In this video, I use a powerful example from classic literature to explore something I see often in my coaching practice — why intelligent, high-achieving men can be the last to recognize when a relationship is emotionally failing them. This isn’t about weakness. It’s about how a certain kind of identity can work against you in love, and what it costs you when it does. If you’ve ever minimized what you were experiencing, kept up appearances while something felt deeply off, or walked away from a long relationship questioning your own judgment — this one’s for you.
P.S. If you’re a man navigating dating after divorce, don’t go it alone. My free masterclass was made for you—learn how to rebuild confidence, attract the right women, and avoid common post-divorce mistakes. Watch it here.
Ready for tailored support? Book your 1:1 dating strategy call with me here and let’s map out your next steps.
See you next week,
Kimberly
There’s a character in John Steinbeck’s, east of Eden novel named Adam Trask, and this is a book I happen to be reading at the moment, a book that was a multi-generational book written in 1952. The reason I’m telling you this is because Adam is a good man. He’s a decent, hardworking, earnest man. The kind of man who builds things, who shows up, who believes in the future that he is creating.
And his wife is one of the most coldly, manipulative characters in American literature. She lies to Adam from the beginning. She shows him who she is repeatedly without much effort to hide it, and Adam cannot see it. And it’s not because he’s stupid, it’s not because he’s a weak man, it’s because he’s decided.
Who she is to him, [00:01:00] and that decision is low to bearing for everything he believes in about his own life. Now, Steinbeck wrote this character in 52, but I talk to men living this exact dynamic every single week. So today we’re gonna talk about why high achieving men are often the last, to see what’s right in front of them in a relationship, what it costs them while they’re actually in this dynamic and what it does to their dating lives long after it.
And so if you’re intrigued, stick around now. Welcome to this channel. My name is Kimberly Hill. I’m a dating and relationship coach for men. I support good hearted men to attract deeply loving relationships and go on to maintain those relationships. I work privately with men on a one-on-one basis. So if you have been watching this channel for a while and you’re thinking, Hey, maybe it’s time to reach out to Kimberly for some support.
The, you know, stuff she talks about on her channel is resonating with me. [00:02:00] Then of course you are welcome to book a complimentary call with me to see if we would be a good fit to work together. Now let’s get into it. So the pattern I see constantly with high achieving men, um, at work, if something isn’t performing, you’re gonna address it.
You don’t let an underperforming employee, , coast indefinitely because you don’t want to have some uncomfortable conversation. You’re not gonna let a business problem quietly fester because. Fixing it feels hard. You’ll deal with it because that’s what you do. That’s what high achieving men do. But in your relationship, the same man who holds everyone around him to an exceptionally high standard.
Watches his partner chronically underperform emotionally in terms of effort, in terms of respect for the relationship. And these men often say nothing or do nothing and hope that it changes all on its own. And the reason is not that these men are [00:03:00] weak, it’s actually the opposite. It’s that high achieving men have been so conditioned to solve problems that when you can’t.
Solve one. It creates enormous cognitive dissonance. So instead of acknowledging that the problem is real, I don’t have a relationship that’s working, or the woman that I’m married to is not really the woman I thought she was, you’ll minimize it. You’ll rationalize her poor behaviors, or you’ll tell yourself that she’s just going through something, or this is a phase.
You’ll say to yourself that things will simply get better when the stress of this or that or that. Settles down or you know, this is just a season in our relationship now. Adam Trask did this for years and. Kathy, his wife shot him and left him on the floor of their home, and he still built a story around it that let him stay attached to this version of her [00:04:00] that he had fabricated.
Now, this is not a character flaw unique to a fictional man in 1950s California. This is what happens when a man’s internal narrative about his life becomes more important to him. Then the reality he’s actually living in, and this happens to more men than you would imagine it does. So you apply your problem solving identity to a situation that requires a completely different.
Scale set, which is honest self-assessment. And when that doesn’t work, you just keep waiting it out. Now, layer on top of this what’s called an identity piece, because this is where it gets very important for a lot of men that are high achievers. Success isn’t just what you do, it’s who you are. And a successful man doesn’t have a failing relationship, a successful.
Man doesn’t walk away from something he built. A successful man doesn’t let people see [00:05:00] thing, see that things aren’t quite perfect at home. So you put on this front, you show up to the dinners, to the family events, to the social gatherings, and you perform the version of your life that matches the image you’ve created.
It’s fine. It’s good. We’re good. And here’s what I want you to understand, because this is not just a modern problem. This is not a you problem. If you look across literature, across history, across mythology, you will find the same pattern repeated across thousands of years of human experience. And I’m not gonna go into all those examples today, but these are exceptional men who built and led, um.
Uh, and achieved, and they, you know, they went selectively blind in their intimate lives. And it’s not because these men lacked intelligence or they lacked capability, but because the more a man builds his identity around a particular vision of his [00:06:00] life, the harder it becomes to see, to see the person standing in the middle of it clearly.
Because seeing your wife or your ex-partner clearly, uh, in the moment that these things are taking place with me, which would mean I have a tongue tied problem today, which would mean dismantling. The story you’ve built for yourself, and that story is holding everything else together. So Steinbeck, when he wrote East of Eden, understood this so well that he made this the emotional spine of one of the greatest American novels ever written.
Adam Trask, the character in the book isn’t a cautionary tale about weak men. He’s a portrait of what it looks like when a genuinely good man ref. Fuses to let reality interrupt his vision. So he maintained the front. And many men maintain the front. You tell your friends things are fine. You tell your family you’re gonna, you know what?
