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Sex Rank Affects Every Relationship You Have

June 7, 2012 By 39 Comments

Reader:  I wanted to ask you something do you think the principles of game can work with female-female friendships?

I think I’m my best friend beta husband. She kind of did something disrespectful and unconsidered that I know she wouldn’t do to our bitchy common friend and I think me being too nice has to do with it. This is a woman I had known for 12 years and I always being nice and accommodating and I think she kinds of decided that if I treat her like a queen is because I’m her slave. I told her that what she did was mean and she kind of laughed at my face and say that I was being “silly” even though she did something that I make sure not do to her like four years ago because I knew it was not right… anyway  I decided to cut contact and not call her (She is unemployed now, so I call her so she doesn’t spent money but then she does calls our other bitchy that lives in Boston) and it took her a week to call me  to apologize properly.

Now I wonder if I should add more Alpha to our relationship (call her less, give her less gifts and other stuff)  or you think I’m being paranoid? Has Jennifer noticed anything like this in her girlfriends?

Athol:  Sex Rank is in effect for same sex relationships too. It’s always the most attractive guy that’s leading the male-male friendship. It’s always the most attractive female leading the female-female friendship. We all fall somewhere in the pecking order.

This effect is why a lot of guys running the MAP find their work environment changes for the better even though they were trying to work on their marriage. Their status in the social group rises because they are more attractive and people start treating them nicer. They stop taking crap at home and they walk into their office feeling more confident and assured, people notice and respond to it.

In general, you train people how to treat you. If you’ve been deferring to your friend for years and years, she is in charge of the relationship. She’s dominant and you’re submissive. By bumping back on her you upset the social order a little lol. It may well be that you’re pulling level with her, or the dominant/submissive roles are going to change. I’ve also had some minor amount of email confirming that in same sex romantic relationships, MMSL works pretty much on cue too.

There’s always a dominant and a submissive partner in any dyadic social relationship. This is simply what humans do on an unconscious level. I know people go crazy when I talk about dominance and submission, but it’s extremely important to grasp how dominance and submission exists in every interpersonal exchange. When you get on a bus, the bus driver is dominant and you pay your fare and sit well behaved and appropriate… i.e. submissively… on the bus. When a cop pulls you over, the cop is dominant and you’re the submissive. The middle manager is dominant over the staff, but submissive to the director. You can have a dominant role in one social place and a submissive role in another. Stop thinking dominance and submission is only about wearing black leather and consentual whipping lol. It’s everywhere and happening all the time.

Most interpersonal conflict arises from attempts to maintain threatened dominance and/or evade being in a submissive position. When I started “breaking free” at work, I got into “trouble” several times with my superiors. Once it became apparent I wasn’t going to be contained, and in fact was becoming someone that could bump back on them rather firmly, they backed off and were much nicer. For the reader in question, there was a big blowing up of the relationship when she bumped back and then it resolved after a bit.

This is also why the Captain and First Officer approach creates a low conflict marriage. If you’ve already decided on the power structure and agree to it, most points of potential conflict are side stepped. Otherwise the alternative is somewhat akin to the Rule of Two of Sith Lords. There’s a Master and an Apprentice and eventually the Apprentice seeks to kill the Master and either succeeds or is killed themselves. So it works great for a while then always blows up somehow.

It is very very rare that there are genuinely equal relationships. Usually when one couple says they have an equal relationship, that’s the viewpoint the dominant partner wishes to believe in and the submissive partner states agreement because they wish to not displease the dominant partner. I’ve often seen quite bullying dominant wives get very angry when it is pointed out they don’t in fact have an equal relationship because they are running the show. More ironic than that is if a husband acted to a wife, like they act toward their husband, they would be outraged at the dominance and “abuse.” The Rationalization Hamster is strong.

Dominance is not a good or bad thing, it simply is. You can use it for good or for evil. You can exploit others, or quite benignly lead the way. There’s no requirement that the male has to be the dominant one and the wife the submissive one, it just seems to be the way most people are wired for eroticized relationships.

And whether dominant or submissive, I don’t advise putting up with abuse, deception or neglect in your intimate relationships.

