Coach Katharine

I Didn’t Need a New Man, Just a New Way to Connect with Him 

My view of what I wanted in the world was shaped by two powerful beliefs from childhood. The first, from my headmistress, was that I should be a strong, independent, successful, modern woman. She drilled into us to study hard so we could have successful careers just like our male counterparts.

The second, probably sourced from a love of rom-com films, was a belief that when the time was right, I would meet my Mr. Right and fall so deeply and madly in love that nothing else would really matter because I’d always have him there to make me happy.

For a short while, these two directions seemed to coexist. I’d got myself a good career and was steadily rising through the ranks. I’d married a man who really made me feel like we had something super special between us. Something that was worth the risk of becoming a step-mum to his young daughter, something that made me feel it was us against the world.

After a while though, the romance side of my story started to slip through my fingers. My demanding career, alongside all the other responsibilities we’d picked up as a couple along the way, meant the movie-style relationship became sidelined and replaced by an endless list of things “to do.”

And I often felt I had to handle a lot of it myself. We had another daughter, set up a holiday rental home, took in two rescue dogs, did a huge home renovation project and any free moment we had was given to friends or family, not to each other. The chores were relentless, and I felt frantic and shattered.

My job then started to take me abroad once a month, putting a strain on our child-care arrangements, and my husband’s new working hours had him leaving home at 6 in the morning. We became like passing ships in the night. Dinner had mostly turned into a ready meal shoved in the microwave and eaten off our laps in front of the TV, as opposed to the quality time together I’d always expected it to be.

There were no rows, as we didn’t have time for that, but equally there was no connection–we had no idea what the other was thinking or feeling. I craved a loving, caring relationship where we supported each other and couldn’t wait to be in each other’s company. Instead we had an exhausting, ungratifying and narky coexistence.

From there we started to lose our way as a married couple, and that really scared me.

I went away on a week-long leadership training trip for work, and where I saw other colleagues calling home and checking in enthusiastically with their partners, my husband wasn’t interested in hearing anything about it. When I got home and confronted him as to why not, he said he thought we were just on different paths in life.

But I didn’t want to find out where those different paths might lead. I knew I didn’t want a divorce. I knew that my whole career would feel futile without the love of my family by my side. I knew I had a great man, but I just no longer knew how to connect to him.

I had to do something, so I turned to Google and found Laura Doyle and the 6 Intimacy Skills™, which turned out to be my marriage’s lifeline.

I devoured Laura’s book The Empowered Wife on my morning commutes and had a truly life-changing realisation. I had been feeling helpless and trapped because the only way I could see to fix our problems was to leave my job, yet we’d built our lifestyle around a double income family so how could I do that?

However, where I thought I needed either my husband or my circumstances to change to get the connection I craved, I discovered that I could just change some things about me and my outlook and in turn have a remarkable influence on the connection of my whole family.

That really spoke to the independent woman in me: that I had the power to fix things single-handedly.

I saw that in my misguided attempts to lead a successful life, I was trying to organise and control everyone else around me, which no one was responding well to. Yet I also saw I could change that.

From that point on I wanted more than the books. I got myself a coach and actively started to apply the Intimacy Skills to my life.

First of all, things just started to change for me. I relearned how to make myself happy and not to lose myself by drowning under the weight of my to-do lists. That was so revitalising and gave me a much-needed positive energy that rubbed off on all around me.

I also remembered how to value and respect my husband the way I had when I first met him, and I started to feel a healing gratitude for the amazing family that I had. But as all this work was changing me and how I showed up at home, it was also changing my husband and my children, and gradually I attracted my husband back to our old connection.

Things in my home couldn’t be more different now.

As we became closer again, we began to share dreams and aspirations, and we started to plan a whole new life together. Far from me leaving my job, my husband actually took a job in the same company to enable us to move, as a family, to a life in sunny Gibraltar!

I get so much support now in all our responsibilities and we have so much more quality time together. We laugh on the padel tennis court as we learn a new sport together. We socialise and parent together, rather than always being a tag team. We eat our meals together as a family on the terrace and share things about our days. We listen and support each other when we face challenges because sometimes things in life are not easy.

But, most importantly, we’re back on the same path and it’s the road of a happy marriage. The map to that road I love to share with other women.