The Real "Happily Ever After"

It’s rare that I run across anything Red Pill friendly over at HuffPo, but  the other day I came across a very telling post from a blogger, Martha Lyles.  She is essentially writing a letter to herself, from her modern perspective as a wife and mother and grandmother to the 20 year old woman she was, who was so excited about her Big Party.  Ironically, this was in the “Religion” section, not the “Women”, “Weddings” or “Divorce” sections (and note there is no “Men” section...and the Democrats wonder why more men don't vote for them...) It’s entitled “Letter To A Young Bride After 43 Years Of Marriage”, and it’s a wonderful retrospective on her marriage (as opposed to her “wedding”).

 I’ll let you read the whole thing – it’s quite poignant – but there is one quote I want to hone in on:

“...The same goes for being a wife. You'll marvel at Dick's unswerving commitment. You'll learn to put him first and -- believe it or not -- you'll delight in doing so. You'll see your role as his helpmate and cheerleader. You'll pack his bags for business trips, tucking love notes under ties. You'll view all the joys in your life as gifts from above, like the six wide-eyed, rosy-cheeked grandkids who clamor for your cookies and your kisses. And you'll sense, time and again, the grace conferred in your wedding Mass sustaining you as husband and wife.”

Religious sentiment aside for a moment, consider the perspective: “You’ll learn to put him first and – believe it or not – you’ll delight in doing so.”

This is not, as you might think, a “see, I toldya so!” about male dominance in a relationship.  This is a “see, I toldya so!” about how you don’t get divorced.

It's also a glimpse into the real, Red Pill reality of Happily Ever After (HEA), the romantic nirvana that inspires romance novels, mommy porn, and soap operas.

When you want to study how to do something, the two areas you focus on are “successes” (to establish a base-line metric) and “failures” (to determine how deviations from protocol derail successes).  Athol spent a considerable time in marriage forums preparing for his book, and if you have to then you can see how learning from other people's failures can be valuable for avoiding hasty divorce.  However, if you want to know how to keep your marriage going, it's a good idea to not just focus on the failures but spend some time looking at successes to inform your marital toolkit.

After all, what is a “successful marriage”?  Certainly, one in which you aren’t getting divorced has to be held as a basic standard.  That doesn’t mean that your marriage is a success if you aren’t divorced, it just means that it’s “failing”, not “failed”.

When women in their youth begin to form their True Love inspired Happily Ever After fantasy, it rarely includes things like packing suitcases for their husband’s business trips or struggling through childbirth alone while your husband is on deployment.  Or the ugly reality that is early childhood development.  For many modern young women, the idea of “having kids” is so abstract and glamorized and sanitized for them by our culture that they don't understand the level of involvement necessary to keep them from becoming willfully ignorant drains on society.



To young women today, it's as if children were a status symbol, not a new life, merely an option like a new car with leather interior, and not a life-long personal commitment.  They are allured by the feminist ideal of “equality” and "equal opportunity", which means that they see family and children (and eventual divorce and remarriage) as part of the expected checklist -- and their dedication to "equality" means they expect that whatever poor Beta chump they marry will handle all the details.  (Or, conversely, that she will marry well enough to have servants to care for them like her favorite celebs.)  "Happily Ever After" is a gauzy  vague cloud of ill-defined bliss that follows the Honeymoon to them, the natural and inevitable conclusion to "True Love".

But True Love, Red Pill style implies a host of boring, mundane, petty little compromises that do little to empower you as a woman or see you reach “your full potential” in the feminist sense.  I recently read another screed at HuffPo (not important enough to hunt down the quote) about how Michelle Obama shouldn’t have said “Being a Mother is my most important job”, because that put too much pressure on everyone to reproduce and emphasize their children over their career elements.   She offered instead “Being a Woman is my most important job”, with motherhood and relationships and such secondary to her solipsistic “all about me” perspective.  She didn’t even mention a husband, except as an annoyance that got in her way.  Motherhood, to feminism, is a bother, a needless distraction away from the self-indulgent achievement-based Matrix climb for fame, cash and prizes. 

