Good Beta, Betaized, Butler and Hooker Math

Beta skills are great. Everyone needs to know how to cook a meal, clean a house, buy groceries and generally have a full compliment of basic life skills. These really aren’t male or female skill sets in my mind, any one can do these. Kids can do them, I’ve taught people with developmental disabilities to do them.

Good Beta – I help out around the house a lot. I actually generally enjoy performing house work, I’m not saying our house is spotlessly clean and ready for the Queen to visit, but it’s not a health and safety concern either. Jennifer also does a lot of stuff around the house as well, so we both work and we both keep house. Jennifer is also appreciative of me helping out and I’m appreciative of her helping out.  Jennifer does more cooking and laundry than I do plus the grocery shopping. I do more yardwork, cleaning and move the high and the heavy objects. So in the context of Team Kay, my Beta skills and performance is a good thing.

I was actually quite pleased when in the middle of finishing off Thanksgiving Dinner together, Jennifer’s grandmother said, “Look at you two, it’s like you’re working in a restaurant.”   I’m performing Beta skills, but I’m also getting credit for them. I’m not building attraction that way, but I’m creating comfort and in Jennifer’s mind I’m getting points for it.

Betaized – This is where you’re still performing Beta skills, perhaps even exactly the same tasks as I’m doing, but you’re getting no credit for it. If your attractiveness is low, she doesn’t fear losing you, so all the Beta goodies you do are simply to make her life easier, rather than soothe away any sense of dread that you’re not emotionally attached to her. Thus…

If Jennifer is attracted to me, my helping out makes her feel safe about being attracted to me. I’m valuable to her vagina and I’m not one of those hit and run penises.

If Jennifer isn’t attracted to me, my helping out means my value to her is what I’m doing to make her life easier. Her vagina doesn’t care as long as my penis doesn’t go wandering off on an adventure.

You can tell when you’re in this situation because instead of her acting pleased, delighted or positive by your Beta goodies, she simply expects them. If all she does is a micro-second smile and praise routine, she’s simply being polite. Note the difference between her “positive attention” to you for doing something good, and how she acts when the dog takes a dump. If the dog is winning, you’re Betaized.

She’s also very likely giving you directions, demands, lists and expects task compliance. The marriage is run on her schedule and whim. You may very well be cooking gourmet meals, shelling out for expensive trips and surprising her with jewelry…  but it doesn’t count for shit unless she already wants to fuck you.

Butler – This is when Betaized turns into Betashit Crazy. If your wife is a SAHM… and you’re the one both holding down a job AND running about cooking, cleaning, taxi driving the kids everywhere, grocery shopping, yada yada yada…. you’re doing her whole damn job for her!

Now don’t get me wrong here, a SAHM isn’t going to be 100% responsible for every domestic chore in the house while hubby cracks open a beer and farts as hard as he can into the good sofa, that’s a bit much I agree. (Please refer back to “Team Kay” in the Good Beta section of this post, trust me, I get it.)  But if he comes home from work and then is doing 2-4 hours of chores of some description and then not getting even a whiff of the aroma of pussy… he’s basically her butler. His sole purpose is to provide her with a womb-like level of services.

You know how there’s that SAHM thing, itemizing out the value of everything she does to some crazy figure? You know, the one where it tries to assess the cost of everything she does on a per hour basis if was done by outside service providers. Personal chef $400 a week, maid service $300 a week, laundry $150 a week, personal shopper $250 a week, nanny $300 a week, nurse $100 a week, limo driver $300 a week….. = $1 million dollar value of service provided in a year. Okay, so hold that in your head for the next step…

Now account that value assessment for your own domestic chores, into your Hooker Math equation.

(Total yearly income from job + Bullshit domestic chore value plucked from air)  /  Number of times you have sex a year = Cost per lay

If your cost per lay is a figure that makes you disgusted,  you’re her butler.

Have a think about that.

 

Relative vs Absolute Sex Rank and the Forty-Year-Old Wife

Comment on Dread Game and the Gym.

