She can love you. She cannot complete you.

There's a question that sits underneath a breakup, and most men never say it out loud to anybody.

What's wrong with me? Why wasn't I enough?

If you've asked it, you already know it doesn't have an answer. You just keep asking.

Sunday night I put something on the board that took me twenty years and a whole book to figure out, and it's the reason that question has no answer. It's not a question about you. It's a question about where you were standing before she ever showed up.

What we got into:

• Why the question what's wrong with me is the problem, and not the answer — the moment a man needs a woman to answer that one for him, he's already handed her something she can't give back
• The scale. Before her, one to ten, how much did you actually like being you? Whatever that number was, the gap between it and ten is what she ended up carrying
• Why the relief was real — and why a good woman loses respect for you over time anyway, without ever meaning to, once she's the one holding you up

The line that hit hardest:

"I wasn't looking for the right woman. I told myself I was. I was looking for someone to make me feel like enough."

That's not a confession I enjoyed making on camera. It's also the most useful sentence I own, because for twenty years I had the story backwards. I thought I had a woman problem. I never had trouble meeting them or starting something. I couldn't keep one, and every time it ended I had a reason ready that had her name on it — she wasn't ready, she was crazy, I hadn't found the right one yet.

Then I wrote a book about relationships to figure out what was wrong with everyone else, and it told me what was wrong with me instead.

Here's the part I'd want you to take into this week, whether or not you watch anything.

Blame feels like clarity. It's a cage. Every time you hand the reason to someone else, you hand them the fix as well — and now there's nothing you can do but wait for a person who isn't coming back to go out of their way to repair you. That's why the same ending keeps finding you. Problems come and go. A pattern that keeps coming back is something underneath that hasn't been dealt with yet, and it's yours, which is the bad news and the only good news there is.

So here are the two questions from the end of the night. Write them down somewhere you'll see them.

What relationship problem do you keep blaming on someone else?

If you've blamed it more than twice — what is that blame protecting you from?

The second one is where the answer is. Take your time with it.

I put the whole thing on video — the scale, the four missing points, where I went wrong for two decades, and the part about the woman who knows exactly what she's doing and what to do when you spot her.

→ Watch it here: https://youtu.be/3rfwAMnmkn8

—

Michael

P.S. Sunday nights we sit down in The Den and go at one of these in a room full of men in the year you're in. Camera off is fine. Nobody gets called on. Some men listen for a month before they say a word. The only thing it costs you is a Monday night.

If tonight is bad, call or text 988 — the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. A person answers, any hour.