How to have the marriage you thought you were going to have. By which I mean doing it like rabbits.
Spotted at Alpha Game. (I think I’m the only atheist Vox doesn’t hold in contempt lol.)
I’m so going to use the “Prepare for boarding” line. Much better than the old “Brace yourself” one.
Some guy in the comments at Alpha Game said I even looked like a Bablyon 5 extra, which of course totally made my day! That’s awesome lol.
Jennifer: Love it! But in real life my response to “Prepare for Boarding” would be more along the lines of LMAO…and then, yes, I would enjoy the boarding immensely.
I have a policy of not writing blog posts that amount to whining about my day. So with that context in mind, for those still waiting for the 2012 Primer, please accept my apologies for it’s lack of appearance. It’s simply not ready to my satisfaction and that’s the bottom line. I’m kind of upset about it taking so long to be honest and it’s a much rougher experience to rework the material again than I thought it would be. It’s feels like I’m repeating a class I already passed. So while I can see how I can add stuff now and the book can definitely be polished, after that I’m running out of ideas. So the temptation is to just say the “2012″ is the “Second Edition” and take a long nap.
Ironically January, February and March have been the 5th, 4th and 3rd best months of sales for the 2011 Primer and after the website upgrade if April holds to form this will be my best month of book sales ever. So it’s not like the 2011 edition is “broken” and worthless. My biggest concern is that I don’t want a long time reader who got the 2011 edition to feel punked if they get the Second Edition. Quality matters. You guys matter to me. Integrity matters.
Jennifer tells me I’m crazy for feeling bad of course. In the last just over a year I’ve written two books, held a full time job, got the old blog to a million visitors, massively upgraded the website, answered more email than I can count and it was all very silly there with TV and Radio after the first book launched. Incidentally TV and Radio coverage was worthless for sales and hits to the blog. Just worthless. The blog and word of mouth are the key here, by which I mean readers matter. By which I mean you matter.
Anyway… a year ago Jennifer and I were all but filing for bankruptcy and that was even after strip mining my 401k, checking the couch for change and deferring the taxes. If the Primer didn’t sell, we were going to be totally hosed. I seriously love my readers. Seriously, seriously, seriously love my readers. Which means my next news is kind of amazing…
…I’m quitting my day job.
I put my notice in for 5/31/12 to give them time to replace me and leave on the nice nice. My replacement starts in two weeks and I get to train them, so here goes nothing. It will have taken me two-and-a-half years from starting the blog to exiting, but I’m doing it. By May the only thing we’ll owe money on is the house and the book income is equal to my nursing income, so “How You Like Me Now!” All I’m gonna say is that the MAP works on your employer just as well as on your wife. It may take some time, it’s hard work, but it does work.
I’ve changed too. Two years back I wrote a post about trying to decide if I should go to a strip club as a birthday treat seeing I was turning 40. But honestly we were too broke to do anything like that lol. I’m 42 in a few days. I’m so much more content than ever before. I’m so alive and that matters too. I’ve never been so happy. I’m finally doing it.
And I’ve had lows too. Look I don’t mean to be morbid here, but you only get so much time to be alive. My father died and he spent decades doing a job that he didn’t want to do before breaking free of it. His last ten years were I think his happiest. Steve Jobs got cancer once and then went berserk creating iEverything and then got taken down early. I’ve spent a lot of time watching Christopher Hitchens on Youtube recently and he seems to have done some of his very best stuff shortly before the end too. Randy Pausch too. Why the fuck do people have to get cancer to want to do the stuff that really matters?
Oh and don’t freak out or nothing guys. I don’t have cancer and I feel fine. But I have this weird thing where I’m actually comforted that if I died the books would keep selling and Jennifer and the girls would be okay. I’m just still trying to cope with suddenly being promoted to being the family patriarch and it didn’t come with any kind of warning I paid attention to. I know I’m messed up still because I still can’t watch that damn Harry Potter movie where Dobby dies without crying. As if taking your daughter and her friends to the movies wasn’t awkward enough to begin with. So fuck you Dobby.
Don’t wait. Don’t keep doing the same old shit day after day that you hate. Don’t stall for time. You don’t need cancer for permission. Fuck waiting for the Make a Wish people, they aren’t coming to your house with a shortstop and a free Playstation.
Anyway… I can’t stop watching this video either.