Jennifer:  Athol is dominant in our relationship, but he’s so light about it that I don’t feel controlled by him. It’s not like he runs my day or micromanages me. I like following his lead. Also he does respect my input and listens well. It works for us. I’m not oppressed lol!

 

Filed Under: Captain and First Officer, Girl Game and Sexy Wives, Nice Guys and Betaization

An Unfortunate Shortage Of Leftover Bacon

June 6, 2012 By 22 Comments

So here’s how today, my Wednesday morning played out…

Awaken 6am due to purposeful lack of alarm set for 6am. Fall back to sleep. Wake up at 7am with raging hard-on coupled with intense need to void bladder. Stumble to bathroom, urinate awkwardly. Do not wish to disclose further information regarding urination. Upon shower completion… dress warmly for aerobic walk to local establishment. Intention, partaking of large iced coffee beverage. In hand liquid stimulant, return home, uphill, brisk pace.

Arrive home, drag hamper proximal to washing machine. Place clothes within engineering marvel, add appropriate cleansing agent, press start. Return to kitchen and engage in minor verbal altercation with wife as dish-washing appliance prematurely operational. State intention for cooking breakfast, dishes to be washed post-consumption of omelets with addition of prior evening’s macaroni cheese and leftover bacon. Course of action accepted by spouse with pleasantries.

Dilemma. Large quantity of macaroni cheese available, but shortage of leftover bacon.

Spouse leaves for own walk for caffeinated beverage. Window of opportunity apparent. Cook macaroni cheese omelet with bacon for self. Consume entirely, evidence destroyed. Determine wife unharmed by lack of bacon disclosure.

Car to be cleaned. Wheeled trash bin transported to stern of car. Near entire contents of trunk added to trash receptacle. Interior of vehicle receives similar treatment. Reach under seats and discover multiple lost items: six pens, a camera battery, two AA batteries, straws, numerous fossilized french fries and a small Mrs. Potts toy from Beauty and the Beast. Also recovery of 73 cents is pleasing. Using a total of nine sanitizing wipes, interior of car including door-sills polished. Acquire vacuum cleaner from domicile, thoroughly suction entire car. Suction seats, foot pads, cup-holders and doors. Can no longer locate the 73 cents.

Dump vacuum cleaner contents into wheelie bin. Wife returns from walk, impressed by effort with car, reports guilt of state of own vehicle. Use wifely expression of guilt as perfect moment to inform of unfortunate bacon shortage. Cook macaroni cheese omelet for wife. Consumed gratefully. Wife retires to bathroom to bathe. Myself, five minute tidy of kitchen, start dish-cleaning apparatus as previously advertised. Quick tidy of bedroom and dining room returning to baseline cleanliness specifications. 10am and chores completed, save empty dishwasher and fold laundry as distraction after lunch.

Bid wife fond farewell upon departure to her employment location. During succulent parting kiss, playful instigation via mild fondling of left breast. Receive superficial blow to forearm in response. Kiss repeated and second verbal exchange of positive pair-bonded emotional state made.

The day awaits.

Filed Under: Humor and Everything Else

Clearing The Trash Before The Boss

June 6, 2012 By 3 Comments

I am enjoying being home again and settling in to finding new routines… which are distant memories of my old routines of being home with the girls when they were tiny. Except now they pile out of the house at dawn and come back in the afternoon under their own power. Holy crap this is easymode. Somebody nerf me lol.

Alphaguy (and others) are worried about me though…

The other pitfall is that you’ll become the defacto person to do all the chores around the house. At first you won’t know it, but then it’s “honey can you run up to the store and get some milk?”. Then, “Can you pick up the kids at school”, next thing you know you are running around doing Honey Do stuff all day long. Be firm! Save it for the weekend or in the evening. I speak from experience!

In part I’m correcting an imbalance, the Honey Do list entered the fossil record back in early 2010. So we do actually have a ton to catch up on. A burst of effort is fine to catch up, but I agree that there is a trap in donning an apron and snapping to attention when Jennifer rings a little bell. My name is not Jeeves.

My trick to stop getting sucked into housework is to first understand that housework expands to fill the time available to do it in. Even having labor saving devices like a washer, a dryer and a vacuum cleaner doesn’t end up saving you any time… if you allow the work to expand to fill the time available.

