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Manhood often feels like navigating through uncharted territory, but you don't have to walk alone. Join us as we guide a conversation about how to live intentionally so that we can join God in reclaiming the masculine restorative presence he designed us to live out. Laugh, cry, and wonder with us as we explore the ins and outs of manhood together.
00:00
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the Restorative Man podcast. My name is Jesse French and excited to be joined by my cohost, Cody Buriff. Cody, how are you today? Good to be here. to have you here. I like, I always love storytime with Cody and I want to tee that up because our guest in today's conversation is a good friend of ours. I'm friends with him because of you. You were friends with him first. And so
00:28
Take us back to that fateful day when you met Ike Dolby. Yes. Ike, I'm glad you're here with us. I've been real excited about this conversation and I'm glad that we've been friends for a long time. I think it's been 20 years actually. Yeah, dude. Yeah, 20 years now. You guys are old. Yeah, I feel it too. Yes. How it all started. I had driven up to Canada to
00:56
be on this summer thing with crew. was like a summer mission trip kind of deal, development sort of thing. And I was in college and I'd driven up, shown up. It was a long drive. So I got to my like little dorm room kind of thing. And we were in these like apartments or whatever with separate bedrooms. And I laid down and went to sleep. And then I woke up to the strumming of a guitar in the room next to me and being serenaded by this man I'd never met before.
01:25
What? Hang on. What time? What time in the morning are we talking about? I honestly have no idea if it was probably in the afternoon or something. I don't even know. OK, I was hoping it was like three thirty in the morning. No, I just remember waking up from this nap like being serenaded by this awesome guy named Dolby that I met. And that was our very first engagement as I remember walk like coming out, look, turn around the corner and kind of peeking my head in your bedroom or whatever. And there you are with your guitar just kind of strumming away.
01:54
And, uh, that was the moment we connected. that's right. Ike, do you remember that? Oh yeah, man. It was a really long drive up to Canada as well. And I'm pretty sure it was sometime middle of the afternoon. It was like maybe an hour or two before dinner in our first session of all the guys together that were up there for that trip. And
02:24
I remember I had just woken up from a nap myself and was just like feeling the need to play a little bit, sing, I think probably a worship song or maybe a silly Jack Johnson song or something like that. I was into that back in college. yeah, around the door pops this bearded beauty. And we're like, oh, hey, hey man, what's up? That was our first interaction.
02:55
And I'll say since then, like we've been on multiple back country trips together, even back up in Canada, but there was one we did the journey backpacking trip together, guided it together and Ike brought along, was it a little guitar or a little ukulele? It was a ukulele. Yeah. And so he's like sitting fireside with all the guys on this, on our backpacking trip and just strumming away. And that was, That's true commitment to like pack in even a mini ukulele, like.
03:23
That's true service to the guys on the trip. like, it'll add some pounds to my pack for your benefit. Let's go. Let's go. Ike is a good man. I guess I've known you 20 years now and I'm glad to have you as a friend. So yeah, thanks for joining us today. I'm blessed to call you a friend as well, Cody and glad to call you a friend as well, Jesse. Yeah, likewise, Likewise. Well, I know today we wanted to have a little bit more of a specific conversation with you. Ike got quite a story.
03:53
which I mean, guess, yeah, if you go back 20 years ago, you never would have guessed that was going to be the story. And you, I assume probably wouldn't have chosen it at that point, had you known. And so just give you an opportunity to tell a little bit of your story and what has happened in your life over the last 20 years, specifically in the realm of you got married and then unmarried. And now you're actually remarried and having kids. And so there's a whole lot of roller coaster things going on.
04:21
that story that we're just grateful that you're willing to share with us. So. Yeah. Yeah. It's even difficult to think about how do I condense 20 years into a couple of minutes? Seriously. Well, could you, could you just kind of start off and let us know how did things get started and kind of give us at least the first part of that story? What happened to you? Yeah. So honestly, it was just a little bit before you and I met Cody.
04:50
I was in college at Purdue and involved in campus ministry there, campus crusade. you know, guy meets girl, things kind of progress. I got interested in her. She seemed interested in me. And I guess it was probably right around just after our trip up to Canada, started getting a little bit more serious and looking at a dating relationship, doing the whole Christianese DTR.