DrocK: Fun thing to try! Since it can be a challenge to set-up a good Dread Game scenario, especially early on, I’ve found that there are mildly effective ways to get your own ‘in-house’ game going and throw her Hamster through a loop just by pushing the right buttons. While not as effective as getting real IOI’s, it’s a good way to mess with her a little bit, generate a little sexual tension and can have a profound effect if you’re creative about it. Case-in-point – I casually threw out the Old Guy vs. Young Guy game idea at my wife over the weekend by simply shaping it as a question. She’s loosely aware that I’m MAPping, but is not aware of MMSL. We’ve been sexless for about ~55 weeks or so (not that anyone’s counting!), but things are improving quickly and dramatically.

So I asked her who she thinks would have a better chance at winning her over – the Young Me that got her when we met (at 23) or the now me about 10 years later. I don’t doubt that I’m much wiser and more attractive now, so I was comfortable asking her. Might not work too well if you’re brand new to MAPing, so the timing could make a difference. So she said the now, older me. Hands down. I let her think about it for a few seconds and then clarified, ‘WE ARE talking about winning over the 20 y/o you from 10 years ago… still think the now me would have a better shot?” Again, yes, without hesitation she affirmed that the now me is far more attractive and would get the ‘younger her’ attention much more readily vs. the younger me.

After that I didn’t have to say anything at all. Just watching the wheels turn and the expression on her face change slowly from ‘happily content with my more attractive husband’ to ‘holy shit, I could lose him to a friggin’ 20 year-old if I don’t step it up’ was classic.

Athol:  If there’s a single moment women have where they get the Red Pill for themselves, it’s the moment when they realize relative Sex Rank doesn’t count, only absolute Sex Rank does.

Women all start off their sex lives pretty close to the peak of their attractiveness and are very attuned to their peer group. So they think of themselves as being hot relative to their peer group cohort…. and then keep thinking of themselves as being hot relative to their peer group as they age. So if a twenty-year-old looks at her peer group and decides she’s a 9… she’s a 9. But then twenty years later when she’s forty, when she looks at her peer group of other forty-year-old women and decides she’s a 9… newsflash, she’s not a 9.

Obviously the same woman at age 20 isn’t going to be as hot at age 40. Relative to her girlfriends, she may still be the hot one, but in absolute terms compared to all the women in the Sexual Marketplace… maybe she’s a 6 or a 7. Hell if she got properly fat, maybe she’s a 4. Meanwhile her husband has potentially continued to gain Sex Rank as he gains money, power and social influence.

This is utterly horrifying for women to realize.

It’s a bitter pill to men to realize they screwed up a bunch of stuff in the past, but at least there’s a hope for the future. Sure it’s hard work turning things around, but every single guy that’s run the MAP, eventually gets to a sexy outcome if they put the effort in and make the hard choices. It may take a couple years to get there, but there’s always hope.

Women are just screwed though. You’re forty. The best bit is over, you’ll never be as hot as you were. This is as good as it gets. Please keep your arms and legs inside the train, it’s all downhill from here. Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

Actually that’s not entirely true. There’s a loophole that will carry you into your golden years, loved and desired… your husband’s oneitis.

So if you are an older girl, yes you’re getting older, but you don’t just throw on sweatpants, give up and plan to negotiate for alimony, chocolate ice cream and cats. You age gracefully. You exercise, you wear makeup, you play with him, you keep your game on. Yes it’s all building a sand castle below the high tide mark, but that’s what life is all about anyway. You battle to the end in a mighty effort, repairing, rebuilding, until that one wave that’s unstoppable washes over it all and it’s finally gone. It’s hopeless, it’s always been hopeless, but that’s okay.

If you’re a woman, if you keep your attractiveness together as best you can, that’s going to trigger his oneitis, his memory of the young you imprinted on him. You’ll be fifty-three and dancing with him, a shot of your cleavage, your smell, your touch, those same adoring eyes… and you’re twenty-three again. Maybe no one else sees it, but he will, because he has oneitis. He’ll look around at all the other husbands with chubby screechtards and think to himself, relative to everyone else, he’s got it really good.

