The Moment When You Realize It’s All Been Bullshit

Somewhere in the comments of Work On Your Weak Areas First, I said…

Athol:  “It’s when you effectively frame that emotion/thought and act like you’re heading for the door, that very likely changes her feelings for you.”

Reader Question:  Ok, I am sorry if I am dense. But what does that entail exactly? Telling her, “If things don’t change I am leaving.” (although a bit more subtly) Or just starting to go out to bars / clubs / etc and picking up girls and not coming back home until 3am on weeknights?

If the first, in my case, she would probably just say, “Well, you have to love me for who I am!” Or something similar and the second, she would assume the worse even if I was just hanging out not interacting with anyone, and accuse me of cheating.

Sorry I am at a loss on this last step… and it very well could be covered in the last part of your book, if it is, I just haven’t gotten that far yet.

Athol:  It’s really just having an obvious change of heart about her and not trying to hide it.

For example imagine you’ve been begging and pleading with your wife to change her behavior / pull her weight / come back home / break it off with him, yada yada yada. You’ve pandered to her, tried to please her, let her get away with things and so on, all in the vain effort to get what you want from her/the marriage.

It’s in the moment when you completely out of the blue, act like you’ve finally understood something you’ve been stupid about for the longest time. When you in the middle of a normal day just say “You’re never going to do that thing I want are you.” Just say it as a statement of fact, not a question. Then no matter what they say in reply, you just say, “Okay. Thank you.”

The emotional frame is that you’ve realized that while you are still married, still living in the same house, still with a joint checking account and nothing has really happened…. everything has changed because you’ve just accepted that the relationship is over. The frame is that everything you’ve believed to be true about your marriage up until this point, has in fact been nothing more than an illusion you’ve convinced yourself to be true. And now, you no longer believe in that illusion. There is no marriage.

Or for the less Zen among us, it’s the moment when you realize it’s all been bullshit.

It’s in that moment where you change direction and start the process of leaving her, that she will often decide she wants you to stay. The power of the take away is very strong. No one, but no one handles being dumped very well. Its usually the ultimate display of who is the higher Sex Ranked in the relationship.

The hard part though is quite frequently that emotional change of direction can’t be faked easily. Very often I email guys that they have to play the game tougher and not tolerate something clearly inappropriate the wife is doing, and they wiggle out of actually doing it. Then it gets worse and they still wiggle. Then it gets really bad and they snap and they are “just fucking done with the bitch.”, and start acting like they are heading for the door, which quite often results in ”the bitch” taking a big step in the direction of being docile and doting on him…

…but the trouble is they don’t actually want her anymore. Their love for her feels empty and gone. They are disgusted they have had to metaphorically bitch slap her to get what they want. Cue up the “Why do I have to act like an asshole to have her want me, when the whole time I’ve loved her and done everything to make her happy?” speech. But they are getting what they wanted finally, so somewhat annoying to leave now just as it got good.

My advice in that aftermath of the switch is to just see how it goes. When you go from pussy whipped Beta to having your balls back, it’s an uncomfortable feeling if only for its newness. It may not be permanent. Love can quietly sneak back in again.

And as always, not everything works all the time. If you get to that point of “I’m just done with her”, she might agree that it’s basically over too. So there are risks involved in doing this. But all that you’re risking is a bad relationship that’s slowly killing you. Seems kinda like a win no matter what happens.