Alpha Mail: be careful what you wish for

Anonymous is forced to confront the bitter plight of the woman who successfully lands a handsome, sexually attractive man in marriage:

I have seen you give guidence to some guys and I was hoping you could help me because I am a women and admitedly get emotional. I have children and am a fulltime Mother, so these are very hard questions because they come from a place where upsetting the applecart, so to speak, is something to be done in only the most dire of circumstances.

My Husband is in a situation where he works on a daily basis with several women. He works with one and then the others are in his office. He takes the tack of being brotherly with them. He is very friendly. This has often been a problem for me, but he insists that it is common in his work place (I worked there, I know it is and there are a lot of affairs there as well) but I would prefer he was a bit more reserved out of deference to being married and to me.

He recently listened to a voice mail on speaker from one of these women and she said "Hey, its me, call me back." She said it in a way that made my hackles go up. I confronted him on it and he told me I was crazy. Then he said he can't force her to say "hello, I am so and so."

The problem is, this is just another time where he has been over familiar with female co-workers. He went away to a class of 20 men and four women and he studied with...one of the women. Get what I mean?

And since he knows that I don't like it, he simply doesn't tell me anything. So I trust him less.

He says he is not having sex with these women, he is not cheating, he loves me and our family but that it is just the way the work place is. Knowing it would piss me off, but knowing that it would be more awkward to not do so, he added her and the other co-workers to our facebook page.

It is a situation where he would rather ignore or piss me off then anyone else. I have simply had enough. It will not change because he thinks I am wrong.

All it does is we get into a fight and he goes to work with women slobbering over him and telling him how spoiled I am. He then comes home and tells me how spoiled I am because I ask him to help me with something and I am covered with mess and have sick children. In other words, this "spoiled" attitude toward me is not coming from reality.

Got any advice? You say women are emotional, and we are, but we also can sense things. I find these things out. Over and over. Am I susposed to ignore them?

It appears I am if I am to continue in this marriage. I know it is hard being married to an attractive and susccessful guy. While he outright rebuffs sexual invitations, he has no problem with pissing me off in order to not piss off other random women.

What is your take on this? I would love to hear I am crazy and this is all in my head.

My take is that you are married to a man with a relatively high Sexual Market Value who has maintained or increased his value over the course of the marriage while you have not. This growing gap between your relative SMVs has made you sensitive, jealous, suspicious, and from the way you describe it, increasingly unpleasant to be around. This does not, however, mean that you are crazy or that it is all in your head.

There are some basic principles to keep in mind here.

1) Mises on Human Action: "Since nobody is in a position to substitute his own value judgments for those of the acting individual, it is vain to pass judgment on other people's aims and volitions. No man is qualified to declare what would make another man happier or less discontented. The critic either tells us what he believes he would aim at if he were in the place of his fellow; or, in dictatorial arrogance blithely disposing of his fellow's will and aspirations, declares what condition of this other man would better suit himself, the critic."

2) A man does not answer to his wife. A wife does answer to her husband. This is both Biblical principle and a fundamental reality of Game. A man cannot be simultaneously a) responsible for a woman and b) answer to her.

3) One can only control one's own actions. One can merely hope to influence the actions of another individual.

4) Men tend to mirror the emotions and demeanors of those with whom they are interacting.

5) Men tend to keep their negative opinions of their wives to themselves unless sufficiently angered or pressed.

So how do these five principles apply here? First, it is pointless to speculate about how you would behave if you were in his shoes. You are not only two different people, but because you are married and people tend to marry, if not opposites, at least complementary personalities, it should be no surprise that he behaves in a very different manner than you do, or than you would like.

For example, I am a notoriously standoffish individual. I don't want anyone touching me and it would seldom occur to me to touch someone else except in a formal, parental, or sexual sense. Spacebunny found it rather humorous that some of our more affectionate female friends would say "I'm going to hug you now" in order to let me brace myself for impact. And as you might expect, Spacebunny is a much more friendly and affectionate individual than I am, so it took us a little while to adjust to each other's expectations of acceptable behavior in public. It wasn't difficult, because we both knew the other person had a different perspective and we both attempted to understand and accommodate that perspective. I do not get the impression that you have any interest whatsoever in understanding or accommodating his perspective here, you simply want him to accede to your preferences because you are his wife and therefore have the right to dictate that your preferences shall apply. But if he was the nebbishy, cowardly sort of man to whom his wife's word is law, neither you nor the women at work would find him attractive, so that's clearly not going to happen.

Second, I have the impression that you have gone about attempting to convince your husband to change his alluring ways by presenting your perspective like a prosecuting attorney to a man on trial rather than like a well-loved subject making a request to her king. Guess which approach tends to be much more successful with men, especially men who hold positions of responsibility and authority? It doesn't matter what you think your "rights" are - and women do tend to make a very foolish habit of standing on imaginary rights that exist nowhere but in their own heads - what matters is what approach is more likely to achieve a more successful outcome. Do you think your husband would be anywhere nearly as friendly and responsive to his female co-workers if they were regularly presenting him with imperious demands and declaring their rights as his fellow employees? I should also note that I think it is potentially very problematic that you refer or imply several times to ending the marriage over what very well may be literally nothing.