05:18
kind of talks. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That's that's a defined relationship for anybody who wasn't part of the cheesy Christian culture we grew up in. Yeah. So when you go from that early, you, hey, we're friends. Hey, now I want to date you. And I want to be more serious about pursuing you. And, you know, I really felt like I was meeting the girl of my dreams at that point. And
05:47
She was checking all the boxes. She was telling me all the things that I wanted to hear. We were both involved in campus ministry. Felt like there was a solid faith foundation that was really important to me at the time. She also had been there for me through actually the loss of my father that happened that next year. So that was another big compounding sort of moment for me. And to have somebody with me going through that meant a lot.
06:17
at the time. you know, fast forward through graduation, I proposed, you know, wait another year and a half to then get married, looking for jobs out of school. That moved me and her subsequently out to Colorado, out of Indiana. And yeah, got married here in Colorado. Things seemed great. I was flying as an airline pilot at the time. That's what I went to school for.
06:45
Did that for a couple of years. You know, things were tight. Money was tough. There was some student loan debt to pay off. There was, you know, navigating life fresh out of college, being on the road quite a bit. And things seemed to be working fairly well, but, you know, career wise, that wasn't the path for me. I didn't like the lifestyle. I didn't like being away from home. So often I really had a family mindset. I wanted to be a dad.
07:15
Desperately had wanted that since I was a little boy. I've always wanted to be a dad and Yeah, so flying as a pilot it didn't pay very much at the time I was flying for a rinky-dink little airline that basically paid their pilots in flight time not really in money So I did not make much money, but I worked like a dog. I was gone a lot I really wanted to be home really wanted to start a family so
07:44
At a certain point, I could no longer afford to do it financially. It was a bad time in the market, the whole housing crisis and market crash. I had just had to find something else. And I was looking to find something else because I just didn't want to fly anymore. I didn't want to be gone away from home anymore. So got out of that and got into what I'm doing now, which is still aviation related, but that allowed me to have nights and weekends at home. And I think it was right around that time.
08:13
that I started noticing a bit of a shift in moving out of the honeymoon phase of that marriage and into more of the daily grind and noticing things weren't quite right and believing that it was on me. It was on me to keep that marriage growing, to keep that marriage thriving, but that responsibility was only on me.
08:42
I was hearing from a lot of different sources, not excluding Christian men's ministry, that was telling me that I just needed to step up and be more of a man. And I needed to fight harder for my marriage. And it was on me to be the spiritual leader, to me to be the leader of my family. And that if I did these things, if I did these five steps, then my wife would love me more. My wife would...
09:10
be more engaged in the relationship. And that simply wasn't the case. It takes two to tango. So I was putting in all this work and all this effort and trying to take on more and more around the house, trying to take on more and more with the relational equity and not really seeing any kind of results from that. So we tried some marriage counseling that felt pretty flat.
09:38
didn't really go anywhere. was sort of a check-in. How are you guys doing? No, we're good. Things are good. That was sort of the persona that my wife and I would put out as the image. You know, we've got everything together. We're doing good. And not really getting into the heart of the things like, actually, we're not good. She's not happy. I'm not happy. I feel exhausted. And I don't know what to do anymore. And, you know, throughout that relationship,
10:08
I think my wife also would say at that time that she expected more from me, that she wanted me to meet her needs and her needs were not being met the way she wanted them to be met, but then not really giving me the communication I needed to be able to actually meet those needs or begin to meet those needs. But then I was also not allowed to have desires or needs on my side either. So it became very one-sided.
10:38
Yeah, and looking back I can say that now, but in the moment, I felt like that was normal. I like that's how it was supposed to be. And like I said, I was getting messages from multiple places saying that that is how it is. And you just got to love harder. You've just got to keep doing more. Yeah, I feel like there's even like a little bit of an undertone of like you need to die to yourself, you know, be like Christ was for the church. Like that can be taken way out of context in a lot of ways. So.
11:07
That's what I'm hearing as well. Well, and it just feels, it feels so prescriptive, right? Of just like, kind of what you said, like, Hey, if these three steps are accomplished, like, you know, this output will be realized. And so, I mean, there's so much appealing on some ways of like that approach, right? Of like, well, there's certainty there and there's clarity and there's something to just like really, really follow and subscribe to, but.
