious behavior. We don’t notice when we do it.
Difficulty and shame in identifying feelings
Men have emotions, don’t let the archetype of the emotionless stoic fool you. Men and women have a different set of emotional weights while also expressing them in different ways. For example, women experience jealousy similar to sexual arousal. They see another woman go after their man and want to keep him loyal. Men express jealousy through violence and anger. They want to crush the head of the man going after their woman.
Since the world is becoming ever more civilized (as technology allows) the standard selection of male emotions have become less useful and more detrimental. A side effect of this bountiful life of ignoble ease is that male emotions, instead of being guided in healthy directions, are shamed and vilified. Almost every man who has attempted a round of Dread in his relationship first reported his boundary enforcements as ‘calmly.’ They do this as if anger is still to be shamed, even when attempting to remove shame as a manipulative behavior that affects them.
It’s so ingrained in us that the simple male response to a grievance (anger) triggers an instant and instinctive shame. Now men have more emotions and expressions of emotions than anger, but you’ll be surprised how often they are treated like this … unless women experience the same emotional response.
Rigidity/difficulty adjusting to change
If you’ve ever wondered why so many men preach about the good old days, when men were men and women were women, you’re watching codependency to some extent. Humans have evolved to become the world wide apex predator and predominant species, specifically because of their adaptability. We have larger brains, smaller claws, more sweat glands and less muscles than anything else on earth. We have these traits because they give us more mobility, cooperation, and problem solving skills than the animal kingdom.
So when you see guys attracted to the halcyon days of the past, you’re seeing someone desperately seeking validation. You’ll also notice it’s never for the actual past, but some idealized form of the past. In the past, you would have 6 brothers and sisters, 3 of which died before their 5th birthday. Women were loyal because otherwise they would starve to death or be eaten by bears. Men worked themselves to death, otherwise their wife and children would starve.
The codependent man doesn’t see that, he sees a cigarette ad, where men work and barbecue, while women cook and mother 2.2 children. These symbols create archetypes that codependent men build as their narcissistic fantasy, demanding the world validate them. The idea of adaptation doesn’t even occur.
Problems with intimacy/boundaries
In volume 1 I have written about the Madonna/Whore complex, where men treat women as two separate beings: either whores of Babylon that sex is OK for and virginal Madonna’s, mothers that you don’t want to see debased with sex. The problem with this is men incentivize their wives and girlfriends to become less sexual over time by using shame and outward judgment of women based on these mental models.
When the time comes to have sex with his wife, the codependent man secretly talks them both out of enjoying it, and then resents her for following his incentives, which leads to
Chronic anger
The covert contracts in codependent men are everywhere. Be a whore for me, while I shame everyone else and treat you like Madonna. It’s a double bind, either she is sexually available and shamed for it, or she’s sexually prudish and resented for it.
Because of all these double binds, which are unhealthy narcissistic behaviors, men have a continual cycle of resentment which causes chronic anger. And since anger is a shameful behavior, it’s bottled up and explodes in all kinds of self destructive behavior at best, and extreme over reactions at worst.
Lying/dishonesty/Poor communications
Codependent men are always terrified of abandonment. AS Dr. Glover points out in his book No More Mr Nice Guy, this manifests in a concept called hiding the badness, or toxic shame. Since honesty can sometimes create conflict, codependent men will constantly hide, lie, or otherwise distort reality so as to avoid conflict, which they see as abandonment triggers.
This means that communication cannot happen. It creates a cycle of distrust that ultimately sabotages a relationship. Many men are naturally attractive, charismatic, good fathers etc. Over the years, these behaviors slowly whittle away at their talent until they are left in a situation where their wives cheat on them with what looks like a downgrade.
I’ve read many reports where men say their wives had cheated on them with guys with dead end jobs, or no jobs at all. Cheated on them with guys who were objectively worse than him. It made it even more painful, at least an upgrade would be something a guy could understand.
The problem is that they don’t see the obvious. Those men may have not had the same attractive qualities, but they were honest and unafraid of conflict. Sometimes, it’s not that a woman will cheat with someone better, but someone who is different.
Difficulty making decisions
The final trait of codependent men is their inability to make hard decisions. Everything is swaddled around maybes, what do you think?, or I don’t care, whatever. Everyone knows the trope of a couple going out to dinner and no one being able to decide what to eat. The problem is that codependent men are worried that making any choice exposes them to the consequence of picking wrong, and eventually being confronted on it.
It also exposes a complete lack in his ability to improvise, solve things, or just not be bothered by small setbacks. I’ve talked in volume 1 about the lack of neuroticism in men being an attractive quality that women value, and these small examples are emblematic of unattractive behavior and codependency in men.
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A primary benefit of building your own frame is to learn how to become more attractive, and less unattractive. Removing your need of validation, fear of abandonment and inability to handle conflict is a key aspect of getting out of your wife frame, and starting to put your own points up on the scoreboard.
I wish I could say it’s a grand achievement, but it’s really just the bare minimum. Crawl before you walk