And the term “wife” is anathema to feminists.  When a feminist reflexively uses the term, it’s almost apologetic.  “Husband” is often used with a proud sense of ownership, like she just got a great lease on a car, but a feminist woman rarely describes herself as a “wife” unless she’s in trouble.  And a feminist has very little, if any, ideological instruction on being a wife save how to end the practice.   Feminism celebrates divorce and punishes success when it comes to marriage.

Now, if you’re a long-term carousel rider with a fat trust fund, then sure, a string of wealthy ex-husbands while you assert your feminist privilege doesn’t hurt anyone but those poor chumps.  Such childless, often sexless unions in the UMC have been a social bloodsport for decades.  But once you start getting kids involved, shit gets real.  You aren’t just splitting up the CD collection when you divorce, you’re splitting up a family with people who depend on you, and that’s got jack to do with your self-important career goals.  The feminist approach to "family" in general is little better than their approach to "marriage".  Gentlemen, you are warned.

But back to the successes.  As I was saying, it’s important, if you want to avoid divorce, to study what goes right, as well as what goes wrong.  This wonderful article is by a woman with a 43 year track record willing to impart some cosmic wisdom on you, ladies.  Listen up.  This is what Happily Ever After looks like, not three ex-husbands and a lonely condo full of cats in Miami.

Feminists can often manage to get married . . . they can rarely manage to stay married.  And very, very few can be said to be in "happy" marriages (marriages in which both parties can consistently say that they are happy with the way things are going).  And part of the reason has nothing to do with ideology -- it's because they don’t know how to be married.  In attempting to re-write the social rules of marriage, feminism's built-in escape hatch made the effort to work on a marriage a lot harder than ending it.  Feminists can become brides pretty easily, thanks to the power of pussy.  They can just as easily become ex-wives, with a stroke of a pen.  They rarely become "wives" (under the Rectification of Names).  So for all of their vaunted empowerment, it seems that feminism insists that an empowered feminist woman can do ANYTHING . . . except be a good wife.

That, of course, fuels hypergamy and divorce and other crap, but the plain fact is that feminism has rejected the Happily Ever After in favor of the EPL divorce, and now we have a nation of women bellyaching that they STILL aren't happy, despite getting everything their heart desired for 40 years.  They want their Happily Ever After, but they aren't willing to do the work required.  And Happily Ever After requires a lot of work.  Just ask Martha Lyles.

This woman was a wife.  She had a husband.  She didn’t have a co-equal partner in her relationship, she had a captain of her ship to whom she was loyal and respectful.  She did things for him that a feminist considers demeaning: packed his suitcase, quit school, ended her career aspirations for his benefit, raised his children, cooked his meals.  She deferred to him in important ways, and often in unimportant ways, not because the custom or religious rite demanded it, but because that’s how successful marriages work.

She doesn't write about the sacrifices her husband may have made -- that's his story, not hers.  She doesn't write about how hard it was and how regretful she is of her missed opportunities.  She writes of the sacrifices of a woman in her marriage, but she also writes of the rewards.  The Happily Ever After.  Grandchildren, a big happy family, and a great husband she adores and looks up to.  And she doesn’t just mention he’s a “great husband”, she describes an important attribute of his greatness in his devotion and thoroughness in helping her fight cancer.  No mere domineering chauvinist is likely to do that.  He repaid her sacrifice and devotion with his loyalty and steadfastness, not merely providing practical support during her struggle, but being her unwavering rock to which she clung as she wrestled with her own mortality.


Any of your weak-willed Beta future ex- husbands going to do that, feminists?  Good luck.

The important thing to take away from this success story is simple: the author was not merely extolling the virtues of marriage, but she was demonstrating the necessary dedication to fulfilling Happily Ever After.

