Birthing Instincts · Dr. Stuart Fischbein + Midwife Blyss Young

#435: The Making of a Good Man with Ashley Mariani

October 15, 2025·1 hr 21 min·6 clips

Ashley explains that once a woman's brain categorizes her partner as someone to be cared for rather than an equal, romantic intimacy cannot cross back over.

1. Birthing Instincts episode 435 examines fatherhood, relationship breakdown after birth, and patient autonomy in obstetric care. 2. Dr. Stuart Fishbein, a community-based obstetrician and podcast co-host, leads the interview solo while co-host Bliss Young travels back from a retreat in Greece; guest Ashley Mariani is a couples therapist, reverend, and founder of Mind Online Therapy specializing in intimacy and birth trauma. 3. The episode's central thesis is that most postpartum relationship crises are predictable and preventable if fathers understand what being a 'protector' actually requires. 4. Dr. Stu opens with a text exchange from midwife Tiffany: a patient with a repaired fourth-degree tear is being told by her OB that a C-section is mandatory, despite Dr. Stu arguing the recurrence risk is a small percentage and refusal is the patient's legal right. 5. The night-shift OB who took over augmented labor and the woman delivered vaginally at 8:57 with no tears, while the patient advocate sent by the hospital told the woman she had to comply with her doctor's preference. 6. Dr. Stu cites this as an example of 'robotic doctor thinking' and notes that ACOG recommendations cited without data are not informed consent. 7. Ashley Mariani's path into couples work began with two C-sections and what she calls two rounds of obstetric violence, which led her to train as the therapist she needed and then expand into holistic couples work. 8. Ashley's conference presentation, 'Becoming the Protector,' opens with a composite case study named John: a 1990s kid whose conflict-avoidant father watched hockey rather than guiding him, leaving John unable to handle disagreement or think critically. 9. John's adolescence contained no rite of passage — no mentor or coach who pulled him aside to say 'here is what responsibility as a man looks like' — and he graduated into adulthood unable to weigh options, question authority, or name his own emotional states. 10. John meets Jill, an overachieving perfectionist whose Excel-sheet approach to life means John never has to think for himself — he simply lets her lead and enjoys the absence of conflict. 11. Ashley notes that high-achieving, type-A women with hyperaroused nervous systems often face fertility struggles, and Jill is no exception: scheduled sex, lost intimacy, and mounting criticism of John follow. 12. In the hospital birth room, Jill realizes she feels like a number rather than a person and turns to John for protection; he freezes, defers to nurses and physicians, and she experiences what Ashley calls the first major betrayal. 13. After discharge, John's mother arrives and begins overriding Jill's preferences, and John — enmeshed with his mother and unwilling to risk her disapproval — refuses to set boundaries, choosing his mother's comfort over his wife's. 14. Ashley states: 'I would rather my wife be uncomfortable than my mom be angry at me' — and calls this one of the most common patterns she hears in intake emails. 15. John enters a shame spiral, detaching through gaming, pornography, and 'taking the long way home from work,' while Jill juggles postpartum recovery and infant care alone. 16. Jill's intuition eventually surfaces the pornography use, deepening what Ashley describes as a layered betrayal wound that by the time couples reach therapy has become a question of separation versus repair. 17. The episode's most quoted line is Ashley's statement that 'when you're mothering a man it's hard to want him as a lover,' explained by the neurological separation between the caretaking container and the romantic intimacy container. 18. Ashley and Dr. Stu discuss the therapy path: addressing shame first, then values clarification, then building male accountability networks and 'brotherhoods' that replace the missing rite of passage. 19. The episode is a structured interview with an embedded slide presentation from the Reclaiming Birth Conference in London, Ontario; Dr. Stu speaks from personal experience, referencing his own regrets about his ex-wife's relationship with his mother. 20. Best for parents and expecting couples navigating the postpartum transition; not for listeners who want birth technique content rather than relational psychology.

As heard by us

A plainspoken look at fatherhood, boundaries, and the strain they can put on family life.

Dr. Stu and Ashley Mariani spend the episode on a familiar but messy problem: how fatherhood gets read by everyone around a new baby, and how that reading can strain a couple's relationship. The strongest passages stay close to ordinary tension. A partner freezes.

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Hear a conversational episode that links birth, fatherhood, and relationship strain.

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