Athol Kay's Blog, page 13

Female Isolation Anxiety

Louis .C.K routine…

I think he somewhat overstates, but the takeaway is that women really do have a finely tuned radar as to whether or not they will ever let themselves be isolated with you. I don’t mean “at the movies on a date”, or “at a restaurant”, there’s other people in those locations. I mean really alone, alone. As in just you and her.

Men experience Approach Anxiety walking up to the girl, women experience Isolation Anxiety going off with the guy alone. It’s the same physiological process of fight or flight kicking in. Men are programmed to prep for a physical conflict with another man when they approach a girl. It’s not her he’s worried about, it’s her boyfriend / husband / thug that’s that problem.

What women worry about is the guy turning into a thug-bastard-man-bear-pig when they they finally let themselves be alone with him. As a result, they have an extremely high co-relation between being sexually attracted to someone and allowing themselves to be truly isolated with them. That way if the worst happens, at least it was with a male they found attractive i.e. high value. Please don’t take the mental leap between hearing me explain the factors at work and taking that as a mandate for violating consent.

What I’m saying is that if you’re a guy, if you’re with a woman who is actively displaying interest in being alone with you, even if it’s cloaked in some other activity that you’d really be doing together… she’s into you in a big way.

Then if she’s into you… you don’t have to try hard to be something or someone you’re not. She’s already got that mental “yes” inside her head giving you approval to escalate things further with her. So have fun, enjoy the date and make some moves on her with a crooked smile. She’s expecting you to.

Is a Religious Conversion Like an Affair?

From the forum…

Sleepy:  I was reading Athol’s blog yesterday “Quirky Gifts and Flair” and read this line… she starts checking out of the relationship because she’s unhaaaaaappppppy and about to Eat, Pray, Love an exit.

So, my wife of 20+ years and 4 kids who has always been anti religion started to convert to Catholicism in secret. When I figured it out, I felt like she was cheating on me (about 6 months of individual and couples therapy and I still feel this way) as this was done in secret and her reason for needing god was that we were no longer good as a couple and she needed “love”. I flipped and basically took a position of no contact as if this was an affair, which she has done with just enough complaint that I know she still wants too.

Without going into all the details here (if there is a lot of interest I could add a thread in the 911 Relationship ER section) I guess my question is how evil am I and are there others out there who have felt this way?

Athol:  Well Eat, Pray, Love refers to a book, but the answer to your questions is yes / no / kinda / sorta / it depends.

It’s usually a critical junction when one half of a couple changes their religious status, either becoming more religious, less religious, or changing religions. They can be a wide variety of changes in personal interests and personality from benign to quite alarming as someone changes from one religious viewpoint to another. It’s always hopeful that an inter-faith marriage will stay stable, but the more divergent the expressions of belief are, the greater the stress is on the marriage.

This is largely the same effect at work as shared beliefs of any sort. Two democrats or two republicans are likely going to be more comfortable married to each other than a democrat and a republican are. It’s all about being able to relax with each other at the end of the day instead of wanting to disagree about something. Same deal if someone suddenly becomes crazy about a diet while the other isn’t. It’s a relationship stress to have one of you wanting to eat Paleo and the other being a Vegetarian… though the old joke stands that if you really want to piss off a Vegetarian give them vegetables to eat… most of them just want to eat pasta all day.

The more fundamentalist (Wikipedia) the conversion the greater the stress on the relationship is. Note that Wikipedia link to fundamentalist covers Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu and even Non-Religious fundamentalism. As soon as one half of the couple digs in their heels and states they are right and their partner is not merely in misguided disagreement, but utterly wrong… or even literally damned and/or evil for whatever reason… the relationship is heading for seriously choppy waters.

If you’ve ever had your partner educated as to your total failure of morality by their near entire social group, you’ll know just how hopeless your situation is. You could be a tax-paying, law abiding, full and complete stop on red, look both ways before you cross the street, girl scout cookie buying sweetheart, but having 20-30 people tell your spouse that failure to believe in [religious belief] turns you into a horrible fallen person hell bent on destroying everything precious and good… well, it has an effect. Speaking as a good evangelical Christian back in the day my first serious girlfriend was Catholic… it doesn’t take many people giving you “Godly frowns of concern” to make you feel uneasy about your relationship. That was a Catholic girl too, not even a clutch-the-pearls Non-Christian… that would have had people directly saying things to me like, “I’d like to encourage you to seek the Lord’s guidance”, which is how evangelicals tell you you’re retarded.

And yes I get that there are a wide variety of expressions of belief from rather insipid, to rather psychotic in intensity, even within each faith or even denomination. I’m painting with a wide brush here.

Anyway… back to the question at hand…

My knee jerk reaction to your situation is that you have two issues rather than one issue.

(1)  The state of the marriage.

(2)  Her interest in Catholicism.

