It's the wrong kind of tough

On my last post, Robert Browning commented:

"You are wrong. This guy is very tough. The is as tough as nails. He took an oath. He mad a promise. And no matter what hell or torment his wife put him through this guy is going to keep his word to the day he dies and stay loyal and true."

Yes, sticking to your marriage vows, come hell or high water, is tough. It is honorable. It is absolutely what a man should do.

Oftentimes you see the refrain of "dump the bitch!" or "time to trade in for a younger model!" in the manosphere. Marriage is a God-ordained covenant, however, so jumping off because your wife is a pain or simply getting tiresome or old isn't a viable option, unless you're a pagan. In that case, you're going to hell anyhow, so breaking a marriage vow is the least of your worries.

My grandfather told me "staying married is easy - you just don't divorce."

Unfortunately, if your wife doesn't feel the same way, your decision to stay married can be overruled.

Staying in a bad marriage because you made a promise is "tough," but letting your wife walk all over you is not. That's so obviously wrong that it makes other men cringe and women loathe you.

It's not an either/or choice. "Lose your marriage" or "be a doormat" is a false dichotomy. There is a third way, and it's called game.

Coming back from the pit our previous example dug himself into wouldn't be easy, but it is possible. It would be tough - but it would be the kind of tough that comes from testosterone and grit, not just hanging on by your fingernails.

If you tell her enough is enough and she rebels, so what? You're already not getting sex or respect or even love. And if she breaks the covenant, you're off the hook. Work your way back towards headship. If she's a Christian, tell her that both of you have screwed things up and need to get back to a Biblical marriage.

Seriously, what do you have to lose? Better to live as a man.

Literally not sleeping together

This fellow argues that sleeping single in a double bed is a sure sign of trouble:


"Is there another room in the home which provides for a more natural setting for a couple’s intimacy than their own bedroom and particularly their bed? Just walking into another person’s boudoir makes me uneasy, it’s their sanctuary and their holy of holies, and not for random strangers. The bedroom is where lives are made and secrets told. There are few other places where a couple can be so open with each other or where they can more freely enjoy each other’s affection and sensuality. It’s a place where couples can reconnect and where they can fall in love again and again. If the bedroom is love’s temple then the bed is it’s shrine.

It was also unsurprising that these same couples who slept in separate rooms had virtually no sex life to speak of . Without the ability for closeness with his wife, a husband will find other places for his passion such as his job while her desire gets stifled or redirected towards the children. If allowed to continue they soon can become so disconnected emotionally and spiritually they may as well be strangers and any impression they might give of being the happy couple is only by sheer luck or to intentionally throw others off the trail.

I’ve often wondered what these men thought as they moved into their guest bedroom with suitcase in hand, what was going through their mind? Did they offer to fix the problem? Did they ever attempt to even change her mind? Or were they too busy returning emails or catching up on the latest scores to even bother thinking about it, because ignoring seems much simpler than dealing with the real issues in the relationship? Or maybe he was just satisfied that doing so would shut her up for a while.
I’m convinced of few stronger signals that a relationship is in serious jeopardy than when couples stop sleeping in the same bed together."


This follows what I've seen as well, though I doubt most men are "too busy returning emails or catching up on the latest scores to even bother thinking about it." That's blue pill thinking. Men know something is wrong but don't know how to fix it.

I knew a guy who was tall, broad-shouldered, proud, and aggressive in public. He was older but fit. His voice filled the room and he'd slap you on the back, then lean in and share a confidence in your ear like you'd been friends forever. You'd assume he was a solid alpha, or at least a very confident beta.

Until you visited him at home.

The children had moved out some years before. His wife, an overweight and bitchy woman who ran a very successful business catering to the rich, ran his life at home. He would cringe and hunch over when she came into the room and complained at him about something. It was the strangest transformation you could imagine. Dr. Heckled and Mr. Pride.

They had a beautiful house in a beautiful neighborhood. Nice cars. Nice stuff.

But they had separate rooms. He once half-apologized to me about it in a fumbling way. "You know, as folks get older, sometimes they just start to go their own way, so a few years ago she let me have this room..."

On the wall of his room were pictures of classic guns, sports memorabilia and other masculine accoutrements.