11:35
You know, you're talking, all of us are like, that so much to be said for leaning in and intentionality. Absolutely. But the simplicity of these inputs yield this output is that's not. true. Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It's not a slot machine where you put in a quarter pull lever and then you get something in return. Right. Yeah. Like, would you be willing, brave enough to share.
12:02
the moment or a moment when you realize something was really wrong? Yeah. So I think I really started feeling that something was truly different and something was not okay. When we reached a point with our life here in Colorado, I had been wanting to start a family and each time I brought up that conversation, maybe it was the third or fourth time in as many years that I've
12:31
was like, well, what the heck? We keep making this plan to start a family and then it just keeps getting pushed with another excuse or another reason why we need to delay. And she really wanted to pursue her career and get it to a point where she felt successful enough that she could then step away for a little bit to start a family. But that was an ever moving goalpost. You know, even when she said, just this next, this next stage, just this next step.
13:00
this next position and then I'll be ready. And it got to a point where she was being pursued to start a position in Chicago. I never wanted to live in Chicago. I never wanted to leave Colorado. I love Colorado. I love everything about it. I mean, I grew up in Indiana. There's not the same kind of things available.
13:26
As there are here in Colorado. So it came down to me having the sense and the feeling. again, a lot of assumptions were made in this relationship and not really communicated. So some of that may also be on me or may not be. My intuition may have been correct at this point, but I felt that if I said no to this move to Chicago.
13:55
then the marriage was over. And so I made a vow to myself at that point that I would be willing to sacrifice anything and everything if it meant that it would turn this marriage around. And I chose then to say, okay, let's move to Chicago so you can pursue your career. And I will continue waiting for you to hit that point where you're ready.
14:24
time to start a family and I will show you that I love you so much and I love this relationship and prioritize it so much that I will literally sacrifice anything and everything even to the point of sacrificing myself and my wants, my desires, my needs and put it all on the table. So we moved to Chicago and with the understanding that we did communicate this, the understanding that this would be a reset, a reset.
14:54
for us, reset for the marriage, a reset for life. No family, no friends, no contacts there in Chicago, or just starting from scratch. And within maybe about a month of that move, very quickly went right back to business as usual. And her job took her away. She was spending a lot of time in the office, a lot of time doing work social events that I later found out were
15:23
know, cover-ups for things that were going on behind the scenes. And I felt very lonely. I was taken away from my friends, my support network, and now I was isolated. I was now working from home for the first time. I had been in the office up until then, but my office was in Colorado and my new home was in Chicago. yeah, home was now work and work was now home.
15:52
There was no escape for me at that point. I was stuck where I was at. things started to devolve very quickly from there. A lot of fights and arguments, a lot of hurt feelings on both sides, to the point where I felt I was no longer being heard in any way, shape, form. I was just bashing my head against the wall trying to get my feelings across to my wife.
16:19
And so I had to write her a letter and say, hey, look, we had been through some marriage counseling at that time because things were real bad, just no connection whatsoever. So I wrote her a letter, you know, explaining how this is what I'm feeling. I have to put it in writing because it's the only way I can get it across. And then in that letter, I asked the question, are you cheating on me? I get a sense that something else is going on. And I never received a response to that letter.
16:50
Other than within like another day or two, she asked me to leave. She said, I need some space. I need you to get out of the house and I need to have this trial separation. She had been asking for that for, gosh, probably about a month or so at that point. And she said, I know that I don't appreciate you for everything that you do. And so I just need some time apart so I can really just...
17:18
start to see what it is that I should be appreciating about you and made a lot of kind of excuses as to why I should leave the house. I pushed back. said, no, I think that's a bad idea. I don't think we can actually work on our relationship if I'm gone. But she emphasized that's what she needed. And so I said, OK, if that's what it's going to take for us to make any kind of progress, then I'll leave for a little while. So I packed up some stuff.
17:48
drove down to my mom's house, is super fun in your 30s, to move out of your home and go move in with your mother. Luckily it was only for just, the plan was just for a month at that time. So I drove down, stayed with my mom and a couple days after that, I received a anonymous Facebook message, some
18:15
profile of a person I could tell was clearly fake a picture that was taken off the internet somewhere and a fake name and in that message it said that my wife had found her way into someone else's marriage that she was a homewrecker and called her a plethora of names and Yeah, I was floored Absolutely floored
18:44
This was, I think at 2 a.m. that I get the ding on my phone. This came through. So I waited, waited until I knew that she would be awake. I'm getting ready for work, called and said, hey, what is this? What's going on? And denial upfront, like that's bogus, but something still didn't sit right. There was enough detail in that anonymous Facebook message that something about it rang really true.
