Athol Kay's Blog, page 15

Positive and Productive

Psychology Today…

The idea that “venting” anger has a beneficial cathartic effect is well entrenched in modern culture. Belief in the value of venting has manifested in the online world in the form of “rant” sites (e.g. Rant Rampage) where people not only get to freely express their vitriol, they can also read and comment on rants left by other venters. However, decades of research have shown that venting, far from releasing anger, actually makes it worse. Not surprisingly, a recent study has shown that online ranting seems to increase anger and is associated with anger-related problems. Ranting may be problematic because it associated anger with aggressive behaviour. On the other hand, expressing anger in a constructive and non-aggressive way can actually be beneficial.

So…

I totally get that bad shit can happen in your life. But ultimately, having a screaming fit about anything never fixes the problem… and it can make things worse.

The have been a couple of times in our marriage where I’ve gotten extremely angry with Jennifer and as much as humanly possible during those moments, I’ve shut my mouth until I could talk like a rational person. In the most serious ones I’ve simply taken space from her until I could calm down. I’m not naturally a ball of anger, so my calm down period is usually fairly short, your mileage may vary. All in all, screaming some toxic venom at your partner is just creating a second problem other than the one that made you angry.

You’re always going to be better off over the long term, finding a productive and positive solution to your actual problem, rather than simply complaining about it. Talking to others who can keep you on track is very helpful too.

Come join the forum. Get the free forum booklet. Buy the Primer. Get started. Whatever it is, it can’t be that bad.

 

She Comes Fourth In Your Life vs. Children Come First

One of the fun things about having a co-ed forum is sometimes you see a woman and a man say exactly the same thing. Word for word. Just one favors men and the other favors women.

Male: A slight variant on the classic Patrice O’Neal line about making your woman, the fourth most important thing in your life. The order being, (1) You, (2) your mission, (3) your blood relatives (Patrice just said his mom for #3) and then finally (4) your woman.

Female: “I will never put a man ahead of the children. The children always come first.”  Hmmm…. well then, one also imagines if she is the one that decides whether or not something is in the interests of the children, she also trumps both the kids and him. Which suggests an order of (1) Her, (2) Shoes, (3) the kids, (4) that guy that’s always here for some reason.

So…

Well that ain’t going to work if you both decide to play the same strategy of my way or the highway. What immediately begs the question is what happens if someone else comes along and offers the #1 spot to your #4 slot spouse? If only for… oh…  five minutes or so?

You have to consider that for someone to allow themselves to be the 4th priority in your life, they need to be about in the range of 2 points of Sex Rank below yours. That’s a healthy Orbiter distance. I doubt a learned MMSL reader would allow themselves to be so taken for granted.

The Order of Priority

Assuming no one is toxic and needs to be treated with purposeful distance…

Athol:  Self Care > Husband > Father > Son > Brother > Friends > the rest of humanity.

Jennifer:  Self Care > Wife > Mother > Daughter > Sister > Friends > the rest of humanity.

If you notice, Jennifer and I both have each other in the #2 spot. Frankly neither one of us has the interest or ability in micromanaging the others day and self-care. We obviously care about each other, but at the end of the day, if I turn into a complete douchebag I expect to be jettisoned from the marriage. Likewise Jennifer may not turn into a Beluga Whale without me authorizing the self-destruct sequence and heading to an escape pod. We hold each other to high, reasonable and positive standards. It’s a really easy way to live.

The Captain and First Officer differences kick in at the Husband/Wife role position. After that we’re parents and so on down the line. We have a very clear order of priority and mutually understood chain of command. It makes things so easy to manage.

Anyway…

All I know is that all these women proudly saying “the children come first” are keeping me in business.

Because you know that somewhere in the background there’s a hollow-eyed man raking the leaves out of the gutters… thinking about what he just read on MMSL… and how he’s sick of her not fucking him right.

You can say “the children come first” all day long. The husband always hears it as “you’re last in line.”

When they start having an affair, they won’t even need to hide it from you, because you don’t notice them anyway.

Exact same thing goes for husbands with the super Alpha careers. Little woman at home wondering if he’ll ever call or show up for dinner on time. That shit gets old fast. Let alone telling her his mother trumps her. Gotta sting like hell to hear that. Thank God for Facebook and old friends…

 

Apologize Like A Boss

Sometimes you screw up and feelings are hurt and it’s unquestionably your fault. If that’s the case, you should apologize. It’s the right thing to do.

