Play the Game

Stop spouting the rules.

There’s a lot of information in this series. By the time a man learns how to stop being codependent, build healthy boundaries, develop his own frame and the various dynamics that exist in relationships between men and women he’s become a student in his life. When most people are new to an art they love to talk about it. White belts in Karate talk more about Karate than black belts. High school football players talk more about football than pros. The guy who has slept with his first girl talks more about sex than the guy whose slept with twenty.

And like that 8 year old nephew that spends Christmas holidays telling you about what he just learned about dinosaurs, men love to talk to their women about what they know. Stop that. Women hate sales, and love marketing. Sales involves telling her how great a salesman you are, how you know everything she is doing and the reason. Marketing involves something more. You show, not just that you know the rules, but you know how to play. This is important.

Play the game, stop spouting the rules.

Up to this point you’ve learned about all the subtle details of male and female dynamics. How men speak overtly, how women speak covertly. How subtext provides a contest for status and harmony in conversation. How Dread creates anxiety, anxiety creates desire, and desire creates an opportunity for sexual release and relationship comfort. How to handle conflict, and more importantly, not taking responsibility for her emotions through conflict.

The next most important part is to remember, none of this is supposed to be overt. Everything has to be covert. Women hate sales, women love marketing. By spouting the rules, you are making three unforced errors:

1. You make an appeal to some unknown rulebook and expect her to abide by it.

2. You establish that you aren’t actually the man you are presenting as. You’re following instructions, no different than a marriage counselor telling you to man up and you puffing your chest because of that.

3. You’re sabotaging your own efforts. Anxiety doesn’t feel good, but neither does the soreness after a good workout. Growth can’t happen without discomfort, stop trying to fix the process.

♦♦♦

This may come up in your relationships while you’re running Dread because women love mysteries, and finding the source of these new changes you are making in your life is a mystery. Women make abrupt changes in their life when they meet a new man that they desire. They mirror his habits as instinct. They assume that a man making abrupt changes is doing the same thing. During Dread, if you’re doing well, you’ll be in bed, about to fall asleep when she catches you at your least guarded state and ask if you’re cheating

“Is there someone else?” And your instinct is to deal with that by being honest and open. Don’t

“There is no one else. You’re acting nervous and insecure because I’m making changes in my life and you want to know why. I’m trying to become a better man, husband, and father and I’m doing this for the family.”

Vs

“I’m trying to sleep. Ask me when I don’t have work in the morning.”

There’s a tinge of anxiety in a comfort test. A woman feels something, she doesn’t know what, but it’s uncomfortable. She’s asking you to stave off this discomfort. It’s like a hamster running in a maze. It can run slow or fast, but doesn’t get anywhere, the hamster needs someone to show it how to get out. This is the fundamental negotiation in a relationship that happens, covertly, when both people want it to.

You are valuable, you are the luxury good. You are the best she will ever do, and everyone knows it. You have chosen to be with her, among your many past present and future options. She feels anxiety because she doesn’t know how to keep you, and you provide (through your responses to her actions) a pathway to stave off that anxiety. Sexual availability is key. Having a nice roommate, a business partner, a great conversationalist and fine mother to your children are good, but they aren’t a relationship. Sex is the keystone to all the other qualities.

So you establish, above all, that a healthy sexlife is a great way end to that hamster maze. Eventually you add more expectations, the good mother the pleasant conversation etc. but this is Dread, and Dread is about being taken for granted. Nothing takes a man for granted more than sexual denial. So when you start spouting the rules, you send a signal that all she needs to get comfort is to ask for it, no strings attached. You signal that you don’t value the things you bring to the relationship, as you’ve made them free. People only value that which has a cost.

♦♦♦

You’re having an argument, probably over nothing. Usually because she is emotional and strong feminine emotions make you uncomfortable so you get mad. Now everyone is yelling. You think to yourself

“I have the book about Frame, about Dread! I got this” then look over and say some nonsense like “You’re angry because you are two days from shark week. I know this because I’ve been tracking this the last 3 months and we fight like clockwork.” Sit back smugly and wait for her to admit your brilliance, thank you for spread sheeting her emotions and admit she was wrong, you were right, and to offer a blow job for your hard work.

It doesn’t go that way. Every argument now has “Let me guess, another wonderful piece of wisdom from that fucking book, right?” while you sit there, dumbfounded that the author (me) so confidently told you how and why your stupid arguments happen and that no one is acting according to the rules. Men are stupid because they love a just world, complete with rules, good faith actors and accountability for rule breakers.

Athol Kay talks about this in his book Married Man Sex Life Primer, in where he talks about the difference between formal and informal hierarchies. When you’re at work, in the military, talking to the cops or in court, you’re in a formal hierarchy. There are rules, everyone has a spot on the totem pole. There is hard power enforced by everyone. The rulebook is the same for everyone.

Informal hierarchies are based on a fungible, negotiated hierarchy, ever shifting and constantly tested. Relationships are informal. You may be the primary breadwinner, but a sufficiently nagging wife can wear the pants. The winners in this battle follow the cardinal rule of relationships: the person who needs the other person less has the power. As an aside, if you’ve ever known or been that guy who is a great leader at the workplace, but comes home to a controlling, demanding wife (aka the type 2 or 3 captain) this is why. The man is great with structure, but horrible without it.

♦♦♦

You got turned down for sex for the nth time. She says she’s sorry and really wants to, but there’s this nagging injury that she’s self diagnosed. Doctors can’t find it, she hasn’t bothered to take steps to rectify it, and like you’ve so eloquently said on more than one occasion “Is your mouth broken too?” to which she points out that you are being mean and she was in the mood until you said that shit.