But leave it too long. Don’t bother trying. Ignore him. Shun him from your bed. Eventually the scales will fall from his eyes.

If you’re a husband, the dread of relative and absolute Sex Rank can wake her up. Indeed if it does, it’s potentially doing her a favor. She shouldn’t confuse the fiction of older women in the dating market with the reality of it.

The truth is, most husbands idly fantasize about hooking up with younger women, I mean I do. But given a choice between a bunch of hook ups, short term relationships an/or a soft harem of younger women… most husbands would still choose their wife provided they had reasonable assurance there would be a good sex life with her. The kids, the history, the aroma of… pie.

Personally I don’t need Jennifer to be twenty again. Forty is fine. Just a good forty.

 

Dread Game and the Gym

One of the hard things about running the MAP and exercising is that it’s slow going. Especially at the start. That first 6 to even 12 months can be not much more than laying the groundwork for pulling out of Phase One and into Phase Two and Three. Other women throwing themselves at you might be a loooooong way off.

Something you can do early on though to create the sense that you’re actually serious about changing and are making progress toward fitness goals, is to update her periodically your improvements. For example I’m on a four day cycle of (1) upper body, (2) lower body, (3) rest/light day, (4) cardio hell.

Cardio Hell is the exercise bikes in the gym and going pretty much as hard as I can for an hour. The first time I did it I only managed 40 minutes before wanting to get off. The next time I did 11.3 miles according to the bike. Last time I did 12.0 miles. Today I did 12.4. Each time I either texted Jennifer or told her. We were at the gym together today so obviously she saw it as well.

My actual numbers aren’t wildly important, just the progression in improvement. It could be 4 miles, 4.3 miles, 4.7 miles. The message is the same… dude is getting fitter. I do the same with the Leg Press on leg day. I did X! I did X+20! I did X+40!! Rwar!  Jennifer really is impressed by it.

There’s no threat here, just natural excitement that you’re progressing. Her hamster will kick in and do the heavy lifting supplying a sense of growing dread that you’re getting hotter.

Of course Jennifer has been doing the same thing right back to me. Running and shit. Bitch. Crap, she’s really working hard here. Wow. Hmmm.

Jennifer: It’s not a competition lol. We do both feel better and that’s what’s important. Okay…it’s a competition….but you’ll always win at weights so I can win at running.

Got My Mojo Working (It Just Won’t Work On You)

Great song.

The solution is of course outcome independence. When you’ve got your mojo working, while you’re fixated on the one that isn’t interested in you…

…someone else is staring at you with drenched panties.

All you’ll have to do is call her over and she’ll do the rest.

This does of course assume you have you mojo working. It’s pronounced “mojo”, but it’s spelt m-u-s-c-l-e-s.

There’s also nothing like reducing your attention and going off with another girl to make you seem suddenly more attractive anyway. Nothing breeds like success.

New Year’s Eve and It Just Happened

Slightly out of context…

Reader:  I have also discovered that there’s another guy on the scene she’s been seeing behind my back messages on Facebook meeting up with him when supposed to be visiting friends so things could get interesting.  Do I tell her I know about this guy or keep quiet and work on my MAP and win her back?

Athol:  Also added into that concern was that Christmas is coming and he doesn’t want to ruin it for the kids. Plus based on Facebook messaging it only seems to have been some “drunken fumbling” so far. No actual sex.

Yes you do work on your MAP and get yourself as attractive as possible, but with another man active on the playing field, you need to actively intervene on that as your first order of business. Skip to Chapter 27 in the Primer and follow that. Once all the drama and dust settles, women typically will gravitate to the male with the most dominant approach to the situation. Gather your information and make a move to stopping it.

If you don’t intervene, you running the MAP isn’t going to work. She’s already getting her Alpha fix from someone else, leaving you only a Beta supply role. You can up your Alpha all you like and she won’t notice she’ll be so busy creating space between you. The sudden threat of ending the relationship and removing her entire Beta support system in your justifiable anger typically snaps a wife’s attention back into proper focus. The boyfriend is typically in no position to really offer her a Beta support structure, meaning the failure of the affair as a relationship. It usually takes the betrayed partner’s unwitting Beta support to sustain the affair.

