The Main Event

The main event is the culmination of Dread. Some women are smart and capable and self aware enough to see the changing dynamic and to adapt. If she is smart, she works on the relationship and things move along, better and more fulfilling. Alternatively she decides she doesn’t want to work on it and it ends. Either way, you have built your life to succeed. The stay plan is the same as the go plan for this reason. Divorce isn’t failure.

Other times, women are run by their hamster. Her emotions are run by the hamster, spinning in its wheel and going nowhere. Running around in the maze of Dread with no way to escape. Perhaps you haven’t offered an escape. This could be because she doesn’t associate being valuable to you with receiving value from you. It could be because of mental issues that she needs to deal with. It could be a hundred different reasons that you will probably never know and shouldn’t even try to diagnose. You didn’t start Dread because your wife is a fixer upper.

You started Dread because you weren’t happy. YOU were the fixer upper.

So in some cases, especially type 2 and 3 captains, you sometimes end up in the Main Event. You receive the mother of all comfort tests, a massive, overt blowup of your wife, struggling to get out of the hamster maze, completely incapable of retaining her hypergamous best option, and playing the only card she has left: overt communication and a sort of ultimatum.

I don’t know how to make you happy and keep you around.

It’s not a fight, it’s not a comfort test. Its the comfort test. Ive had one in my marriage, so I say this: If you’re not seeing snot bubbles and diaphragm spasms, it’s not a main event.

A main event is not a wife having a temper tantrum.

A main event is not your wife crying because you canceled your vacation.

A main event is not getting a blast of shit because you left to go out with your buddies instead of watching TV with her.

A main even is a mix of desperation, desire, and admitting that she doesn’t know how to escape this emotional maze.

There is one correlation to the main event. If you think you’re having one, you aren’t. A main event, by necessity, happens when you aren’t expecting one, or even care if you get one. It has to. There are tons of field reports where guys asked if their latest fight was a main event. It wasn’t. By looking for one you’re still living with a covert contract. All this Dread was tips and tricks in order to try to win your wifes affections. No matter how good a job you do, this always fails. There’s a hundred small tells a man gives out that betrays his intentions. Women instinctively fight against it. Remember women love marketing and women hate sales.

In order to have a main event you have to be checked out. You’ve given up on the idea of winning your wife back. You’re moving onto building a life of abundance, a life of outcome dependence. You’re your own mental point of origin. You have frame. You may even have that drawer full of divorce paperwork waiting for you to be ready to pull the plug. That resignation to separation changes everything you do, every way you act, and every tell in your body language for one congruent message. You are loyal to that which adds value to your life, period.

A wifes frustration comes with habit. They used to be able to get away with a good cry to get their way. They would get angry, babble until their man gave up and surrendered. They used to claim victim-hood. None of it works, so I must not be doing well enough. So they try harder, and still nothing works. No manipulation works anymore. Worse yet, their man isn’t even miffed about it. This is the source of that anxiety that desire, that attraction.

It’s being aloof Not pretending to be aloof, but actual aloofness. You’re watching a man get slimmer, hotter, more attractive over a year. Not only that, but something tingling that hasn’t tingled in a long time. The tingle is anxiety, worry about abandonment from a hypergamous best option. A woman will never use overt communication except as a last resort. Directness is as foreign to women as a tampon is to men.

So this is why you have to be surprised by it. And then you have a choice to make. Is it too late, or are you willing to reset and start a relationship with your wife? There are no wrong answers, it’s entirely up to you. Later in the book I’ll go over the 5 different endings to this story and their consequences.

And if you decide it’s worth it, you have a new Mental Model. The Come to Jesus moment.

Now not everyone has a Main Event, and not everyone who has a Main Event wants to pass it. I’ve only ever seen one man ever fail his main event. It was the beginning of the end of his relationship, which isn’t bad, except for he didn’t make that choice, it was made for him. The only way to fail it is to not recognize the dynamic and to be evasive about what you want. The point here is for certainty, one way or the other. There is room to be vague and ambiguous if you expect an adversarial divorce (which you should) but the Main Event needs to be clear.

So assuming you want to, how does a come to Jesus moment work?

The Come to Jesus Moment