At the risk of leaning too far into the Athol Kay demographic, over the weekend I had some thoughts inspired by the Wife Porn thread that I thought were relevant.
It never ceases to amaze me how readily divorced women (and sometimes thrice divorced) are to dispense tips on the makings for a great marriage. Or more fascinating, to hear pussy-whipped husbands parrot these same lines. A divorced guy’s marriage advice is usually “just don’t get married.” So allow me to toss in my two cents here.
In all the years I’ve been counseling men I have yet to have a guy tell me he’s getting more sex now than when he was single or dating his wife, but sex isn’t the issue here – desire is the root of the problem.
As I’ve stated in many previous posts, properly motivated, women will move across the country, crawl under barbed wire and out a 2 story window to fuck a guy she has the genuine desire to fuck. This applies equally to your wife of 10 years. Before marriage women look for ways to get laid with a guy they want to marry, after marriage they look for ways to avoid it, but it’s desire that motivates it.
Chris Rock says it best when he goes into sex after marriage –
“If you like fucking, marriage aint for you. I haven’t fucked in 8 years. I’ve had ‘intercourse’, but I haven’t fucked since I got married. I haven’t had a blow job in 8 years. I’ve had ‘fellatio’ but I haven’t had my dick sucked in 8 years.”
This is the essence of desire after marriage; it generally becomes another chore to add to a woman’s to-do list. Get the kids to soccer practice, go get groceries, fuck her husband and fold the laundry. Add a fulltime job to that list and sleep becomes the new sex. But it’s not about being tired or overwhelmed, it’s about desire. My wife used to work a night shift and if she came in at 2am and woke me up telling me she felt like having sex, I could be in the deepest of REM sleep and wake up to knock it out with her and be ready to go for two, because I want to have sex with her. Women love to play the “but I really want to, I’m just not into it now” card to counter this, but as always, never forget it’s her behavior that defines intent, not her words. Remember, a woman will fuck; she might not fuck you, she might not fuck me, but she will fuck somebody. She just needs to be properly motivated.
Desire Levels
All of those preconditions she had for you to accept YOUR offer of marriage – a good job, be a good provider, a good listener, be funny, have status, being reliable, a good physique; all of that does nothing to increase her desire to have sex with you. The single, bachelor is concerned with Interest Levels, the married man should be concerned with Desire Levels.
So how do you prompt this Desire? How do you get a woman who knows every intimate detail about you for the past 10 years properly motivated to fuck you like she did when you were 20-something? Women will offer the Oprah-correct, “more romance!” and men will roll their eyes and murmur “more alcohol.” Put out of your head right now all of these feminine-correct notions that you need to “rekindle the fire” or find some gimmicky ritual that will lead you back to that desire she picked up from some article in Cosmo – I’ve gone down that road before. ‘Date Night’ is a band-aid for a symptom of a larger ill and this is a prolonged lack of Desire. There is nothing worse than going through the motions of a pre-planned, pre-scripted, ‘date-like-you-used-to-have’ only to have your wife lay on the bed like a dead fish. No amount of opportunity (which is what a date night is, scheduled opportunity) will lead to her wanting to have sex with you.
It’s not about frequency, it’s about quality. Frequency declines after marriage, it’s just logistics (especially after kids), but spontaneity doesn’t have to. Would your wife fuck you in the car like she did when you were dating? Would she be up for fucking in the great outdoors if you were hiking together somewhere? Would she be down for anything kinky that she hasn’t done before or in ages, or is it all just ‘vanilla’ sex now? Here’s a list of things you should do from a a man’s point of view:
Make her want it
If you’ve been married for years, she probably feels pretty secure with you and whatever degree of control she has in regards to regulating the flow of sex. Make her uncomfortable. As counterintuitive as it sounds, this is the single most important advantage you can take. Begin to incrementally take the power that her intimacy has had sway over you for the past 10 years back from her. When you were unmarried even the slightest bit of anxiety that she may be put off for another, better, prospect than herself prompted that desire to fuck you better than the others.
Most important though is to do this covertly. If you go popping off about how you’re taking your balls back and she’d better shape up or you’ll be looking for a woman who is into fucking you, you’re dead in the water. You have to imply with your attitude and behavior that something’s changed in you. The best principle to remember in marriage is that you will only get what you’ve gotten if you keep doing what you’ve done before.
The power of the ‘takeaway’
In one form or another PUAs use the takeaway to shape desired behavior. This is behavioral psychology 101, reinforce the behaviors you want and punish the ones you don’t, all the time remembering that too much reward leads to satiation and cessation of the desired behavior. Don’t buy your wife flowers in order to get her to fuck you, buy them AFTER she’s performed accordingly and to your satisfaction. So many married men I know (even in their 60s ) still attempt to purchase sex from their wives by ‘allowing’ them to buy expensive things thinking it will lead to ‘appreciation sex’. In reality it will invariably lead to negotiated, obligatory and desireless ‘debt sex’. Remember, the pool boy that your wife cheats on you for didn’t buy her a goddamn thing to make her want to fuck him.
Your attention is your best tool in this regard. One thing I tell AFCs is not to give away the farm on the first date and that women are by nature attention craving. When you give away your attention without her having to seek it devalues your attention. This is a paradox in marriage because it’s understood that she ‘should’ have 100% of your attention and over the years there is zero mystery about you. When you begin to take away attention she’s grown accustomed to she will seek it. And again you must do this covertly as she will respond to it covertly. You have to be sensitive to the adjustments she makes in her attention seeking, in conversation, in posture, in habit and behavior, because she wont overtly tell you “oh please pay attention to me.” This will add to her desire to have sex with you in order to reaffirm this attention. Sex then becomes a reinforcer for her in this attention seeking which you can then use to modify her behavior – in this case being genuine desire.
