Being able to look at your own life as if you are the main character is more difficult than it should be. You can’t be surprised when we are surrounded our entire life by a consistent message of man = bad. Well, not so blatant, that would be too easy. It’s more that all the things that can positively define men are bad.
My wife and I went to the doctor once. I had asked for a blood test to give a baseline for my various hormones as I wasn’t getting any younger. The doctor (she) gave me a 20 minute riot act about roid rage, liver damage and cancer. My wife asked for 3 different blood tests and left 3 minutes later with multiple prescriptions.
The metaphor should be clear.
Dread involves detaching from the identity of your wife, building your own identity, and finally, having your wife attach to your identity. The reason why is the polarity between narcissism and borderline. A metaphor to understand the two would be the narcissist is the main character in his one act play, and borderline would be the main actress in the script. This can be healthy or unhealthy. This is dependent on how attached to reality you are and how much work went into building the identity vs defending it.
This is what I mean when I talk about healthy and unhealthy levels of narcissism. Healthy narcissism does work to achieve an outcome. The identity develops as an emergent property of that work. We are what we do. A consequence of this is that you become the biggest identity in your relationship at best, or clashing of the titans at worst. When you read books like No More Mr. Nice Guy by author Robert Glover, he acknowledges that this may not help your relationship, it may in fact end it.
This is why. Two narcissists cannot co exist.
A relationship can only last when both people want it to. I’ve often said that relationships are a woman’s job, and this is where it matters. Does she want to be a woman, is she willing to develop a healthy level of borderline to compliment your healthy narcissism, or isn’t she? Part of Dread involves you watching for investment signs like this and acting accordingly.
The identity of a borderline is based on validation from the strongest personality in the room. You may have heard of the term Hypergamous best option, and it fits here. Hypergamy is the evolves sexual strategy of women, where they aspire to form a relationship with the best sexual option she can. Men often get mad at this, but it’s a good thing. Women who do this allow for the concept of monogamy, in fact, hypergamy is monogamy.
Women aren’t men. Women can only sustain attraction to one thing at a time. It can be the love of her father, the love of her husband, her career, her political leanings, etc. But it’s only one thing. Now in the absence of a strong identity for her to latch onto this way, women trend towards filling that void themselves. That is they become narcissists.
Women were told they could be anything in life, so they decided to be drunken frat boys
The way this happens in marriages is they find themselves their best man, or find themselves desperate for any man and convince themselves the available one is the best. Over time, a death by a thousand concessions occurs. Men try to be nice, try to be fair, and slowly whittle away that strongest identity of their until they have turned themselves into the borderline of the relationship. Everything is filtered through the lens of pleasing their woman. And this is how the power dynamic flips.
Men were told they should be better women and so they became submissive bumbling housewives.
So as men get through a round of Dread, they work on their physical, intellectual and emotional selves. They build frame. Once they have frame they begin to look at their relationships. They define which dysfunctional archetype they are in. They see whether they are watching their wife put points on the scoreboard or they are putting points on it themselves. They aspire to be at the point where they stop keeping score against their wife.
Finally, they get to a point where the whole dynamic changes between them, and they have to change strategies (again)
I used to hear similar stories from men:
“Now the relationship is better than ever, except she never initiates sex with me”
“Everything is great, except she cries a lot more than she used to over stuff”
“She keeps asking me how I want it done and I don’t care”
This keeps happening because men have developed their healthy narcissism, and their wives have bought into it with healthy borderline. He is the main character in his story and she’s the star actress. They get everything they wanted: a submissive, happy, sexually available wife and aren’t able to recognize it.
If you want a feminine wife, one of the consequences of that is she’s going to act like more of a woman. This means you initiate in the bedroom (mostly.) This means she will cry during movies more. This means she will accuse you of cheating if you’re not home by 10. These are normal, healthy behaviors and you shouldn’t be irritated about them. These little irritations show a lack of your leadership in the relationship, and where you can focus your efforts.
If she asks you how you want some task completed and you tell her “I don’t care, figure it out.” Then you need to accept that whatever she did is good enough. Men who tell her to figure it out and then complain that it’s not done to their standards send mixed messages. The wife sees this and doesn’t decide to do better next time, she decides not to try at all, or to sabotage her efforts since nothing will be good enough. As her hypergamous best option, you set the standard. Up to this point you’ve been acting as if she was dead in the relationship and living to that standard so you know it’s achievable.
If things were done incorrectly or not up to your standard you have one of three scenarios:
The remainder of this post is for paid subscribers of Rian Stone's Substack. TheRedArchive holds the freely published portion above; the full text is available from the author at https://rianstone.substack.com/p/borderline-is-femininity.