The trouble with apologies though, is they very easily turn into displays of weakness / fear / low value / submission. Then instead of repairing the damage, they actually do further damage as you entitle them to enrage against you even more than before. People always feel better at ease venting anger toward someone in lower status than them, than venting toward someone higher status than them. Thus a groveling apology creates greater social distance between you.

In case you didn’t hear that correctly… I’m saying you’re probably better off not apologizing and letting them be mad at you, than going down on one knee and begging forgiveness. You don’t drop your status and beg.

All you should do is acknowledge you did the wrong thing and if something is possible to be done to correct a situation you have caused, state a plan of correction and follow through on it. You don’t “act sorry” though. To apologize like a boss, just acknowledge and correct.

Then once the apology has been stated, you don’t go back and rehash it endlessly. You’ve apologized, it’s up to them to figure out their emotional state after that. If they keep coming back for another helping of angst and drama, state you’ve already apologized and refuse to be drawn into further debate.

Gifting is also a potential tool to use as well, but you use gifting to simply frame the acknowledgment of your wrongdoing more seriously, rather than attempt to buy their love and positive attention back. Trying to buy their positive attention back is also a display of low value. The purpose of something like flowers is to force them to pay attention to the apology. You’re making them acknowledge your acknowledgment.

The other trouble with gifting is that it can turn into a behavioral reward for them to be all dramatic and hurt at you. It only takes a couple of times trying to buy your way out of the dog house and it would be completely rational for them to start trying to figure out ways to get you into the dog house. A couple rounds of that and you’re a big Beta pinata full of cash and goodies.

…

Anyway… I love The Big Bang Theory… watch both videos.

 

This is the Dinner

This is the dinner

You can eat the dinner, or not eat the dinner

The choice is yours

You may stare at the plate and wish for a different dinner

But no other dinner will come

The kitchen is closed

Energy Sets and Unintentional Benefits of MMSL

Obviously I’ve been writing with the goal of fixing sex lives and repairing marriages, but one of the striking things about MMSL is that so often I get reports of fairly unrelated benefits from having run the MAP. The biggest and most obvious one I hear is weight loss. All I’ve said is “get to the gym” and people report back all kinds of weight loss and improved body shape. If I was running a weight loss program I’d probably be boasting about average pounds lost or something. I mean some people really do report back with 80+ pound losses.

I also hear a lot of “things got a lot better at work” and “the kids behave better now”.

The truth is that I tend to see a lot of things as a sort of “energy set” where multiple things are kinda crappy throughout someone’s life. House kept crappy, relationship crappy, job prospects crappy, fat… that’s a set that goes together. Then as one thing gets resolved for the better, eventually everything else gets easier to manage too. Eventually everything steps up to a higher set of energy. Like stepping up to… house tidy and repaired, relationship good, job better, in good shape.

Almost everything I teach boils down to having a high and positive energy. High energy is sexy. Half the reason I tell people to work out is just so they feel better and more positive about themselves.

I’m curious. Apart from more / better sex, how has MMSL helped you? Have you seen that pattern of low energy sets changing into higher energy ones?

There is No Female Action Plan

A mildly disjointed collection of rantings trying to bitchslap the proper understanding of what running the MAP is, into the minds of the wives on the forum. Somehow there’s this understanding that the Red Pill is in fact pink, and all they need to do is grow long hair, put on some lipstick, fall on their backs with their legs apart, and their Alpha Prince will cum.

Except all that happens when they do that is their fat, underemployed ManBetaPig just enjoys the sex and then lights up a joint and plays Diablo 3 for five hours. I exaggerate to be sure, but that’s the essential problem.

So… ranting…

There is no “FAP”

The only difference between what a man needs to be doing and what a woman needs to be doing is what creates a dopamine response in the opposite sex.

Male Alpha = more dominance, power, strength

Female Alpha = more flirty, girly appearance

That’s about it.

If you’re a female running the MAP, you should have men other than your husband throwing IOI’s at you. If you don’t, you’re not yet in Phase Three.

Why the “default yes” is a bad thing

It’s basically like dumping three tons of fish into the dolphin tank at SeaWorld and wondering why the dolphins are no longer interested in doing any tricks.

If your wife is into you, she doesn’t need a rule to want to fuck you.

