Winning The Ultimatum, But Losing Anyway

Reader:  My wife used to be very touchy feely with me, but has stopped. If I touch her she’ll move away after a moment. If I ask her for sex, 90% of the time she’ll say yes, but she’s stopped having orgasms. Not sure what to do.

She was overweight for a while, and I told her that I wasn’t all that attracted to her and would leave her if she didn’t lose the weight. I put up with her being fat for years and it was long enough. She cried and yelled at me for two days and after I held my ground, she started dieting and working out. She lost 40 pounds and is maybe 10 pounds away from what she weighed when we got married. She looks great. She started dressing better, wearing makeup, changed her hair. We still had sex while she was losing the weight, but she wasn’t into it anymore. She’d say lets just have a quicky since you aren’t really attracted to me. Well now I am very attracted to her and she’s still not having an orgasm during sex and not interested in trying to have an orgasm with me. She does use her vibrator in the shower sometimes.

I’m not sure what to do next. The MAP and ultimatum worked to get her to lose weight, but she’s basically giving me duty sex. She’s not cold exactly. She’s polite and distant and won’t tell me what she’s thinking. I can’t find any evidence of an affair, but I bet if I asked her about her feelings she’d say that she loved me, but isn’t in love with me.

Athol:  Sometimes you can win a battle, but lose the war.

Having given her an ultimatum, and stuck to your guns that you’re willing to actually end the relationship, you’ve given her a massive shock to her system. She’s been wandering along through life believing all the Blue Pill rules about unconditional love and so on, and you shoved the Red Pill down her throat and held her nose until she swallowed it.

So she complied with your request, but she’s still in shock and has near zero relationship comfort anymore. I think you might have it backwards on the “in love and love” front. She’s probably in love with you, but determined not to love you. You’ve got an oversupply of Alpha and an empty tank on the Beta stuff.

The lack of orgasms, and the lack of desire to be touched, is very likely her Body Agenda being determined not to continue bonding to you, and not to continue to trust you. She complies with sex because she thinks without giving you sex, you’ll just leave her. She likely thinks you don’t love her and will probably just ditch her anyway. She may also think you were cheating on her around the time of the ultimatum, or at least had a backup woman to jump to if she didn’t comply with the weight loss.

At this point you need to turn the Beta up, way up and quickly. Do whatever it is that she most likes as comfort building things. Flowers, cards, love notes, acts of service…. whatever it is that speaks to her best.

My advice is to do a combination of apologizing and reframing. The apology is for making the issue solely her weight. I’m completely serious that you should apologize for that. The reframing though is that you thought that her losing the weight was going to get you what you really wanted, and what you really wanted, was things to be how they were when you first got married. You wanted to feel passionate about her again, you wanted the energy between you both to be there again.

But now that she flinches when you touch her, and doesn’t orgasm and obviously isn’t into it anymore, you’re even further away from what you really wanted than you were before. The weight loss has been a good thing and you’re proud of her for doing it, but what you wanted was her. Express to her your grief for what you’ve lost. You don’t want to feel passionate about anyone else, you want to feel it about her.

Apologize for making it “Me vs. You” when you really should have been trying to make it about “Us.”

See what happens.

As a very serious note: The ultimatum is the tool of last resort and by giving an ultimatum you have to accept that the relationship may fail as a result; I offer no promises it will work. That being said, I’ve tended to express the results of ultimatums as resolving into “success” or “failure” outcomes, it’s been somewhat of an oversight of mine to omit the “limping on together” outcome. In a sense though, you’re still stuck in the matrix of the ultimatum and waiting to have it resolved one way of the other. The ultimatium itself is a massively powerful Alpha move, her compliance needs to be rewarded with a solid dose of Beta.