You don’t ever plan to get cancer in Happily Ever After.  But you do get a strong and resilient Prince Charming willing to stand over your wounded body with a sword, keeping the monsters at bay.  You don’t imagine that you’ll get piles of diapers and bills and bad report cards and problem children in Happily Ever After.  But you do get a strong, disciplined father to keep order and enforce policy among your children until they can do it on their own.  You might conceivably envision grandchildren in your Happily Ever After, sitting around rosy-cheeked and respectful of you.  But you probably don’t understand how to get to that point – and truly appreciate it – because you have to first raise your own brood to adulthood and steer them toward their own productive relationship before you get rosy-cheeked grandbabies.

 For those feminists who feel they can have a “co-equal partnership” with a man, while secretly exerting feminine privilege as a means of manipulating and controlling your husband until you lose all respect and desire for him, you are forever denied this Happily Ever After.  Because you refuse to do the work and be a wife to your husband.  You get the EPL version, in which you marry a billionaire after spending your ex-husband’s money on eating, praying, and loving.  Oh, and good luck with that billionaire – I hear there are simply scads of them around.

(Or was that cats?)

But it's not just a bust for single feminist career gals.  It works both ways.

For those men who have eschewed the possibility of marriage in the pursuit of a permanent ticket to the Puerarchy, letting your bad experiences and fear of rejection give you a rationalization why you shouldn’t be required to invest in a 50-50 shot at success, please believe me when I tell you sincerely that I appreciate your willingness to Go Your Own Way.  But you, too, are exempt from this Happily Ever After.  In truth, you may change your mind at some point, when you are older and your perspectives change.  Our sperm is viable into our 70s, and a mid-life family has a lot of advantages.  But if you are committed to being uncommitted to a woman, then expect a long, slow decline with fewer friends alive every year, until you are alone, babbling incoherently to robots in some distant future retirement community.


Marriage is by no means for everyone.  But it is not, as some would contend, not for anyone.  It’s a trade-off, an exchange of commitments and obligations and sacrifices and dedications and courtesies and fears and delights and secrets and trusts and weaknesses and power and – yes – financial considerations and sex, and if you are not prepared to indulge in that kind of personal commitment and dedication (and few 20 year olds of this generation are) then I encourage you to avoid the issue entirely.  Believe me, it will take the pressure off to not have to worry about marriage and family.

So put “Happily Ever After” away in your mind not as "mythical" but merely as forever out of reach.  Substitute some government-subsidized retirement plan at a tropical resort where you’ll expire on the golf course or in your sleep . . . alone.  Imagine a world in which you are by yourself at age 50 and the doctor mentions cancer and you realize that since your sister died you have no one in the world to call and talk to about it.  That’s the "swinging single" alternative to Happily Ever After.  When you’re writing up your last will and testament, and you realize that everything you own and collected and cared for will go to your niece in nephew who live in another state and who might pass you in the grocery store without recognizing you, that’s what you get when you’ve lost Happily Ever After.  The real Happily Ever After.

Because Happily Ever After doesn’t mean a blissful paradise of champagne and strawberries and anniversary dinners in four-star restaurants.  It doesn’t mean kinky hotel sex and romantic walks on the beach as a matter of course.  There are few diamonds in for-real HEA.  You want the truth?  Happily Ever After can be brutal, as anyone’s life can be brutal.  But Happily Ever After softens the brutality with a thick protective layer of humanity, wherein the love you pledged at the altar has grown between the two of you and expanded and transformed until it supports a web of such love that echoes across generations. 

When you’re surrounded by your wife and your children and their spouses, all deeply concerned about your well-being and quality of life when your body betrays you, that’s Happily Ever After.

When your sons, grown men all, and your grandsons drop everything in their busy lives to rush to your bedside and then spring into action to build a wheelchair ramp you didn’t think you’d need, that’s Happily Ever After.

When your daughter-in-law enlists the aid of experts and researches the furthest reaches of medical science on your behalf, motivated by love and pure, unadulterated respect for the only father she has left, that’s Happily Ever After.

When an entire community floods your house with calls assuring their support, based on their deep respect for who you are and what you’ve done to touch their lives, that’s Happily Ever After.

