As Athol Kay says in his Male Action Plan:
Whether the marriage manages to continue, or fails into divorce, males learning to DHV and achieving it, will either put themselves in a more dominant place in the marriage with greater sexual response from their wife, or return themselves to the sexual marketplace, with a higher sex rank and better able to attract a new partner. Either way, they win.
My intention, by far, is to preserve improve my marriage. And I’m fairly certain that will be the overall response. However, there are definitely some areas of real contention and risk to be worked through. Tonight we hit one of them.
The short, short version:
We bought our house at the absolute peak of the housing bubble, mostly because that’s exactly when we got married (and moved out of state). Our $200k house is now a $160k house, and we had very little equity. Now we’d both really like to move closer to town for various reasons (both practical and not so), but for obvious reasons that’s not really an option.
This is probably one of the big sticking points of our marriage right now. The wife just doesn’t want to accept that we’re stuck here for a while. In fairness to her, there are real practical difficulties inherent in our current location. But reality is reality. So every now and then, we end up having nearly the exact same conversation about moving. “What if we do this?” “Then this and this and this.” Rinse, repeat. We go through the same list every time because there really isn’t a way out other than, “win the lottery and be able to afford selling the house at a major loss.”
I’m sure she’s not doing it consciously, and she’d get really pissed if I brought it up to her face… but every time we have the conversation, I hear shades of female hypergamy at work. The subtle undertones are, “I’m not getting what I thought I was getting out of this deal.” Well, fair enough, except for two things: 1) Neither am I, or this blog wouldn’t exist, and 2) she’s the one who pushed so hard for buying this goddamn house in the first place – a house that we’ve barely been able to afford for the past three years, that puts us in a crappy location, an that we can’t afford to sell. I’ve busted my ass to pay for this place – and I’m continuing to do that, even though we’re having to consider a mortgage modification – and I can’t help but feel a real slap every time the conversation comes up.
It came up again tonight, and it turned into a bit of an argument. Not a real argument, just more of one than usual because I decided not to be all beta and submissive about it, and to be blunt. Also to point out that we keep having the same conversation about it. And when that pissed her off and, to be frank, she started acting like a child… I just put a stop to that pretty quickly.
She was pissed. Royally pissed, but in the “OK, I’m not going to talk to you way.” Game theory tells us that this should pass and eventually things will settle down. Except that, as I’ve written before, in an LTR, some shit tests are based in real issues, and this is definitely one of them. There’s a definite risk here that she won’t settle down after this.
Tonight, it seems like she is settling down gradually. She’s a lot less pissed than she was. But this area, more than just about any other, is the one that runs the biggest risk of “returning me to the sexual marketplace.”
That’s not what I want, but Athol is right: if it does, then at least I’ll still be better able to attract a new partner.