Other forms of the takeaway may include certain regularities she’s grown used to over the years that she takes for granted. One of these is a regular kiss. I used this to a great effect with my own wife. I would regularly come home from work and go kiss my wife as soon as I saw her, she became accustomed to this and after a few years I came to realize that I was like a puppy dog in this regard, immediately seeking affection as soon as I got home so I began to take this away. Eventually she covertly recognized this and began to greet me at the door with a kiss. She was prompted to desire that connection by a takeaway.
Stay in shape
Nothing kills married sex faster than one or both partners letting themselves go physically. Most married Mothers who do so love to use their pregnancies as justification for their lack of motivation and obesity. Arousal is the important component to desire. If your wife kept herself in bikini model shape after she’d been overweight your desire to fuck her would undoubtedly increase. The same applies to you. Every day I’m in the gym I see countless 30 and 40 somethings straining and training as if their lives depended on it. Actually their sex-lives depend on it. For far too long we’ve been taught that “it’s what’s on the inside that counts” and how wonderful inner beauty is. Funny how hard men and women will train once they’re divorced eh? The question is, what is it about their situation that would make them take care of themselves physically that they wouldn’t while married? Before the divorce, they never had the time or motivation, but now it seems they have plenty of both.
By staying in shape – and by that I mean better shape than your spouse if possible – you send a message, not only of confidence, but a covert understanding that she’ll have some veiled competition for your attention via social proof. Thus you not only create genuine desire by physical arousal, but you simultaneously create a psychology of desire by prompting her natural competitive impulses (i.e. Dread).
Dont drive drunk
“It provoketh the desire, but taketh away the perfomance.”
Alcohol is NOT an aphrodisiac. I know that sounds odd coming from a guy who’s worked in the liquor industry for 8 years, but it’s true. Alcohol does lower inhibitions and perhaps disposes your wife to lovemaking. After years of experimentation I’ve perfected the ‘pantydropper’ – that magic formula of just enough alcohol to get her going, but not so much as to have her passed out over the toilet bowl. Still, sex is better sober and the obvious setback of whiskey-dick isn’t going to improve her already dubious desire to have sex in the first place. Understand the dynamics of her sexuality too. Strike while the iron’s hot and be sure to be up and ready to go at the peak of her menstrual cycle. I have my wife’s period down to a science now and I know that she’s physically ready to rock & roll her best by week 2. Catch her right after a good workout and after I’ve come back from lifting and that’s the benchmark for ‘real’ genuine sexual desire. You simply cannot inspire her to a standard of desire if one or both of you have a depressant in your bloodstream. If anything you want to accelerate blood flow not impede it.
Spontaneous combustion
Predictable is BORING. There’s nothing more predictable than sex with the same person you’ve been getting busy with for 10+ years. Oddly enough the spontaneity principle is exactly why garbage advice like ‘date night’ and “keeping it fresh” articles in Marie Claire sell magazines and don’t save marriages. All of these “freshen it up” ideas are predictable. For all of the wacky ideas you can come up with for ‘new’ sex, you’re still fucking the same old lady you married 10 years ago. You’ve got to be willing to push the envelope with her expectations of predictable sex. Suggest it when she least expects it. Tell her to flash you her boobs or some other cheap thrill when the opportunity presents itself at the beach or somewhere semi-public. Creating a condition of desire doesn’t have to directly and immediately lead to intercourse. Ask her for a hummer in the parking lot before you go to dinner one night. Even the asking is arousing. And even if she turns you down you can still use her rejection to your advantage since it implies that, perhaps at some point in time, she (or some other girlfriend you had) used to do this because she wanted to (assume the sale). When you do proposition your wife make it seem as if it just popped into your head at that very moment. Again, think covert, not overt. Overt requires planning and planning = predictable and boring. Covert implies spontaneity.
The Cardinal Rule of Relationships
In any relationship, whether romantic, personal, business or familial, the person with the most power is the one who needs the other the least.
This may sound Machievielan, but it holds true, especially in marriage. If you are wondering who has the great degree of control in your relationship the answer is always her. Just like a good DJ knows, she must come to you. If you are the PRIZE and she recognizes this, you will inspire genuine desire. Women don’t want to marry other women (with the obvious exceptions), they want to marry men and you have to man up and be a man to do so. So many married guys I know have walked their entire married lives on eggshells because they put their wives in a position of being the gatekeeper of his own sexuality. “She’s got the vagina man, I don’t wanna piss her off” is the mantra they repeat to them and themselves. This then flows over into other aspects of their lives and places a woman (often unwantedly so) into becoming the authority in the marriage. Just as in single life, if her intimacy is used as her agency to get a desired behavior from her husband that’s the value it has. When you can prove to her that her pussy is no longer a rewarding reinforcer for her desired behavior of you, you remove this agency and reset yourself on at least a partial footing of your prior bachelorhood.
As I stated, women don’t want to marry other women, neither do they want to marry themselves. In becoming accommodating for her by allowing her sexuality to dictate their behavior, men often see identifying with a woman as the best course of getting laid in marriage. And like in single life this ends up putting a man in a sort of married ‘friends zone’, with which a woman feels obligated to have sex occasionally. You’ve got to avoid these traps by maintaining a stubborn sense of your own identity and actively protect against identifying with her.
