Case Study: Double Bitch Management?
The question is, which one is being a bitch?
I have to go after writing this, and I only have one question. Is the wife being a bitch, or is her husband?
Most of the time I pick the saddest of sad sacks to write on. Their experiences are extreme outliers, and good for getting a very basic concept that seems to fly over the head of men, and make it click. This isn’t one of those cases. In fact, I can think of only one other marriage like this in my decade of dictating the field reports inside of the married Red Pill space: a woman named Vampire Squidina and her husband. It’s a rare one, the type III dysfunctional captain. I believe it’s in Frame.
If you’re reading this but haven’t heard of my best selling Praxeology series, this references the three types of men inside of dysfunctional relationships. The first captain is the Drunken Captain with a begrudging first officer. It’s the most common and easiest to fix. Husband was otherwise competent, attractive etc. However, through injury, sickness, or laziness, has declined considerably. Consider the man who married a girl who instantly gained 50 pounds and stopped working, kind of like that. For the most part his job is to get his shit together and wifey has to learn to let him lead again.
The second captain is the Neurotic Captain with his constantly complaining passenger. It’s a competent man, though likely less attractive than the drunk. His wife is neurotic and he’s walking on eggshells to appease her. She runs things via withholding validation. It’s becoming more common to see these guys, you would call them pussies. Their road is a little harder and fills most of the field reports I write about. It’s too much to get into here.
The third captain is a rare one. It’s the Captain and her husband. Husbands who have wives who run the show, super confident types, for various reason that are out of scope. Guys are drawn to this who tend to float or coast. You could call them man-children. They don’t get the same path the other guys have. For example, a big part of the first two captains is to learn, or relearn, not putting up with their wives shit anymore. But for a type three, he’s been doing what he wants anyways. Being selfish is easy, and he will not be able to be a confident asshole so long as he has that man child within him.
Which leads me to Billy. Billy is a type 3. He doesn’t have a bad sexlife, but he’s not in control of it. Billy doesn’t wear the pants. Billy doesn’t aim to do better. Billy married a striver, and Billy knows something is wrong, but he didn’t quite know what.
The Problem: She’s’ good, and everyone knows it. When her focus and energies were spent on Billy, he felt like a million bucks. She dove headlong into wedding planning, and your input was barely solicited, let alone factored into a decision. On the big day, you mostly felt like a tuxedo mannequin stand-in. Since then, the tone’s been set. He’s a set piece.
Billy does okay, and is secure enough to be a Husband First Officer to the Wife Captain. The problem is his wife isn’t nearly secure enough herself to be a good Captain. She makes her share of mistakes, and she knows it. She does things like emasculating him in front of friends, or soliciting and then disregarding opinion, mostly out of insecurity. And she’s intelligent and creative enough to be really good at it.
The Wife as Captain isn’t working for him. And it’s probably not working for her either, but that would require admitting mistakes, and she doesn’t do apologies. The battle is over someone who wants more and someone who is content yet aimless. He needs a mission bigger than his wife.
Eventually though, he’s going to run into problems. While becoming the Captain of his own ship, he’s going to become a shitty First Officer on hers. She’ll see him enforcing boundaries and think it’s withdrawal of duties, and will likely withdraw her own “duties.” Learn the term “Outcome Independence,” because you’re going to need it.
From Frame:
You “win” this with Dread, but not the “go out and pretend my phone died” or “flirt with attractive coworkers” Dread. She’s probably too smart for that, and will see them as the emotionally manipulative tactics that they mostly are. Your Dread is just a gradual but real, pure, raw, SMV increase. Would your wife defer and be a good First Officer to George Clooney? Fuck yeah. So you, my friend, need to become her George Clooney. Right now, she probably considers herself physically, mentally, emotionally, and professionally superior to you. And you won’t convince her to get on board your ship until that changes.
> But the road is long and hard. She won’t hesitate to tell your social circle that you’re being a shithead, since she works all day at her high-powered career, then comes home to “run the household” (since “you’re so forgetful” and naturally couldn’t manage cell phone and utility bills yourself), and has an ungrateful husband who just wants to spend all day at the gym and then Home Depot. If you have kids, this is only going to be more acute, especially as you become the “fun parent,” while she’s frustrated that you’re no longer supporting her efforts to make them trilingual at age 3.
Billy, 2IC
Billy, a 6 foot, 37 year old 192 pound skinny-fat man who doesn’t lift. So far he’s read No More Mr Nice Guy.
At least once a year, for the last 7 years, my wife will go fucking nuclear about how unfair her life is because all of our friend’s husbands make more than me. The other wives don’t have to work and get to play tennis all day. She says how I’m unambitious and that she just needs to “be at peace” with the fact that she’s going to have to make all the money for our family so we can live the life she wants. I would normally Defend, Explain, Excuse, Rationalize (DEER) whenever it happened.
About a month ago, she had another one of these episodes. But this time, by the grace of God, I just shut the fuck up. For the first time ever, I saw right through it all. She knows I have a fragile ego and was just trying to poke at it to motivate me to become the man she wants. Even if she doesn’t consciously understand that herself. When she’s on this rant, there is a strong implication that I’ve become the kind of man that she would never have agreed to marry. When I stopped talking, it kind of freaked her out. She was afraid that I had finally become unretarded enough to actually understand that. Over the next couple of days, she would try to break the ice and “apologize” which was just another disguised entry point into “talking” which I didn’t want to do.