Yet he slept there alone.

Late one evening we were talking and he got talking about his marriage. He told me he was afraid. Afraid of being alone.

Yet he was worse than alone. His wife despised him.

What if he'd said "no" when she told him to get his own room?


What makes a "tough" guy turn to mush around his wife?

Why would he even stay?

Tell me what you think.

On male stress

Dr. Helen addresses the seeming dichotomy of men seeking situations which are apparently bad for their health:

Most women think that men cling to traditional male roles because it benefits them. Certainly ascending a professional ladder offers more money, power and status than chugging along on a mommy track. But these perks come at a price. In a recent 15-year survey of married American men and women between the ages of 18 and 32, Christin Munsch of the University of Connecticut found that men typically reported being in the best health during the years they split the burdens of breadwinning with their partners. As these men assumed more financial responsibility relative to their wives, their health and wellbeing declined. Often they suffered from the worst health and the most anxiety when their wives were out of the labour force entirely.

There is no question that being the sole provider for one's family is stressful. It is almost laughable to compare the difference between being young, single, and unencumbered to being middle-aged, married with children, and responsible for everyone. The stress is constant and can only be mitigated, never eliminated. Even when one has more money than one needs, the strain of everyone constantly having a hand out and the decisions that necessitates creates an amount of stress.

But then, the way one builds up one's muscles is to stress one's body. This stress is not to be avoided, or lamented, but rather, utilized. It's also why married men tend to outperform men with fewer responsibilities and less stress.

Granted, one can no more handle too much stress than too much weight. An excess of either can literally kill a man. But that doesn't make it something to be feared, merely respected. Being a man is about more than living as long as humanly possible. And building a family is more than worth the price one pays for the privilege.

Competition

It's not too hard to grasp why this Japanese man prefers his sex doll to his wife:

Masayuki Ozaki bounced back when the spark went out of his marriage — by starting a new romance with a rubber sex doll he swears is the love of his life.

The ultra-realistic silicone dummy, called Mayu, shares his bed under the same roof as his wife and teenage daughter in Tokyo, an unusual arrangement that triggered angry arguments before the family declared a delicate truce.

Ozaki, 45, said: “After my wife gave birth, we stopped having sex and I felt a deep sense of loneliness.”

“But the moment I saw Mayu in the showroom, it was love at first sight. My wife was furious when I first brought Mayu home. These days she puts up with it, reluctantly.”

Masayuki’s long-suffering wife, Riho, tries hard to ignore the rubber temptress silently taunting her from her husband’s bedroom.

She said: “I just get on with the housework. I make the dinner, I clean, I do the washing. I choose sleep over sex.”

If a wife won't provide the primary element of a marriage to her husband, it should hardly be surprising when - not if - he turns to alternative providers. The sad thing is that the article makes it clear how little is required to satisfy most men, and how little many wives are willing to do in that regard.

This is what a good wife looks like

To say nothing of proof that NAWALT:

Having been sold a pack of feminist lies that make both men and women unhappier, those of us in the millennial generation who are interested in happy marriages have had to rediscover a lot of politically incorrect truths from scratch.

But there’s one truth that is particularly difficult for our genderless, sexless culture to accept, because it eviscerates not one, but two shibboleths of the age: first, that men and women desire the same things in relationships, and second, that a selfish, “be yourself” attitude is a good prescription for marital bliss.

The unspeakable truth is this: a spouse’s physical appearance is much more likely to be important to men than women. Maintaining their figures and beauty—through reasonable efforts—is one important way that women can make their husbands happy.

My wife is in phenomenal condition. She works very hard to stay that way. And, indeed, after children, it is one of the greatest gifts a wife can give her husband.

The myth of gender equality

Feminists may talk up equality, but the fact is that women don't want anything to do with it in marriage.

It’s common knowledge that roughly half of marriages today end in divorce. This is up significantly from the 1960s, when about 30 percent of marriages ended in divorce within 15 years. The underlying social and economic changes that have spurred this increase remain a bit of a mystery. But the topic was taken up in a massive 2016 study conducted by Harvard sociology professor Alexandra Killewald.