Let’s quote a feminist shall we… Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique…

The more a woman is deprived of function in society at the level of her own ability, the more her housework, mother-work, wife-work, will expand – and the more she will resist finishing her housework or mother-work and being without any function at all. The time required to do the housework for any given woman varies inversely with the challenge of the other work to which she is committed. Without any outside interests, a woman is virtually forced to devote her every moment to the trivia of keeping house.

…

Study after study revealed that American housewives were spending almost as many, or even more, hours a day house keeping as women thirty years earlier, despite the smaller easier-to-care-for homes and despite the fact they had seven times as much capital equipment in housekeeping appliances.

Or put another way, it doesn’t matter if you have to walk down to the river and bang your clothes on a rock to wash them, or pop them in the washing machine and then the dryer, if you have six hours to do the laundry… it takes six hours. So some thoughts and tips….

(1) It’s a Trap! Recognize there is a housework trap that can suck you in. Give yourself a time limit. If you only have an hour each day to clean, it typically only takes an hour. I’m a night owl at heart and have zero thoughts in the morning, so that’s when I’m cleaning. I just stop the house chores at 10am.

(2) A Little Dirt is Okay. Accept that no one is coming to your house wearing white gloves and running a finger along anything. The Health Department is woefully understaffed for such shenanigans. Besides, getting foodborne illness from food cooked in your own kitchen is fairly self-correcting. As such I use a variant on the 80/20 rule as a guideline…. meaning that 80% of the mess is cleaned up with the first 20% of your effort, and the remaining 20% of the mess is cleaned up with the final 80% of work. My advice is to just get it 80% clean and call it quits on that area of the house. You can exhaust yourself deep cleaning one room of the house in the same time you can clean five rooms pretty well. And frankly, no one will notice you cleaned out the grout behind the fridge. If you lie awake at night thinking about your dirty grout behind the fridge, you either have a mental illness, absolutely no life or have your mother-in-law coming to stay.

(3) Pump Up the Jam. Music increases productivity and television decreases productivity. So no television, just crank some tunes and wade into the chore list. Jennifer and I have wildly different musical tastes, plus I’m mildly deaf so I like to really crank it up and give the cats some hard rock induced PTSD. I love Pandora for this. Click, Click, Boom!

(4) House then You. If you can stand it and are doing morning cleaning, time your shower in the morning to come after all your cleaning chores are done. Can be a bit tricky if you have very little ones, but if you can do it, it makes a nice transition / cut off from cleaning up and then doing whatever else you need to do with your day.

(5) Your +Something. Have something else productive to do during the day that you’re clearing you way to get done. I’m into my email around 10:30am today instead of 7p-9p. So yeah, I’m doing some “housewife” stuff, but I’m way ahead of things for MMSL today compared to what I was a week ago.

So anyway…

…if you’re a gamer you’ll know exactly what I mean in the title of this post. Clearing trash mobs is all part of the game to get to the juicy stuff that drops off the boss. But you don’t spin it out into time-wasting nonsense like a noob guild. Just nuke the trash mobs into the ground with some quick and dirty AoE spam, then go do the cool stuff.

Jennifer: Believe me, if he turned into chore-man instead of writing it would stress me out…I need him to write!  It is freaking me out a bit to have him doing things I was doing a week ago, but then I can get home from work earlier, be less stressed in the evening, and enjoy time together and family time more.

 

 

Filed Under: Alpha and Beta Male Traits, Humor and Everything Else, The Male Action Plan (MAP)

When Your Wife Hugs Everyone And It Drives You Crazy

June 5, 2012 By 24 Comments

Reader:  My wife is a “hugger”, sort of. She doesn’t hug everyone, but she does hug friends, including male friends.

*** edited out five paragraphs of ranting descriptions of hugging occurrences ***

Ok, so you can tell this is a REAL issue for me.

The hugs aren’t full body hugs, but they ARE two armed hugs. They only last for perhaps two seconds. I’m SURE her boobs touch the other person. Hell, I occasionally get a hug from a woman and generally her boobs touch ME, so I really shouldn’t be bitching. So rationally I know the hugs are no big deal, I don’t think there’s any impropriety occurring, but that doesn’t stop the caveman me from wanting to grab a club and cave in a skull. I’m talking about the “other guy” of course.

