Mortification Game

Of sex and spreadsheets. A number of people have asked me my thoughts on the woman complaining about the fact that her husband dropped a bombshell on her concerning her near-constant sexual rejection of him just as she was going on a 10-day business trip via email, including a spreadsheet that kept track of when each rejection happened and her excuse offered:

A sexually-frustrated husband compiled a spreadsheet charting a whole month’s worth of his wife’s excuses for refusing to have sex with him, including “I might be getting sick” and “I still don’t feel 100%”.

For a whole month the amorous husband jotted down every response from his other half when he asked her for intimacy, which elicited replies such as “I feel gross” and “I’m watching the show”, which he claims was a re-run of a Friends episode. The unnamed man then collated the information and put it into an excel document before emailing it to his wife as she arrived at an airport ahead of a 10-day business trip.

Excuses also include "I'm exhausted", "I need a shower" (didn't shower until next morning), "I'm trying to watch the movie" (fell asleep 15 min later) along with a few cases of not feeling too well and a number of ‘non-verbals’.

Shocked at the email, the anonymous lady tried to get in touch with her husband but found he had cut contact with her.In the end, she decided to share her husband's endeavour with users of social networking site Reddit by uploading the spreadsheet.

She then wrote: "Yesterday morning, while in a taxi on the way to the airport, husband sends a message to my work email which is connected to my phone. He's never done this, we always communicate in person or by text. I open it up, and it's a sarcastic diatribe basically saying he won't miss me for the 10 days I'm gone. Attached is a spreadsheet of all the times he has tried to initiate sex since June 1st, with a column for my "excuses", using verbatim quotes of why I didn't feel like having sex at that very moment."

The spreadsheet, which has since been deleted, quickly went viral with people taking both sides in the debate. Most people criticised the husband's "immaturity" and said he should have gone about it in a different way.

Thereby proving that most people are idiots. The first thing is that this spreadsheet didn't come out of the blue. It is almost surely a quintessential male response to a very typical female tactic: the demand for proof. Women often try to put men in a false "heads I win, tails you lose" position, in which they demand proof of the assertion, but if called on this demand, then try to argue that the anticipation of the need for proof somehow disqualifies its relevance. That is exactly what the wife is attempting to do here. She's trying to use that the fact he made the spreadsheet and sent it to her on the road to retroactively justify her previous actions.

Needless to say, women who exhibit this basic inability (or refusal) to grasp cause-and-effect aren't often taken seriously. Think twice before you resort to such rhetoric; even if it works, you're making yourself look like a moron.

Although apparently there are those foolish enough to buy her "tails you lose" tactic, because they are using her very "immature" language to describe her husband. But there is nothing immature about what the man is doing. It's idiotic to claim, as many have, that he should "talk to her." He's obviously been talking to her already, the spreadsheet is filled with verbatim quotes from the woman. What he's doing is calling her on her bullshit, which makes many men and women uncomfortable. After all, what will happen if women start being held accountable for their actions? We can't have that, can we? Society will implode overnight!

The woman's response, and the furious response of other women, to the husband's action demonstrate how effective it is. Remember, women always communicate strategically when speaking in general terms about sex and love; what they say can never be taken at face value but must be interpreted properly. This is clearly the first time in months that the woman has paid even the SLIGHTEST attention to what the guy thinks; it's genuinely amusing to see the various women claiming that the combination of the spreadsheet and radio silence will have a counterproductive effect when she's already a) sexually rejecting him 88.89 percent of the time and b) has left him at home while she hits the road.

The fact is that she's feeling incredibly humiliated and defensive. And since in women, defensive crouches are followed by instinctively sexual responses, if he maintains his frame, the chances are that she'll return from her trip more sexually willing than before. (Personally, I doubt he will, he'll probably contact her too soon, apologize profusely, buy her flowers, and they'll be back to their old routine within a week.) But what he has inadvertently done is to introduce Mortification Game to a worldwide audience, Mortification Game being a subset of Dread Game.

Dread Game isn't for healthy relationships, but it can temporarily improve unhealthy ones and buy them time to fix things. This spreadsheet isn't indicative of immaturity, but rather desperation combined with a desire to save his marriage while honoring his wedding vows. It would be much more effective for him to have simply gone radio silent and had sex with other women while she's gone; the sexually hypercompetitive nature of women would likely have her sensing his subsequent indifference to her deprivation upon her return. But he chose not to do that, instead he plunged once more into the gap to try to salvage what looks like a fairly hopeless cause.

The beleaguered husband doesn't deserve scorn or criticism, but the sort of sympathy one spares for the underdog. As for the wife, well, any woman who repeatedly turns down her husband because watching television repeats is more of a priority merits all the mortification and marital difficulties she subsequently experiences. I don't know if there are any relevant studies on the subject, but I hypothesize there is a very high correlation between the hours of television a wife watches and the amount of Internet porn that a married man consumes. Someone close to her needs to inform her that this isn't a game, posturing and playing the victim is not going to work here, and she needs to take responsibility for her failures as a woman and as a wife immediately or her marriage will be over.

And, by the way, for men and women alike, keep in mind that if someone ever throws something like that spreadsheet in your face, you have quite literally asked for it. Every time someone brings up a concern to you and you dismiss it for lack of proof, you set the stage for the person preparing a quasi-legal brief against you. Never resort to the idiotic rhetoric of claiming that unless the other person can prove it, it never happens, because that is ignoring the obvious logic that SOMETHING upset the other person enough to cause them to bring up the subject with you.