“A core unresolved question is how trends in marital stability relate to changing family and economic circumstances. Have wives’ greater earnings power and work experience increased divorce by reducing the costs of exiting bad marriages? Are strained household finances associated with heightened risk of divorce? Or do spouses’ work and earnings patterns alter marital stability by conveying signals about whether each partner is fulfilling the implicit, symbolic, gendered terms of the marital contract?”

Killewald analyzed three different theories (or “perspectives”) on divorce: the financial strain perspective, the economic independence perspective, and the gendered institution perspective.

Surprisingly, no support was found for the economic independence or financial strain perspectives, theories that suggest marriages are more likely to end when the cost of divorce is low or limited financial resources lead to family stress.

Killewald did find support for the gendered institution perspective.

“…the strongest evidence for the gendered institution perspective is that, for marriages begun in 1975 or later, divorce is more likely when husbands are not employed full-time. Consistent with my hypotheses, there is no evidence that this association is weaker for later than earlier marriage cohorts. Just as male breadwinning has remained important for marriage formation (Sweeney 2002), the results here demonstrate its enduring importance for marital stability. The results are consistent with claims that bread-winning remains a central component of the marital contract for husbands (Nock 1998).”

One of the best ways for a passive-aggressive man to get his wife to leave him is to simply stop working. Stop paying her bills and most women will decide the grass is greener, or at least more profitable, within a year or two. It will reduce any alimony too.

Hypergamy and college degrees

As I warned nearly 10 years ago, the combination of hypergamy and the male-female imbalance at the universities is already severely reducing the ability of women to marry up.

Then consider that a portion of those men will prefer to marry women who are not college graduates. After all, most men are relatively indifferent to the educational attainment of their wives. Even if only 30 percent of men marry non-college graduates, that means a woman who graduates from college has less than a 50 percent chance of marrying up. Which, in most cases, means she will never marry.

Overeducating women is not merely dyscivic, it is dysgenic.

Don't marry a feminist

From PJ Media:

Don’t marry a feminist, son, because she has an ax to grind, and someday you’ll become her target.

Don’t marry a feminist because she’s unable to give for the sake of giving. Feminists always tally up a score.

Don’t marry a feminist because family will not come first. Her career will.

Don’t marry a feminist because equality, not marriage, is her ultimate goal. And for marriage to work, the focus and commitment has to be marriage.

Don’t marry a feminist because if you get divorced, which you likely will since competitive relationships don’t last, she’ll blame you — and then use your kids as a weapon.

Don’t marry a feminist because you’ll never be happy. Feminists are perpetually angry and dissatisfied and have no sense of humor.

Seriously, don't do it. Every man who does comes to regret it.

The inevitable divorce

When your wedding picture looks like this, you should probably just keep a family attorney ready on speed dial.

• Uncomfortable bride, check
• Goony-faced groom, check
• He's grabbing onto her, check
• She's trying to pry his hands off her, check

I wonder if wedding photographers should be given the power to prevent a wedding. There is no way the man who took this picture didn't think to himself at some point, yeah, these two are totally going to go the distance.

A change in the balance of power

Another post-Wall woman learns the hard way that the nature of the game changes with age:

To Claire, it sounded like a different world; a sweet shop filled with thrills and excitement, all available at her fingertips. Just the pick-me-up she needed.

Sadly, six months later, Claire would do anything to be back in the marital home, listening for the sound of her husband’s key in the door. For she, like countless other middle-aged divorcees, has found the world of internet dating — of which Tinder leads the field — to be a tawdry, loveless, moral abyss.

In fact, she’d be the first to warn any married woman secretly thinking the grass might be greener on the other side to stay firmly where she is.

It's interesting to see that there are more and more articles being published warning women off divorce. I would expect this means we'd see more marriage and less divorce as the socioeconomic situation continues to worsen.

Lack of action has consequences

This social scientist is going to come in for absolute hell from feminists, but he's telling the simple truth:

The consequences of men being sex-starved by their wives are deeply worrying. For such a sexual drought has a profoundly negative effect on our society — fracturing families and potentially leading to violence and crime.