When your wife holds your hand and cries so you won’t have to when you tell the doctor to go ahead and take the leg, that’s Happily Ever After.

This month, Papa Ironwood got an up close and personal look at the stark nature of Happily Ever After . . . and compared to the alternative, he considers himself a very blessed man.  I think it made the decades of sacrifice and effort and toil to keep his marriage and his family a going concern worthwhile.  Whether or not you agree with him, well, let's just say that he's got the benefit of experience to support his position.

But then, he's always been wiser than the rest of us.  He wanted Happily Ever After . . . so he built it for his wife and kids, one hug, one kiss, one drop of sweat and one tear at a time.

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Alpha Move: Be Hungry Like The Wolf

I apologize in advance for all of the errors I'm going to make in this post -- I got three hours of sleep last night between landing at the airport from a long weekend in Las Vegas and getting up this morning to get the kids off to school.  And yes, I may very well be suffering through the tail end of a hangover.  It's certainly within the realm of possibility.

A long weekend in Las Vegas has the potential to be life-changing if you do it right, and while that sort of thing didn't happen this weekend, I did make several very intriguing field observations about Game in the wild, untamed, anything-goes erotic landscape of Las Vegas.  I like Las Vegas, if you can't tell.  It's like Disney for adults.  While they used to call it Sin City, I prefer the more accurate term the "City of Id".  If you've got a sexual itch to scratch, Las Vegas is like a premier buffet.  

But before I expound about my Single Game in Vegas observations, I want to cover the Married Game advantages to a weekend away in this most decadent of environments.  Some couples fear the idea of Vegas, too insecure in their relationship to be tempted by the fleshpots of Nevada.  Me, I just needed a vacation, and Mrs. Ironwood had a conference there, so we killed two birds and while she was being all noble and saving the world I was getting wasted around the clock and spending my kids' inheritance on penny slots and fruity rum drinks.

This was my third trip to the burgh, and after Mrs. I's conference was over and I was able to sober up enough to go and be social with her, we decided to blow off the closing  session for something a little more . . . intimate.  

"Intimate" in this case meant dirty dancing with my wife in front of a crowd of drunken strangers.

Look, everyone wants a hot sex weekend in Vegas, and as you get older your expectations for such events go up even as they become more infrequent.  And there was plenty of sex -- but that wasn't the draw for either of us.  We already have plenty of sex, thanks to the Red Pill.  But what is often missing from the lives of middle-aged married couples is that sense of excitement and intensity that may have faded over the years as you get used to each others' personal sexual idiosyncrasies.  The stuff that turns into hypergamy and/or infidelity if you aren't careful.  There is real danger in relationship ennui, and as Athol points out in yesterday's insightful post, you just can't count on a regular Date Night to keep things spicy and interesting.

But a drunken weekend in Vegas ...

We hit the buffet at Harrah's and pigged out, which did both of our stomachs good.  We were actually planning on heading over to the Erotic Museum, which I've planned on attending each of the three times I've been in Vegas and never quite making, and this time was no different.  We were even headed to the taxi stand to splurge on a cab there when we walked passed the open-air Carnaval bar at Harrah's and decided to stop inside for a smoke and get our bearings. We ended up staying there for over six hours.

The reason was the band.  Now, you can find every kind of entertainment known to man in Las Vegas, from transvestite lounge acts to comedy to acrobatics to a donkey show, if you know where to look.  The entertainment options are truly limitless.  But the mid-Sunday-afternoon band at the bar, an 80s tribute band called the Nancy Rayguns was free, enthusiastic, and actually quite good.  Throw in some drink specials, a flair bartender named Flippy, and a crowd of middle-aged Gen Xers who actually remember the songs that the band played, and you have one hell of a pink-and-teal acid-washed party.

But I had the nascent beginnings of a plan.  The point of this exercise wasn't merely to be entertained: it was to pay some very public attention to my wife in a way she would be reluctant to see if we weren't in the land of the 24 hour hooker, surrounded by a sea of Asian tourists and drunken old farts. The point was to show her that I'm still hungry.  Like the wolf.

