It’s almost scary how many people go through their marriage with a severe case of roommate syndrome. So many of today’s marriages are passionless agreements to survive. They settle and make do often because of habits and previous experiences with each other.
There’s also the phenomenon known as the nice guy this is the guy who wants to make sure that everybody is happy. Everyone is in a good mood. No one is upset. Yet interestingly enough nice guys often cause roommate syndrome.
What is a Nice Guy?
The nice guy is the type of man who struggles with people having emotions. Nice guys become very anxious around people who have rather large emotions. They are very upset or overly joyous this will bother a nice guy.
This is because nice guys are manipulators. They want to make sure they have some resemblance of control over how other people feel about them. Nice guys often overestimate their capabilities. They often will end up failing on promises kept, because they want to make sure that the person they’re promising stays happy with them. In doing so they wind up, causing themselves more pain and more stress than if they had put up normal boundaries. And just let the other folks have their emotional response.
Because nice guys want to emotionally manipulate the people around them this means that they are working overtime to make sure people like them and say nice things about them. This causes nice guys no official opinions themselves. They will reiterate thoughts that their wife has. They will have and reuse everybody else’s thoughts, but they will not have their own that they share. This often causes nice guys to have conflicting views and not stand for anything in particular.
Because nice guys fail often and have no set form of beliefs. They open themselves up to people, taking advantage of them. Whether on purpose or without intention, nice guys become perpetual victims.
So because of all of these aspects, nice guys often create lots of strife, irritation, disappointment, and other problems.
Nice guys as a whole, are liars. They are hard to trust because they will say what it takes to get you to like them doesn’t mean that they agree, but they’re going to want to have you like them over them having their own thoughts. So this causes a lot of trust issues in a marriage.
What is roommate syndrome
Roommate syndrome is a passionless marriage. Now this doesn’t start that way. Roommate syndrome is a gradual extinguishing of intimacy and passion.
Many times during the honeymoon phase, there’s often lots of sex and deep connection happening between a couple.
Yet, as life goes on, we are carried down that river without much attention being paid to the marriage itself. But through the years we have had unresolved fights and arguments. We have had hurt feelings and buried resentment. All these little unfixed interactions have put a wedge between the intimacy that we desire and just getting along.
So as the years go by, we have found a happy medium where we don’t do much arguing and even fewer thoughts being thrown around. This is so that we don’t ruffle the feathers of our spouse. Because it’s better to just exist that you have big emotions.
Discontinued until eventually, we are just coexisting with the woman we are married to. Yes, we exchange, “I love you’s”, and on occasion, we may have some intimacy. But as a whole, you are doing your thing, she is doing her thing and it’s staying peaceful and that is the only positive to this.
How does a nice guy create roommate syndrome?
Well, as mentioned, nice guys hate big emotions. Especially when the woman that’s supposed to love and honor, gets loud and angry. Nice guys are often conflict-avoidant. Because you have to have your own thoughts when you’re in an argument and it’s hard to stand up for yourself when you’re desperately trying to appease and just fix the problem as quickly as possible.
So when conflicts arise in a marriage, there is no resolution to the problem at hand. The nice guy is dipping out of the discussion because he can’t handle the fact that he is feeling big emotions and that his wife is feeling really big emotions. When our spouse is upset this becomes very scary for that Nice guy.
So as the nice guy keeps trying to fix the problem, and keeps trying to emotionally, manipulate his wife he doesn’t let the big swings happen that create the great intimacy that he wants. Since he is so busy trying to control every aspect of the marriage, it doesn’t get the conflict intimacy that a couple needs. The trust is being weathered away Because the wife doesn’t get a chance to see that her man stands for something.
The nice guy is busy, making sure that he feels safe. Doing so causes him to forget that there are other people in this family. And so the passion dies out because that got resentment and hurt feelings sitting behind it. Not to mention passion might be too big of an emotion for the nice guy. So the only solution in a marriage with a nice guy is the relationship-killing roommate syndrome.
How do you fix the problem?
The solution to getting rid of the roommate syndrome, is you have to change yourself. Roommate syndrome is an indicator that it’s time for some growth. So if you wanna fix and get rid of the roommate syndrome in your marriage, you have to work on yourself. That means you have to stop being the nice guy. Now many nice guys will hear that and think that means they have to become a jerks. Because if you’re not being nice to other people, you’re being a jerk to them. That’s not the case. A nice guy and a jerk are two sides of the same asshole.
So first off, you have to allow other people to have emotions. Let them experience their emotions. It may cause you to have the thought that you don’t care about them that’s only if you are aloof to the emotions. You see there is a difference between showing empathy and showing sympathy.
Sympathy is you fixing the problem. You sympathize with the fact that your wife is upset so let’s see how I can fix that. Wow, empathy is acknowledging that your wife is having an emotion and you’re OK with that. You can sit there beside her and hold space so that she can feel that emotion. You’re not trying to correct the emotion you’re not running off to try to fix it. You’re just there with her.
This is scary. I understand because we have all these thoughts that our wife is going to leave us that she hates us and that we never going to have sex ever again. After all, we made her mad but that’s a lie. We are telling ourselves. It takes practice, but the more you’re able to be with your own emotions, And the more you can let your wife be with her own emotions, the more emotional intimacy you create.
Something else that you can do to help alleviate roommate syndrome is to have your own opinions and share them. Yes, you will have to do the hard work of backing up your thoughts however, the results will show your wife that you’re actually thinking for yourself. Now this can be scary and dangerous to a nice guy because Your thoughts are not going to sync up with your wife’s thoughts all the time. She may push back and I hope you relish in that experience. Because that’s where conflict happens and that’s where conflict intimacy comes into play.
As you continue to grow, and you continue to expand on the different types of intimacy, you share those experiences those emotions those thoughts with your wife, and each one of those increases the intimacy that you want to grow. Doing so allows, you to start having more physical, intimacy, and passion in your marriage. When you have more the roommate syndrome will disappear.
The key point to all of this is you have to be intentional with your thoughts, and your actions and not walk them off.