What she’s saying is essentially, “Because of (1) I’m (2)” which is trying to turn it into one issue. This is a poor solution because the marriage issues aren’t going to be fixed by going to church and it is obviously driving a bigger wedge between you.

My advice would be to figure out the marriage issues as marriage issues, and allow the religious issue to be handled as a religious issue. So grab the free forum booklet and answer the nine triage questions in a 911 thread on the forum and people can help you get to the bottom of things.

Or put another way, if the marriage is chugging along just great, everyone getting along well, lots of sex and laughter… would it matter very much at all if she was a standard issue Catholic?

I will say this much though, I’m not convinced she’s been hiding it from you as a way of hurting you, more as a way of trying not to lose you in the process. When I became an atheist, I kept that a secret a looooooong time. I thought I was risking my marriage coming out about it, which because my faith was part and parcel of my attractiveness to Jennifer, I think it really was. When I finally told Jennifer she bawled her eyes out with me feeling like the worst husband ever. Even after that, it took fourteen years before I felt comfortable publicly identifying as an atheist.

Anyhoo…

As official MMSL policy, I personally don’t care what you believe or disbelieve in. I obviously self-identify as atheist because I don’t believe in a deity, but I’m not trying to actively convert anyone to that point of view on MMSL. I only try and get involved in religious issues on MMSL when it seems to be clearly screwing with the marriage. At this point the entire fabric of western civilization is sufficiently screwed up that individual marriages are like sandbags keeping back the flood-waters. I don’t care what type of sand you have in your bag, just that you have a sandbag that isn’t going to fall apart.

 

Music Makes You Feel Good

I’ve always been  kinda funny about music in that I “get it” about three to five years after everyone else does. I remember being a teenager and the entire world being crazy about U2. As in everyone listening to U2 and I’m like… uh-huh. U2 even came to Wellington in either the late 80′s or very early 90′s and for months before the concert I had to listen to all the pre-concert hype from all my friends. Then the concert which obviously I skipped. Then the months of post-concert cooldown. I can’t tell you how sick of U2 I was after all that.

Then five years later I DISCOVER U2, IT IS THE GREATEST BAND IN THE WORLD, WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME ABOUT U2?

Everyone else is like… uh-huh… where have you been?

So anyway…

I’ve been digging around on YouTube for all the old bands from back in the day. There’s so much music I’ve forgotten from then. Found a few bands and cranked it. Made a Pandora.com station or two and just had stuff playing in the background doing the daily routines. It’s surprisingly energizing hearing the old music in the background and…

…OMG…

…I’ve become like one of those old people. You know the ones, listening to jazz from the 1930′s or something.

I mean no. It’s VERY ENERGIZING and screw anyone that doesn’t like your music. It’s what you like. So crank it up. The hardest thing in the world some days is feeling positive and able to face it with a smile. The truth is it really does matter and makes a difference for you when you’re more positive. You being happier makes everyone around you a little happier. Feelings are infectious, so infect someone.

Okay, okay I admit it.

I’ve been listening to freaking Petra, but if you tell anyone I’ll fucking cut you.

 

Quirky Gifts and Flair

Reader:  This is prompted by the fact that Mother’s day is next weekend. My problem is just being done with the divorce I’m not sure how to play this or her birthday in August.

I bought a cashmere scarf for her in Scotland when I was there this year. I’m thinking that should be the Mom’s Day gift, and it would be just from me.

Of the two, the birthday seems the most problematic: I won’t necessarily celebrate anything with her and she’ll likely be partying with her group of fantastic, sycophantic friends. Add to that the data point of my bday in March, when the only thing I got from her was a “Me and the Boys” gift, which was the one thing I asked for. So I’m thinking with bday I just slide in with the boys on a gift like she did.

Athol:  Okay… so I just heard “cashmere” and figured it was expensive as hell. Which means you don’t give something expensive to your ex-wife. She is probably ex-pensive enough as it is.

Recommendation… sell it on eBay.

…then just for shits and giggles, I Googled “Cashmere Scarf eBay“.

Ah… wow… holy crap.

That’s a lot of scarves for cheap.

I *think* they might be great deals.

I have no fucking idea what I’m looking at. I thought cashmere was made from rabbit fur, but these seem to be made from goats. Or something. I mean I really have no clue what I’m looking at. Cashmere could be made from the inner lining of Muppets for all I know. But they seem to look nice and for crazy cheap.

Jennifer came over and started explaining what cashmere was and labels and I kinda lost track of what she was saying in her cleavage.

Anyway…

Guys… What’s your secret for quirky gifts she didn’t see coming?

Girls… Whence comes your flair?

 

If You Really Really Love Me

From the forum…

Kalda:  Now, almost three months later, I am doing better and still making progress. The biggest improvements have been physical. I’m in the best shape of my life and maintaining 5-6 workouts a week while cutting back on the junk food. She, however, is the heaviest she has ever been.