Also it’s very tempting to drag the chain a little and keep the peace until after Christmas. I must strongly advise against that. The longer you let it go, the greater the likihood that the Emotional Affair, turns into a Physical Affair and that makes it a great deal harder to reign back in and repair. I would also assign a 100% chance that if the affair is still active by New Year’s Eve, that it will be fully sexual. She’ll just stage a big fight about something, storm off and make a beeline for him. You’ll be home alone with the kids and knowing exactly what is going down. New Year’s Eve is just one of those “the rules don’t apply” nights of the year.

She was having a good time, she had a few drinks, they were dancing, the ball dropped, it was meant to just be a little kiss, but then it wasn’t and “I don’t know. It just happened.”

So dig up the dirt and blow it all into the open as soon as possible. I’m told there’s quite a sizable divorce filing spike in early January each year. Tick Tock.

Preselection For Married Guys

Preselection is a tricky element for a married man to master.

Basically the more women that are interested in you, the better. If your wife sees some hot blond talking with you, slapping you on the forearm and laughing just a little too much… your wife is going to view her as being interested in you. So it’s tempting to create situations where your wife sees other women paying attention to you. Usually early attempts to make this happen simply turn into you hitting on another woman in front of your wife, and instead if your wife being attracted more… she’s just mad.

If you’re single and trying to meet women, then yes, you need to be active in approaches toward them. The bold confident approach is much better than being passive. However for married guys, you’ve already met a woman, so you’re not meant to be actively looking for another one. Thus you need to be somewhat passive and let them come to you.

The trick is to be generally attractive, engaging and playfully fun with your interactions with women… and importantly, most women you’re coming into contact with. Plus don’t ignore other men either. You’re just like this with everyone, it’s your personality to be magnetic and Alpha. You’re not trying to actively target someone to escalate. You’re just “the sort of guy that’s attractive to women”. Thus when women are attracted to you, the cause is your attractiveness and not you being disloyal. You weren’t out looking for anyone in particular, they came to you.

Your wife knowing other women want you is a very strong Alpha Trait presence. The balance of being loyal and not actively seeking women to escalate with is a strong Beta Trait presence. She’ll be turned on, but also feel you’re safe enough to trust and give you her all. Your wife wants to believe that you’re not going to dump (or cheat on) her on a whim, but push comes to shove, you’ll end up with a new woman easily.

The downside is without active approaches, the level of attractiveness you need to reach the threshold where other women approach you, is going to be higher. So if say she’s an 8, if you’re a 7 she’s not interested no matter what. If you’re an 8, nothing will happen until you make a move on her and start actively trying to engage her. If you’re a 9, you won’t need to make a move on her, she’ll seek you out.

So if your wife sees another woman being interested in you and you’re equal Sex Rank to her, your wife suspects you made a move on her. If your wife sees another woman being interested in you and you’re higher Sex Rank than her, your wife just thinks this is the sort of thing that happens when you have a hot husband.

On the flip side, being married is usually a Preselection boost in the eyes of other women. It’s not uncommon for freshly married guys to find themselves getting hit on more than they were before they were married.

Anyway the solution, single or married, is just the same. Make yourself more attractive. You catch more with honey and all that.

 

No Excuses

Empathy and Helping Others: Capacitor vs. Conduit

Comment on yesterday’s post, You Can’t Fix Their Problem.

J:  Very true, Athol.  The Strengthsfinder test shows Empathy as a strength.  To me it feels more like a weakness, because I feel other people’s emotions as if they were my own.  I’m 37 and still trying to figure out how to put my empathy into action without hurting myself.

Athol:  Undeveloped empathy is a pain in the ass and a classic trait of Nice Guys fast tracking the Betaization approach to a sexless marriage. And trust me… I get it. Someone else hurts and you feeeeeeeel it inside you. You just feeeeeel you have to do something and help them. Or you will feeeeeel awful. There is a solution though.