I think that's a trap too many Blue Pill dudes fall into: once they are safely in a relationship, they forget the need to publicly express their desire for their woman.  Mrs. Ironwood and I went into that bar as a middle-aged husband and wife, and while that didn't change ostensibly, in actuality it was far more like a boyfriend taking out his girlfriend to a show than a husband and wife enjoying a quiet afternoon of entertainment.

Simply put, the moment I heard the first rockabilly strains of "Goody Two-Shoes", it was like it was 1987 all over again.  Sure, there was an element of nostalgia for my lost youth -- but it was far more a reminder of how far I've come in my life.  In 1987 I was overweight, underconfident, and mired in Blue Pill ideology that saw me get my heart handed to me by a series of women.  Hearing that band brought me back to my youth, sure.  Only this time I knew what the hell I was doing when it came to girls.  And I had conveniently packed my own.

So it was SHOWTIME for Ian.

Back when all of these songs came out, I had been stunted by insecurity and brow-beaten by the Blue Pill: it made me either a sullen wallflower or an over-the-top spaz when it came to girls.  It was the Age of AIDS and date rape seminars, the height of the cultural purge of masculinity the feminists waged throughout the Age of Teal.  I had been awkward, ugly, low-value, and sullenly embittered by the unfairness of it all and the hopelessness going forward.  You know, Teen Stuff.

Now . . . . not so much.  It took that nostalgic, painful flash of teenage angst associated with that music to make me appreciate just how far I have come.  The dude I was would never have dared to nuzzle a chick's neck in a public place without three pieces of signed and notarized documentation stating in advance that said neck-nuzzling was an acceptable and mutually consensual act agreed upon before hand that in no way obligated either party to any further activity not covered herein.

But now, I brazenly nibbled and more or less felt her up in an affectionate-and-socially-acceptable way in front of a crowd of drunken strangers.  I knew now what all of her Indicators of Interest were, and how I could arouse them through a combination of brazen cockiness and bold Alpha displays, especially in the social context of fellow adults engaged in similar pursuits.

I knew that the ragged strains of Joan Jett and the smooth crooning of Boy George, not to mention the naked , raw sexuality of Oates (sorry, Hall not so much) triggered a similar sexual nostalgia for her, taking her back to when sex revolved around cute boys and marrying someone rich and famous, not the titanic interpersonal struggle it evolved into as we matured.  I knew, without a shred of doubt or a hint of insecurity that I looked good, I was out with my chick, I could exhibit my social prowess through a series of increasingly-humorous and sexy displays, and, with a degree of certainty usually reserved for a cash transaction, that Ian would be getting lucky in Vegas that night.

The band played "Lets Get Physical" and I cavorted around Mrs. Ironwood's chair like a drunken teen, up to and including borderline obscene pelvic thrusts.  Then we had another drink and the time of our lives.  A drink later, I hit the jackpot.  They played Duran Duran's Hungry Like A Wolf.

Now, while I really didn't know Mrs. Ironwood back in the 1980s, I've picked up enough about her personal history to know which songs and performers elicit specific memories.  And I know for a fact that there has always been a certain damp spot in her panties for Duran Duran.  Something to do with a middle school crush, perhaps, I'm not sure of the details but based on memorabilia and previous response, Duran Duran -- Simon Le Bon, Nick Rhodes, John Taylor, Andy Taylor and Roger Taylor -- just does something to Mrs. I.  Live Duran Duran, after three rounds of fruity rum drinks and a free pour-in-your-mouth shot courtesy of Flippy the flair bartender, and I could only imagine what was going on in her libido.  And I knew just how to turn it up.

All the way to 11.

(It's like everyone else just goes to 10, but ...)

When Hungry Like The Wolf came on, I got up in front of everyone and started dancing with the two drunk chicks who were celebrating their 40th birthday and reliving their own nostalgic moments on the dance floor. Mrs. Ironwood giggled girlishly as I paid them some nasty (but tasteful) attention, and got some solid preselection points in return.  Then I went back to the table, grabbed her by the hand, and led her out on the dance floor.