I’ve found that deep sexual frustration results in men having affairs — which was the case with Suzanne and Michael — and then, all too often, divorce and family breakdown. Sexually starved men are more likely to visit prostitutes, view pornography and, in the worst cases, even molest other women.

So insisting on fidelity within a marriage is all well and good, but unless women ensure they are also having enough sex with their husbands, they are calling catastrophe into their lives.

Not only that, but it makes other, younger men much more likely to avoid marriage as they hear what the experience is like from older men. And indifference from a wife towards his physical needs tends to breed indifference from a husband towards her emotional and material needs.

This isn't rocket science. And the imbalance tends to get worse, not better, as married couples age.

And it is, make no mistake, mainly women in long-term relationships who lose interest in lovemaking — not their husbands. Younger men experience sexual desire twice as often as young women, while older men feel aroused four times more than women in the same age group.

Wedding photography

She's not helping

Like Darth Vader, a woman discovers that the more she attempts to control her husband, the more his behavior diverges from that which she desires:

I’d been on my husband for years about his eating habits and considered it my job to educate him about how to be healthy, just as I do with our kids. When I first met my husband, he was going to the gym every morning at 5:30am. He was also 40 pounds lighter. But after years of harping on him with no results, I couldn’t shake the feeling it was my fault my husband wasn’t taking care of himself.

Naturally, I didn’t see it this way at first. Why is it my fault if my husband makes bad choices? He’s lucky to have me guiding him! I’m just being helpful! But what controlling wives call helpful, husbands call something else. A man’s reaction to being told what to do by his wife is to do the exact opposite.

Indeed, it wasn’t until I stopped getting on my husband’s case that he began to take care of himself. Huh -- go figure.

My light bulb moment didn’t end there. Once I saw the connection between the two -- my dictating and my husband’s lack of motivation -- I started thinking about other ways I was behaving that would cause him to react negatively. Like the times I’d tell him how to drive, or I’d correct his language, or I’d complain about whatever he wasn’t doing well and tell him how he could improve.

Then one night I saw myself in Ken Burns’ documentary, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. The narrator said this about Franklin in reference to his wife Eleanor:

He wanted someone who had all the devotion to him that his mother had had but not the admonitory part -- that part that told him what to do and what not to do. And sadly, Eleanor couldn’t be worshipful and had to be admonitory.

Eureka. My mother was an Eleanor Roosevelt. So was I.

Most women discover, too late, that they prefer the man they married to the one they remade according to their imagination. Leave him alone to be who he has always been. You'll like him better.

Hypergamy is a bitch

Women who put their careers first seldom understand what they are doing to their relationship prospects:

How different her world is today. Kylie, 48, has just asked her struggling actor fiancé Joshua Sasse — who’s nearly 20 years her junior — to leave their (er, her) multi-million-pound West London home amid reports he has been cheating on her with a Spanish actress.

Kylie and Sasse have split amid reports he has been cheating on her with a Spanish actress. The idea of a tear-stained Kylie after the split is heartbreaking. For there has never been a greater proponent of love than her.

She has searched for decades to find Mr Right. And after doomed relationships with Donovan, the late INXS singer Michael Hutchence, model Andres Velencoso and French actor Olivier Martinez, she finally believed she’d found him.  Only last Tuesday, she was on ITV’s This Morning professing her love for Sasse, saying she’d change her surname to his when they married.

Kylie Minogue is a very successful actress and pop singer. She used to be very attractive too. Let's review the list of public romances mentioned in the article.

1. Actor
2. Rock star
3. Model
4. Actor
5. Actor

Can she REALLY affect surprise that she hasn't found a man stable enough to marry her? This isn't that hard. One would feel a similar lack of sympathy for a man who couldn't figure out why the none of the various strippers, prostitutes, and porn stars with whom he'd been involved had turned out to be Mrs. Right.

Yes, divorce is bad for children

As always, exceptions serve as the basis for poor generalities, lousy justifications, and bad policies. In most cases, divorce will have negative long-term consequences for the children involved.

As the Christmas tree is thrown out and the wrapping paper cleared away, the empty Champagne bottles taken out behind the garage, Google searches for terms like “divorce lawyer” and “file for divorce” spike. Many of the people researching how to untie the knot will probably not do so. But some will.

