She's Not Fine. She's Just Done Trying to Tell You
How to ask questions that actually open the door, and how to show up when she walks through it
My daughter Chloe died on February 1, 2023. We found out at eight o’clock on a Wednesday night. Our younger daughter was nearly eighteen at the time and was on an overnight school trip four hours north. We left at three in the morning to drive through the snow to pick her up before she found out the devastating news on social media.
During that drive, my wife turned to me and said, “This is the kind of thing that destroys marriages. We need to commit to each other right now that that’s not going to happen to us.”
We made that commitment. And I’m happy to say that our love for one another has grown even stronger over the past three years.
That’s not because it’s been easy. It’s the hardest thing we’ve ever been through and it’s far from over. But through it all, we’ve talked through everything. Most of the conversations have been loving and supportive. Some of them have been incredibly fucking hard. We’ve done our best to be honest with each other about what we’re experiencing. And the most important thing we’ve done is stay intentional about trying to understand what the other person is going through.
Near the end of 2023, my wife had the courage to address my abusing weed. Six months after Chloe’s death I couldn’t take the pain anymore and started self-medicating by smoking pot every day. I’d been alcohol free for about nine years at that point, but the legacy of addiction casts a long shadow.
She didn’t cast judgement or seek to punish me. She explained, in no uncertain terms, the impact it was having on her. She told me how painful it was watching me harm myself and how unsafe it made her feel to see her husband avoiding his pain again, rather than facing it.
It was really fucking hard to hear. It’s not because it wasn’t true. It’s because I knew it was true and that it was time for me to choose what happened next. I had to sit in the extreme discomfort of confronting the impact of my behaviour on the person who I love and need the most. I needed to hear what was true for her without trying to explain, rationalize or deny.
That last part can be a hell of a lot harder than it sounds. Grief is a uniquely personal experience, and it makes it easy to fill in the blanks about what your partner is thinking and feeling instead of asking. He doesn’t talk about it, so he must not care as much. She keeps crying, so she must be choosing to stay stuck. You stop trying to understand each other and start building a case against each other. Instead of a partner, she gets a judge and jury all to willing to condemn her.
Breaking that pattern requires something most men aren't taught to do. You have to want to understand her more than you want to be right about her
Curiosity Before Crisis
Most men don’t ask how their wives are doing often enough. It’s not because they don’t care. It’s because they’re operating under the mistaken assumption that no news is good news, and if something was really wrong, she’d say something.
They don’t ask, and the things that need to be said, remain unsaid.
You need to understand what’s actually happening. She’s tried to bring things up with you, and your reaction showed her that speaking up costs more than it’s worth. You might have shut down, gotten defensive, made it all about you or tried to fix it. She walked away feeling more like a problem than a person.
She didn’t get what she needed, and she reminded herself that being honest with you isn’t worth it. So the next time she had something to say, she didn’t say it. Instead of noticing, you convinced yourself that meant things are “good enough.”
That’s the difference between being proactive and reactive. The reactive man waits until the relationship blows up and then tries to fix it, usually making things worse in the process. The proactive man stays curious about what his wife is dealing with because he understands that what she needs more than anything is to feel seen and heard.
Curiosity isn’t a technique or a communication strategy you deploy to try to get something from her. It’s just giving enough of a shit about what’s going on inside her and asking about it before she has to bring it to you herself.
Being Willing to Hear It
Asking is only half of it. Being willing to hear what she has to say, even if it hurts, is the other half.
How you respond when she answers determines whether she answers honestly next time, or at all.
She tells you something true for her, something that took an emotional risk to say. You shut down, or explain yourself, or make it about your own pain, or try to fix it before she’s even finished. She didn’t get what she needed from you. Again. Each time it happens you’re showing her what to expect from you.
You don’t have to have a perfect response and you don’t have to fix anything. You need to hear what she’s saying without making her regret saying it. That means no defending, no explaining, and for the love of God, no fixing. A simple “I’d love to hear more about that” or “that sounds really hard,” followed by you shutting up and actually listening.
It’s not about being weak or passive. It’s about showing her you can hear something hard without making it about how hard it is for you to hear it. Every time you manage to do that, she gets a little more willing to tell you the truth next time. Every time you don’t, she pulls a little further back from you.
It compounds in both directions. You decide which direction every time she opens her mouth.
Curiosity needs a direction
Empathy is not a feeling you conjure up and hope she notices. It’s an action you take, the action is asking. Being curious about her experience means actually asking her about it, before things get bad enough that she has no choice but to tell you.
Most men don’t ask because they don’t know to ask in the first place. Even if they do, they don’t know what to ask or how to ask it. They’ll ask her to evaluate how well they’re doing rather than asking her to describe her experience. Open opens the door to connection and the other is a test she didn’t agree to take.
The most impactful questions help you both uncover and understand her experience rather than your performance. They give her a way to be open and vulnerable without the risk of having to pass a verdict on you. They make it easier to tell the truth because the truth isn’t about whether you’re failing her. It’s just about what’s going on inside her, and what she needs from you.
That’s what these questions are for.
The Questions
These aren’t designed to be delivered like you’re conducting an interview. They’re just questions worth having in your back pocket, for the moments you want to ask but don’t know what to say. Every one of them is about understanding her experience. None of them ask her to evaluate yours.
What am I saying or doing when you feel most loved and supported by me?
What’s something you wish I knew and understood about what this has been like for you?
What’s something you’ve learned about yourself through this that you want me to know?
What’s it like for you when you want to tell me something hard but aren’t sure how I’ll take it?
When do you feel more alone in this journey than you want and need?
When you’re hurting and you come to me, what do you most need from me in those moments?
What is it like for you when you feel truly seen and heard by me, and when does that happen?
When you think about where we are right now, what gives you hope about us?
What would it mean to you to feel completely free to grieve exactly the way you need to around me?
What’s the best way for me to bring up something with you that would make it easier for you to hear, and for you to know it’s coming from a place of love?
She hasn’t stopped having things to say. She wants you to ask her to say them.
So ask her. Then shut up and listen to what she tells you.
I wrote a survival guide for men in the days, weeks and months after a devastating loss. It’s completely free, no strings attached.
It’s just one guy doing my best to help other guys.
I think your guide is for any man not just those going through grief. Although I feel grief is sometimes the male equivalent of empathy. Do you get what I mean? When I’m not myself I can see my husband almost grieving for the “lighter” me. It’s like he misses it. When he expresses it this way, I totally get it.
Sometimes there needs to be a neutral third party, to help partners sharing this immense sense of heartbroken excruciating loss and immeasurable despair ,each will handle it differently and for what ever length of time , neither is wrong .