Now, Mrs. I, as a rule, doesn't dance.  She's still recovering from breaking her heel and other foot injuries, so the entire trip revolved on her walking as little as possible.  But three drinks drunk, with her husband boyfriend insisting that he wanted her -- her and only her -- so much, so publicly, that he was willing to risk looking utterly ridiculous in an effort to impress her with his manly strutting.  But I owed it to her.

 No one puts Baby in a corner. 

So strut I did.  I pulled every 80s dance move but the Robot (even I have some pride) my tired old body could manage.  I put on my my my my my boogie shoes.  There was moonwalking involved.  There was more funky pelvic thrusting . . . and drop-to-your-knees grinding in a most indecent fashion, my face making scenic detours through her cleavage on both legs of the round trip.  There was gyrating and spins.  There was Footloose-style white people dancing.  I even attempted a half-split that didn't end too badly.

 I dragged Mrs. I out of her safe chair near the stage and into and out of my contortions on the dance floor, never loosing eye-contact, never letting my full intention waver from her and her alone.  There was macho struttery and arrogant posturing.  There was lurid movements and gratuitous crotch-grabbing.  I was on like Donkey Kong, putting it out there, working hard for the money.

And Mrs. Ironwood ate it up like Pop-Rocks.

That's when I went to 11.  I popped my collar.  Like The Outsiders. For real. And I meant it.

You could almost hear the gush, and not just from her.  The horny birthday girls (with mommy bobs -- sorry ladies, thank you for playing) were visibly envious.  The crowd, already watching my antics, went wild.  The band called it to everyone's attention.  Flippy flipped out.  I'm not great-looking, but comparatively speaking I was on the high side of the Sex Rank at that club, and I knew it.  I was one of only a handful of guys dancing, and by far the most flamboyant and arguably the most enthusiastic.  I worked it.  Dance-wise, I was AMOG.  

Me. Nerd Boy.  Damn.

In 1987 I never would have considered being that, in any venue.  In 1987 every glance at a woman was plagued with Betacized doubt and cowering fear.  Dance in public?  With women?  With a girlfriend?  Not me, man.  I'm not that dude.  I'm the nerd, over in the corner.

Now I'm the nerd at the center of attention.  I'm the nerd boldly going where I never would have dreamt I'd go.  I was a nerd with Game, and that made me mighty.

It also made Mrs. I terribly, terribly enchanted with my display.  For one brief shining moment, the kids, the house, the jobs, the career track, the money issues and all the responsibilities were gone, and it was just me showing my chick how badly I wanted her in front of the whole world, without pause or reservation (or, apparently, any sense of propriety).  Just me demonstrating how badly I wanted to do wicked things to her body and delight her soul.  How I was hungry like the alpha wolf I was.  The Red Pill kicked into Extended Release, and I commenced to do nasty things to her leg while I nibbled on her ear while the crowd cheered us on. We concluded the song with a heartfelt public kiss with tongue and my hand on her ass and everything, and we got a round of drunken applause from the crowd that I'd never have imagined I'd be getting back when leg warmers walked the earth..

Thanks to a timely royalty check, we'd been able to do Vegas without looking at our bank balance for once. Which meant I hemorrhaged money over four days.  I haven't even figured out how extravagant I was yet, because I'm afraid to total up the receipts.

But honestly, I don't care how much it cost, or how much energy I devoted to making the trip happen, dirty dancing with your wife girlfriend in a crowd of drunken strangers and making every woman there envy her your devotion and attention, that, Gentlemen, made it worth every fucking penny.  It was pure, primal Game. It slashed through years of accumulated bullshit and brought us back to the primal boy-meets-girl that got the whole thing started.  It was Game made manifest.

