Case Study: The best solution is to let this man die

I don't talk about type 3 captains because there aren't many of them, except here

There are three types of dysfunctional captains in relationships in the redpill. I often talk about type 1 captains: the drunken captain and his begrudging first officer. That one is easy. That looks like self improvement. Do things and she may follow kind of stuff. I sometimes talk about type 2 captains: the neurotic captain and his constantly complaining passenger. The man is afraid of his wife and his life is chaos. He needs boundaries and enforcement and assertivenesss. Eventually to train his wife to act right or to give himself permission to leave if she doesn’t.

I rarely talk about type 3 captains. Mostly because there aren’t many. This is a type 3 captain.

Type 3: The Captain and Her Husband:

You are on your way to a double date with your wife and your friends. Your wife arranged the date, picked the restaurant, and made the reservation. She texted you twice that day to make sure you would be home and ready on time, and made you change your shirt three times. Despite that, you were still ten minutes late because your wife spent a full hour rummaging through her wardrobe, complaining that she "looked fat in everything." You suggested she wear that sexy black dress, and she snorted and said, "Of course you would say that," since clearly your preference for her appearance is her last priority.

You apologize to your friends when you meet them at the restaurant for being late; well, they are really her friends, and you cannot remember the last time she was willing to get together with yours. They say it is no problem, and your wife chimes in, "You know how [your name] is; he really has no sense of direction." You are tempted to defend yourself, but you know your wife is smart enough to turn any public argument into a scene where she appears calm and composed, and you look juvenile and whiny. So you shake it off and have a pleasant dinner—although it is a bit hard to swallow your food with your jaw clenching every twenty minutes, since that is how often she throws another emasculating comment your way. At least you can look forward to having sex when you get back home—wait, no you cannot, since it is Thursday, and she has designated Sundays at 7:50 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. as "sexy time" for both of you.

The problem: Your wife has a high sexual market value (SMV), and everyone knows it. In the beginning, everyone complimented you on how "you did really well" and "you are a lucky guy" for dating such an attractive and intelligent woman. You embraced this, joking about how you somehow "tricked her" into dating you, as if she would normally prefer someone of a much higher stature. When her focus and energies were spent on you, you felt like a million bucks, which is why you did not hesitate to propose to her—and that is where things went south. 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 has been set for you as the barely complementary piece to her life.

You are not without your own achievements and value, and you are secure enough to be a Husband First Officer to your Wife Captain. The problem is your wife is not nearly secure enough herself to be a good Captain. She makes her share of mistakes, and she knows it. She does things like emasculating you in front of friends, or soliciting and then disregarding your opinion, mostly out of insecurity. Unfortunately, she is intelligent and creative enough to be really good at it.

The solution: Your wife as Captain is not working for you. It is probably not working for her either, but that would require admitting mistakes, and you cannot remember the last time your wife apologized for something. At some point, you abandoned your Male Action Plan (MAP); go read some Athol Kay and create a new one, because it is time to launch your own ship. You will actually have the easiest road getting started because your wife is probably so self-involved she will not care much about your self-improvement goals. You may even get comments like, "Glad to see you are going to the gym again; I was wondering if you were ever going to care about what the doctor said about your blood pressure."

Eventually though, you are going to run into some problems. While you are becoming the Captain of your own ship, you are going to become a terrible First Officer on hers. You are no longer following Her Plan For Us (or really, Her Plan For Herself and You As Long as You Agree With Everything) without question, so you are going to butt heads quickly. You will decline going out with her friends and instead say you are going out with yours. She will see this as a "withdrawal of duties" and will likely withdraw her own "duties." Say goodbye to those 7:50 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Sunday sexytimes, buddy. Learn the term "Outcome Independence," because you are going to need it.

You "win" this with Dread, but not the "go out and pretend my phone died" or "flirt with attractive coworkers" kind of Dread. She is probably too smart for that and will see those moves as the emotionally manipulative tactics they mostly are. Your Dread is just a gradual but real, pure, raw sexual market value increase. Would your wife defer and be a good First Officer to George Clooney? Absolutely. So you, my friend, need to become her George Clooney. Right now, she probably considers herself physically, mentally, emotionally, and professionally superior to you. You will not convince her to get on board your ship until that changes.

But the road is long and hard. She will not hesitate to tell your social circle that you are being a terrible husband since she works all day at her high-powered career, then comes home to "run the household" (since "you are so forgetful" and naturally could not 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 become more acute, especially as you become the "fun parent," while she is frustrated that you are no longer supporting her efforts to make them trilingual at age three.

