CLARIFYING OI

This post is probably going to get a lot of heat because it draws a fine-line in the otherwise broad term: Outcome Independence (OI). TRP/MRP throws around OI like it must apply in all situations without exception. The implication of over-application of OI is twofold: (1) you lose sight of the consequences of your own actions, and (2) you undermine your MAP and the ultimate goal for which you set it up in the first place.

OI is often discussed in the context that we should not become emotionally invested in the outcome of our efforts. To do so undermines the authenticity of our change, and women can sniff out a phony from a mile away. That said, it is unrealistic to assume total OI is possible, and the default conclusion proves this. The default conclusion goes something like this: If you desire me and start screwing me, great; if not, that's fine too, I can find someone else who will give me what I want. There is a third option that gets left out of this mix, which is the only true OI: If you don't desire and screw me, that's fine too; I won't cheat, won't divorce you, etc. I am okay with living my life alongside you even if I don't get what I want.

The "ditch and replace" mentality actually proves you aren't OI. It proves that you are emotionally invested in the outcome of your efforts, which is why you can't stay with her if she won't give you what you want. You must find someone else who will give you that outcome instead. So, what gets passed around as being OI is really a way of saying, "Don't be true OI, but do break oneitis. True OI is BP."

To that end, here is a foundational truth upon which the rest of this post is grounded: Husbands have actual desires and it matters to us if they're not being met. There is nothing wrong with adjusting probability in our favor, as long as we accept the alternate probability as a real occurrence and not just a theory - and we don't let that occurrence hinder our ongoing efforts toward probabilistic stage-setting.

WHAT IS A CONFIDENCE INTERVAL (CI)?

Suppose I want to get my protein up for the day. I buy lots of chicken and separate them into 8oz sections. On average, these 8oz sections have approximately 72g of protein, but none of them has exactly this much. One might have 68 and another might have 77. The total distribution of these numbers on a graph would look something like this. The horizontal axis represents how many grams of protein each chicken has, the vertical represents how many chickens in your sample have that many grams. How narrow or wide the curve appears is called 'standard deviation.' If it's normal for 8oz of chicken to have 60g or 84g of protein, we'd have a wide curve; if the range is typically more like 70-74, we'd have a narrow curve.

Now, your sample produced an average of 72g of protein. What if you bought another batch of chicken and got an average of 68g? Then another batch gives you an average of 77g? The more information you have, the more confident you become about the actual average protein amount for all 8oz chicken slabs everywhere in the world.

At some point, you can calculate from the average and standard deviation different degrees of confidence for what that true average actually is (rather than the sample size averages). For example:

  • I might be 95% confident that the actual average is between 70g and 72g

  • 90% confident that it's between 71.6g and 72.3g, or

  • 99% confident it is between 65g and 80g.

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH MY MARRIAGE?

We are creatures of habit. We have biological and social conditioning that shapes the way we think and process information. Newton's first law of motion is: An objection in motion stays in motion unless an external force interferes. Our decision-making patterns are the same. We will keep making the same decisions toward the same destination until some external force/motivator bumps our direction or alters our speed. This could be a lack of sex, declining fuzzies from the husband, observing someone else's marriage, discovering TRP/MRP, or any other number of external influences. But for the most part, even if they're unhappy, many women prefer the security that comes with consistency as being of greater significance than their unhappiness, and thus will be fairly consistent in their behavior patterns as established by biology and social conditioning (MMSLP talks about this in more detail).

Assuming these principles can be relied upon (as most of the required reading in the sidebar presumes), every day of interaction with our spouse gives us a set of data points. There are two directions confidence intervals move from here:

  • UNIVERSAL CI: When we compare our spouse's data points with our neighbor's, co-worker's, friend's, etc. we now have multiple samples. Collectively, we start to see a collective average that describes the totality of all women. This is where phrases like "AWALT" come from.

  • Alternatively, if I look at my wife's interactions in one day as one set of data points, then another day as another sample of data points, and eventually get to a month of data points, I can develop a degree of confidence in a range of possible reactions that are relatively close together. For example, if I sneak up and wrap my arms around her from behind while she's looking out the window:

    • I can be 100% confident that her reaction will be somewhere between complaining she doesn't want to be touched and screwing me on the the floor right there.