Serendipity gets it

 Serendipity: Yeah I learned the hard way that sex = everything is fine, but even when he wasn’t getting sex he didn’t seem to care and just gave up.  MMSL helped me understand WHY I didn’t want sex with my husband for so long when early on in the relationship I definitely did. I couldn’t understand what changed and lack of sex was something my husband complained about forever and I always thought it was the kids, being tired or whatever it was. Now I know why.

So despite my FAP I had to add in an ultimatum because there was some medical involved (anxiety/depression) and possible porn addiction (since deleted and seems done with).  If anything the FAP, some therapy and this site just really made me realize what my worth really is and that I was/am doing everything to fix my marriage and relationship. Been very loyal when other women may have had an affair of some sort.

Athol’s comment: “The central theme of MMSL is to get yourself into a position where you’re so valuable as a potential partner, that you no longer are required to tolerate being in a relationship with a crappy partner who refuses to handle their own shit.”

That’s exactly what did it for me. I got fed up. I was fixing my shit and now it was his turn or else I was leaving.

Female desire is reactive, but…

Female desire is reactive… but there are other men out there she can react to.

If a male 6 watches his wife transform from a 6 –> 7 –> 8  and does nothing about fixing his attractiveness and handling his shit, he’ll eventually lose her to another man if she decides to pull the trigger.

Maybe he does shape up / get to the doctor / get a job / stop being an ass…. maybe he won’t.

If he does, great. If not, well she can collect child support and be better placed to find another man.

That should all sound very familar.

If he’s freaked out and going full Beta…

When he goes full-bore Betamax you bring him to MMSL. Then he takes it all seriously because he has a pathway he can learn to walk where she ends up staying with him.

All the husbands brought to MMSL by their wives come freaking out and wanting to go full Beta. Then they learn.

Wives must work on looking hot

She absolutely must run girl game and spend more time at the gym no matter what.

Unless she maximizes her overall attractiveness to men in general, any ultimatum she pulls will be less likely to succeed.

Her hot gym body is her leverage.

If his dick doesn’t work

The ultimatum is you demanding he go to the doctor to get checked out

Stop listening to the men on the forum, they aren’t your husband

A forum wife who has a crappy husband, listening to a forum husband in a sexless marriage, can’t model her MAP on what he wants his wife to do. The problems are different.

It’s always the unhappy spouse that comes to the forum. The unhappy spouse always has to do the same thing – become attractive and strong enough to gain leverage in their own relationship and then if required, force the issue.

Why sexually rejecting  totally crappy husbands can be helpful over the long term

It’s not “rejecting him”.

You are making yourself more attractive – improving the quality of the cheese so to speak – and rewarding him when he acts in a positive manner.

“No X until Y” is training him to act in a certain way…. but so is “Yes X even if there’s no Y” training him to act a certain way.  It’s just training him to act a different way.

Most of the forum wives doing the “default yes” thing are simply running a variant on a covert contract. “I will X and you will Y” and then because X is given out before Y… Y doesn’t have to happen… so the wife gets pissed off and then can’t help but lower her sexual response to him.

Most women unwittingly ruin the sex as a reward by being so shitty in bed during the sex, that it becomes a form of punishment rather than a reward. Most guys would rather have 12 sexual experiences a year where the girl was really into it, than 120 sexual experiences a year where she lies there disgusted and immobile.

Offer high quality sex for his good behavior.

There’s no X until Y

I mean seriously. Would any of you as a mother walk into a grocery store and hand the kids a bag of candy and say “please be good” and then no matter how bad they were in the grocery store, do the same thing week after week after week?

If you’re a First Officer you’re meant to be able to stand in for the Captain if need be. Get a backbone, have some pride in yourself, have some standards. Stop this Nice Girl crap.

You wouldn’t let a random douchebag screw you, so why do you lower yourself to let the douchebag you live with do it?

Could you ever imagine Jennifer tolerating me being a drunken, unwashed, broke, loser and still fucking me every day? If you can, she wants to talk to you lol. We hold each other to high but not unreasonable standards. I am a better man for her and she’s a better woman for me.

That’s the MMSL model. I’ve been ranting this for over three years. I’m at a loss as to how my message is so distorted on this forum.

Jennifer: Damn straight. That is all.

