When She Rewrites The Relationship History and the “Sexy Moves” Fail

Reader:  I’ve read your book and it’s basically exactly the resource I’ve been looking for.  I’m a natural alpha, but have a serious case of Oneitis and have been Betaized when I’m around her.  I’m working on getting the alpha back.  I felt there are two situations the book didn’t touch on though, that I’d like your thoughts on.  I’m 26 and have been with my wife for 7 years and married for the last 2.

1) In October, I got the “i love you, but I’m not in love with you” speech, but there was a twist.  It was more like “I love you, but I’ve never been in love with you”.  We always had a lousy sex life throughout our entire relationship, but since she was the first person I ever seriously dated and the person I lost my virginity to, I was too naive and stupid to know anything was wrong.  She always had an excuse for her lack of interest like “my birth control is messing with my hormones, but I’m going to change it in a couple months”.  I always believed them and I think she believed them herself as well.  When we first started dating, I think our sex ranks were on equal footing, but within a year she started taking care of herself, lost a bunch of weight, started wearing makeup, etc, and shot up several points.  I’d say her sex rank has been 1-2 above mine for the last 6 of our 7 years together.  How does the fact that she’s never shown attraction to me change the MAP?

2) Though she definitely wants an alpha to take care of her in everything non-sexual, she wants to be in complete and total control of when and how we do anything sexual.  Any attempts at initiating fail miserably and always have.  I tried several of your sexy moves but she interprets them as “begging for sex”, and it’s been a huge turn off.  How should I deal with this?

Athol:  I suspect she’s rewriting the history of the relationship. It’s very common to do that right before they leave or file for divorce. You can have a ten year relationship that’s wonderful, and when it falls apart in the 11th year, they say something like, “I was never really happy and I’ve been just going through the motions since the beginning.”   They do this because it looks bad to say something like, “The relationship has been quite wonderful for ten years and you’ve been a loving attentive husband. But I’ve been having an affair for the last six months, so by me leaving you, I’m quite clearly the one in the wrong.”

By rewriting the relationship history, she’s trying to snow you into being passive, and just accepting whatever she’s about to unleash on you like a spineless chump. She’s also framing herself as “not a bad person.”

The biggest problem is the Sex Rank differences. Basically she “ran the MAP” on you six years ago when she lost the weight and prettied up, but didn’t actually push for anything in particular. So she’s coasted in Phase Three with you ever since. Now she’s pushing to Phase Four or Five. You’re six years behind schedule in self-improving as she was probably unconsciously looking to upgrade to a hotter guy than you back then. (Or perhaps quite consciously, but whoever she was aiming for didn’t pick up her option.)

Because of the Sex Rank differences, she’s in control of the sex completely because she’s way hotter than you and wants to not be bothered unless she’s really horny in a general sense. Basically her sexual interest in you is very low, so all the Sexy Moves that would work if you were equal or higher Sex Rank than her, fail because you’re so far below her Sex Rank.

By way of explanation, if your Sex Rank was two points higher than hers, you wouldn’t need to try any of the Sexy Moves on her to get her interested in sex with you. You’d just say, “Let’s go somewhere private and have sex.” and she’d follow you.  I think the Sexy Moves are a positive influence on your Sex Rank, but they aren’t easily going to overcome a two point deficit.

So that’s all bad news I’m afraid. Even worse is that as you know, the ILYBINILWY speech usually means there’s another man in the picture. Realistically a hot girl with an average guy is absolutely going to be targeted by other men and a wedding ring on her finger isn’t going to stop a fair number of them. If anything it’s going to encourage some of them.

So you immediate steps are to (1) actively rule out another man being in the picture (check credit cards, phone records, email yada yada yada) and (2) immediately get to work on making yourself more attractive as quickly as possible. Also helpful is (3) start creating a contingency plan for getting hit with a divorce filing.

I’m more than a little concerned that you’ve found me too late though. You can’t just watch your wife go from a caterpillar into a butterfly and not try and keep pace with her.