    • I can be 95% confident that it could be between neutral reaction and starting to get a little wet.

    • I can be 90% confident that her reaction will be somewhere between a smile and a happy sigh and turning around and kissing me.

SUBCONSCIOUS INTERVALS

Whether we like it or not, we are all operating under these subconscious confidence intervals. We have established patterns of living with our spouses that influence how we interact around them. Here are a few things to consider:

  • Men who first discover TRP/MRP (myself included) have experienced an external force that moves us in a different direction. So, our responses to her behaviors are intentionally/consciously different, which starts to change her subconscious impressions of us. Because this starts in the subconscious, it takes time to fully change how she perceives us as the new, better men we're trying to become.

    • Note: I do not count ordinarily occurring stimuli as external forces, even if they are external. For example, my wife often gets jealous of aspects of her sister's life. When she comes back from visiting her sister, she has experienced an external stimuli affecting her response patterns, but it's one for which I have already figured out the ordinary data points and have adjusted my subconscious formula for how to deal with her in those situations.

  • Her subconscious expects us to act a certain way toward her when we get home from work, and it also has a pre-prepared response to that anticipated action. This is operating within the "typical" or "average" under the system as it has always been. We understand and expect a possible range of behaviors (our confidence interval) and the possibility that someone might act outside that range, but for the most part our predictability remains in tact. This is why DB marriages stay DB marriages until something changes. Things don't magically get better one day.

Here's where things get important: Operating on subconscious principles is beta/BP. Alpha/RP is about being conscious and intentional with what we do.

  • What if a new pill was discovered that could safely put chicken on more steroids and increase protein count per oz? That previous confidence interval is no longer 95% for 70-72g, it's now 90% for 120-125g. It takes more time for us to measure and adjust to the new expectations, and someone has to put in more effort to feed the chickens differently, but the norm has now changed.

    • When men take the red pill, it's like putting those chickens on steroids. It would be stupid to expect the same response to a different set of stimuli. That said, there is a lag between subconscious expectation and actual changed interaction.

  • I suspect that RP guys who have been RP for a long time (from what I've observed in RP marriages in my legal practice) eventually have just adapted to the new norm and now have a new subconscious set of confidence intervals that they have established with their wives, and those wives have established on them. These marriages also fail. Why? Because something is lost when we operate subconsciously instead of intentionally - it's still beta, even if it has the appearance of alpha. That is why I think I still see alpha men who give good fuzzies still end up in boring DB relationships. They are coasting on a previously successful balance of alpha/beta traits rather than maintaining intentionality.

OI AND CI

When people on this sub say to be OI, it's usually in the context of not letting your wife's reactions affect your drive for self improvement. But at the same time, there's no point in self-improvement if it doesn't make us happy; and sometimes we require things outside our own internal psychology to make us happy. If I get lost in the desert with no food, I can mentally tell myself to be happy all I want, but the fact is that I'm starving. That experience of starving has an actual impact on me and will eventually affect my emotional state whether I like it or not.

Likewise, if I'm in a DB marriage, I can mentally tell myself to be happy all I want, but the fact is that I have a biological imperative that's not being satisfied. Again, "ditch and replace" isn't really OI; it's just finding someone else who will give the outcome I want, proving I actually am still invested in the outcome. All I've done with that mentality is broken my oneitis and blamed oneitis for my dissatisfaction (which in some cases might legitimately be the problem). As a post on TRP/MRP (can't remember which) recently said, "Guys, yes it's good to focus on self-improvement, but let's remember that this sub is still about sexual strategy." Self-improvement and becoming "OI" (in the more appropriate uses of the term) are not the end in and of themselves; they're more like catch-22 principles whereby you get your goal by abandoning the goal. But you still have a goal, and that's okay ... otherwise no one would be here.

There is nothing wrong with establishing new patterns of living and developing confidence in the expected results of that new pattern. Being OI doesn't mean we are forbidden from becoming invested in those results; it means that we accept the fact that we're only operating on confidence intervals and not absolutes. We should expect that for a 95% interval our SOs "typical reaction" will actually be atypical 5% of the time. That's okay.

If we start seeing things like 7 or 8 times out of 20 instead, it means one of two things:

  • There are additional variables that we have failed to account for.

