Among the hundreds of relationship authorities on YouTube that help us all to keep our marriages alive or make decisions otherwise, the one that makes me sick to my stomach is Jimmy on Relationships.
Jimmy is this self-professed-bad-husband youtuber that claims he saved his marriage by apologizing once he realized how bad he was.
His recipe for a successful relationship is to stop doing lazy-husband stuff, being lazy, and to start to be a listener and to acknowledge and validate your wife’s feelings, and to apologize for the past mistakes.
Wow. Great! We have our new Nostradamus, finally.
The corniness and the obviousness of his claims is one aspect of my discomfort.
But the reason why I think that his content does more damage than good is that he gives his audience a cliché picture of reality, with the effect of instigating false hopes.
Cliché and childish expectations
He paints a portrait of men, including himself, that watch football, drink beers, don’t help at home, never listen to their wives, and never agree with their wives’ opinion. I believe he confessed he cheated or was about to cheat.
Don’t get me wrong, these men exist. A small percentage are really bad and irrecoverable and are irrecoverable because probably have an alcohol problem or just affection issues, for some reasons. These men just need to be let go.
For a great majority of men that match the Jimmy’s portrait, watching sport or having a can of beer should not constitute an issue at all. They’re common activity men and people in general enjoy and should not be policed or criticized. If their wives point at these actions to accuse the husband, it’s a wife problem, certainly not men’s.
Stereotypical depiction of husbands
And for those remaining that prefer to soothe themselves into cheering for their team instead for their wives, don’t need Jimmy to tell them they should spend more time with their wives. Most probably they tried to spend quality time with their special one, with poor success, after which they just gave up.
The problem of Jimmy premises is not that it’s just trivial and useless and time wasted.
Jimmy causes damage in the relationship because point men and women, each gender for different reasons, to the wrong problem.
Men tend to believe they’re inherently bad, and their hobbies are deleterious, and therefore they need to contrive, apologize, and crawl. Wrong for two reasons.
One, we already said that these hobbies are acceptable, in proper proportion, if not even healthy. Two, emotionally healthy women don’t like spineless men, and will dislike you if you become a yes-men.
Jimmy reinforces women’s bad expectations
Women, on their other hand, are led to believe they can point finger at their husbands: “you’re bad because you watch football”; “you never agree with me”; “everything is your fault so you must crawl”. They’re doing nothing but pushing their spouse away, thing which could happen in the short term or in the long term, depending on the husband personality.
Incidentally, this could have happened to Jimmy himself. When I discovered him, less than one year ago, some of the video he posted featured his wife. In these videos, the two explained that their relationship improved in the moment both started to accept the situation (i.e. that it was his fault) and discuss about it. Now, not only they don’t record together, but I’m having a hard time to find their old videos together. They may have broken up. I’ll update you if I find something.
At the end of the day, people who marries Jimmy’s premises, get in a situation of completely wrong expectation, like now one must agree with his wife no matter what. Jimmy does not consider that some men can’t agree with their wives because they are wrong, or they want to poke their nose into stuff they don’t know, like their husband’s job, their husband’s relationship with his family, money, you name it.
Among the multitude of relationship experts on YouTube, occasionally some, including myself, get it wrong (for example those who push the concept of emotional cheating). But mostly they’re all a great source of marital and self-improvement advice with no notable exception. Consider Anna the Wingman, Marni, Greg Adam, Esther Perel, dr. Ramani, Apollonia Ponti, Kris Godines, dr. PsycHacks. They approach love issues from different points of view, but they have all in common that you need to become the best version of yourself. You just need to pick the one who nails your problem and/or speaks your mind.
Jimmy, unfortunately, narrows everything down to a trivial matter of cheesy complacency.
Marriages are not fairy tales, there are amazing team works, when done right.
