Blue Pill Regret, Red Pill Pain and An Encouraging Thought

Reader:  ROI – my situation is similar to yours and I struggle with the same issues. I tolerated years of sex that swung between mediocre and nonexistent but finally started changing myself using the MAP techniques. The increased sex rank and destabilization has started working. My wife is initiating sex occasionally and her level of enthusiasm has increased somewhat. The dynamic of our relationship outside the bedroom has become better with more alpha on my part. But I’m just not excited about having sex with her anymore and it is troubling.

I don’t think its about the difference in sex rank. It’s not a matter of “I’ve lost 50 pounds and you haven’t so now you’re ugly”. It’s more about the sexual disconnect that I’ve created over the years. Wanting something I could hardly ever get was driving me to madness so I willed myself to not want it. My sex life became masturbation and porn and they never let me down during all those years she did. My instinctual reaction now when I think about having sex with my wife is anger.

Intellectually I understand the red pill idea that women are for the most part automatons when it comes to their sexual response. Intellectually I understand that it’s irrational to be angry at my wife for not behaving the way I wanted – it was my failure for not evoking those behaviors. But it just fucking hurts. It’s hard not to be resentful. It’s like I’m stuck in these bad patterns of thought. The rage has worn a groove in my head and now it’s difficult to accept improvement in things that I’ve bitched and moaned for the last decade. The recent articles here and at Ian’s site about initiating have had me thinking a lot about this lately. I don’t want to initiate anymore. Part of me doesn’t trust her with my sexuality any more because she’s used it to hurt and humiliate me in the past.

Athol – any ideas? We are starting to get what we said we wanted. Why can’t we be happy about it?

Reader:  I think your feelings are normal. I’ve had some of the same struggles in my head after running the map and changing 10+ year bad sexual and emotional relationship into a great one. The reality of the red pill has empowered my to change the relationship into what it should be, but I’m still mad about it at some level. I kind of feel cheated out of all those wasted years. And I sort of hate it at some level that I have to game my wife into loving me the way I think she should just love me anyway. But that part of my thinking is fading away, just taking some time.

Athol:  The Red Pill does not taste of chocolate. In fact it’s pretty damn bitter sometimes. The worse you’ve done things the Blue Pill way, the harsher the Red Pill tastes going down. It really sucks to realize you’ve wasted so much time and effort to work against your own interests.

Jennifer and I have always had a good sex life, but we’ve always struggled with money. One of the things that I realized around six years back was that instead of trying so hard to have an equal relationship, we would have been better off if I really had just pushed myself harder to advance my career goals. This point was hammered home when one of her friends got engaged to a dentist and Jennifer told me the news via excited verbal diarrhoea. The word “dentist” was repeated very five seconds with increasingly greater emphasis. The harder I tried to not listen, the louder Jennifer got. Dentist, dentist, dentist, dentist, dentist….

My response to her was simple. “I’m sorry I’m not a dentist.” Which sounds weak, but my eye contact and tone was icy steel.

Jennifer immediately checked up and apologized and rattled off a long list of my good points and contributions to the family. Held me tight and kissed me deeply. She wasn’t intentionally trying to hurt me, so easy to forgive her in that sense. It was the purely unintentional nature of it all that stung. For sure Jennifer liked me, loved me and wanted me, but she would have liked me, loved me and wanted me more if I was a dentist or whatever else similar I could have been. All those years of being superdad and Mr.Equal wasn’t exactly as great as I thought they were.

And so I resolved to make something of myself, and immediately made things significantly worse by wasting eighteen months trying to sell real estate and basically suffering a massive loss of income. I tried very hard for far too long to make it work, and it all turned to crap on me. To her great credit, Jennifer did stick by me and frankly was too supportive for our own good, she should have chewed me out about it all not working rather than put up with it. I would have stopped trying so hard earlier. 

I went back to nursing four years ago, and we’ve been digging out of the money hole slowly but steadily. 2011 was a very special year in that finally the book was out and the money situation shifted in our favor more. We’ve also slowly changed to me being more of the career minded one and Jennifer has picked up a lot of my housekeeping slack, and even started adding in some extra part time work as well. We’re both responsible for getting into our mess and we’re both working to get ourselves out.

But yeah… we could have done so much of this right from the beginning. So many wasted years that it’s kind of sickening to think about in that sense. And I would be lying if I said that there haven’t been times where it really doesn’t seem fair that I have to work harder than she does. But I can say that the more I get things together, the less it all bothers me and it is what it is. Captain works harder than the First Officer. We’re getting on better than ever and the sex in the last twelve months is amazing.

It’s funny looking back too, my first serious girlfriend Mary Fitness Tested me hard over my career goals. I wanted to go into ministry work and help people, she thought I would be better off using my writing and humor skills doing something like marketing. One of the things I liked most about Jennifer was her idealism and that the social status thing didn’t matter, but it is a factor after all. Doh!

I will say this though, without Jennifer and without all these endless missteps and dead ends along the way, I would not be were I am today. There would be no MMSL. Which is as Gandalf says, “Is an encouraging thought.”

Because everything happens for a reason…

…but usually the reason is because someone was stupid. The Red Pill does not taste of chocolate, and frankly it’s more like battlefield medicine than anything else, but it is excellent knowledge. Armed with that knowledge you, and I, and together, we can be less stupid and make significant changes to our lives.

It’s okay to be angry. Just use it as motivation to propel things in the right direction.

Often things get worse before they get better. But they can get better. Give it some time, get into action and start making positive changes. In time things will feel more enjoyable. Feelings follow actions. If things are improving, things are improving.

“Even more dramatically, the researchers also found that two-thirds of unhappily married spouses who stayed married reported that their marriages were happy five years later. In addition, the most unhappy marriages reported the most dramatic turnarounds: among those who rated their marriages as very unhappy, almost eight out of 10 who avoided divorce were happily married five years later”   Link