He will never change!

"He will never change" is a line I hear often in consultations. Here's why our own thinking becomes the glass ceiling of our marriage.

“My husband will never change! I know him far too well! Sadly, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks!”

These are the exact words women sometimes say to me in consultations when they describe a critical situation in their marriage.

From there our dialogue tends to go something like this:

— Can you honestly say that you always speak to him respectfully, never shout at him, never get irritated?

— No, of course not, I do snap at him sometimes, but not for nothing. There’s always a reason. Last time he did… (a description of a specific situation follows)

— Do you agree that he might not be thrilled with that style of communication, and that he might think his wife will never change? That you’ll always keep showing him the same “old tricks”?

— Yes, but I don’t behave that way for no reason. I’m exhausted, I don’t know how else to get through to him.

— And if he stopped doing the things that hurt and drain you, and truly heard you — would you keep shouting at him and being angry?

— Of course not. What for? I’d be glad and happy if he understood what’s going on and changed.

— So you’re ready to change, and you’d even be glad to learn some “new tricks”. And in your opinion he definitely won’t change his behaviour if you stop doing the things that irritate and anger him?

— Well, I’ve tried more than once, but there was no result…

— Tried what?

Then she explains that she did everything to make him happy — but when we start going through each specific situation point by point, it turns out her line of behaviour was far from the kind that could make a man happy, or even just not angry.

Usually within 15-20 minutes of that kind of conversation I manage to show a woman that her man isn’t nearly as hopeless as she’s used to thinking. She simply never learned how to communicate with him and doesn’t understand anything about male psychology.

That’s no surprise, because nobody teaches us this anywhere.

Of course men make plenty of serious mistakes too, and I tell them about those when they come to me. But when I work one-on-one with a woman, I show her the things she can change in her own line of behaviour so that her man’s attitude changes too. Discussing her husband’s mistakes with her is pointless, because he isn’t in the room to hear it.

When people come to my consultations for a while, they start understanding the basics of each other’s psychology, and for many of them the situation in the relationship changes dramatically.

Talking to me personally isn’t cheap any more — new requests come in every day and the calendar fills up tightly despite constant price increases.

So I decided to gather everything most important and fundamental that I know about the behaviour of men and women into one training programme, “Healthy Relationships”. It’s a course about how to get out of a crisis and start building a relationship harmoniously.

But this time my team and I decided to go further. We know that simply listening to useful information rarely changes anything radically.

So we’re preparing 30 assignments for our students, one for each day of the course, so they can make real changes in their relationships while they’re still going through the programme.

To sum this up: when we ourselves don’t believe that the person we love is capable of behaving differently, we often become the glass ceiling of our own marriage.

Every thought in our head pays rent for living there.

That’s why, from my point of view, thinking badly of the people closest to us is the worst possible strategy — it’s simply unprofitable and foolish.

Do you agree that sometimes our own thinking becomes the main obstacle to building a happy relationship?