It's all right there in the 16 Commandments, Number 2 (Make Her Jealous), Number 6 (Keep Her Guessing -- no one expects a popped collar . . . until it's too late), Number 9 (Connect With Her Emotions), Number 11 (Be Irrationally Self-Confident -- I told you I went to 11), Number 12 (Maximize Your Strengths - goofiness and gratuitous displays of ego, check!) . . . and especially Number 13.

Ah, Number 13.  Always Err On The Side Of Too Much Boldness, Not Too Little.

Too often we married dudes forget that.  There's a timidity that can arise from long acquaintance, a mix of boredom and familiarity that needs to be regularly washed away like a bad stain on your Members Only jacket.   Blue Pill dudes don't get it at all -- it might as well still be 1987.  But as far as Married Game goes, this is a tricky but essential way of keeping your woman's interest high.  You must be bold.  You must find some way to reach beyond the mundanities of middle-age and grasp the essential testosterone-poisoned, horny-enough-to-screw-a-goat teenage libido and all the reckless abandon it represents . . . without doing something stupid like cheating on her.

You Must Boldly Go, if you want her loins to ache for you.  Show her, in public if need be.  Fuck propriety. Fuck mature wisdom.  Fuck middle age reserve. (And while you're at it, remember Number 14). Show her that you're still the same horny, groping teen you were back in the day.  Show her how she makes you throb, and do it unashamedly, without reservation.  That she's sweeter than wine.  Bust a move on her behalf.  Show her that you have that wolfy hunger that made you do awkwardly stupid things in your adolescence . . . but now you have the wit and wisdom to boldly display every nasty shred of Alpha in your aging body.  Show her that you're the MAN, and that she's damn lucky to have found you, and damn special for being the center of your personal universe.

And if you do it right, you'll never have to worry about Number 16.  Because you've got Game, son.  That's the key.  Game.  Understanding the complex interplay of heterosexual dynamics that leads to high-quality interpersonal and physical encounters with an ever-increasing level of satisfaction, and being able to play those emotional notes like a Moog synthesizer until she's practically begging to do simply nasty things to you once you get back to the hotel room.  Like a virgin . . . only not so much Madonna as whore.

The rest of the evening was eventful, but I'm going to stop the narrative here.  We made it back to the hotel after a few adventures -- Vegas is a hell of a town.  Once we recovered sufficiently, and we were far from prying eyes (they're watching you), I continued a display utilizing good old Number 14.  I don't need to relate the details here, for dramatic reasons.  Use your imagination.

Let's just say . . . I was hungry like the wolf.  And there are other things I've gotten much, much better at since 1987.

More later.  Must sleep soon.

Ian out.

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My Favorite MILF

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A Married Man's Courage

Athol Kay, author of Married Man's Sex Life Primer 2011 and How To Answer "Do These Pants Make My Ass Look Fat?" and other popular and profound utterings on the matter of Married Game and the Red Pill announced this weekend that he is about to quit his Day Job to focus full time on writing and being The Married Man.  That's a huge step for a new author, and deserving of note and praise.  Here's what I told him:

Congratulations, Athol. You’ve graduated.

When you commit to being an author of something — literally an authority — at first it feels fake, like someone is going to come in and bust you for pretending to be something you’re not. Often you have either vision or talent, but not both, and you barely understand your craft. Not a damn word you write seems worthy, and trying to attract attention to what you, yourself, feel is mediocre almost feels like fraud. After all, who the hell are you? Why should people pay attention to what you have to say?

But the difference between a pro and an amateur is more than whether or not you get paid. It’s whether you persevere, whether the potency of your vision or the abundance of your talent can push you beyond your own mediocrity, encourage you to perfect your craft, and whether or not your own passion can sustain you in times when it really seems like the whole world is just waiting for your next Big Fail. The Caucasian mountaineers having a saying: “Courage is hanging on for one moment more.” In every writer’s life you face moments where you stare at the screen and you have the very real choice of giving up or persevering, and it takes real, manly Courage to force yourself to go on when your Muse is off smoking pot with her friends somewhere and left you with a whiny baby.