  • She has been moved by an external force as well.

PROBABILISTIC STAGE-SETTING

I used to call this "psychological conditioning," but that sounds way too negative for what I actually mean. The idea is that we are all here because we have goals and desires that we want to see met in our lives. If you don't have any goals or desires, you're not alpha. Period. If you do have goals and desires, you should expect them to be met as a result of your actions. This is not "covert" anything - it's just a fact of life. We are allowed to have expectations.

Covert contracts are about establishing a system of absolutes. We develop hard, rather than soft expectations. When we develop a mindset of probabilistic outcomes, we can create the emotional detachment that the OI mentality seeks while still maintaining appropriate focus on the end-result. For example, if I try to initiate sex with my wife and she rejects me, I accept this as a possible outcome of the probabilistic stage I have set. If she rejects me 90% of the time, I have set a very crappy stage at fostering a healthy sex-life. As the man, I am responsible for setting that stage because she is incapable of setting a stage whereby she is attracted to me. If she tries, my changes are not authentic - they are extremely beta in an effort to please her.

In response, when I realize I have done a crap job with probabilistic stage-setting I should re-adjust my stage so that the average/mean/typical response my wife gives is more aligned with my desired outcome.

ISN'T THAT BEING MANIPULATIVE?

To be clear, we're all manipulating each other all the time, whether we like it or not. Every single action we take is intentionally or subconsciously manipulative in some way. What we really need to discern is harmful manipulation from productive manipulation. When a trainer at the gym is yelling at his trainee to get more reps out of him, that's manipulation. He's using psychological tactics to produce a desired result. It's also beneficial and the trainee wants it.

Likewise, I enter the conversation with the assumption that wives want fuzzies and tingles. They want to be sexually attracted to their husbands, and they also want to feel safe, secure, and comfortable with them. As MMSLP says, a woman cannot will-power herself into these types of feelings. As a result, we must adjust conditions (i.e. manipulate) to produce these feelings. I should probably put this in bold:

If I love my wife, my desired outcome is also aligned with her best interests.

I see nothing wrong with operating in this type of manipulative framework until it becomes abused to get her to do things that she will eventually regret doing. Getting her to do things that she doesn't want to do initially is fine. That's how you discover what you like and don't like. Hopefully she'll be doing the same to you. This avoids boring and mundane lives that don't ever change or involve new things. But if it's clear she'll regret it, don't go there just because you want it - that's harmful manipulation and can produce serious psychological damage and destroy pair bonding.

VARIABLES

You already know a lot of the key variables that will set up the probabilistic stage for accomplishing your goals. OYS, passing tests, getting fit, etc. are all primary variables. They follow principles developed from universal confidence intervals (AWALT).

But every individual woman has additional variables that only her husband knows about, which he has discerned through developing personalized confidence intervals. For example, my wife hates the word "juicy." So, although I may do everything else right to set the stage for attraction and comfort, if I slip up at dinner and say, "This steak is so juicy," that's going to push her away from the average/mean and toward more of an outlier response, defying my confidence interval. So, I have to start accounting for that in future interactions.

This is significant in distinguishing between TRP and MRP. Plates and new relationships often don't have the opportunity to discern these additional variables. So, although responsibility, routine, and the lack of the "mystery" effect are examples of things that work against us, this intimate knowledge of our spouse is one key advantage we have that we should take advantage of if we have actually bothered to pay attention to our wives throughout the relationship.

CONCLUSION

Nobody wants true OI and we are biologically incapable of it. The way we talk about OI is really an effort to break oneitis while maintaining our goals/desires. While breaking oneitis is sometimes helpful, there's also nothing wrong with pursuing your goals and desires in the context of your existing marriage/LTR. To pursue those goals, we must develop a framework of probabilistic stage-setting whereby our spouses are most likely to meet our needs and desires, which benefits both of us. Because we are only fostering probability and not demanding absolutes, we graciously accept the undesired outcome as periodically expected and part of the plan, but adjust our probabilistic stage when it becomes the norm. That stage is defined by primary universal confidence intervals, which is what you will learn from this sub, as well as personalized confidence intervals, which is what you will learn from paying attention to your wife.