Brad Wilcox and Samuel Sturgeon of the Institute for Family Studies suggest that there might be good reason to hold off, particularly if you have kids. Of course, there might be good reason not to hold off! But the majority of divorces involving kids don’t come from “high conflict” marriages or situations involving abuse; Wilcox and Sturgeon point to data indicating that most divorces come from couples who are still basically functioning as parents.

Counterintuitively, kids whose parents divorce amid flying crockery and lurid accusations may actually do better, post-divorce, than kids whose parents unhappily fizzle out. But if you think about it for a while, that’s not all that surprising. In homes with major conflict, divorce brings a certain measure of peace and stability. But if your parents are basically civil to each other, divorce could come as an unwelcome surprise.

Our parents, our family unit, are the first and most bedrock fact of our lives. Suddenly breaking that apart -- for no reason apparent to the children involved -- shakes a faith in the world that will never be rebuilt in quite the same way. Moreover, divorce often means downward economic mobility. Unless you are hugely wealthy, splitting your income across two households means that sacrifices have to be made by both parties, and often, that financial stress is added to the emotional upheaval of unraveling two lives.

Small wonder, then, that the children of divorce tend to have worse outcomes on various measures than the children whose parents stay together: According to Wilcox and Sturgeon, “Divorce typically doubles or triples the odds that children will experience depression, delinquency, school failure, or future relationship difficulties.”

Marriage isn't about two people, it is the foundation for the family. And as such, it should never be taken lightly or dependent upon something as ephemeral as "happiness".

When solipsism resembles sociopathy

Among other things, this is a good example of why a man should never, ever, ask advice from women:

User PseudoDad wrote on the site: 'Since our son was conceived 2 1/2 years ago we have had sex just 5 times. Prior to this, we weren't at it like rabbits but I was very happy with twice a week.' He said he wanted to broach the subject in a way that respected his 'wonderful' wife of six years, and asked: 'When is enough enough?'

His post received hundreds of replies, with women suggesting he do more housework, consider counselling, or simply 'accept that she might just not be interested right now'.

Mumsnet user monkeysox was the first to reply when she asked him whether he was doing enough housework.  PseudoDad replied to insist he does his share, but another mum told him to 'accept that she might just not be interested right now and you have to grit your teeth until she feels she wants it again. 'You're not owed sex just because you want it,' said BravoPanda.

Actually, as a husband or wife, you quite literally are owed both sex and sexual exclusivity. Otherwise, there is absolutely no point to marriage other than legally establishing who the father of the children is.

Game-aware readers will immediately recognize the problem; the man's socio-sexual rank is too low to attract the interest of his wife. No man who does housework, worries about respecting his wife, and considers his wife to be "wonderful" when she is more frigid than the average iceberg is going to be attractive to a woman.

What the man should have done is left his wife one year ago; 18 months is more than sufficient time to determine that a man's wife is simply not committed to actually being a wife and performing the single most important function of a wife. But in a case as hapless as this, I can't imagine it doing any good.

My recommendation for a man in this situation would be to continue to play the family guy martyr as long as the wife wants to be financially supported by him, then hope for a reasonable divorce settlement when she finally tires of the pretense and decides to go in search of more interesting men.

What I find more remarkable is the average female response. It is clear that their first instinct is to justify the woman's actions and defend them, simply on the remote chance that they might one day find themselves in a similar position. This lack of empathy is solipsism, not sociopathy, but in this case, it genuinely resembles the latter.

Alpha Mail: divorce rape

A reader wants to start a #GamerGate-style movement against the divorce courts:

I want to start a gamergate style movement against divorce rape.

I just got divorce raped. In the end I'll pay to my ex around 50-60% of my net payh. I went from joint possession (50-50, equal possession) of my kids throughout the divorce, about two years. I now have four days a month. I must maintain a life insurance policy with my ex as beneficiary. I must pay in cash for medical support. The bitch can remarry, have another man raise my boys, and make me pay for it. And the state will beat me and put me in a cage, if I don't surrender.

I now have negative net worth, my ex has all the property and a net worth in the millions. She is a [professional] and earns [a lot more than most of us].