The worst part is she’s not even wrong about me being unambitious. I have a sales job, which I’ve had for over a decade now, which I hate. I’m not a sales-y guy, so I find it difficult to try harder because it feels inauthentic. I get by at work on vibes alone. I’m generally useful and likeable, and I’m on 100% commission, so there’s no reason to get rid of me. I also have a crippling procrastination habit, which has plagued me since the 6th grade. I know exactly what I need to do to unfuck my life, but can never stick with it long enough to make real lasting change. I have seriously eroded my self confidence.
Anyway, since I didn’t know if shutting the fuck up was the right move, I was looking on the internet for similar stories to mine. In doing so, I discovered this forum. I instantly recognized that I was in the right place for me when I read that the commandments were to Shut The Fuck Up (STFU), lift, sidebar, and own my shit. I know I need to fix every aspect of me, not just career wise, but mentally, spiritually, and physically.
A few years ago, I made it halfway through No More Mr. Nice Guy (NMMNG) even though I was unaware this subreddit existed so at least I had a jumping off point. I have lurked for a month now, just trying to get the lay of the land. I started implementing some basic principals and had immediate success in exercising frame control with my wife. Even though I’m a retard at my core, I felt like progress was possible.
However, I got an ice cold bucket of water on Father’s Day. Me and the wife were just sitting on the porch, watching the rainfall, having a nice discussion. But, like the fucking verbal kungfu master she is, one thing lead to another and she had ambushed me in the “it’s not fair that you’re a fucking bum and I don’t want to work” rant. I had done so well over the last month of not stepping on that landmine, that I was hurt and mad at myself for letting it happen. I was Defend, Explain, Excuse, Rationalize (DEER)ing like a motherfucker. She was spraying her emotions all over me and I was just fucking drowning in that shit. I broke. I threw my chair back and told her to “get fucked” and stormed off inside to watch a movie with the kids.
Now, that may seem tame to some of y’all, but that is absolutely not something I ever expected to utter to my wife. It was like an animal instinct to protect my feelings. I fully expected her to come in crying about how I had crossed the line and demand an apology. But she didn’t. She just sat outside by herself for a long time. Again, I think she was afraid that I was catching on to the implication that she doesn’t love and respect me anymore.
The next day, when I came home from work, there was a whole page, handwritten letter from my wife on my desk. I opened the envelope and it started something like this “It’s not fair to you for me to take my frustration out on you...” I closed that bitch up and put it back in the envelope without reading it. As of this writing, I still haven’t read it. I’m going to have to be in the mood to read it.I know she doesn’t truly think she’s being “unfair” to me, as evidenced by the fact that she has done this several times since we’ve been together. Hell, she’s even blown up at me twice in the same month, and she said she was “sorry” the first time. She wants what she wants and doesn’t give a flying fuck about my feelings. For her, it’s about skillfully captaining the boat and getting her dipshit first officer to not quit. I know this will be a problem from here to eternity until I get control of the boat myself.
Sexlife:It hasn’t been a huge issue. It’s not the thing that directly brought me here. However, sex is completely in her frame. I’ve just been too big of a pussy to realize it.
As an example though: the other night, she was sucking my dick. I told her to “kiss it”. She stopped and said “weird...” not in a fun way, did it, then kept going. She otherwise did great. Afterwards she said, “where did you get that idea from? You’ve never asked for that before.” She has used this every single time I’ve tried something new. She says it in a very judgemental way, and uses it to control the sex in her frame. I can’t fucking stand it because it has worked really well at keeping me in my little jar and in fear of what she thinks of me. It’s a subtle way of calling me a pervert.
This time, I told her that she was being judgemental and trying to ruin my fun. She tried to defend herself. I just stopped her and said that I won’t tolerate her trying to ruin it for me. She just stopped talking. I’m not sure it was the “correct” thing to say in that situation, but it was the truth for once and it felt right.
I’ve tried to hold myself accountable for so long, and failed so many times at it, that my confidence has eroded down to the bedrock. I’m here to try and reverse the slide for once in my pathetic life.
As an example: I’ve done the Starting Strength novice linear progression at least 25 times over the last 6 years. My current lifting numbers are a peak I’ve reached each time. Something will come up: vacation, illness, lack of motivation, injury, boredom, whatever; and I’ll just drop down 70% and run it again. I suspect this plateau is probably near the end of my linear progression, and I need to introduce intermediate programming changes. But, that requires holding myself accountable to the basics: protein, sleep, consistently lifting, and not being a pussy.
I need to work on my focus, command of my emotions, and belief in myself. In short: quit fucking procrastinating. I am the master of making a big ass task list, then not doing one single thing on there.
But, since things must be done, I see no other way than to take control once and for all. Therefore, in here, in addition to lifting and reading the sidebar, I will take ownership of the things that I say I’m going to do. I need to start with baby steps, with a sufficiently low bar, that I can start to stack up some wins.
Every day, I must write 3 tasks I want to complete, no matter how small, and do them without fail. In my next Own Your Shit (OYS), I will keep score of the number of days I successfully achieved those 3 things I told myself to do.
Analysis
If you know what to look for, the one thing that should pop out to you is that he wrote this entirely in his wife frame.
