As a quick prelude to this post I would like to say that I had hit some stagnation relationship wise for the past few months. I had turned the relationship from me walking on egg shells to me doing what I wanted with slight regard for my LTRs feelings every now and then. I am the man in the relationship and we have fun together but something felt off...

Oh, and first real post here. Warning: Long.

Remembering the postive parts of BP me

I wouldn't say that TRP made me into a robot but it definitely had me hyper aware of a constant power struggle in my relationship. I saw shit tests and went through all the phases: wildly overthinking them, to being angry at them, to mildly resenting them, to laughing at them... but still realizing that they had to be dealt with in a particular manner as to maintain this new status quo of "my way or the highway."

LTR treated me great for the most part but the relationship didn't feel awesome and I couldn't figure out why. She was doing what I wanted, she respected me, we did fun things together, sex wasn't amazing but it was always available and occasionally pretty good. The one major issue is that she had wild emotional swings (more than I would contribute to AWALT)... but I'll get to that later.

So I'm sitting here wondering why she isn't trying to suck my balls through my dick like it's a straw like the early days of the relationship... I've hit the gym and am in at least as good of shape as when she called me "the hottest guy she had ever laid eyes on," I dress better, I make sure to do the manly shit in the relationship, I pass shit tests, and when those previous mentioned emotional swings come I stay calm and rational and keep both of our shit together. They were always about "you don't care about me" and since I did things here and there that obviously showed I cared about her, I honestly took them as words of a woman with too little attraction towards me... and maybe they were... but I don't think it had to do with my looks/clothes/physical aspects of SMV.

A couple recent posts (responses, actually) shined a light on some major failures that I think were holding me back.

First post: /u/thefamilyalpha - Response to: Active Dominance Techniques

There is plenty of normal MRP stuff in there but then there were a few hints of stuff I saw and thought "damn I remember when I used to do that." And it smacked me across the face. Sure I did something nice every once in a while but between those moments I was too focused on not being too nice. And that made me an asshole who had just enough redeeming qualities to want to be with.

So I am literally on the brink of throwing in the towel on the relationship when I see that... It's going "fine", but like I said, back of my mind had been "this just isn't working" for a bit now.

So what did I decide to do? I decided "fuck it I'm going to be fun and romantic and all the shit I repressed in order to regain the power in the relationship!"

And that lasted... well about a couple of days. Now I didn't actively take back my new demeanor out of spite or lack of OI, but I saw shit tests and I felt that power struggle and I naturally cut back on the "good beta" and doubled down on the alpha. This was basically a lack of OI disguised as something else. I wanted to give a little and see instant results and when it "didn't work" I threw the idea in the trash prematurely. In fact, looking back, I had done this same thing many times before.

To give an extreme example (skip if you wish):

She wanted to go to her friends house and have a few drinks. Now I know this usually turns into let's drink all night and I really didn't want to. She'd been pretty pleasant for quite a while (come back to this and slap me for keeping score once you read the next paragraph and linked post) so I said okay, let's go see them but we're not drinking all night. She gets a little tipsy and we stay a little longer than I had wanted because she had to have "one last drink," but I wasn't too worried about it. On the drive home she unzips me and starts giving me unsolicited road head. Once we got home I was horny and ready to go and she gave me the tiniest of an LMR shit test and that was enough to convince me that she was just fucking with me and had just blown me for a bit as a reward for being beta and doing what she wanted for the evening. I went from literally having my dick down her throat in the car to having one of the worst arguments/breaks of frame in months if not over a year.

The next post I will refer to made me realize that I was keeping score - /u/jacktenofhearts and her emotional outbursts were possibly from her walking on eggshells. In hindsight they did all happen after she got the impression that I was "mad" at her or displeased with her in some way. I hadn't fought with her in months and she said it "always felt like we were fighting" and in my head it was "no, you are always upset," but every occurrence of this, whether I actually said something about her behavior or she imagined I did, felt like a fight to her... she went through the fighting emotions (sad, mad, back to sad, etc) and, of course, she couldn't understand that I was not going through the same emotions.

So where did this lead me? Well it led me to remember that I did a lot of nice, thoughtful, and more importantly fun shit with a lot of women who worshiped me back in my BP days. Outward affection and acting like someone they could relax with wasn't the death knell that instantly led me to a BP shit relationship. It was being with a woman who was used to being in complete control, that I had gotten oneitis for, and not setting boundaries when I should have and normally would have.