Everything Is Better Except I’m Not In Love Anymore

Reader:  Okay, I was a beta schlub. That seems to be so far in the past now. I am reading the post on GNO and the man trips and am thinking, if my wife really wants to mess up, I am fine with it now. I won’t put up with it, I will just move on to another woman if that happens. I am content with my wife. She has a lot of great traits. But so do lots of women. I would be giving up some good stuff and a little bad stuff for new good stuff and bad stuff. I am not about to burn my marriage down, but I look at other options as possible if she decides she wants something else.

Have I gone too far in my thinking now? Is this too much lack of oneitis? I am just so far removed from my divorce is always the last option mentality of two years ago.

Athol:  I think there’s always a mental dip in love feelings as you run the MAP. If you’ve had your illusions shattered and figured out you did a bunch of stuff wrong in your relationship, it’s always hard going to own up to it and fix it. Usually there’s a sense of hope and progress as you turn things around, but it’s just not the same blind joy in your relationship you had before. It’s definitely better than the bad stuff that was going to go down… it’s just not as giddy as when it all started and before you realized it was almost about to all get flushed down the toilet.

Oneitis and the Alpha Widow effect are damn near the exact same thing, just two different terms to spin it into the frame of the man better. It’s basically just a high dopamine, low serotonin mental state and looks damn near the same as OCD focused on a person. It’s called falling in love.

That being said, learning the whole Red Pill point of view where everything gets boiled down to chemical reactions and you can consciously start doing things to manipulate your feelings, and your partner’s feelings…

…well after a while it starts seeming like the entire concept of love is all bullshit. Not only that, your entire relationship history was just slot A, tab B and a bunch of chemicals. If it’s all just this giant game, love dies. It’s all fake. Cause, effect. That’s it.

The good news is that you manage to fix your relationship and change all the structural stuff in your life Everything turns out better. You get on great. Sex is up. Kids are behaving better. More respect at work.

It’s just….

…meh.

Everything is meh.

In time though, especially once you start really mastering what you’re doing and understanding about Alpha Beta et al, and you have your structural stuff together… you’ll start to forget you need to game each other. You’ll just be doing what you need to and getting on with it.

Then you’ll read something about some other couple with some kind of freaked up problem and you’ll look across the living room and tell your partner about it. They’ll look back with that “WTF” face and come over and read it over your shoulder and groan at the cluelessness with you. Their hand will be on your shoulder as they read and for some reason, their cheek is so very kissable…

The truth.

The truth…

The truth is that anyone who tells you that Oneitis can finally be killed, is either a badly damaged individual with serious attachment issues, or someone still working their way through the process. Quite obviously the goal of learning Game is not to turn yourself into a Cluster-B personality type, but to discover and master a relationship skill set in which you can love in relative safety of not being taken advantage of. For most of us though, getting to the end of the process is something that can take several years. It takes a long time to unlearn everything we did wrong, stablize and then learn what we need to and have it become second nature.

The truth is that all those chemicals… they. feel. so. real. and. you. cannot. stop. them.

The truth is you can resist all you like, but attraction is not a choice. So you will feel love again. You can’t choose not to feel.

The truth is love will come back.

***

Though I do have one caveat about all that in relation to the woman you are with…

…she needs to be a First Officer worth a damn.

***

Video related / unrelated.

Fixing Flat Tires and Relationship Game

It’s 2013 and women no longer need to be frankly insulted by offers of being rescued from anything by men. Like a fish needs a bicycle and all that.  I-don’t-really-need-a-man-for-anything-when-I-have-my-vibrator-my-chocolate-and-all-these-adorable-cats. So I exaggerate a little, but in truth, many women actually find white knights a tad creepy

Hmmmm…

But can she get the lug-nuts off a flat tire?

Well to be honest, some women can and it’s no issue to them at all to change a tire. But there is a pure strength element to it and some women just can’t. Which then forces them to call someone else who can. That boils down to…

(1)  You.

(2)  AAA or some other car service outfit.

(3) That other guy that wants to fuck her.

Those answers are ranked in the order of your best interest. If your woman has to be saved, you should be the guy doing it. You don’t want to frame some other guy as the rescue hero for her. You should consider that if you can’t fix her problem, and she has to call some other guy in, you’ve green lit setting her up on a first date experience where he’s going to game the hell out of her.

Bad things may follow after that.

So anyway… if you don’t know how to change a tire… watch the video and at least spend 15 minutes of your time having a practice run through changing a tire before you need to put the skills to use.