19:15
More phone calls over the next few days where little bits of more truth came out slowly until finally was admitted to the yes, there had been some cheating going on. I drove back up to Chicago at that point. They said we've got to do something. I don't know what. I don't know where to go from here. But I had enough wise counsel through my uncle at that point to know.
19:44
Don't make any rash decisions at this point because you don't know what you might regret. So it was a time to stop and wait and evaluate. And so that's what I did. I drove back up. Wasn't sure if I wanted to stay. Wasn't sure if I wanted to go. But I knew that I just had to see for myself what was going to happen. After I drove back up, moved back into my house, I was checking the mail another few days later.
20:13
and found a credit card bill. And in that credit card statement, it showed some credit card charges for that time that I was down with my mother in Indiana. That showed some hotels and bars and restaurants in downtown Chicago. I'm like, why are you going out to these places? And why does it look like? Why are you staying in hotels when I should be at home? And yeah, sure enough.
20:42
There was another, and this was a different infidelity on top of the other one I had just found out about. So was more compounding. So yeah, at that point I was just absolutely wrecked. Wrecked as a man, wrecked as a husband. Yeah. Man, I, I, yeah. And that was how many years ago?
21:09
This was in 2018. Okay. Yeah. 2018. So seven years ago, and yet even just as you kind of recount some of that story, like I feel the shock, right? The disappointment, the complete, my world is flipped upside down now. How did you process that? How did you begin to wade through all of the layers of what that would mean? Yeah.
21:37
That's a great question. And I'll say this, up until that point, through the loss of my father, I had begun to lose some trust in God. And I had really, since college, held God at arm's length, sort of with a vow, like, hey, I believe in you, but I don't necessarily trust you with my heart because you allowed my father to battle cancer for six years and...
22:04
not perform the miraculous healing we've been praying for. So I'm just, I believe in you, but I just don't trust you. So that's like kind of the context, like that's the background that then this plays out. So then, yeah, that initial moment of that anonymous Facebook message, that first discovery, I hit absolute rock bottom.
22:30
I I'd given everything of myself to this marriage at this point and now it was completely in the trash. And I realized at that moment, weeping into the rug on my mother's guest bathroom floor, that, and this is a really stupid cliche Christian saying, but it rang so true in that moment, is when you're at rock bottom, you're still standing on the rock.
22:58
And in that moment, I felt more palpably the presence of Jesus than I ever have. Even until this day, I felt Him right there with me and in it with me. And from that moment on, my relationship with Christ just deepened further and further. And that's where I turned to. That's where I went and thank God that I didn't feel that abandonment there, too.
23:28
because I think I had felt a sense of abandonment with God before. And in that moment, I felt him there with me. Yeah, and abandonment, At least for sure the loss, right? The loss of your head and then the loss of your marriage, To have something then that counters so deeply like, I am actually with you. Yeah. So keep going. of how did the rest of things play out? Yeah. So at that point, I got
23:57
I'm more further involved in my local church up in Chicago. got involved with, I went to a men's breakfast and, you know, people, guys that around the table were just asking me like, hey, you know, what's going on lately? What's new in your life? What's happening? And I casually mentioned, well, I think I'm on the path towards divorce right now. I'm not a hundred percent sure, but you know, life's pretty rough. And one of the guys said, well, hold on a second. That sounds pretty heavy.
24:27
I would love to hear more and a couple of them threw away the curriculum for that day and said, hey, we just want to sit and pursue you for a little bit and see if we can, you know, love on you. And that was huge. I'd never experienced that before. One of those guys invited me to a men's small group that he had going on. A couple of guys in there that had been through something similar. And those men really surrounded me and loved on me to help me through some of that.
24:54
I saw individual counseling. I was very angry and dealing with a lot of anger on top of the grief and the sadness that I was feeling. That individual counseling was super beneficial. I mean, I can't say enough about therapy. If you're dealing with something, go, go get some help. Find a good therapist and do it. It's worth it. And the other side of that too was seeking some marriage counseling.