So I have two questions for you:

1. Do you let Jennifer hug other men?

2. Could my wife be putting me through a fitness test? If so, I’m not sure how to handle this because we’ve fought a few times in the last 20 years (Shit!) about this.

I’ve suggested my wife could give one armed hugs and hold her other arm in front of her, but she thought that was a ridiculous idea despite my assurances that I’ve had MANY women do that to me. (It sends a subtle, non-insulting message, while still allowing a hug to happen.)

So, am I being an idiotic prick? Should I just learn to deal with, perhaps by starting to hug other women more often? I’m not a real “huggy” person (except with wifey), but maybe I should learn how?

Help me Obiwan Athol, you are my only hope.

Obiwan:  The short answer is… two second hugs aren’t a big deal. Relax.

The longer answer is…

It’s not really a fitness test because I think she genuinely is a social hugger.

You have an impasse. Her threshold of what is appropriate touch is a lot higher than yours. But you complaining about it will cross her threshold of what is appropriate influence. Or put more plainly, she hugs people and it sets you off, but when you complain about it, it sets her off because you’re “controlling and paranoid”. So you get nowhere complaining about it.

So much of what is appropriate is determined by a host of social cues I’m not there to see or be a part of. Which is why I edited out the descriptions of the alleged inappropriate two second hugs, because I know someone in the comments is just going to skip ahead and tell you your wife is pregnant with another man’s child.

However, any place it is socially appropriate for your wife to hug another man, it’s also socially appropriate for him to shake your hand. So she hugs him, you stroll over and offer your hand / introduce yourself. He’s pretty much obligated to shake your hand, or otherwise he’s massively disrespecting you, whereupon, it’s all fair game to make a bit of a scene. If he doesn’t shake your hand and touches your wife, call him on it in public right there. “Is there a reason you feel you can put your hands on my wife and not shake my hand?”

Or… seeing your right hand is unshaken and free, playfully and just a little too hard sock him in the shoulder, or slap him on the back. Say “great to see ya” and smile. (Important tip: Only do this if you can whip his ass in a fight)

When he shakes your hand, if it’s the choir director he’s probably an okay guy, so set your handshake to medium and be friendly. If the other guy is a douchebag, basically crush his hand and stare at him unblinking while smiling. Hand strength being a pretty good indicator of your total physical ability. It’s kind of a variant on the iron hand in the velvet glove.

It’s overly Beta to get all twisted up about her two second hugging someone, it’s Alpha to confidently shake someone’s hand.

***

If Jennifer wants to hug someone she can. Doesn’t happen overly much though and her affection for people is quite genuine rather than sexually motivated. We actually had a long talk about this together tonight and debated the issue a little. I’m actually more of a hugger than she is I think, so the higher threshold one of the two of us is probably me. I think for the two of us, public hugs with the opposite sex are okay. Anything beyond a vanilla hug is crossing the line for both of us.

Jennifer:  It really does depend on so many things.  A two second “nice to see you, I really like you” hug is totally different than a 15 second, half-groping, rubbing your back and not letting go hug.  Also, if you are hugging every man you work with, that’s crossing a boundary.  If you are hugging a friend, or someone from church, that’s a more social situation and understandable.  It’s funny…hugging is apparently much less sexual to me than to other people…if I’m hugging a friend it’s not sexual to me since I’m not sexually interested in them…and hugging is different in intent and expression than groping.  If I’m hugging Athol, of course it’s different (nudge nudge wink wink). 

Filed Under: Alpha and Beta Male Traits, Cheating and Infidelity, How To Choose A Wife, Instigate Isolate and Escalate, Nice Guys and Betaization, Uncategorized

Cleaning The Kitchen (With Authority!)

June 4, 2012 By 26 Comments

It’s a balancing act.

Today I’m home on the first Monday of my new life. I get my exercise in and do my Internet rotation of checking email, comments, messages, yada yada yada. I’m going to vacuum the house and actually remove the mattresses spread across the living room from the 7th grade sleepover held on Saturday night.