Just go do it. No one else gives a shit if you don’t.
Reader: Hi Athol, Long time reader and fan. I’m in my mid-30s, married, very happy and very committed. I’m a strong alpha with my wife, and she loves it.
I have a secret addiction: flirting with girls online. I do it all the time. It makes me feel good and strong, and helps me keep up my game, at least verbally. I have many girls online with whom I flirt constantly, and even engage in explicit sex chats with sometimes. None of these girls know my real name, and I’ve never met any in person – and I don’t think I would. To me, it’s something akin to Interactive Porn. So it’s not physical cheating (I’ve never met any) and it’s not emotional cheating (I don’t actually have a real emotional relationship with any of them).
My wife and I don’t have sex too often. But I get seriously turned on by the excitement I get from flirting with these other girls.
I’m not worried about getting “caught” because I’m good with the privacy and technology and boundaries. But I feel like I’m doing something wrong, and I feel like I should stop; but I can’t help myself. The problem is not practical but moral, in my mind. And it’s not obvious to me if I’m doing something severely wrong and I should stop, or if I’m not causing any harm to anyone so it’s okay to continue.
I’m not quite sure what to do. I’d love to hear your suggestion; I value your opinion a lot, Athol. Thank you.
Athol: Ironically you’re writing to me unworried by the practicalities and worried about the moral issues. I pretty much approach things from the other direction. People get themselves all sorts of tripped up trying to create and maintain a moral framework that often simply isn’t workable in reality. It’s often far easier to find out what works in practical reality as the greater good, and then say it’s the moral thing to do.
Most things that are really fun are potentially addictive or in some way damaging if done to excess. Rather than being the all purpose Fun Police and stamping out all enjoyment except for 1950′s chaperoned formal dances, my general rule of thumb is that “It’s not a problem until it’s a problem.” Flirting itself isn’t a problem, I mean I flirt quite a lot in real life and generally run the “Goofy” part of my “Goofy and Groping” game on everyone. But you’re basically emailing me to tell me there’s a problem with your flirting routines… so whether you want to say it’s a moral issue or not… you know there’s a problem of some sort here.
So rather than getting mired into this activity as a moral issue at the start of the process, let’s look at things from a purely practical point of view and ask the key question…
Is this activity helping you get what you really want from your marriage?
My hunch is that all the excitement (dopamine) you get from this activity means you don’t actually really engage with your wife all that much. Which means she isn’t really responding to you sexually because you’re basically not tripping her wires all that much. Thus not that much sex. Which is probably what you really want and is the need you’re trying to meet by going online and doing this activity in the first place.
Which makes the whole thing a vicious cycle of wasted effort getting you what you don’t want. Bingo! We found the problem.
I suppose you’re going to want a solution now…
My basic solution would be for you to stop this activity that isn’t working to get you what you want, and start trying to engage with your wife, the same way you engage with these women. It’s not going to be an instant fix and will take a solid month of stopping the old behavior and starting the new one to rewrite your way of thinking.
It could also be helpful to have a discussion with your wife about you feeling under-stimulated and needing to do something more fun and engaging. I wouldn’t blurt out exactly what you’ve been doing up until now, but it’s certainly not a bad idea to state what you actually need from her.
Reader: Hey Athol, I’m a long time reader, and I’ve emailed you before, but never for advice. I was hoping you could take a few minutes and give me your perspective on something.
I had the type of marriage that made me wonder how you knew me so well when I read your book. 100% beta, and she pretty much walked all over me and took it all for granted. I spent years doing everything I could to make her happy, and she never was. I couldn’t figure out what to do for years, but I had bad enough oneitis that leaving was never even considered. We even moved across the country because things got so bad at one point that we thought a giant change would help.
Well, it turns out she was cheating on me most of the time. To my knowledge, she never slept with anybody, but there was flirting, then there was dirty texts, then pictures, then skype sessions, etc. At one point there was physical contact with somebody, but she said it never escalated to sex. I don’t know if I believe her. And I knew about some of this at the time, but too put it bluntly, I was too much of a pussy to confront her.
Toward the end of it all, she flew back to California to visit her family. She ended up being gone for a couple of months, and during that time communication got more and more scarce, until she was responding to texts with single acronyms, and telling me she couldn’t talk, citing reasons like, “I’m driving right now.”, “I’m too tired right now”, or “My phone is about to die, I need to charge it before we can talk.” Being the paranoid fellow that I am and knowing that she was acting extremely out of character, I started looking for cheating. I found texts, pictures, and phone calls that lasted for several hours that happened before and after every time her “phone was about to die”.
I wanted to fix things, and ended up finding your book. I read it in a day, and it was enlightening. Armed with that knowledge, I might have been able to make things better, but then I discovered that her online flirting had turned into an emotional affair, and there were “I love you” texts and pictures, as well as pictures of her as a kid, and other things you wouldn’t share with somebody when you were just looking for a quick and fun flirty type of thing.
I decided to finally confront her, and wrote her a letter. She told me about everything before I could give it to her, though. We talked, and we decided to separate. We thought we could do our own things for a while, and in a few months or a couple of years, decide what to do.
We’re both young, and we were only together for 4 years (married for 2). I still care about her, and wanted her to be able to survive and take care of herself, so I agreed to give her alimony. We agreed on an amount that is more than she would get at a low wage job, but doesn’t hurt me much, and I would continue to pay her part of the phone bill until the contract expired in two years. We also both wanted to keep being friends, since we were so close. It was a couple of months before she was able to physically leave the house, and by then we had both started dating other people.
That was about six months ago. As time went on, I became happier in my new life, and started going through a lot of personality changes. I immediately added a ton of alpha to my personality (or maybe it was there and just neutered by my oneitis and overall conditioning in the relationship from early on.) I got a wonderful new job. I met a girl who is so compatible with me in every way it’s insane, the relationship has been amazing and we’re both extremely happy. Not to mention I get laid at least daily. (She also reads your blog, and we’re both happy to know so much about the internal dynamics of our own relationship).
I decided I definitely want a divorce, I’m just saving the money to hire a lawyer. From when me and my soon-to-be-ex-wife talked about it, it wont be contested, which makes things easier. We agreed on the alimony, which I am already giving her, and there is no savings, property, or children. I told her I wanted the divorce a few months ago, and she was okay with that.
(There’s an actual need for perspective coming up, I just needed to give you the back story first. It’s an usual situation when a couple is this friendly after splitting up, so I thought the context was necessary.)
A couple of months, ago, she called me and told me she misses me. That she wants me back even though she knows she can’t have me. She told me that she doesn’t want the divorce anymore. I told her that I still wanted it, and that she can’t have me. She started calling me more and texting me just to talk casually, and I realized that being friends with her is more difficult than I thought. Eventually, I figured out that it’s just not healthy for me to be friends with her, even though that’s what we had wanted when we first decided to split up. I stopped responding to her emails and texts most of the time, and she asked me why I wasn’t responding to her anymore. So I told her that it’s difficult for me to be friends with her, and I can’t talk to her much like she wants.
Guess what? She started calling more. I kept ignoring her. I thought I was clear on the phone, but she didn’t get it. A few days ago, she moved back here. She said she was moving back here to be with a boyfriend she had while she was here, and she’s living with him right now.
We had a couple pets, and I still have them. I told her in the beginning of all this that she could take them as soon as she has a stable place to live where she can keep them. I am also holding on to her stuff in a storage unit I have in my building until she has a stable place to live and can come claim her things.
She sent me an email a few days ago after getting back into town asking if she can arrange a time to come over and see the animals again. I sent her a very clear letter saying that it wasn’t healthy for me to talk to her socially or see her anymore, and that she should see the animals when she came to pick up her things and was here anyway, but other than that I did not want her to come over.
Yesterday, she sent me the following email (the first one that was not friendly, by the way):
“Its kinda fucked up that you won’t let me come and see our animals unless I’m coming to get some of my shit. I don’t hav anywhere for that stuff yet. I need to buy myself some storage drawers for the clothes I do have. You hae to remember that these are my pets too and I want to see them. Its like having kids right now. We don’t have a custody agreement but what if we had kids and I wouldn’t let you come see them unless you were coming to grab some of your stuff? It would be frusterating for you too….I can’t come until I have that other money from you anyways…but still…you’re keeping my kids away from me” [sic]
Even thought it’s not really in my nature, I’m finally starting to get mad. I’ve done nothing but help her, even after a marriage where we had sex only every couple of months, she didn’t contribute to the household or the relationship at all (basically a bored SAHM without any actual kids, who didn’t actually do any housework – yeah, it was bad), and then cheated on me. I’m still helping her with alimony, even though there is no court decision yet because we haven’t filed paperwork. Plus, for what she is costing me in alimony, I could probably hire a lawyer to take this to court so she doesn’t get alimony at all. I have enough evidence of her cheating on me, and I have evidence that I tried to help her work and go to school during the marriage. Everybody I know thinks I am being way more nice to her than I need to be in the first place, and she’s just as ungrateful now as she was while we were married.
It’s only recently that I’ve started seeing the bigger picture here. Her calling me more, moving back here, and trying to bully me with anger like she used to are all some sort of mixture of wanting me back and batshit crazy.
I’m not exactly sure what to do about this last email. Having gotten mad at it, part of me wants to email back angrily and tell her that she should be happy I’m giving her anything at all and not fucking her over in court, seeing as how without the money I’m giving her I would have plenty of cash for a lawyer and she would be lacking rent money. At the moment, I haven’t responded, and plan to ignore her unless she emails me more. More than anything, I just want her to go away. I still want to give her alimony to help her get her life on track, I just don’t want to talk to her anymore. And I don’t want to see her. And if she does contest the divorce, I’ll just make her fight for alimony in court and use that money to pay a lawyer. I just want her to live her life and leave mine alone, and I can see that weather she realizes what she’s doing or not, it looks like she’s trying to get closer to me and hang on as much as she can.
What’s your take on the matter?
P.S. Thank you for reading the essay of my marriage. If you respond to this, I will by another copy of your book lol. And feel free to post this one if you want; I wonder if parts of it might benefit your other readers. “Cheating wife trying to get closer to her husband after he starts cutting her out of his life” probably applies to more men than just me.
Athol: Hiya, as you know, there’s nothing to salvage in this marriage because she has abandoned it. Her return of interest in you is simply to attempt to get you to continue to provide for her. Nothing more. There’s no reasonable hope at all you could ever let her back home and not have a repeat of the same behavior. It’s over.
To be blunt, she’s not your friend. You’re giving her cash for her doing absolutely nothing. You may as well be paying protection money to the Mafia for all the difference it makes. I’ve heard those sharply dressed gentlemen can be very agreeable and accommodating with their friends that pay them money on a regular basis for doing nothing.
You need to speak to a lawyer immediately. I’m absolutely not kidding about this at all. For now don’t do anything different with your wife until you seek legal advice and get the divorce process started.
My strong hunch is that as soon as you start “fighting back” and cutting off the “alimony” and forcing the issue with her stuff, she’s going to make an aggressive move of some sort toward you. It may be actual violence or property destruction, but will more likely be serious verbal harassment. The most dangerous thing she can be driven to do though is immediately get pregnant. If she gets pregnant to anyone…. you’re the husband and on the hook for child support as a sort of default setting. So there’s simply no time to waste on that account. Guido and Fat Tony swinging by to clear up your “little misunderstanding” is probably going to be less expensive than her getting pregnant while you’re still married to her.
Incidentally she absolutely intends to try and have sex with you on the “pet visit” and you’ve been right to avoid that. That’s just opening yourself up to all sorts of potential nastiness coming around and biting you in the ass.
So the next move you make with her needs to be her getting the divorce papers, and then following through with all the stuff your lawyer recommends for dealing with the “alimony”, the pets and her stuff.
Having said all that…
….you already knew that was the right answer, didn’t you.
The problem is that actually following through on it seems not very nice. The reason it doesn’t seem very nice… is because it isn’t very nice. But it’s certainly just. Look, she had all of your support and love and she abandoned it. If someone gets out of a car and announces “I don’t want this crappy car anymore” and walks away from the car… you don’t start pushing the car behind them in case they change their mind. (You just remove the stereo and tires and get what you can for them.)
In addition, you now have a new girl in your life. So lets review the Shrek, Princess Fiona and Donkey arrangement shall we.
You’re Shrek.
Your wife is acting like a very bad tempered Donkey… and you’re PAYING HER to do so. So you’re treating her like a Princess Fiona.
Your new love interest sounds great and is laying you like tile. So she’s acting like a Princess Fiona and watching you send resources out of the relationship for no good reason. So to at least some extent, you’re treating your girlfriend like a Donkey.
Obviously that’s all messed up. And seeing your girlfriend actually reads MMSL… she’s going be doing the double fist pump woo-hoo in the air thing about now. You’re welcome baby… you are very welcome.
Your wife wanted pretty badly to be on the Donkey Plan, so actually put her on the Donkey Plan… stop giving a rat’s ass about her and let her be her own beast of burden.
And thanks for buying the books, much appreciated. Plus seeing you’re getting divorced soon, it’s kinda like they are 50% off.
Reader: I’ve been avidly reading this blog and it’s helped so much. Thank you so much! My question is how do you deal with ex’s while using your process? My hubs got 2 little kids with his ex and I’ve got 2 little kids from my prior marriage. His ex is out of state and emails him things that I feel are inappropriate (such as ‘X’ program reminded her so much of him & she just had a nightmare about him dying and woke up crying etc). She stepped out on him several times during their marriage and he’d finally had enough and divorced her before meeting me. How can I have “girl game” and deal with this without coming across as jealous and turning him off? I am jealous, I admit, as the bond of parenthood is something he shares with her and not me. But I haven’t any concrete reasons to feel jealous as far as his behavior or actions go. He’s never lied to me and is very straightforward. I would love to know what you think I can do to encourage boundaries between his ex and him while still maintaining my dignity and girl game. Or do I need to stay out of it? Please help.
Athol: Here’s the thing, when someone is clearly over stepping the boundaries and trying to make inroads with your partner, experiencing jealously is completely normal and appropriate. Failure to express something about the inappropriateness of what’s going on is generally a bad thing. It’s fine to step up and claim what’s yours.
In this case though, it’s not sounding like he’s being emotionally hooked into her, and she sounds borderline Batshit Crazy. I mean “I had a dream about you dying and I woke up crying” is really messed in the head. Who says that sort of crap? So you really want her to not become even more Batshit Crazy and stay on her side of the fence and not do something like use the kids as pawns to inflict misery on your husband. My suggestions are:
1. Both of you should have access to the email/phone that she attempts contact on. Affairs grow in secrecy and putting it out into the open just removes the possibility that it’s going to happen. Your husband probably doesn’t want an affair, but she wants your husband, so that’s the point here.
2. Never respond to her Batshit Crazy emails. Just ignore them. Reply with an email children related or a topic that disinterests her. So if she hates baseball… thrown in a paragraph about baseball. You’re not trying to piss her off, just bore the hell out of her.
3 Respond to all emails with something that is completely on point related to the children.
4. Mix up him responding to her and you responding to her with about a 2:1 ratio. Reference each other in the emails to give the impression that you and your husband are in constant contact with each other. (“Okay sounds good, let me check with hubby/wife and we’ll probably XYZ”)
5. If she does something good for the kids, praise/compliment her for it. This will totally befuddle her and typically blunts aggression toward you.
6. When she acts the way you want her to act… i.e. as a non-crazy, non-bitch ex-wife, be pleasant with her.
So the overall approach is one of having a unified presence, being open and generally keeping the discussion on point about the children and things she isn’t interested in. Ideally you never have to confront her, just create the impression she has no hope of making any traction on your husband while taking the moral high ground of everything being good for the children.
So your frame with your husband is simple too. “Look I know you don’t want her, but she just keeps doing this crap and we need to deal with it without her making serious trouble for us and using the kids like a football.” Eventually she’ll start behaving.
Jennifer: Captain and First Officer for the win. Go team! The answer to her crying about a dream of your husband dying is “Little Billy got an A on his report card.”
Per the official tenets of Game, I’m meant to dump Jennifer and find someone younger and hotter. I should probably do this before she turns forty in about six months to protect my street cred or something. So let’s play the relationship math game and see how things play out.
I’m about to turn forty-two, so let’s say I schedule a large trash pickup and kick Jennifer to the curb. In this fantasy experience Jennifer doesn’t fight back and turn into a jilted demon bitch like Miss Piggy with a Ph.D in Women’s Studies, but simply wilts away into the background weeping and pining for the loss of me. Also in my dream Van Halen never lost David Lee Roth as lead singer, fat free bacon tastes just like real bacon and I have chocolate flavored semen.