 You have to learn the difference between being a capacitor and a conduit or empathy will drain you into a lifeless, negative, depressed person very quickly. I don’t often talk about personal energy as I think it might be a side tracking concept for many people, though it’s definitely a vital “under the hood” reason of why the MMSL approach works. In this case though it’s the direct issue at hand so gotta talk about it.

In short, everyone has some sort of energy level ranging from high to low. People with higher levels of personal energy are more attractive than people with lower energy. Half the point of advising physical exercise when running the MAP is simply to raise the energy levels of the person. You end up looking and feeling happier and more attractive. Both the looking and the feeling are positive attractors.

We all know some down in the dumps person who never does anything but complain and we all like to route ourselves around dealing with them if possible. Likewise we all know some bright, perky, active and happy person who is active and engaged with the world that we like to seek out. Unless of course we’re the depressed grumpy person… because who can stand happy people when you’re unhappy. People of like energy levels tend to seek each other out. Half the point of the MAP is to raise your energy level so that your spouse raises theirs.

Incidentially, that raised energy level for people running the MAP often pays off in unexpected ways. People running the MAP to fix their marriage often report that things have gotten better at work, with their kids, the house is cleaner, they finally finished some other stalled project and so on. Fixing any problem in your life also helps fix every other problem in your life in a minor way too.

Anyway…

Personal Energy = your time, effort, money and mood.

A capacitor is something that can gain a positive charge and then release it… but once the energy is released, it’s delepeted of energy and needs a new source of charging. A conduit is simply a waypoint for an external energy source to flow from one point to the other.

When you feel emotionally moved by someone else’s problem and seek to solve it, if you act like a capacitor, you are using up your personal energy to create and maintain a solution. Basically energy moves from you to them. It’s a one way trip and while they can be better off for it, you end up being drained. Plus, because you are the source of their solution, they will return to you for yet more of your energy. Helping people can create unintentional dependency as you become part of their energy system.

When you try and solve a problem as a conduit, your job is simply to make yourself available as a tool for them to solve their own problem, using their own energy. You’re providing knowledge, advice, insight… basically providing a connection. You’re there to help remove blockages from their energy system. Sometimes you do use your own energy to jump start another system, but that’s to get it running under its own power again, rather than you continuing to power it.

So if you are particularly empathic, the solution isn’t to withdraw from the feelings of other people’s problems. The solution is actually to widen your scope and find out everything about the person and the problem at hand. Try and see the big picture of what empowers them as individuals and as a couple. What the true deep needs are. Find out the history of the relationship… what things were like when it was good… what was happening when things went wrong. If you can see the relationship/problem as an entire energy system, very often the blockage point is easy to find. Sometimes there’s more than one. This is why I ask for information on the entire relationship history, all the medical issues and medications, the emotional shock points, is there someone outside the relationship siphoning energy off the primary relationship? Then you’re looking to reconnect the relationship over that broken area, rather than you trying to resupply power to the entire thing from the outside.

So widen your scope. Open yourself further to your empathy and experience the total landscape of emotions and actions in others. Once you identify the problem area… let the other person solve the problem. By solving their problem for them, it makes you tired and them dependant on you.

And to be quite blunt, some people are just energy vampires. Just keep demanding they solve their problem… sometimes they will, but mostly they just start leaving you alone. Either way, you win.

Oh and hey…

May the Really Really Weak Force be with you.

 

Phase Four: Short, Sweet and to the Point

From the forum…

DrBeta:  Several posters have advised me in my Phase 4 “State Your Expectations” that I needed to move to a Phase 4.1, wherein these expectations:

1.Healthy sex life

2.Productive wife.

3.Self-care (stay in good shape, dentist, doctors, etc.)

4.No negative talk

Are really all sub-ordinate to this one:

1.Quit drinking.

Those of us that remember the book know that Phase 4 is supposed to be quick compared to other phases, and I’ve been there about two months.

So I rebooted Phase 4 yesterday, and it started with “Quit Drinking”.

To my surprise… no defensiveness and no denial.  Some pleading.  Some, “I wish…” and me foreshadowing Phases 5 and 6, as in

“I am making changes in my life.  I am going to become a much better man.  You are going to have this choice.  ‘Do you want to keep up with me?  Or do you want to lose me just as I’m becoming the best man I can be?’ “

She wants to try and keep up.  So I say:

“You do not drink anymore.  You are no longer a drinker.”