From the best selling book on marriage that outdoes anything you’ve read in your life

The example from the quote isn’t meant to be taken literally. The idea is a boss woman with a good job who is trying to be the patriarch. She can’t, but she’s too proud to admit mistake. The husband is a pushover, and he doesn’t seem to want to be responsible for his own decisions, for whatever reason. And now we are here. I don’t want to start by telling you how to feel about this. I think the example of this case study stands on it’s own. This man started fucking around seven years ago. Victim puked, then 4 years later tried to take thins seriously.

It’s a cautionary story.

Billy knows she wants a child.

I was on hardcore red pill for a while. I went through marriage counseling and did an intense personal inventory. I set boundaries, stopped playing the victim, and drew a clear line in the sand regarding abusive behavior from my wife. That, along with some lifestyle changes, allowed us to make real progress. We have been cruising along with little to no problems for the past year.

The night before last, she was arguing with me over something trivial and yelled, “FUCK YOU” at me. It seemed completely unprovoked. This is my trigger. I was so shocked. Instantly, I lost it. I walked to another room to get away from her, spiked the glass I had in my hand, and then turned and kicked a nearby door clean off the hinges. I instantly regretted losing my temper like an idiot. I was so angry, I cleaned up the broken glass right away and then went out and walked for a few miles. I think what made me so upset was that, in an instant, it felt like we had undone all the progress we had made.

At the height of our dysfunction a couple of years ago, I was ready to leave. I had an exit strategy in place. I stayed and worked hard at fixing this for two reasons. First, I did not want to drag my dysfunction into the next relationship. Second, she desperately wants to have a child, and realistically, at this stage in her life, I am the best chance she has. I felt sorry for her. Because things have been going so well for more than a year, I agreed to start trying for a pregnancy this month. I am terrified of having children in a dysfunctional or divorce situation. I feel stupid for even considering having children now.

I have not slept at all and have not spoken to her in two days. I am still furious and do not want to yell or get angry again. I am sitting here with a glass shard in my thumb and a black-and-blue fractured foot, wondering what the hell to do. I am realizing my situation is not as together as I thought it was. It feels like my castle is crumbling. After years of being walked on and taking abuse from this woman, I have set an absolute boundary of no disrespect, and yet again, I have no way of enforcing it.

If you prefer lighter reading. There’s a great fictional story of a promise keeper who learned to enjoy life. Contemporary fiction by men, for men

Introduction

A good friend of mine, Rich Cooper, often quoted as saying: Men love complicating their lives, then justifying why they do it. I word it differently though the sentiment is the same. Men are increasingly acting on their feelings, then desperate look to justify it. It’s annoying and it’s everywhere. Even here, in this praxeological space. Guys will spend inordinate amounts of time picking up the jargon, learning the mental models, and articulating the right words in the right combination. Then they use all this to justify the stupidest covert contracts.

Take Billy above. His case study is fun, because he posted this 4 years before he actually started posting field reports and doing any work. It’s like a Prequel. It has everything the Prequels had: shitty writing, bad characters, horrible motivations, and bad special effects. How else can someone write the words hardcore red pilled in the same paragraph as marriage counseling and personal inventory?

If you don’t know, marriage counselling is considered the worst idea in the red pill. Marriage counselors, the ones who survive in the marketplace, know that the only way to make money is to pander to women and force extra duties onto men. If they don’t women complain and find another counselor, while men don’t really care. We’ve got old interviews which I’ve been trying to find, where counsellors admitted that once things get heated in a relationship, men will actually listen to what they say and attempt to do what they asked, while women forget marriage counselling exists while they spiral into crazy. Not to mention the more cynical of women who use it as part of their moral checklist, saying,

“Well. We tried everything. We even went to counselling. But he couldn’t get past when I wasn’t emotionally fulfilled by him and so fucked another dude so it’s not my fault he didn’t want to grow.” Or some other babble. And while Billy claimed to have set boundaries, stopped being a victim and drew a line in the sand about abusive behavior, his next statement is about his wife purposefully crossing those lines by the standards he’s set. This isn’t boundary setting, this is begging. Boundaries without enforcement are wishes.

I read it thrice and have no idea what a personal inventory is. I am guessing it has something to do with hippies and feelings and MBTI or palm reading. It has no place here because it means nothing. But they are all a wonderful covert contract, which really sets up the second half of this mans report.

And this is what I want you to take from this. If you really pay attention to how this man describes his OODA loop, field report of a life, you see it all in front of you. If you get what we go here, you’re using this to look in your own activities: