I was reading a TRP report by /u/OmLaLa and one thing struck me funny, and that’s to never underestimate a woman’s need for validation and her lack of culpability to her actions. Read the FR and you’ll get the gist of it there. In his case, a plate behaved badly and he did the correct thing. She was having a fit, and trying to bring drama into his life. He smashed it like you should and she’ll be on the next list like she deserves.

The question it puts on the table is again, why we don’t give into fits, drama and the like with wives and LTR’s. It demonstrates even more so why bad behavior should be dealt with on our terms, and swiftly. In the case of the field report he did the correct thing. In our case, we’re dealing with a permanent relationship. Not so easy to let the plate fall.

I recently had interaction with another MRP contributor about teachable moments and how to interact with a wife who’s throwing a temper tantrum. Here “the oldest teenager” in the house reigns supreme and my initial thought was “Give bad behavior no response. Isolate yourself until she learns how to respond like a the first officer you need her to be”

The back and forth was either isolate bad behavior, or give her the emotional direction she needs. I get that sometimes people haven’t been taught the rules of engagement, and I totally see the argument that was made here, but in the end I still think you need to go with isolating yourself from her temper tantrum. I wrestled with it, as even if you’ve been doing this awhile you should be introspective. As much as we like to call this a science, there’s still a lot of grey area. In the specifics mentioned I think that at best it’s a judgment call left to a well-seasoned practitioner. In the case of someone just swallowing the pill, STFU is the right call. As Vince Lombardi lamented on the forward pass, “There’s three possible outcomes, and only one of them good.”

The nature of a woman, as highlighted so well by OmLaLa in his field report is that she’s validation seeking and without culpability.

A woman’s lack of culpability, or as we like to affectionately call it, her hamster, is how she can say things like “don’t you want to know why you ruined the whole evening?” or “You weren’t around and I was lonely so I fucked him a little bit”. It’s a strong trait that lets her take the self out of her actions. Never mind that it was a slight comment or that you were away on deployment. She may have committed some minor or heinous act, but it was outside forces that forced her to do it, therefore she’s not responsible. In many cases she’ll make the leap that, hell, it wasn’t even really her.

The second part of this is her nature of validation seeking. We all are to some degree, but in the case of a woman, she is validation seeking in terms of her feelings. She needs to know she’s right about the way she feels. Look around you, and watch the women in your life. Their social networks are infused with emotional validation from “oh Betty didn’t invite me and she invited Donna and Claire? Does that mean she doesn’t like me anymore?” to “Why did she friend so-and-so on Facebook? She knows I think that she’s a bitch”. As men we may see the simple facts, maybe Betty didn’t invite her because she forgot, and maybe she friended so-and-so because their kids are on the same basketball team. At home she throws the classics at you like the age old “Does this make me look fat?” she knows her ass looks fat, but her hamsters trying to reason away why, It’s trying to justify it is ok to have a pumpkin spice latte every day and skip the gym. Her ability to move through the fabric of her social network is based on cohesion, so validation is a huge portion of that. It’s in her nature to constantly seek good social cohesion and she does this through validation. Women’s identity is based on their social network, and a crisis in the network is a crisis in the id.

The dark side of her social validation is when she feels bad. Noobs and bluepills often seek corrective action in fixing this “feelz”. She had a bad day at work, so you ask her what’s wrong. She hears “He’s asking so it must have been as bad as I thought”. You walked through the house with your work boots on and shitted up the place, so she flips out that you never care about the hard work she does. So you explain to her that you needed to grab something real quick to beat the return at the tool rental place and save $50 (not to mention the 2 grand your saving by not hiring someone). What she hears is you making excuses and she’s correct in feeling like you don’t care. It is true in a sense, as you don’t care about her feelings, you care about being right (validation seeking on your own behalf).

So back to the hero in this story, you have a wife who’s throwing a temper tantrum is the correct move to help her understand why she’s misbehaving or to isolate yourself and her by proxy? Our hero was right that she would need guidance for why her behavior was wrong. Just like we need to tell children to say please and thankyou society and relationships have rules of communication. The correct answer is still, isolate first.

If she’s throwing a huge tantrum and you hit her with “I will be glad to discuss this when you can talk like a grown adult” all you’ve done is feed her validation. You’ve spun the hamster faster, because in her eyes and in her emotions, she feels bad and it’s your fault. Remember she lacks culpability? To top it off, you’re talking down to her and reinforcing the reason she has all these feelz. A woman needs to feel, it’s in her basic nature. You need to be the oak in the storm, the rock in a sea of waves. By leaving the situation, you are playing on two things. First, you are denying her validation, that her feelings are justified. Second, you are communicating in a way she understands (covertly) that her social cohesion is at risk. It forces her to come to you as an overt communicator, and her to enter your frame. You can’t deny a woman her need for social cohesion, her need for emotion and ultimately he feelings, so don’t. Give her a good framework to operate within, and she will get relationship validation by nature of the positive experience you offer in an LTR. Women seek emotion, good or bad (often as a comfort test but that’s another discussion). So give her a framework where she only gets good from you.

Once she’s calmed down and realized that you’ve removed yourself, now is the opportunity for her to know, “I’m glad you calmed down. I could see that you were mad. Let’s talk”