So my mother-in-law is a bit of a pack-rat. We’re talking VHS tapes of shows that haven’t been on the air since the 80s, newspapers and magazines from the 90s, and so forth. I have a lot of theories why she does this crap, but that’s not the point of this post. Instead, I’m starting with something more important than women: pooping. I’m sitting on the pot, taking a shit, and my book and my cell phone are still in my suitcase, so I grab a magazine from a basket near the toilet. We’re in luck. It’s one of the newer items in her hoard. A Redbook from 2009, or was it 2007. I forget. 200X is close enough. I flip through and find an article about women lamenting their shitty husbands.

I know, I know. That could have been any Redbook, any article. But this one talks about the super-wife. The woman who “does everything around here,” often while working, too, and resents her husband for it. This article goes on and on about loser men who prefer a life where all they do is work, maybe take out the trash once in awhile, and sleep, while their wives do all the thinking and run the house. That’s actually a pretty popular and common modern trope. The queen rules the roost, or something like that.

These women hate their husbands. They don’t consider these men their husbands. They consider them another child. But the bottom line wasn’t surprising: You don’t desire someone you resent. These women had unsatisfying sex lives with their husbands. Many were cheating, many wanted to, many were thinking about divorce. But whatever their end-goals, sex was less frequent and less satisfying for the women who felt like they were in charge of their households.

So obviously, you think a woman who feels like she’s unfairly burdened and like her husband “doesn’t do anything around here” would do what all blue pill people recommend for any failing relationship: communicate. Tell her husband how she feels and ask him to do more instead of being a passive aggressive bitch while he wonders why she’s such a cunt and why he ever married her. But these women never do something so obvious or direct, for a variety of reasons.

First, however much a super-wife may hate her husband, women like feeling validated and important. Knowing that the home just plain can’t function without you and you’re absolutely indispensable is validating. Some of these women feel powerful. Telling your husband you feel unfairly burdened and want him to do more would be showing weakness, and since these women are the men of the house, and unlike most men, women actually get Red Pill ideas, they know that as the leaders of their households, they can’t show weakness.

Second, a loser man you browbeat into showing an occasional winner quality is not a winner. He’s just a bigger loser. Most women feel like if they have to actually ask their man to be less of a loser, and while in the course of obeying their orders, he does something non-loser-ish, that’s even worse than just being a natural-born loser. Parroting Rollo’s words, women want a man who “just gets it.” If you have to be told how to be a man, especially by your woman, you’re not a man. You’re just another child she has to take care of.

Third, and kind of in line with the above, women don’t trust a loser to lead their families. He’ll just screw it up. Giving a man some control over your household means relinquishing that control yourself. Worse, even if a man is competent at a task, he might not do it the way she would have done it, and women can’t stand it when someone else thinks or feels differently than they do and is still somehow successful in life. If you’re going to do something she could have or would have done for the family, she’s going to try to insist that you do it her way, because it’s a slap in her face if you do it your way and, worse, if things actually work out as well or better your way. And while it’s 100% true that women don’t want to be the CEO of the family organization, the one thing women would hate even more is to be an employee. A woman’s preferred role is the business owner. The guy who sits back and collects checks while other people run the place. And run it her way.

A lot of women out there really, really hate their husbands. So many of them hate their husbands so much that you can print an article about hating your husband in Redbook. But you can manage a woman’s expectations like you would any other employee in your organization.

First, women need to feel validated and important. Even indispensable. But this needs to be because you carved them a niche in your universe. Not because they took over your household on account of you sucking. Ask your wife to do things for you. All the time. Little things. Big things. Have a few things around the house that are “her things.” Things you specifically assign to her (even though you could do them yourself faster, easier, and better), because if she’s doing those things, that frees up your time to do other things. Let her feel powerful and important, but as an essential cog in your machine.

Second, take initiative. You run your household. Pay attention. You can’t drink beer and cuddle in front of the TV. And think your wife’s happy. That’s the path of the loser. Your job is to see something that needs to be done. Then just do it or if you need another set of hands or if she’s capable of doing it while you do something else, have your wife help or take care of it. But you need to be the one who notices a thing needs doing, you need to be the one to plan the solution, and you need to be the one who either takes care of it or utilizes your wife to take care of it. In woman-world, it’s the person who notices the problem first and complains the loudest about it who gets all the credit when it’s fixed. Not the person who does the work and solves the problem. So notice problems and fix them. When your wife brings you a problem that’s not on her list, tell her it’s not on your list today because you’re doing X today instead (X being the next thing you noticed needs doing), but ask her to get started on her thing. Pretend like it was your idea and another thing on your list and order her around.

Third, trust your woman to take care of some shit while you’re gone. At least twice a month, go out with guy friends or go to a professional networking event or take a class or something. Be gone. But tell her to try to get X, Y, and Z done or at least started. Make sure X, Y, and Z are trivial tasks that are easily within her abilities, because women have self-esteem issues and hate doing things they’re not already good at.

The modern sitcom trope is a wife who rules the roost ordering her bumbling husband around as he fails at everything he touches and she angrily declares that he’s never having sex again, but at the end of the episode, everything is all right, she reassures him, he feels comforted that she loves him despite his faults, and she makes everything better. As with all things marketed to women, this is just telling us what they want. Women want a man who rules the roost and orders them about, is invested enough to care whether they succeed or fail, but at the end of the day, loves them no matter what. Women want a father.