Also in worst case scenario where she has both a flat tire AND a flat spare… usually the spare isn’t punctured, just very low on air. So just toss it in your car and fill it at any gas station with an air compressor. (Always have a couple bucks in quarters in your car.)    Or at the very least, park her car somewhere safe and drive away with one of the flats in your car.

And remember to act like it’s no big deal. Climbing the highest tower, slaying the dragon, not much to tell really. Just the Princess Fiona Plan on a  normal Tuesday. Quid pro quo and all that.

Also…. if you’re a girl and you want to Game a certain guy into rescuing you and all the wonderful isolation and one on one time that entails (not to mention the social obligation you can impose on yourself to invite him over to your place for a nice dinner, wine and a remarkably improved likelihood of coitus), you just park at the side of the road and call him up and say you have a flat tire. Sound mildly frustrated, but not too much. If he says he’ll come, coo to him with praise and gratitude. Then get out of the car, unscrew the little black cap off the tire valve and using your car keys, depress the little pin in the center of the value and let the air out of the tire until it looks properly flat. Then await rescue…

 Pick a day he’s not working of course. If he’s into you, he’ll come.

 

OMGMAKINGCOFFEEALPHABETAHELPNOWPLZ

Reader:  After reading MMSL and have started to turn my marriage into what it should be…slowly. I had a friend, who knows I’ve read MMSL, come up to me this morning and ask me “Is it too beta to make coffee every morning and bring it to your wife in bed.” He said it’s a way to show her that you appreciate her everyday. I told him I would not do that everyday. Is that too Beta? Am I wrong?

Athol:  It’s a comfort building move, so yes it’s Beta. I’m fairly often up before Jennifer and I always make a beeline for the coffee maker myself. Takes me an extra minute to make Jennifer a cup as well if she wants one. As Beta moves go it’s a fairly quick, easy and direct one.

But the real question is whether he’s generally Alpha or not. The formula looks like this…

Alpha + Beta = WIN

Beta = LOSE

Women love Beta. Love, love, love Beta…. but only from a man that has Alpha.

There really is no “bad Beta” unless you mean it in the sense of “the cup of coffee you bought her this morning was a terrible cup of coffee.” As in, something that was meant to be nice and comforting, was actually kinda yucky. If you cooked her dinner and she gets food poisoning, that’s “bad Beta”.

But usually what people mean by “bad Beta” is a Beta move delivered with a Display of Low Value / terrible Alpha. That’s what gets her contempt circuits starting up.

You don’t scamper about like a lost puppy looking to be let outside, bringing her a cup of coffee. You don’t wince at her slight frown of displeasure with the first sip. You don’t return to the kitchen to “try and get it right”. You don’t bounce up and down on your heels waiting for praise for bringing mistress her coffee. You don’t hope you get your dick sucked for bringing her a cup of coffee.

You just make her a cup of coffee.

Then get on with your Alpha day.

When You Can’t Tell The Difference Between Normal and Crazy Anymore

Way, way, way back in my Talk About Marriage commenting days, I used to have a signature line that said something like, “50% of my advice is that she’s cheating on you, the other 50% is ‘What the hell are you thinking?’”

It’s not always true anymore, but you’d be surprised at how often someone has a completely screwed up situation that they are so used to coping with… it seems normal to them. For a lot of people actually arriving to the MMSL Forum and finally telling someone else their story is what makes the light bulbs finally click on for some people…

I also need to say to you all that I was utterly shocked that you moved me into the 911 category. I feel like, with all the confusion and upheaval, that I’ve lost touch with reality. HE definitely has, at least is that way some of the time, but now I realize I don’t know what is normal any more, what is really bad and critical. I do realize I’ve been too Beta and too polite. That I should have thrown a shit fit on day one, and laid down an ultimatum. And by taking care of the house, family, bills, I was relieving him of responsibility and freeing him up to pursue his outside interests. That really pisses me off. I thought I was making life easier for him, and it turns out I was!

That one involved requests for threesomes, a workplace death, depression and an affair… yet she was shocked at the moving her thread into the 911 Category to monitor it better. More to come possiblity too.

So anyway… got something happening where you kinda, sorta, maybe think it’s a messed up crazy situation? Get the free forum booklet…  Join the forum…  Buy the Primer…  and you’ll be on your way to sorting it all out before you know it.