Then thanks to a remarkably convenient and poorly explained combination of time travel, teleportation and cloning, when I was fifteen I had started growing a clone of Jennifer in an abandoned warehouse just two blocks from the house I live in now. When I hatch her when I’m forty-two, the clone Jennifer, henceforth called Jennifer is twenty-seven. I realize calling the clone Jennifer… Jennifer is potentially confusing, but that’s intentional. I figure I’m going to yell out the wrong Jennifer’s name at some orgasmic point, but if I do no one will notice I messed up.
So anyway, Jennifer is great. She’s hotter than Jennifer, but I guess a little less useful around the house. Also she needs a bit more in the conversational skills department, but then with chocolate flavored semen that’s really only a passing annoyance. We have a couple kids together and apart from occasionally messing up and talking to Jennifer about something I did with Jennifer, everything goes really great.
Well really great for about fourteen years. See when I’m fifty-four and Jennifer is thirty-nine, the cloning process seems to fall apart and apparently there’s some sort of mental instability in the Jennifer version of Jennifer. Even worse, it turns out thanks to a remarkably suspicious crossing over from an alternate reality, Jennifer had already started a cloning process creating some a-hole called Athol some two years before I had started the cloning process to create Jennifer.
For those of you getting lost, or simply sexually aroused by a recap of science fiction… Athol would be fifty-four, Jennifer would be thirty-nine and Athol would be forty-two. The kicker being that when Athol was originally cloned, alternate reality Jennifer brought $5000 of Microsoft stock and it’s done extremely well over forty or so years and Athol is loaded like a geek’s cumshot. I try vainly to out game Athol, but it’s just no use. He’s everything I am and everything I’m not.
Pretty soon Jennifer starts telling me she’s just feeling confused about things, never really been sure that she’s loved me. She wants some space to sort out her feelings… and you guys know the tune. All those years of cloning just thrown back in my face like I’m some kind of mad scientist devoid of feelings and logic. So at the age of fifty-four, I suddenly find myself wheeled to the side of the road to get collected in a large trash pickup.
I do of course still remember Jennifer, and look her up on Facebook. We exchange some texts and phone calls about old times and we get together for lunch. I try for a f-close but apparently she has telepathic cats and she’s all “This has been nice, but I need to buy tuna right now.” and that’s about as close as I get.
So yeah…
Maybe I’ll just stick with Jennifer. She’s got conversational skills and doesn’t care that my semen doesn’t taste like chocolate. Plus as a season ending cliff-hanger… apparently we’re both cylons.
Jennifer: That’s right dear, stick with the original model. She’ll still love you when you’re 54, or 64, or…you get the idea. And she’ll still want to do you too…
I’m averaging about one email every four or five days along the lines of “Should I marry my girlfriend?” It’s semi-spooky that random strangers write me emails asking my advice on such a major decision and only give me a two to three hundred word snapshot of their girlfriend to make a judgment on her wife worthiness.
Sometimes the girlfriend is clearly a train wreck and the relationship is a less enjoyable experience than accidentally hitting a deer. At least no one blames you for a four-legged-bastard leaping out of the dark right in front of your car. I mean seriously why do deer do that? Do deer have fraternity hazing rituals? Truth or Dare with cocaine? Sudden diarrhea? Anyway, those guys I just tell to get the hell outta Dodge before it all goes down.
The others though aren’t so easy. These guys seem to have a fairly good relationship with the girl except for… a vague sense that they should email me and ask my opinion. My hunch is that these guys are self-selecting and have women’s intuition, God is telling them, sixth sense, quiet discomfort that progressing the relationship to the next level is a bad idea.
So here’s the rule…
If you’re a guy, your default setting when it comes to getting married is… to not get married. Not to anyone. That’s the rule.
However the exception to the rule, is the exceptional girl.
If she’s not exceptional, don’t make an exception. That’s what exceptional means.
Anyway…
If you sense a disturbance in The Force about your relationship, and you can’t put your finger on it, I suggest you look at two things. (1) Is it that you simply aren’t that much into her to want a life time contract with her? Or (2) you have already noticed her doing something that is a deal-breaker in some way, but you haven’t addressed it because the rest of the relationship is “so good.”
And she doesn’t have to be the perfect girl, because she doesn’t exist outside of romance novels and lingerie catalogs. Some positive combination of looks, likeability, lust and loyalty is rare enough these days. Or at least she should be smart enough to cover her weaknesses with pie.
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