I'd have contributed much more to alt-tech if this hadn't been going on. Sorry, but this sucked the life out of me.

Following my own interests, I'm going to take the war to cuckservatives and feminazis who passed these damn laws that invert male headship of the family. We're going to change those laws. We're going to remove anti-male judges from the bench. We're going to work on getting Trump on-board with pro-father initiatives.

It really happens. It can happen to any man. And retreating from society and civilization and women is really not a viable option.

Perhaps we should stop pedestalizing and demonizing women, and instead focus on doing what men do, which is fixing the structural problem.

Men prefer smart women

In theory. In practice, not so much:

As the tides of history and gender change, it would be easy to assume that men — recently unseated as the dominant intellects and degree-havers in the U.S. — would adapt to a world where women are not only their equals, but often their intellectual superiors. After all, there's nothing like dating someone who makes you a little sharper. But more and more research reveals that though the thought of a smart woman is appealing to men, a real, live smart woman standing in front of them is actually a turnoff.

It never ceases to amaze me that women find it so impossible to understand that men do not share their preferences with regards to the opposite sex. Women prefer to marry up in terms of intelligence, as they do with pretty much everything else from height and weight to income. So, it should be obvious that either a) men prefer to marry down, or b) every man who permits a woman to achieve her goal of marrying up is actually too stupid to realize he is marrying down, in which case perhaps she isn't marrying up after all.

It's not bad that men prefer to marry down in terms of intelligence. If they didn't, then women who achieved their preference of marrying up would be reliably marrying into a structurally unhappy marriage.

The French, at least, understand this. Let women be beautiful. Let men be brilliant. Vive la différence.

There is always hope

Sometimes, we are so focused on the darkness and the nastiness of the fallen world that we forget that there has been a Divine Invasion. Sometimes, we are so occupied with battling the demons and shadows that escaped Pandora's Box that we neglect to remind ourselves that the box also contained the the little winged fairy of Hope.

This story of an unlikely couple is a reminder that giving into despair and fatalism is not necessary:

It was pure chance that [Chris] Dempsey came into [Heather] Krueger’s life.

The code-enforcement officer in Frankfort, Ill., overheard one of his co-workers talk about a cousin who was dying of cancer and desperately needed a liver transplant.

Dempsey readily agreed to get tested to see if he was a match.

“I spent four years in the Marine Corps and learned there never to run away from anything,” he explained to CBS News. “So I just said to myself, ‘Hey, if I can help, I’m going to help.’ ”

He turned out to be a match.

All that is necessary to resist evil is the knowledge that sometimes, occasionally, against all odds, the good guys sometimes win.

When divorce-rape isn't enough

Even getting the kids, the house, and half the money isn't enough for some women:

We have been following the investigation of the murder of Florida State Professor Dan Markel – a case that has cast suspicions on the family of his ex-wife and fellow professor Wendi Adelson. Much of this suspicion has been drawn to Adelson’s brother, Charlie Adelson. Charlie Adelson was reportedly romantically involved with Katherine Magbanua, who just happened to be the mother of two children with Sigfredo Garcia, one of the two accused hit men (with Luis Rivera). Magbanua was arrested recently and then Rivera has cut a deal to cooperate in a guilty plea. Now Rivera has reportedly given evidence that further implicates the Adelson family. Rivera pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and told police that the motive for the murder for hire was because “the lady wants her kids back.” In a truly chilling added element, Rivera said that he saw Wendi Adelson before killing her husband and that she stared directly at him and Garcia.

All I can say is that if you're going to have a hit man kill your ex-husband, you should probably consider taking some acting lessons first and find a professional to write your lines for you. And just to avoid insulting everyone's intelligence, don't replay the scene from the last crime drama you watched.

 Listen to the policeman's voice as he's interviewing her. He knows perfectly well that the woman was involved, and her weird statements intended to draw the investigation's attention away from her family only tended to reinforce his suspicions. Every policeman has seen a thousand women fake-cry to get out of a ticket.

She says that she is “scared someone maybe did this – not because they hate Danny but because they thought this was good somehow.”

As a general rule, if a woman is talking about how she is scared, she's either lying or trying to justify an action she knows was wrong.