25:23
or a couples therapy, knowing that, kind of going into that knowing that there was going to be a lot of difficulty there in not knowing what the outcome of that might be, having some hopes, but just not knowing for sure. And, you know, at that point, I'd come to the understanding through therapy, through some other additional resources that the marriage I had was dead. And I no longer wanted that marriage anyway, because
25:51
That's what led us to that point in the first place. So the question was, could something new be rebuilt or was it time to put that dead marriage to bed and move on to something else? There's all kinds of thoughts and doctrines around divorce in the faith community. They'll tell you divorce is wrong, divorce is bad. But at that point, when you're living it,
26:20
It tells you something different. And even Jesus says in the case of infidelity or sexual immorality, he doesn't require us to stay in a marriage that is dealing with adultery. But I think it's also, it is encouraged. So I felt like I really wanted to stay and see. I wanted to know if something new could be started. And I heard God telling me too that if I was going to stay in it, that he had something for me.
26:51
that he was going to do something with it in me and he wanted to see that through in me. But he wasn't going to require me to do that, but he gave me a promise that if I did stay, he was going to work on me. So I chose to stay and choose a harder path and just see what was going to happen. There's a great resource out there called Affair Recovery or AffairRecovery.com. They are a faith-based organization. I sought their help. They've got some great coursework for
27:20
all sides of infidelity, whether you're betrayed or you're the unfaithful man or woman, or even if you've been both, not both man or woman, but both faithful or unfaithful. And that was huge for me. There was a support group there of other betrayed men that we had some weekly phone calls. There were some coursework. As I was going through couples counseling with my wife at the time, we were getting stuck. Progress wasn't being made.
27:50
There was a little bit of maybe therapist abuse going on there too, where our couples therapist was telling me that I was the one keeping us stuck because of my bitterness and my unforgiveness and that I just needed to move towards forgiving and moving forward. But that didn't sit right with me. I still wasn't getting the apologies I needed. I still wasn't getting the transparency that I needed, the honesty that I needed to move forward.
28:18
just something was still off and still wrong. So I suggested, hey, let's go to this retreat that a fair recovery puts on down in Texas. So she agreed. We signed up. went down and boy, that those first couple of days, they really harped on to the unfaithful partner that full disclosure.
28:43
has to happen. If there's any secrets, anything that's still being hidden, that's just additional infidelity. And for your betrayed spouse to move forward, they've got to know the truth. They've got to know what they're forgiving. They can't just give a blanket forgiveness statement. You've got to know what you're actually forgiving. So come maybe like the day before the last day of that retreat.
29:11
I get woken up early in the morning and my wife says to me, hey, there's some more that I need to tell you. And she reveals more, more infidelities, more affairs. And at this point, I had hit that initial discovery back in May of that year. This was now December and I'm taking Rurai back to ground zero.
29:39
like no time had passed just right back to it. And I'm thinking to myself, I don't know if I can start this over again. This journey of grief, this journey of reconciling the truth with what I know reality to be. And I've got to rewrite my reality again. That was very hard. And then even later, she looked, it was after that conversation, later on,
30:07
I still at that retreat. says to me, Oh yeah. And by the way, there, was this one more. Oh my gosh. Wow. So, I could you help us understand if for somebody who hasn't gone through that, like what's going on inside of you in those moments and that season when you're like discovering this, like what's happening for you? It really is just a
30:36
I'm trying not to use profanity. It's a mind sh**. mean, the rug gets pulled out from under you in that moment. What you had believed reality to be gets completely flipped. It's like getting yanked out of the matrix. The world looks completely different in a split second. And you suddenly have to come to terms with a new world.
31:05
that you didn't know existed. seems just so disorienting, right? Like that's absolutely. Yeah. We are now in, like you said, the new scene, the new reality. Yeah. Yeah. I remember going to breakfast after that, that next disclosure at that retreat and the other betrayed men and even some of the, the unfaithful men that were in some of the support groups looked at me and saw me and they could see it on my face.
31:34
they could see that something was different and I was in absolute shell shock. You know, I'm just walking around days like a zombie and they could see it on me and some of them came up and loved on me a little bit said, Hey, I know this is really hard and you'll get there. Just hold on. But right now this is really hard.