Have You Ever Said, “I can change him!”

Why? Did he poop his pants? He’s a grown man, not a baby.

Most people don’t actually say the phrase I can change him. More often they say things like: He had a bad childhood. He was abused. His father left when he was little. His mother was an alcoholic.

Things like that.

The overall message is I Can Love Him Enough To Heal Him.

Let’s tap the brakes a bit on that thought and break it down to what it means at its core.

You want to:

• soothe his pain
• help him learn to act like an adult
• give him skills for life
• be an unconditional source of love and support

Ummm… That’s a mother.

If what you want is a partner and not a child, then you have to act like a partner. If you want a man-child you act like a mother.

The Reason This Dynamic Is So Powerful

Humans are community animals. We are meant to connect to others and get a portion of our needs from outside of us. It’s only natural that when we see a fellow human in pain, we want to do something about it to help.

A person who acts like a child is going to subconsciously trigger that protective instinct that we feel about children. Even though we can see with our eyes that they are a grown-up, our brains can sense the childishness inside of them and we react to it.

We have something called mirror neurons in our brains. This is why babies can learn so fast by mimicking us and how we can read body language and micro-expressions, and feel the energy from another person. It’s the thing that allows us to read the room.

If we encounter someone that is vibrating with pent-up pain and immaturity, we don’t need to be told, we can feel it. Like with any kind of sense, some people feel it more than others.

A man who is sending off childlike signals is a conundrum. He looks, sounds, and feels like a man. Often in the beginning he is the perfect man. He seems like a caring, sensitive person who is a dream come true and makes you feel like you have always wanted to feel. This period is full of love bombing, declarations, making big plans for the future and you feel like you have met the man of your dreams.

Sometimes you get the surly type that acts like a baby from the get-go, but a man like that will have a hard time dating because no one wants to be attached to a dud. The kind that manipulates you into thinking they are great are the ones that do the most damage because they are tricky to sniff out. They get you to let your guard down and then they strike.

A Personal Story About A Man Baby

My father and my ex-husband were both this way. The blame does not fully lie with my mother and me, but we do hold a fair amount of it for enabling it to remain that way, and for making it a bit worse over the years with that enabling.

This is why I know the man/child dynamic so well. I was raised by one and then I married one. It took me nearly 20 years of being in that marriage to finally get the big picture. I was never going to be able to heal a wound I didn’t create.

I don’t want anyone else to be stuck in that dynamic hoping for that dream to come true.

In a relationship, it takes two people to work on the dream for it to come true. If you are either chasing or dragging another person you won’t be able to get to that finish line you envision. It will be a different finish line. One full of dysfunction, intermittent reinforcement, games, manipulation, and possibly abuse.

My father used to be helpful. My mother is a classic overachiever who is used to doing too much for everyone. To look at my father today you would wonder how he ever got along without her. A lot of that is her fault. He could very well make his own doctor appointments, get his own prescriptions from the pharmacy, make his own food, do his own grocery shopping, drive himself to the dentist, pay the bills, etc… But she doesn’t trust he will do it well, so she does it to avoid the negative impacts.

Like a teenager, he will never have the skills to do it if he isn’t given the chance to. He could do it before and he could do it again if he was forced to. It is a learned helplessness and she helped him learn it.

I repeated this pattern in my marriage. I did everything for the household and business and all he had to do was show up. I did get upset that everything fell on me but I also didn’t allow him the chance to do most of it. When I did test it, things would end up a mess that I would have to clean up. It wasn’t until the final few years of marriage that I demanded more and did less and that is part of what led to the ultimate downfall. I no longer cleaned up the messes and we fought a lot about how I had abandoned him and was mean and hateful.

I split up our finances and he had a spending account he had to keep track of and when he ran out of money each month he would throw a fit and rage until the next allotment came through and things would be ok until he blew through that money again.

His allotment was thousands a month and none of the household finances came out of it. It was over a third of the total coming in. He did what he wanted with it. I ran the home off the rest of it, including what he needed like food, bills, medical, dental, gas, etc… He was never expected to pitch in for the family funds.

His allotment was his fun money.

This is the way a child manages money. They see a toy, they want the toy, and they get the toy. Rinse and repeat. Thoughts about playing with that toy and saving for the future go out the window when something new catches their eye. It’s a short vision technique that doesn’t allow for growth, only for instant gratification.

I would never in a billion years do that again with a future partner!

That was like me giving a child an allowance and not expecting him to participate in the family responsibilities at all. That was bonkers and no wonder it didn’t work. It was not a lesson. It was a bandage to prevent his spending addiction from ruining our lives.

The final few years it did end up taking a hard toll on his life. I took a step back from paying his bills and he was solely responsible for them and when he hit a high debt that was debilitating him I let it happen. I didn’t step in to help except to advise who he could call for assistance. I offered to go to therapy with him and help build a budget but I didn’t take control anymore and fix it like I had all the other times it happened.

So he went out and found another woman to do it for him. He cheated with a financial analyst and she came up with a budgeting plan for him to follow.

Of course that didn’t work and he is now back in that same crippling debt even with making a 6 figure salary now.

It didn’t work because she did the same thing I did. She thought she could love him through it. She couldn’t, I couldn’t, the next one won’t be able to either. Because it is a faulty strategy.

It will never work.

If you want to change a man, do so by loving yourself and allowing him to walk beside you into the future. He will if he wants to. If not, that is your clue that he is not looking to grow up.