Then Jennifer calls and tells me youngest is in the nurses office at school. For the last four years a sick kid has required Jennifer to bail out of work and go get them. I couldn’t go because someone has to be having a genuine 911 emergency to leave my shift. I gotta be honest, when Jennifer called me and told me youngest was sick, I totally missed the cue and was in nurse mode like I was dealing with one of my staff reporting one of my clients was ill. Crap I mean ex-clients. Dammit ex-staff.

Anyway, half of my brain is running the circuit where I tell the kid off patiently teach about faking illness to get  ginger ale from the sick food cabinet and/or a day off school. The other half of my brain is wondering why Jennifer is even calling me about this without knowing what youngest’s temperature is. I need vital signs.

Oh… oh… duh. Sure I’ll go get youngest. No problem.

I go back to email for about twenty seconds and…. holy crap I can’t sit here, or I’ll zone out and be here for another two hours.

To the Atholmobile!

/Spinning TV Transition Effect

I go collect Princess Nausea and bring her home. She immediately plops on the mattress in the living room, pulls a blanket over her and falls asleep. She didn’t give me a chance to get vital signs. She didn’t even ask for ginger ale. I have a speech I want to give.

Anyway, youngest is a pain and suffering trooper so I’m good with all this. But sleeping in the middle of the living room floor is messing with my vacuuming plan. So I Plan B it and start cleaning the kitchen.

Well I mean I’ll start cleaning the kitchen after I get all this email cleared away… and maybe one more level.

/Spinning TV Transition Effect

Crap is that the time? Cleaning the kitchen, cleaning the kitchen, cleaning the kitchen…

I actually mildly enjoy cleaning in the “bringing order to chaos” sense. I’m not a fan of scrubbing, but I do like having completed cleaning something. About halfway through the process Jennifer comes home. About two minutes of being home, Jennifer is getting in my way by attempting to finish the process of cleaning the kitchen. She probably has a mixture of “dirty kitchen guilt” and a mild fear that I’m perhaps angry about something… probably the dirty kitchen, plus she asked me to pick up youngest from school. Like I’m about to go all Hulk and break shit.

I’m standing there holding a dish towel unloading the dishwasher etc and now she’s physically standing between me and the sink/dishwasher. She blocking me and starting to wash dishes in the sink…

In days gone by I would have simply gotten pissed off about this and… well…  literally thrown in the towel. “Fuck you bitch if my cleaning the kitchen isn’t up to your standards” I would have said loudly and firmly in my internal monologue. “Do it your own damn self.” would have been a great follow up too. I would have just grumped away in reality though.

All I did was shoo her out of the kitchen. “I’m just cleaning, let me finish. I told you I was going to do one chore a day and youngest is sleeping in the living room so I can’t vacuum.”  Jennifer looks disoriented. I tell her again, “I’m not mad or anything. It’s over. We made it.”  She still looks semi-lost but she prompts me to use the old baking soda I’m about to toss out to clean the sink. I do. Holy crap the sink shines shines like Excalibur. I did not know that would happen.

Eldest comes in and looks around at the shiny kitchen. She looks concerned. “Are people coming over?”

Damn you people.

“I’m just cleaning the kitchen!”

I twirl the dishtowel and SNAP! it against the cutlery drawer like a whip.

…

Peace at last.

Jennifer: It’s going to take some getting used to lol. Fear the whippy dish towel LMAO.

 

Filed Under: Alpha and Beta Male Traits, Humor and Everything Else

Pushy

June 3, 2012 By 32 Comments

I’ve been getting some general concern that I’m shooting myself in the foot by using politically incorrect words like “dominance” and “submission”. I’ve also reached into the grab bag of f-bombs and slang to describe the lady bits. The thought being if I just eased up a little, I would start appealing to women more.

Ahhhh…. no.

I write about the appeal of the Bad Boy tempered by the Nice Guy. Thus MMSL is written with a mix of Bad Boy and Nice Guy. As soon as I start toning it down and start trying to appeal to women by writing like a Nice Guy, my female readership will start drifting away. Slightly more than half of MMSL’s readership is female already, so consider that to be the best evidence I have.

I write about how women like rough sex (if only some of the time). Seriously now, how does one talk about hair pulling, spanking and pounding her in the sack with politically correct flowery language? Exactly… you can’t. Words like “dominance” and “submission” are loaded with erotic capital.