So where am I headed with this? Well, it's only been a couple of weeks... but basically I need to keep in my head scoreboard gone. Without that I don't have anything resembling true OI. I need to bring more to the table than being a body with a dick on it and some opinions. When the shit tests fly in and I can only assume she's checking this new armor for weaknesses I need to act as I would normally but without the pull back regression that has kept me in this relationship limbo. I do, however, need to make sure that I am not bending too much in the name of this "change" I'm trying to make. Also, I need to 100% recognize that this could be a set up for covert contracts if I let it. I'll give it a good while and reassess pending nothing out of left field happens.

Favorite part so far (another skippable part):

I told her when I first started dating her that the reason I chose her was because of how she kissed me. She used to kiss me like I had never been kissed before, just something about it was above and beyond in passion or lust or something. It was constantly this thing over my head thinking I was failing somehow or that kind of passion couldn't sustain time... I don't know, I just remembered what it felt like and it wasn't there. I'm not saying we're kissing like we first met, but the passion behind them is more than I have felt in years.

Bonus mini FR: Taming the Starfish rather than taking the Starfish

As I expected, there would be shit testing to go along with this change and I'll give a brief description of one I saw coming a mile away.

Few nights of off the hook sex. Knew she was going to try and pull the rejection card to see how it would go (she's said "I don't feel like I can say no sometimes" - yeah... good job me at making sex a sometimes negative experience.. not this time but assumed she would test the waters). Normally this would lead to me picking whether I wanted to accept that and either we don't or she goes with it and it is inevitably starfish (cue scoreboard operator).

This night something felt different. I had been kissing her like I knew her for 3 months, not 3 years... but nonetheless when I jumped on the bed I got "no way!" and "it's too late!" and "I'm so tired!". Instead of stating too bad, or getting butthurt, or just taking her clothes off and going to town, I played with her a bit... kissing her as she tried to dodge and protest a bit about how she needed her sleep. She then did her best "okay just go" (scoreboard operator ain't home) which used to be my cue to decide to take the starfish (Sorry /u/BluepillProfessor I disagree with you a little here - poundtown on the starfish bred resentment IMO and should be reserved for a rare occassion) or leave it. She made sure to throw in a slightly annoyed facial expression.

I kept poking fun at her while escalating, telling her "if you're just going to let me use you to get off at least put on a good show for me" and other shit like that. A couple seconds later she started to kiss back, presumably part of the "good show." Little did she know she just killed the starfish for the evening. I went down on her and since I didn't have some grudge in the back of my head over her shit test I ate it like I was a teenager and suddenly she is looking down at me rather than up at the ceiling. I mention how mad she must be that I'm giving her all this pleasure and she agrees she is mad. She grabs a pillow and covers her face so I can't see her facial expressions change. Once I get her worked up I decide to fuck her to finish rather than let her get off via my tongue after all that LMR. I decide I want to cum together so my orgasm is better and I make her hold hers back until I say so. I even grab her a towel so she doesn't have to run to the bathroom (told you I was a gentleman).

In Closing

If you're thinking that I've just listed how much I have failed over the past year or so, it's because I have. I think it was a necessary step to get to a point where I could do better. If you're on the fence, where you think your relationship is tightened up, but there are still some issues you can't quite put your finger on, I implore you to read the posts I linked to. Those are the points I'm trying to get across. My game was weak. I was gaming her body, I was even commanding the relationship, but I really needed to start gaming her feelz and I couldn't do that with the scorecard in the back of my head. Why wasn't she kissing me with passion? Probably because I was sticking my tongue down her throat with no feeling at all.. not sure why I expected her to be passionate when I didn't even feel it in myself.

I obviously haven't given this enough time to fully call it a success so if you're thinking that I am just rationalizing acting like a BP bitch I fully invite you to say so. Although I hope the newbies realize that I am only saying to let loose the positive aspects of yourself that you may have held back during your transitional (maybe anger?) phase. If this helps nobody, shit sorry guys I'll take the criticism that comes with a first post and try again next time. If this all blows up in my face I will make sure to be back with a much more woman hating tone and a whole lot of examples of AWALT for the crowds to get riled up at.