The Fungible Wife

Reader: So here’s todays issue.  I have been doing everything you told me to do — okay everything you tell everyone to do in your blog and in the book.  One of my favorite plays was to spend some time with a very attractive female friend of mine who has kids.  Added benefit is that the wife does not like her, so it gets her attention when I meet with her…

…It was one of those moments when you think to yourself:  Why am I putting all this bloody effort to seduce the one woman (i.e. the wife) who doesn’t want to be seduced by me?  What the fuck is the point?  I feel lonely with my wife.  I feel like I don’t connect with her anymore, and given the choice I would have preferred to keep talking to the other woman.  I think about divorce more often than I should.  But I have two children…

…Am I falling for another woman, am I falling out of love with my wife, or am I just tired of feeling like a jerk in my own house?  I just don’t know if this is worth all the effort when I could just say I am done and be with someone else in one day.  I know I can.  Women like me, I like women.  What am I fighting for?  If she isn’t interested why should I be?  I feel like I am begging for scraps in one restaurant when I could go next door and have a feast.

Athol: It seems like you’re getting closer to the fork in the road where things either start getting better with your wife, or they start getting worse as the situation starts heading toward a resolution.

The truth of the matter is that for the most part, women are fungible. Meaning one can be replaced with a different one and life can move on ahead much the same as it was. It’s like, as you say, a restaurant where everything sucks, is easily replaceable with a restaurant that doesn’t suck. What really makes one woman more special than another one is our feelings for her.

So if she’s special only to you, but not really anyone else, then she’s not really truly special. If you start thinking someone else is special, and your wife is no longer special, then she will very quickly become uncomfortable about what is happening.  

The one angle where they aren’t 100% fungible is that often they are the mothers of our children, and that complicates things as I’m sure you know.

From your wife’s point of view, the options that are starting to come in focus as being made available to her are either (1) Be a better wife / more positive relationship, or (2) Get shunted off to one side by either your affair or divorce. What she wants is to keep the status quo, but that is vanishing quickly because you need to consent to keep things as they are.

Therefore your wife is going to be terrified that you’re attaching to this other woman. Your sudden emotional response to the fungible factor frightens her further. Your feelings for her are starting to change and that’s whats holding you in the relationship rather than anything she does for you. This may well create the spark that makes her realize what she has in a marriage with you. There’s nothing like a takeaway to make someone suddenly clutch on tight to it and declare how much they want it.

My advice is to keep this relationship with your friend as positive of a friendship as you can. I’m fine with demonstrating the ability to attract another partner, but you do have to keep the moral high ground as best you can or things can get very messy later on.

The fungible approach to women is on one hand very pragmatic and emotionally cold. The idea that a wife could be simply discarded like a broken toilet seat so you can install a new one, is extremely unsettling to women. The old terror of being dumped for a newer model runs deep.

However the flip side of the fungible coin is that is that when a woman knows you can think this way and could actually reasonably easily replace her with a woman of equal or better value, she knows you love her from a position of strength. A “strong man” being an attractive man she can more easily respond to.

But when you stick around because she has what you can’t get anywhere else, you love from a position of weakness. And she knows that, so it’s a turn off.