When Reassurance Isn’t What’s Needed

A story about cancer, marriage, and the distance that grows in silence.

Recently on my Safe Harbour Podcast I sat down with Vicki Feltham, and I want to be honest with you, I was getting emotional before we’d even been going twenty minutes. Not because the story was dramatic, though it was, but because I recognised the man in it so completely. I’ve been that man... most of us have.

Vicki was diagnosed with cancer last year, her baby was one year old, her marriage was still young, and the cancer had spread enough that surgeons were removing her nose... I’ll let you sit with that for a second.

Her husband Mark, by every measure, showed up. He was there every single day, running the household, managing the logistics, holding the whole thing together. He was, by any reasonable definition, being a brilliant partner.

And... Vicki still felt completely alone.

One Story

She described it like this: they were fighting separate battles.

Mark was fighting for the practicalities of their life, the kids, the schedule, the appointments. Vicki was fighting cancer and trying to figure out whether her marriage would survive it and whether her husband would still find her attractive and whether her daughter would grow up with a mother. And they lost the connection of fighting through it together, side by side.

When Vicki said she was scared she was going to die, Mark said you’re not going to die, you’re fine.

And I understand exactly why he said it. It probably made him feel better and it was easier to manage emotionally and he meant every word of it. But it wasn’t the conversation she needed. She didn’t need him to reassure her out of the fear. She needed him to sit in the fear with her.

What struck me most was this. Vicki said she knew Mark was terrified underneath all of it. She could see it in him. He was playing out in his head what raising the children alone would look like, what his life would look like without her. The fear was absolutely there. He just had no way of getting it out, so it stayed inside and slowly created this distance between them at the exact moment they needed each other most.

She knew he was scared. She just needed him to say so. That’s all it would have taken...

Vicki used a phrase that I’ve been sitting with ever since. She called it sitting in the mud. When everything’s gone wrong and all you can see is mud, you just need someone to hold your hand and sit there with you. Not lead you out. Not tell you it’ll be fine. Just sit there. And that, she said, is what most women need from their men in the hard moments, and it’s the thing most men have never once been taught to do.

One Shift

I got off that call and I thought about the times I’ve done exactly what Mark did.

Defaulted to problem solving, to optimism, to practical action, to anything that gave me a role and a function and kept me from having to just be present with something I couldn’t fix. Because being present with something unfixable is genuinely one of the hardest things a man can do, and most of us have never practised it.

Vicki said something that I want you to really hear. She said Mark was so worried about setting off a landmine, saying the wrong thing, being offensive, getting it wrong, that he said almost nothing emotionally at all. And the fear underneath that, she named it directly, is the fear that if you get it wrong the whole thing blows up. Your partner leaves you. You’ve destroyed it. The ultimate fear.

But here’s the reframe she offered, and it landed hard.

She said, what would he have had to say that was so bad I would leave him for it? He would have had to say something horrendously awful. The everyday fumbling of a man trying to be emotionally present, saying the wrong thing occasionally, treading on a landmine now and then, is not going to end a marriage. It’s the silence that does that. The distance. The slow accumulation of two people fighting separate battles.

The most important line in our whole conversation came near the end. Vicki said that by cutting off access to the difficult emotions, men also cut off access to the joyful ones. The fear, the grief, the shame. And the excitement, the tenderness, the deep happiness. They’re not separate things. They come from the same place. When you close the door on one, you close it on all of them.

One Challenge

This week I want you to think of one person in your life who is carrying something you haven’t been able to fix.

A partner, a friend, a family member. Someone who is in the mud right now.

And instead of looking for a way to lead them out of it, just ask one question. Not how can I help, because that still puts you in the role of the solver. Just:

“How are you really doing with all of this?”

And then wait, don’t fill the silence, don’t reassure. Don’t move toward a solution, just stay there with them in whatever they say next. That’s sitting in the mud. That’s the whole thing.

It feels uncomfortable because we’ve never practised it. But discomfort in service of the person you love is one of the bravest things a man can do. And Vicki’s message to Mark, and to every man listening, is that it’s not as dangerous as we think. The landmines are much smaller than the distance that grows when we don’t go there at all.

The full conversation with Vicki is one of the most honest and important episodes I’ve recorded. She speaks with extraordinary clarity about what it’s like to watch your husband go through something like this without the tools to process it, and she does it with no bitterness, just love. If you have a partner, listen to this one together if you can.

▶ Safe Harbour: Vicki Feltham — listen here

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” — Rumi

If you’re ready to look at that truth clearly, the Midlife Audit is a good place to begin. Not to fix your life and not to sell you a dream, just to help you get honest about where things actually are and what your next chapter might look like.

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Listen on your commute. Or your lunch break. Or that walk you keep meaning to take.