You’re working through it. And every day you spend maintaining the [00:07:00] illusion is a day that you’re not getting honest with yourself about what you actually need from a relationship every year that you stay. Because leaving would mean that you have to admit that it wasn’t working. Um, is a year of your life, you just don’t get back.
So the relationship isn’t just failing you emotionally, it’s doing something worse. It’s actively training you to suppress your own perception of reality and to call it a strength because here’s where the real damage shows up. It shows up for you men after the relationship finally comes to an end when something happens, um, that either makes you realize I can’t be with this woman anymore, or after so many years of slow erosion that she ends up saying, Hey, I want a divorce.
And you’re not surprised by it, but you’re thinking, wow, I was thinking about this. 15 years ago now, most high achieving men come out of long-term [00:08:00] relationships or marriages and feel completely blindsided by how difficult modern dating is. And it’s not because these men are not attractive in their own way, or successful men in their own way, or good men in their own way.
It’s because men like you, have spent years in a dynamic. Where your own perception came last, and you have internalized this as something normal, and so you do one of a few things. When you reenter the modern dating scene, the first mistake that you might make is overcorrecting, and so you’ll swing towards.
Extreme self-sufficiency. You might date casually, but you really don’t let any women get too close to you, and you tell yourself you’re simply enjoying your freedom, but really you’re protecting yourself from ever being in that position again. The position you were in with your ex from ever being the Adam Trask again.
Now, the problem is that protection and intimacy cannot coexist. You can’t wall [00:09:00] yourself off from being hurt and also build something real at the same time. It simply doesn’t work that way. Now, the second mistake that happens is that you’ll under screen. And what I mean by this is because you were already in the habit of overlooking red flags or minimizing them in your relationship, you bring that habit into dating.
And so you’ll meet a woman who shows a few green flags, um, and you’ll fast track the relationship because. The loneliness of starting over is very uncomfortable, and the familiar feeling of being needed feels really good. And so you don’t vet this woman deeply enough, or you simply just don’t give the relationship enough time before you accelerate it into a big commitment.
So you move too fast and you end up in this strikingly similar dynamic to the one you just left because the internal pattern. That you also have that created, the first situation was never [00:10:00] actually examined or altered. And the third mistake that really great high achieving men will make after they come out of minimizing their feelings and emotions and prior relationships.
Um, and this is the one that really stays with me, is that you men start to believe that the problem is simply you like. You carry all the shame and guilt that you failed the relationship, like as if it was your job to carry it alone. So after years of holding a relationship together or trying to be the one that was stable, the provider, the one who kept showing up, even when the relationship wasn’t giving back to you, you’ll walk away, you know, kind of deep down, quietly convinced that you’re somehow too much.
Or you’re just not enough, or you’re fundamentally difficult to love, and you’ll take that belief into every new date, every conversation, or every moment [00:11:00] of potential connection. And this is really common things that men do after coming out of. Difficult marriages. Now. Adam Trask in the books spent years after Kathie shot him and laughed convinced that something in him had invited her into his life, that a better man would have kept her, or that a better man would’ve had a different result with her.
And that is the cruelest part of this pattern, is that it doesn’t just cost you the relationship. It costs you your own self-perception on the way out. Now, one of the outcomes, uh, or one of those outcomes is inevitable. Um, and they’re very, very common. I see them all the time with the men I work with, and they trace back to the same root, A man who has learned somewhere along the way.
Whether in childhood, in his teenage years and his adult experiences, [00:12:00] he has learned along the way that his own honest perception of his relationship was less important than the story he was telling about it. And a man who never got the chance to unlearn that before he started dating. Anne. Now if any of this has landed for you, you feel like I’m speaking directly to you, I do want you to sit with one question, and the question is not, was my relationship bad?
You probably know the answer to that one already, but it’s this question, where did I stop trusting my own perception and what was I protecting by doing that? Where did I stop trusting my own perception and what was I protecting by doing that? Because that is where the work begins. It’s not in better tactics for dating go to another channel for that.
You guys know that that’s not the stuff I talk about here. Um, and it’s [00:13:00] not necessarily just gonna be all fixed by having a great dating profile. That’s a great start to meeting people. It’s really in recovering the part of you that knows how to see clearly. That can trust himself as he thrust into the modern dating world and deciding that what you see actually matters.
Now, Steinbeck gave Adam Trask a second act in this book. You know, by the end of the novel, he finds his way back to him himself. And that’s not just good fiction. This is what’s actually available to you man on the other side, um, of this kind of honest reckoning. Now, if. You are navigating dating after a long relationship has ended or a divorce and you want to do that work properly so you stop repeating the same patterns in dating or you know, dating a woman that has a very different physical face.
But ends up leading you down the same kind of hurtful pattern of a relationship, and that’s [00:14:00] exactly what I support men with. So you of course, welcome to book a call with me, but I would love to hear your thoughts. Have you even read this book? Um, Steinbeck’s East of Eden. It’s, you know, of course it’s an old book written in 52.
Just happened to pick it up recently and decide that I wanted to dig into this great novel and realize as I was reading it. I need to, I need to parallel this to what I’m noticing with the men I work with, and I think they’re actually adapting it into a Netflix show, but nothing’s better than picking up a good old classic book.
Anyways, love to hear your thoughts and comments, guys, and of course, see you in next week’s video Chow. I.