My wife bounces between commenting on how good I look in positive ways and expressing concern I will leave her for a younger or fitter woman. I’m looking for some ideas on how to respond to the latter comments. I’ve told her I’ll support any positive health changes she wants to make when she has brought up exercise or diet, but when she talks about me leaving her I just laugh it off. Tonight she said something and laughing it off felt awkward and she seemed sad. Is there a good way to redirect those comments to flirt or keep a positive vibe between us?

Athol:  This is her Loyalty Testing you.

This is actually a pretty serious thing. If she’s really starting to dread that there’s nothing she can do to keep you, she’ll give up on the relationship. So whether she starts checking out of the relationship because she’s unhaaaaaappppppy and about to Eat, Pray, Love an exit, or she starts checking out of the relationship because she thinks you’re going to dump her, doesn’t matter… she’s going to start withdrawing from you, or even start looking for someone who she can jump ship to before you pull the trigger.

In fact you might be a sizzling 9 and her a 7 and she might move sideways to some guy who is just 7 himself to avoid the pain of you smashing her to the ground.

You trying to laugh it off is the exact wrong thing to do, because to her, this is a really unfunny situation. When you laugh, she experiences it as you laughing at her predicament. She’s looking for loyalty and your emotional involvement with her, instead you’re displaying high value and detachment from her.

This is why the pure Alpha approach utterly fails in long term relationships. You can pretty much set your watch on a six month timer for pure Alpha to just blow it all up.

Anyway…

You do two things to pass this test.

(1)  State clearly what your standards are for her behavior as a wife. Stuff like her sexual interest in you, appearance, general work ethic. Make them all reasonably high standards, but by no means impossible. Something that she would have to apply herself to get done, but not kill herself to consistently do in reality.

(2)  Say that as long as she does (1), she never need fear you leaving her, or cheating on her. If she does right by you, you will do right by her. You need to say this with complete conviction and emotional content. You can also say that you know you could find someone else if you had to, but you want it to be her.

What this amounts to is an all purpose, “There is no X until Y” variant. X is the (2) and the Y is the (1).

This all sounds horribly manipulative I know, but what it sums down to for her is this….

(A)  She’s with a guy hotter than her.

(B)  He demands her best of her.

(C)  He’s loyal to her.

Which all in all doesn’t sound like a bad arrangement.  The trick for the guy pulling this off though is this…

…there is no trick. You have to believe it and commit to it, to sell it. What you’re saying is that if someone hotter than your wife comes along and makes a play for you, you’ll just enjoy it as compliment and that’s as far as it goes.

Anyway… Steel Panther video time… kinda like this, just bring it down a couple of notches.

 

…okay so not very much like Steel Panther. My bad.

Diffuse Energy Sets and Why The MAP Only Does Everything

Something that has stuck me over and over again with MMSL is that it’s way more awesome than I could have ever imagined.

Hang on, I’ve got the ego set to 11 again…

K, got it.

Anyway… what I meant to say was that I started MMSL just thinking I was going to target nothing more than guys with sexless or troubled marriages. Instead I get an endless stream of email and comments from both men and women saying that MMSL has helped with an amazing array of things – better behaved kids, medical conditions finally dealt with by getting into treatment, porn addictions kicked, more money made and weight loss.

I mean seriously, as far as I know MMSL is an amazing weight loss program. I could be fucking Weight Watchers for all the email I get about weight loss results. Yet all I’ve done is tell people to head to the gym and eat better pretty much.

Here’s something from the forum today….

DrBeta:  MrsBeta is 60 days sober today.

She’s in AA and she’s getting another coin.  Actually, she’s going to about 7 meetings a week and she’s reading her books and she’s got a sponsor.

Additionally, she’s lost over 20 lbs.

I’ve eased up on the “apply for jobs” because very recently her “job” has been getting and staying sober.  But just the last two days I’ve seen her a bit at loose ends, and I think it’s probably time to return to the job market.

In any case, the change in her has been tremendous and the sex frequency has been way up.

This has all been a result of the Red Pill, MMSL, and the MAP.  If I hadn’t witnessed this for myself, I’d say it was a miracle.

Athol: How many posts have I written about alcohol abuse? ZERO. All I’ve done on the forum is make it clear that “deal with the drinking or else it’s heading toward being over” is the clear demand/ultimatum that DrBeta’s MAP is driving the bus toward. 60 days is 60 days. Seems to be a good as it’s ever been. How awesome is that!

What I’ve come to see are two important things I’d previously not accounted for in designing the MAP.

(1)  The relationship breaking issue, doesn’t have to be sexual, it can be nearly anything dysfunctional, you just make it the thing you set your sights on targeting. Far more often than not you can make your Phase Four fair warning / Phase Six ultimatum a one sentence statement. “Stop drinking”, “Get a job”, “Get off Facebook and pull your weight”, “No more drugs”, “Make me more important than your mother”, “Quit the gaming”… or whatever it is you really want to say with Blood and Thunder in your voice.