Third, your husband is, like every other man, woman, and child on the planet, always going to do whatever he decides he wants to do. Deal with that inescapable fact as it is a necessary aspect of the human condition. The trick, and it is an art that many women have mastered over the years, is to convince him that he wants to do what you want him to do. Think about this: throughout history, many men have met demands to modify their behavior with stubborn defiance, even at the cost of their lives. And yet, women have often been able to wrap those very same men around their fingers and get them to do whatever they want through the arts of seduction and manipulation. While men usually utilize a direct approach, in most cases, an indirect approach works better for women. Your present approach quite clearly isn't achieving the results you would like. Therefore, logic dictates that you try a different one.

Fourth, if the women at work are being pleasant and deferential to your husband, while you are pouting, being unpleasant and demanding of him, who do you think he is going to prefer to be around? Who do you think he is more willing to please? I remember riding home from work with my father, seeing him laughing and joking and smiling throughout, and then, moments after he walked into the house, heard my mother snapping at him about something or other. In an instant, all the good humor and joie de vivre disappeared from his face and he was snapping right back at her, his mood as foul as hers.

And fifth, in the comments you referred to having let yourself get out of shape. The chances are reasonable that your husband finds this embarrassing and that he is embarrassed by your appearance, even though he would probably rather get his teeth pulled without anesthetics than admit it to you or even to himself. (In other words, resist the temptation to ask, if he has any sense at all he will lie to you if he feels that way.) Men not only judge themselves by their wives, they are judged by others that way too. Rise to the level of the potential competition, don't sit in front of the television and tell yourself that because you managed to get someone to put a ring on your finger a while ago, you no longer have to put much effort into your appearance.

Does all this mean that you should simply suffer jealous agonies in silence like a good little Christian wifey until your husband has an affair and dumps your lumpy posterior? Not at all! But you really have to realize that you can only dicate your own behavior and only he can decide to modify his own. And remind yourself that you are fortunate, you have a husband who not only loves you and his family, but is so desirable that other women actively covet him. Isn't that distinctly preferable to one that nobody wants, including you?

So, my recommendation is that you drop the subject entirely for at least the next month. Focus on making yourself more attractive, more pleasant, and more satisfying to be around than the women in his workplace. Try to up your sex game; you don't have to do it every night, but make sure it's frequent, enthusiastic, and try throwing a curve ball once a week. If you're on the rag, use those evenings to improve your oral skills rather than viewing it as the wife's monthly week off. And remember, you're not doing this for him, you're doing this for you and for your marriage. Remind yourself that most of those women would probably change places with you in a heartbeat if given the opportunity, as the office life always looks significantly more glamorous and exciting from the outside than it does from inside its ceaselessly tedious and soul-sucking reality. After all, you used to work there too and it doesn't sound as if you hesitated to leave it in favor of your current - and, I will add - much more important occupation.

And get yourself to the gym too. Make the time five days a week. Focus on lifting weights more than running, stop the snacking, and turn yourself into a wife that he can't help but be proud of. The fact that you may have been once doesn't make you one today anymore than the middle-aged bald guy with the potbelly is still the star running back of his high school.

Then, once you've improved your physique, your sex life, and your demeanor, you'll likely be in a position where you can ask him, politely, for reasonable behavioral modifications. But think carefully about what you're requesting. Do you really want to make Facebook an issue? And can you honestly expect anyone to be less friendly to his female co-workers than he is to his male ones? As others have suggested, I would recommend making requests that concern his behavior towards you rather than his behavior towards others, and I suspect that at least a portion of it is in reaction to the way you are behaving towards him. But I don't think it is at all unreasonable, for example, to ask that he leave his work at work and tell his co-workers, male and female, that if they need to contact him outside of work hours, they should do so via email rather than calling his home.

And rather than taking this as criticism, I suggest that it is good news, because your behavior is something you can much more easily change. Now, it's entirely possible that I am wrong, that your behavior has been impeccable and your husband is a sociopath who is having sex with all of the women and half of the men in his office. I couldn't possibly know as I have precisely zero reliable evidence concerning your situation. But, assuming that you have described it accurately, I think you can go a long way towards improving the situation by first concentrating on modifying your own behavior, and then, making the occasional polite request concerning his own. Being jealous and suspicious isn't going to make your marriage better, it is instead likely to increase the chances that you will help bring about the very fate you fear.

Never forget that under the current legal regime, neither of you have any rights in a marriage except those that your mate freely chooses to grant you, and which can be withdrawn at any time. All the law really guarantees is a reasonable expectation of a woman's claim on a man's income should the marriage end.