Women tell you how to ruin your relationship
They don't want you to listen; Death by a thousand concessions
There’s games in every relationship. You can lose a few and be OK, but if all you do is lose, then don’t be surprised if you end up sexless and miserable. It’s not that women are evil or vindictive, but that they don’t know how to act any other way. They constantly test you and it’s instinctive, they don’t know they are doing it. Instead of bitching about how women can’t be Hulk Hogan with a vagina, why not learn to not only play these games, but win? It’s easier than wishing for women to be men and pretending that’s totally a straight thing to wish for. Speaking of fiction:
In the same way you see a 34 year old woman desperate to settle down and have kids will add a ‘no games’ to her tinder profile, you’ll see guys 7 years into a marriage saying the same thing to us. Blacklabellogic, my old cohost to award winning podcast Red Morning (I swear I have it somewhere) called it the death by a thousand concessions. The problem is most people took that declaration as a statement of hopelessness, and not the understanding of the game. As always, unattractive men with more social media engagement than sense would mistake the map for the terrain.
And what is the terrain? It’s that all these small inconsequential situations are a game, but a game with real stakes. And while I could pontificate some Jordon Peterson-esque jargon filled statement about games and rules and iterations of Dostoyevsky; I hate when a writer tries to baffle the reader with brilliance, and the reader mistakes the complexity of his reading with the depth of his understanding.
The way it tends to work is women love to test their men. It can be an innocuous thing like asking you for a glass of water, just because. It can be a more important thing, like asking you if she can meet with her ex husband because she needs closure with how he left her. In the latter example you probably care a lot, put your foot down and stomp around before saying no. In the former example you probably don’t think anything of it. But both matter in their own ways.
It’s simple boundary enforcement. The problem is that men cannot enforce their boundaries if they don’t know what they are. You can learn about them, or you can have other impose theirs upon you. And when others tell you what you value, they always serve their interests, not yours. That’s why every woman, after hearing about your concerns over your wife heading to Vegas with her freshly divorced bestie will shame you into ignoring your own damned sense.
“If you trusted her you wouldn’t have a problem with this!”
“A real man wouldn’t care!”
If you don’t have a mental point of origin, you may actually be swayed by this stuff. You don’t want anything except peer acceptance, so you’d go along with this. You have no one to blame but yourself for being the husband with a producer credit in a Vegas fuck film.
But what’s the alternative? Leave your wife every time she even thinks about acting outta pocket? She honestly believed nothing would happen there, she honestly believed that it was just closure. It’s a wonderfully evolved trait for women, the ability to have plausible deniability and incongruence without any sort of mental anguish about it. They lie to themselves so that it’s not a lie to you. And you can’t blame them for it, they have to do it that way. Men don’t need to be as deceptive because we can just cave someone’s head in if we want to. Much less effort, but you need testosterone and mass to pull it off.
And until modern America, women just haven’t had the mass to be violent.
And that’s why everything you’ve read, or I’ve written on sexual dynamics is the way it is. You can’t learn what your expectations or boundaries are until you’ve tested them. A single guy plows through women to learn everything about women. His likes, his dislikes, his nice to have qualities, his non negotiables etc. You can let others define this for you, but like I said: they will define whats best for them (read: women) never whats best for you. Unlike the rest of the economy, you cannot outsource this to cheap foreign labor.
The first field report is about trying to put a man back on the plantation. It’s subtle, small, consistent attempts to use shame and ego to get a man to act the way his woman wants him to. I should say using shame and ego to get a man to act the way his woman thinks she wants him to. The word thinks is important. It’s important because every since time I have seen this play out, and I’ve seen it play out a few hundred times now, it always plays out as performative outrage, but compliant sexlife and happiness in action.
Which is a huge part of the problem. Guys take their women seriously. They hear her talk about what a real man wants, or what she originally loved about him, or what he could do and maybe she would be more sexual or nag less. They hear all these proclamations form their women and take it as fact. At best, it’s an unreliable narrator, and at worst, it’s womaneese; using words to elicit action from her man. It’s nice if the words are true, but that’s not required. In this case, what does she want from her man? Well if you take them seriously she wants them to both be miserable, and for her to have a reason to divorce and move onto the next man. If you don’t take them seriously, she wants her man to ignore dumb shit and continue to turn her on.
On a sidenote, I think it was David Claire who wrote about the relationship road map in his book Practical Female Psychology, where women evolved a need for multiple fathers for her children as a survival strategy. Varied DNA creates protection against any specific pathogen. I don’t know if it’s true, but it sure does explain why women love to grind their husbands into dust, only to divorce and find a new one within the year. I’ll go with that until someone comes up with something better.
Billy figures out the game
My woman keeps pointing to 12 year old pictures of us on the fridge when we first met, and says,
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