(2)  Everything is connected in sets of energy. I’ve always known that exercise was going to make people feel better and more energetic, but I really just figured the real benefit was looking better and the wifey getting wet about you easier. Nope. It’s way more than that. I’ve seen a endless parade of men and women making one change in their life, then another, then another, then…. something else completely unrelated self-resolves.

What’s happening is that a whole bunch of crappy stuff in your life is loosely connected to each other in a diffuse set. The connections aren’t at all hard, but they are there. So as one element of your life is made positive, it gives a slight pull on the rest of your life to become more positive. Change another thing positive and that pulls toward the positive too, change another and another and… pretty soon… something else completely unrelated flips from negative to positive.

Look I spent the last three years nodding and smiling and saying “that’s nice” when someone reported “Oh yeah, and X happened” in passing, never really thinking much about it. Until I realized every-fucking-body was saying the “oh yeah and X happened” to me in passing. I just never picked it until I realized that whatever the X was didn’t matter. X was a random goody thrown in like the toy in a Happy Meal. It’s like frequent flyer miles or something.

This is why I’m becoming even more fanatical about you just getting started and doing ANYTHING to make your life more positive. Anything is better than just sitting there. Ever been stumped on something, go away and do something else positive and productive and come back and find you aren’t stumped anymore?

So anyway, it’s not a bug it’s a feature. Everything is working as intended. It does everything except grow my hair back.

So buy the damn book and get started on your new life.

Surprise Package of Lingerie…

These Floors Are Dirty As Hell

So I have this thing where for my birthday, I only get one functional and beautiful item. Age 40 I got a toaster, 41 a laundry basket, 42 a bathmat.

I turned 43 like two weeks ago and I’ve been damned if I could figure out what I wanted. So I didn’t ask for anything and thus got nothing. Really… just no idea what I wanted. It’s not like I still get excited by candy or anything. I’m married to Jennifer, so it’s not like I look forward to birthday sex breaking a 137 day drought. What am I really meant to do with a cake other than go to the gym afterwards?

Anyway I’m standing in the kitchen and it hits me. These floors are dirty as hell.

I need a mop.

So whatever your dirty floor is… get to it.

Stop and Go

If you had to advise someone about things to simply stop doing, or start doing, as part of making their life / relationship / Game better…

…what would they be?

i.e.

Stop apologizing for things that aren’t your fault

Start going to the gym.

Stop…

Start…

The Eternal Captain Rule

If there’s a element of learning the Red Pill that’s like getting a gaping chest wound… it’s The Eternal Captain Rule. Namely…

“Ignorance of your responsibility to have been the Captain is no excuse.”

The perception is that men always have the personal power to effect change, while women can more easily frame themselves as the victim of circumstance. Therefore, if you’re the husband, just because you didn’t know you were supposed to be the Captain, doesn’t excuse you from having failed as the Captain in the past. Even if having an equal relationship was by mutual agreement, if it all falls apart it’s going to be the husband who carries the most blame for the failure.

I’m not saying it’s fair. I’m just saying what it is.

Just as importantly, the average woman quite pointedly responds sexually to a dominant leading man. Lack of a husband displaying reasonable dominance and leadership is a fast track to relationship failure. Weak and poorly leading husbands may as well be actively pushing their wives into the arms of other men. Women as the manosphere so rightly explains, are hypergamous – seeking strong, powerful, leading men. It’s what they are designed to do, its normal female behavior.

Harsh truth here… complaining about normal female behavior makes you sound like a loser. Stop whining about it.

In the same vein I don’t react with shock that someone was half eaten by their pet tiger. Tigers are created to be merciless, rampaging, killing machines. It’s what they do. Your pet tiger killing you is simply your tiger displaying normal tiger behavior.

So for whatever reason your life falls apart and you suddenly become homeless… odds are pretty good that your wife isn’t going to be homeless with you. If she has a better deal than you she can get to be with… she’d be rational to not bed down in the cardboard box with you. It would be her being crazy to stay with you.

I’m not saying that all women are jaded, gold-digging whores waiting for the first moment of weakness to jump ship to a larger cock… it’s not THAT bad (he said softly massaging his right temple for effect, thinking that the tiger metaphor was perhaps poorly chosen)… but every woman expects you can hold your shit together and be a productive spouse on a routine basis.

The old line is that “women don’t want to win, they want a winner.”

There’s a lot of truth to that, but it’s also worth saying that no one expects you to roll through life like an endless perfect season either. You can even have a losing season…

…but if you do, you better have a plan and a show of confidence that you can turn the franchise around and have a winning season.

Right now…     —–>   Buy the damn book.