What if divorce wasn't really about her?
That's the question Karen McMahon poses to open this episode of Journey Beyond Divorce, and the question at the center of her conversation with Geoff Laughton, a Relationship and Men's Work Coach with 33 years of experience, 300+ workshops, and thousands of clients. Geoff calls the pattern the "Masculine Dilemma," a set of unconscious traps that quietly erode men's marriages long before divorce ever becomes a possibility. He's also 44 years into his own marriage, so he's not just teaching this work, he's living it.
Karen and Geoff dig into what actually drives men toward disconnection: confusion about what masculinity even means today, growing up without strong masculine models, and the gap between who a man was trained to be and who he actually is underneath the training. Geoff unpacks the real differences between masculine and feminine energy, not as stereotypes, but as wiring, and explains why so many marriages die from a thousand tiny paper cuts rather than one big blowup.
One of the most useful moments in the episode is Geoff's breakdown of "MSU" (making shit up) and "MUS" (made-up shit), the stories partners tell themselves about what the other person is thinking, without ever actually asking. Karen and Geoff both push back hard on the idea that a partner should "just know" what you need, calling it a setup for failure in any relationship.
The conversation also tackles the "Sir Lancelot syndrome," the nice-guy pattern of trying to rescue and fix a partner's every feeling, at the cost of a man's own needs and boundaries, and why that pattern so often ends in resentment rather than intimacy.
In the back half of the episode, Geoff walks through what he calls a relationship postmortem: a brutally honest look at what worked, when things started to break down (often, he notes, right around the arrival of the first child), where a man went out of integrity with himself, and what he's committed to doing differently before jumping into the next relationship. Karen and Geoff agree this kind of self-honest inventory, done without self-blame or shame, is essential before dating again.
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Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