You feel vindicated, she knows you want sex, but she doesn’t feel particularity like it. She can’t say why, she doesn’t know. That’s why Munchausen's syndrome is so common among unhappy wives. They can’t accept that they are just unattractive to their man and need a reason to absolve them of blame.

Talking solved nothing, communication is all self deception built on cope, with a foundation of lies. And the simplest and easiest reason to accept that spouting the rules isn’t helpful is because it solved nothing. I can describe the world around me with great detail, but it will never change any of it from occurring.

Spouting the rules makes an appeal to a fictional rulebook that no one is following, establishes that you’re not actually attractive because you’ve ceded authority to an outside source and sabotages you ability to stop being taken for granted. Some guys can’t stop doing it, and that’s why you have to get better at narrowing the gap between what you can observe and what you can handle. You have to do better than just noticing when these little events are bullshit, you have to realize that everything in life is an open ended test, even if it looks like it’s only multiple choice.

Everything in life is an open ended question

When you started, you were angry. You were angry at your wife or girlfriend because you felt like you were being taken for granted, and you’re not wrong. Part of it is that you allowed yourself to be taken for granted, or worse; you actively taught her how to take you for granted by sabotaging and hiding from your own wants and desires.

This is a specific type of anger,

as it’s built from resentment. A guy may not think it is, he may argue that it isn’t, but it absolutely comes from entitlement. Most people who have worked through Dread and been the inspiration and research behind this book were kids of the 70s, 80s and 90s. They had narcissist parents who had raised codependent children to some degree. The children had to make a choice: either be loved or be themselves. Everything is reactive to everyone around them. That sort of pathologic borderline personality is a feminine trait, and men are being raised to become defective women.

Those kids were raised behind what felt like a one way mirror. They watched their parents, became experts at watching their emotional responses, and tailored how they acted to meet their needs. This skill works well for a toddler in paleolithic times, but feeds mental illness to them today. When these men grow up and become adults in relationships, it builds into that fantasy: I am good at reading people, but I don’t know how conduct my social responses fast enough. The girl in his life isn’t a parental figure, but because he doesn’t know how to act any better he defaults to what used to work: pander, observe, and mimic.

This works great for someone who will be taken advantage of, but not so good for someone who wants to have a healthy sexual relationship in the long term. Spouting the rules is a way men appeal to the mental models that worked in their childhood when the wife doesn’t respond in the same way. That’s the entitlement, the covert contract.

When your woman is making some grandiose claim why she can’t have sex, you are smart enough to know it’s bullshit, but you’re not smart enough to know which social cues to use in that situation to get what you want. You think you’re holding her accountable, but you’re really saying that you have nothing else you can do. An ultimatum is the admission of powerlessness, and that’s exactly how it’s taken. At best, you’ll have a partner who knows that she should be having sex in a relationship because that’s what good couples do. She will put out the bare minimum of effort and frequency so as to keep the complaining down.

Remember, every unhappy wife is a rape victim.

And now that you’ve started Dread, you know that this is a bad idea, but can’t yet close the gap between knowing something is bullshit, and responding to bullshit. Most guys default to either doubling down on their unattractive behavior and getting increasingly angry at their women, or going the opposite direction and acting contradictory, saying things like:

“I don’t need you woman! I can replace you!”

Used to be conformist, now everyone must acknowledge how non-conformist he is! It’s replaced one covert contract with another, equally unattractive one. This is why one of the first thing you learn is the power of STFU, or to shut the hell up. When you can’t narrow the gape between detecting bullshit and responding to bullshit, you are better off saying nothing. You won’t make processes, but you won’t regress either. It’s a holding plan while you work on your social acumen.

Which leads to the solutions. When you’re shot down for sexy times, and you’ve been given a bullshit excuse, like:

Kids always sleep in the parents bed

I have a headache

Not tonight, I’m too tired

You understand the dynamic at play. You can tell the difference between a no, and a not right now. You can tell the difference between bad sexual logistics and bad sexual attraction. Most importantly, you have narrowed the gap between hearing bullshit and responding to bullshit. Not just sexually, but with everything.

The initial example of the wife who is on her period and overly emotional? You learn that the fight is just emotions, you don’t take it seriously and have a laugh. It’s nothing personal. You know she can’t help it and you decide to have fun with it, or just leave if you’re not in the mood. Or,

You’re in bed and she shoots you down. You know it’s 11PM and you should have made a move way earlier. You start to have sex before dinner; you have some time free, the kids are at baseball practice, and it’s time you’d be wasting with Netflix anyways. Or,

You know that you’ve been gaining weight, or she has. One, or both of you are feeling unattractive and you can work on being more intimate throughout the day to keep her primed for poundtown, or realize that wearing jogging pants with your shit locker hanging over isn’t the best view from the blowjob position. Or,

Amongst all the signs, there’s literally no reason she has to turn you down, and so you go do something better with your time. If it’s just the once maybe it’s time for a workout anyways. If it’s the 20th time, then maybe it’s time to start looking into better options. But you know the last thing you want to do is start spouting the rules, you’re busy playing the game.

And this is the point. Life isn’t a multiple choice quiz:

What do you do if your wife isn’t having sex with you? Do you:

A. Complain and hold her accountable?

B. Go jerk off to porn for the rest of your life?

C. Get a hooker and then get divorced because you broke the rules

You realize the entire thing is an open ended question. When you open your mouth it’s with purpose, and the purpose is not to seek validation or manipulate her into doing what you want. You’ve already got a pretty good idea why you’re in your current predicament and explore all your options, weight all your consequences and benefits, and then make your decisions.

There’s an entire book within that one paragraph, but fortunately for you, you are the only one that can write that one and you’re the main character in it.