Introduction, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3

This week I went more with "just do what he likes damn it!"

As I mentioned in conversation with various people who lent their opinions to this experiment, the prevailing feedback I got can be broadly summed up as so

1) There is no core RPW doctrine, just doing what he likes, whomever that he may be, and whatever that is.

2) Your guy is king of the beta, why is he not slamming your pussy?!

3) Red is generally for relationships in distress, why are you doing this to a relationship you describe as healthy?

4) Red being a mindset, this isn't going to work because it doesn't actually matter what you do compared with his and your beliefs.

5) This could destroy your relationship.

Note this was exclusively from red identified folks. I'd love to hear a discussion of any of those points.

I'm going to expand a bit on my motives, since I got asked a lot about this-

I didn't think this would work, but I also wanted to make an honest, good faith effort to be proven wrong. The logic I went with is that since I want happy relationship, if I was wrong about my beliefs, hence forth I would follow the new means of behaviour.

On the other hand, I also wanted to make people focus on doing rather than philosophy- being I have a general belief that you are what you do, but also because a red focused critique of blue relationship advice is that it generally focuses on an ideal without much actionable information. Thus the infamous "be attractive!" and "embrace equality, that's more important". Ergo it seems logical to put RPW under the same scrutiny.

Things I discovered:

In week 1 and 2, I followed with manuals and advice guides popular with RPW. I fit the profile described in Surrendered Wife - I am a controlling person, but found Care and Feeding of Husbands only applicable to making the best of a union for the sake of the kids. It just made me sad at the empty lives some people are required to live. During these weeks, at the advice off the books, I simply pulled back on my managing, cajoling, bossing, guiding, etc... Trying to listen to the advice meant stopping defining the situation for both of us and deciding the parameters as well as priorities.

Net result, he became frustrated and confused and I felt unloved. Obviously the relationship did not collapse into the sea just because of a little ripple- but I tried to report on this as faithfully as possible, as well as follow the advice from RP affiliated persons.

I was told to ease up on book advice and just look to his leadership. I was not being facetious when I said his leadership boiled down to squeezing my waist and going "naps!" Resolving the minor contretemps of the first two weeks meant talking about it.

Weeks 3 and 4 tried to make this more about what he wanted, but ran into a few problems.

1) Telepathy is not enabled. 99% of communication with Gentleman is filtered through intuition to read what he is actually feeling, rather than stoic man behaviour. This is a guy who is incredibly self aware and selective about self expression and known for being as private as Swiss banking client information. If I wasn't really good at selectively reading between the lines I'd still be single still.
2) Anything I say is effectively and order. He respects my opinion and trusts me such that he's quite happy to defer to most things I suggest. Basically the only way not to be the defacto boss of things is to never cite an opinion ever.

Of course I respect him- this was not something I walked into the experiment without. I specifically picked him out of any other options that presented themselves to me for male partners, including being single (my second best choice), as being the best if I wanted to translate time and effort into happiness.
So the effective advice not to do anything in advice books or texts or even discussed by RPW left me with "do what he wants". Which is about the same as "be attractive". It's true, but the main critique as a blue person I'm left with after this is that one can't necessarily say anything concrete about RPW behaviour as it is done in practice if it's all fungible. And if any of the broader theory can be discarded that makes it very hard to even define what RPW is. It's certainly not just any woman who wants to make her partner happy.
I don't want to make this another tedious "haha, but we are happy without Red!" post that tends to come up a lot- these generally don't provide much interesting discussion. But it basically did devolve to doing what made us happy more so than any doctrine.
My feedback-
Trying to live red for a month did not in any way make me more sexually desirable by his behaviour. He liked the smudgy panda eye goth look I affected- but not so much that it changed his overall perception of me.
I noticed he acts way happier when I just be bossy, overall. From my perspective I find that he wants me to do a lot of handling of his emotions, just more about discouraging and channeling certain things (eg feelings of guilt that I'm just so nice) and less about expecting him to intuit how I feel. He least likes it when I withdraw, although this is my natural response if I'm not feeling so good- and he generally finds it more puzzling than if I were the sort of person who devolved to hysteria- he's used to a lot of high drama women.
I think he both knows how to deal with unholy banshee shrieks and crockery flinging way more than being emotionally reserved, but he prefers peace and quiet, so for him it means I'm often enigmatic. Even though I am on the autism spectrum and he has no clinical diagnosis, I have an easier time figuring him out than the other way around.
In any case, I would catch a cold waiting for him to give me Gentleman focused instruction manual of his own volition. As such, much of my effort on us is figuring out what he actually wants.
Gentleman's feedback-
"I don't have non-specific feedback, without questions. I'm also steroid loaded from being ill, so asking me what I think will lead to 'everything is terrible' and having to talk about this without complete control over my emotional response makes me intensely uncomfortable."
He'll do his best to answer questions if anyone wants to ask him directly.
Self critique and biases

  • I'm blue. Of course oppositional ideology is a massive bias. I would like to think my posting history stands to my commitment to address things as more than making disapproving faces.
  • I'm an atypical woman. This might be true, but it generally runs against the idea that its no use looking for a particular set of behaviours in the wild, because women follow the same biological drives. Basically, unicorns.
  • This was more casual than rigorous. Not much can be done here. I'm one person.
  • Gentleman gave informed consent and thus his reactions may be subject to placebo effects or self report bias. Psychological experiments are supposed to be conducted with ethical oversight. I did track what he attributed to what and his feelings about the activity itself.

Conclusions I am unsatisfied with the answer that RPW is just doing whatever works, since I couldn't see in any way how this relates to gender. None of the concrete, specific advice did anything. The more abstract advice didn't seem to relate to anything.
Basically the hardest part of RPW is not that RPW teaches you to be a self annihilating Stepford wife, as the accusation is commonly leveled at it, but that RPW appears to be "women who find openly TRP tolerable" and even that is showing some gentle cracks as it moves into "not you whiny neckbeards, I mean my husband" for some of the sub's members.
Gentleman's conclusions stand- a lot of RPW stuff just sounds like vaguely nice people who want male dominated relationships. Only for me how 'male dominated' has been presented is stretched so far as to mean 'care about his happiness and value him'. Which feels like the standards I'd hold a pet to as much as a person.