And she agrees.

Now, we didn’t say, “Go to AA.” or anything positive that she could actually do.  We kept this in the realm of the “what not to do”, which ain’t the strongest way to put things.  I have serious doubts about whether she can make this work.  The only times she was completely sober was during pregnancies — but those interludes do provide some hope.

Coincidentally, another sister has quit drinking (for a week), lost two pounds, and Mrs. Beta is thinking, “Maybe it’s time for me to do this, too.”

In the meantime, I’m practicing my this statement-of-fact-as-if-it’s-already-true wife hypnosis technique, and we’ll see where it gets us.

Athol:  I think it’s worth remembering that the MAP works for any “intolerable relationship breaking problem”. It’s just a case of getting to the point where you’re strong enough to walk away from them if they continue to persist in doing what they are doing. It’s not just about getting more sex.

It’s important that the Phase Four demand isn’t frivolous. You can’t pop these demands out willy-nilly and not eventually get a failed relationship as your partner gives up on the endless ultimatums. It needs to be something that an impartial observer would agree was a serious and meaningful problem. Alcoholism meets that requirement.

Also the simpler your Phase Four demand is, the stronger it is. “Quit drinking” is a clear simple directive understood by even a toddler. They may not want it, but they understand what you’re telling them. There’s no wiggle room on getting confused by the demand. Reading a shopping list of points dilutes everything and turns into a debate.

Also with a short simple demand, you can also say it with such greater force of will, that it has a better impact. If you’re a geek, Phase Four always sounds best “in the original Klingon”. Bonus points for the correct reference.

Phase Four means the debate is over. You’re demanding they stop talking and choose.

 

 

Reader Story: MAP is the New Lifestyle

I think had some semi-regular emails for about three month from this reader, the crisis issue being the wife not doing anything dramatic, but obviously getting the hots for another guy which we nipped in the bud. After that, six months of radio silence and now…

Reader:  Hi Athol, I wanted to give you a relatively quick update as to where I am in my journey.

We are still married, I am taking a lot less crap from her and she is attracted to me. Between the MAP and our marriage counselor (which we haven’t seen since late April) things are really going in the right direction. You were of course 100% right. I needed to deal with my structural issues FIRST before I could really impact my marriage. I have done this and continue to work on them. It doesn’t fix overnight, or even over a year. However, my issues have shrunk now to a more manageable amount. I am able to deal with them quickly. Also, my attraction in my wife’s eyes has grown to the point that when I do “screw up” or make a mistake due to those issues, she doesn’t get repelled.

I have taken my drinking from every day down to maybe once every 3 weeks or so, and only one drink on that one time. Further, I now am an avid Crossfitter. I work out 3 days on, one day off, with my wife actually. I have put on about 17 lbs of muscle and my wife LOVES it. She is all over the way I look in sexy underwear and loves my chest. I started to deal with my chest hair as well, which she LOVES. Beard yes, chest hair, not so much. She doesn’t like that. Once I dealt with that my sexual encounters went from me always initiated to her actually initiating once and a while.

I am still not 100% satisfied with our sex life, but I also feel I have a ways to go on the MAP. Honestly, I see the MAP as my way of living now. It fits perfectly with Crossfit to be honest. Continuous improvement! On a side note, we have gone almost 100% (yup almost 100%!) paleo and it has been completely worth it. Further to working out regularly, I of course got my new job for $35k more per year than I was making. On top of that I am also doing some consulting on the side making a few hundred here and there to help chip more in.

All in all Athol, you helped change my life. In doing that I was able to change my marriage. I now feel more in control and my wife knows that I could land another woman if I wanted to. I would never cheat, but her knowing that women are attracted to me now does have the desired effect.

Please keep preaching the MAP, MMSL and fixing YOU to fix your marriage. Thank you Athol. Don’t be modest.. you are saving lives every day.

Athol:  [Takes a bow]