Here, read this from a comment from yesterday…

For years I struggled to communicate what I wanted from my husband because I was using the wrong d$&@ word!  Maybe I was just dancing around the idea when I would say ” I want you to show me who’s boss”,  or “I need to feel your strength”.  I have to say that I, for years, thought that I was broken for wanting this and thought that using the word dominant, in my mind,  would only tell him just how broken I was, highlighting  how far off I was from the ideal, independent woman.  It was so lonely to want something so badly that would only prove how unworthy I was.  I finally ran across takeninhand and then MMSL.   That’s where I found the courage to finally tell him that I wanted to be dominated (especially in bed).  I could not believe his response.  He said “Well why didn’t you just say so?”.  I broke down crying, telling him that I’d been trying for 20 years.  Yes, I learned, word choice matters.

You can’t nice your way to primal sexuality. Women aren’t turned on by the nice, they are turned on by the edge. I’m not saying that you suddenly have to start up with the sailor talk, but if your language is falling all over itself to not offend, it’s basically neutering you. You’re a man. Say what you think. Don’t say what you think you should say.

Women are okay with a little smut. Seriously now, 50 Shades of Grey is flying off the shelves into the hands of a lot of hot and bothered women. Yeah baby. A man who can talk about sex with confidence and a little bit of an edge is telegraphing his ability to be good in bed to everyone around him. It’s an easy instigation move. It’s sexy.

For example, if you can’t even say the word “vagina” without worrying about collapsing from a panic attack, that’s pretty bad. Saying “down there” is a cop-out too. “Down there” is where you ain’t going.

So here’s the plan, I want you to out loud, strongly and firmly say the word “Pushy.”  I know it sounds strange, just do it. Get used to the word and say it until it feels relaxed and casual when you say it. Pushy, Pushy, Pushy.

Say it like this lol…

Jennifer:  He’s just like this in real life.  Laughing to himself as he wrote the Sean Connery thing.  (And yes, I do think Sean Connery is hot…I’m all for the foreign accents, baby.)

Filed Under: Instigate Isolate and Escalate, Sexy Moves

What To Do When The MAP Starts Making Her Nervous

June 2, 2012 By 6 Comments

Reader:  So I’ve been applying the map and it has been working like a charm so far, but I am noticing that where before my wife seemed a little cold, and uncaring, and indifferent towards me, now she is constantly seeking reassurance, asking me to tell her I love her, etc. I assume that this is a good thing but I also feel like I’m walking a fine line when it comes to her feelings of uncertainty of my love for her, how fragile is this situation, do I buck and start going back to more beta or should I stick with the alpha thing?

Athol:  It’s a balancing act. I’d suggest you keep doing what you’re doing on the Alpha front, just add a little more Beta acknowledgment. Mostly you want to avoid the thing where she starts withdrawing from you because she thinks she’s going to get hurt by you dumping her or cheating on her.

The perfect frame is where your wife knows you could replace her fairly easily, but you won’t because she is behaving as you want her to. Regular fun sex, she acts like a grown up, no one is acting out via cheating/abuse, you guys work as a team with you taking the lead. Basically you’re not going to mess up a good relationship or just walk away from it. So as long as she’s a good wife, she should feel safe from being dumped or cheated on.

What’s happened is that it sounds like you’ve moved from Phase One to Phase Three, so the balance of power has swung from her to you. So she’s very nervous now… because in her mind, she can see you progressing to Phase Four, Five, Six and Seven.

So in a sense, she’s waiting for you to drop the Phase Four hammer and make your endgame demands. Which as long as they are the frame I suggested earlier, are going to be good news to her. Your demand is in essence to have a good relationship with her.

You don’t have to have a crazy confrontation conversation, or a big reveal of you running the MAP. You can just draw her attention to it casually. “You seem a little nervous around me lately.” Then your follow up statement to whatever she says is something along the lines of, “I want what I’ve always wanted…  lots of sex with you, a stable relationship where we’re both functional adults, and to have fun together. As long as you want to be part of that, I’m not going anywhere.”

As your little conversation ends, say “Don’t doubt my love.” and playfully spank her on the butt with a faux stern look.

Filed Under: Alpha and Beta Male Traits, Captain and First Officer, The Male Action Plan (MAP)
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