If you’ve had your own business for more than 5 minutes, you realize that if there are NO complaints about your pricing, but you have plenty of customers… you aren’t charging enough.
There are these subtle rules, subtle hints that you need to pay attention to that will make your business successful. You don’t learn these things in school or when you are working for someone else… you have to learn them in real time while you are dealing with something that is close and personal to you: Your product or service and your customers. And all the details need to come to focus. Everyone has different details.
I was thinking about this this morning and how it pertains to my marriage. We had very strange dynamics, lots of personal triggers, lots of trauma from childhood. And we were both looking for comfort in different ways.
When we started marriage counseling, we had to fill out a questionnaire online. It took about an hour to do.
I said I had the same 3 issues that I’ve had since the beginning. That he wouldn’t bathe (but expected intimacy), he wouldn’t help me around the house (but expected intimacy) and he didn’t try to connect with me or treat me like his sweetheart (but he expected intimacy).
His only complaint? He wasn’t getting enough intimacy.
We were on the same page about everything else. Money, values, goals… I was surprised by this, but it was true.
So, with that knowledge, we got to work in counseling.
But something changed… I conveyed very detailed stories showing how he abandoned me, didn’t respect me or my time, how he didn’t want to be a partner, how he faked being an idiot (weaponized incompetence) and how he wouldn’t bathe more than 2-4 times a month.
Somehow, this all got twisted back at me. I’m not sure how. I was trying to be heard and validated, but I got turned into a villain.
I was angry but curious. Let’s figure this out…
I was told that I needed to communicate more clearly, more sweetly, that I needed to let go of all my pent up frustration and just be patient and soft. She made excuses for his bathing, stating it was a childhood wound and again, she told me he WANTED to help, but I was just asking the wrong way.
And he was nodding along with her every step of the way.
I didn’t explode, I’m surprised. You don’t think in the 23 years of being with this man that I didn’t try “sweet” or more linear? or smaller tasks? or rewards? or scheduling it weeks in advance via text, email, little notes, writing on his coffee lid? You don’t think I didn’t take the opportunity post coitus to say “hey, things could be so much better if you just took more showers. We could have a better sex life”. I tried the timing, the different styles of communicating, I read the book about how to communicate with a logic based “Spock” spouse. I did the research, I tried different approaches, JUST like I have in my business. I KNOW what my customer wants and I give it to them, I search for creative ways to make us both happy. I see the patterns and I hammer in on it. I made this relationship a JOB and worked REALLY hard at understanding him.
But I didn’t say all that, I just said “Ok. So I do all this, I do what you say. I’m sweet and patient and explain the same thing 100 times in a sweet tone. Great. But how do I get him to CARE enough to want to help?” I was met by silence. By both of them.
My husband was gone for a few hours one day and came home with about 16 books. All of them pointed to him being the victim of emotional and verbal abuse. Talk to me like you love me, married to a Narcissist, verbal abuse in marriage, being codependent to a Narcissist, being the victim of emotionally abusive parents, being a people pleaser etc.
And after the library showed up, he instantly started acting like a victim. Weepy, following me around the house and talking about nothing. Starting arguments over text (which I shared with my therapist) and it was all a campaign to show what a victim he was. Of me. I was the mean mom and he was the sweet, innocent little boy who just wanted love. I realized then that marriage counseling wasn’t going to help us at ALL if we both didn’t deal with our childhood wounds and if he wasn’t ready to show up to counseling as an ADULT.
And just let me say… he was a voracious reader. He processed information at an alarming speed. I really respected him for this. Three years after he purchased those books, they never came out of the bag. Not one was cracked open. Not one word was read. Instead, he read about controlling your dreams, all about box breathing, a book about God being a narcissist and then he put together an entire website dedicated to talking shit about the church he grew up in. And to this day he never gave me the URL and I have no idea where it is, but he spent countless hours on it.
I showed my therapist all those arguments. I sent her text videos of them. She read them and re-read them over and over again. She said that I apologized, I owned my part in things, I wanted to hear about his pain, I wanted to justify his pain (even though most of it had to do with his parents and his triggers), I held space for him. My biggest want in life is to be seen, heard and understood. I made damn sure I did that for him. But he ignored my feelings, my words, my desperation to share. He failed to comfort me, he failed to meet me half way. He just cut me off, refused to listen and went back to being the victim, begging for me to “love” him physically. Every single time. She said “no wonder you were going out of your mind! You couldn’t get a word in. He was monopolizing every conversation and he absolutely refused to take any true accountability then expected your warmth and kindness without giving you any.”
He was in his own therapy and I was praying to God that his therapist was as hard ass as mine. That she would guide him to address his childhood issues and get him to realize that the relationship with me wasn’t supposed to be parent/child. That he needed to show up and that what I was asking for was absolutely reasonable and bare minimum.
But that didn’t happen. He came back, puffed up, telling me that she said he was just looking for unconditional love, that he was a people pleaser and he was codependent and full of anxiety. And I was a narcissist.
My therapist countered that and disagreed. But frankly, I don’t know if we’ll ever truly know.
So how did we get from “She isn’t having enough sex with me” to the laundry list of issues that came up? While my issues stayed the same the whole time?
I held my ground. I waited for him to address the issues. I waited for him to show up for me as an adult. And he just kept digging the hole that he was a victim, that he was desperate for me to love him and he was just sort of… pathetic. I’m sorry to say. I think he believed if he was just helpless enough, I would run to his rescue, want to hold him and get naked for him, because that’s what women want to do. (We want to breastfeed every stranger on the street.)
But I still didn’t sleep with him.
And the true him started emerging. He started hoarding, he had to go on Prozac, he started glaring at me and being SO cold and scary and he said “I can’t live in a house where my wife won’t touch me, every time I look at you I know that YOU think I’m broken”. He put all the responsibility on me to fix the marriage and he made it CLEAR that sex was the only way to fix it (which is considered emotional abuse, by the way). He never truly worked on our relationship in therapy, he just wanted to be a victim. Then he started reading books on new age religions that saw sex as a way to enlightenment for men. Men got the enlightenment, women were the vessels (but women were still less than, even though they held the key to enlightenment). It was clear he wasn’t going to make progress to meet me half way. I knew there was nothing I could do. I listened, I gave him space. But nothing changed and I didn’t feel safe enough to sleep with him, and that’s where I went wrong. I was now a BAD wife. He was in his rights to throw me away.
How this relates to my business…
He never complained about me. I was doing my job, he was happy.
But the moment I raised my prices (asked for reciprocity, asked for “help”, asked for kindness and asked him to bathe more often) I lost a customer.
He was only willing to “buy” me when I was undervalued. When I finally charged what I was worth, he opted out.
And the cheap ones, the ones (men) who don’t see value in any business like yours (women) will continue to complain about the pricing.
BUT… the customers that see your value, know your worth, know that you have something that is valuable… they’ll NEVER complain about your pricing. They KNOW the value you are bringing, they KNOW who you are, what you offer, what you do and what the outcome will be.
They’ll happily pay your asking price.
So, I was asking WAY too little. I undervalued myself by a LOT.
That changes NOW. I finally see it. Better late than never.
Stop undercharging and overdelivering. Know your worth.
