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Stick with "How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It" for now. Here are the cliffnotes: Men feel an intense need to be a good provider. When you shame them, by criticizing, complaining, nagging, etc. it gives them a "cortisol dump" in their brain which triggers a fight or flight response. This is a physically uncomfortable feeling, and they will withdraw emotionally to avoid it.

If this becomes a repeating pattern in your marriage, they REALLY won't want to continued shots of cortisol, so they will avoid you, withdraw, go to the bar, go to their mancave, work on their car, whatever they can do.

Women need to feel secure and connected. When men withdraw, this threatens women's security and makes them pursue to get that connection and security back. Usually they're not in a very good state of mind at this point, so affection and words of affirmation isn't the natural place to go. Instead, it's usually complaints, nagging etc.

As you can see, it's a negatively reinforcing cycle where neither one of you is getting your needs met, and your reaction to how you are feeling makes it worse. He withdraws, you pursue, he feels worse and withdraws more, you get increasingly frustrated and complain more, he feels worse, and around you go.

So many aspects of our relationships are characterized by these cycles. Another good book to read is "The Sex Starved Marriage", whether your marriage was sex starved or not, it's still a good relationship book about male/female dynamics. You know that men and women are wired very differently sexually. Men feel emotionally connected through sex, they will try to pursue sex to establish that connecion. Women feel emotionally connected through communication and quality time. When H doesn't give you the communication and quality time you want, you're not inclined to have sex with him. When he wants sex and doesn't get it, he feels rejected and is less likely to want to communicate and spend quality time with you and again, around you go.

The point is to recognize these cyclical dynamics in your marriage whatever they may be. When you see them start to happen, it can be helpful to call it out -- i.e. "here we go again, we're doing that thing where I do X and you do Y." Pointing it out in that way takes the personalities out of it and can help you break the cycle.

You also can identify what creates positive cycles in your marriage. If you compliment H on how well he does something, or tell him how much you appreciate it when he does X, he's more likely to do it. That makes him feel good, like a good provider, and he's more willing to connect with you emotionally. You can get these things spinning in a positive direction too, you just need to start to recognize the patterns and how to feed them.

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