Then . . . you don’t suck so much. People pay attention. You get fans. You get (!) money. You also get stalkers and tax issues and challenges you never dreamed of. But success breeds success, and it only takes a moment to glance at popular culture to realize just how low the bar for “success” is. Thanks to Kindle, you can make a living now without an agent and a publisher, and that’s everything. Pushing ahead while you’re successful, while you still have that Day Job to fall back on, that’s easy.

Jumping off of a cliff by quitting that Day Job and trusting in the Fates and your own native Will to carry you and your family to safety . . . that takes Courage. That takes balls.  That takes a Man. Not a guy, not a dude, not a Puerarch. When you are “going your own way” and you have no one but yourself to care about, that sort of thing is easy. When you are going your own way, Captain of your own ship, and you have three crew members who depend on your ability to keep it afloat and on course . . . that’s HARD. That’s a kind of courage a single man without children cannot know. It’s the kind of Wolf Alpha bad-ass move that makes Bull Alpha bullshit like running with the bulls or cliff jumping look like the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese’s.

You graduated, Athol. You have my respect and my admiration, but the truth is, you don’t really need it. You’ve grasped your life by the balls, and you are in control. And the truth is, only a few of us can really appreciate just what a profound act of courage and bravery it is to stand on the value of your own words for your bread and butter.

Well done, sir.

P.S.: Take all the time you need on the next one, Athol.  Remember that God is in the details . . . but also remember that no great works are ever finished, only abandoned.

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The Difference Between Leading And Dragging

A very revealing post over at MMSL ("Our House, Is A Very Very @#$%ing House")

inspired this.  The question concerned the all-too-common issue of a young couple in the early part of the "Oughts" investing in more house than they could afford.  

Essentially the wife presses for a bigger house and presents all sorts of compelling reasons why, and the husband relents under the pressure, Beta-outs, and five years later someone’s laid off and they’re fighting foreclosure.  This happened to millions of folks, and with a mortgage industry that was feverishly talking everyone into upgrading (appeal to the wife with a nicer house, appeal to the husband with a sound investment) it was very easy to let the Great Rationalization Hamster talk us into it.  Something like that happened to Athol.  Hell, it's happened to about half of the people I know.

I’m going to bat for Athol on this, because it seems in his particular case that the upgrade in question wasn’t too terribly unreasonable, the reasons were compelling, and the world looked a lot different eight years ago.  I give him tremendous credit.  When faced with a hard, stressful situation he handled it.  He doesn’t blame his wife for pushing for a better home.  She doesn’t blame him for not being a super-provider.  They handled it like grown-ups.  Together.  As Captain and First Officer of the same ship.

And that points out an essential difference between Single Game and Married Game.  In Single Game the focus is the acquisition of short-term sexual partners through using a bold Alpha presentation and being able to close and move on without serious entanglements.

But in Married Game, the goal is much different: to work in a high-sex functioning partnership that promotes the happiness and well-being of all involved.  That requires significant changes to Game.  For one thing, Beta becomes very important to the process.  But so does leadership. 

It’s one thing to lead a woman to drop her panties and squeal with delight.  It’s quite another to lead a woman through the morass of everyday life, the mountain of bureaucracy, budgeting, and financial worries that every adult in our modern society is heir to.  Single Game is focused on being the captain of your own little dinghy and letting a girl ride for a while.  Married Game means you’re the godsdamned CAPTAIN of the leaky-ass ship with a permanent crew that is utterly dependent on your ability to get shit done.

The difference will be recognized instantly by any married man – even if he shrinks from the responsibility and flakes out, letting his wife take control.  When you are the Captain of not just yourself but a whole crew, you not only have the authority to order and decide policy, you also have a personal responsibility for the safety and well-being of everyone in your crew, beginning with the First Officer.  This is the “burden of command” that is so prevalent in military literature.  Because the fact is, as Captain, when the ship hits an asteroid or the crew is unhappy regardless of whether or not it’s your fault it is still your responsibility.

The analogy is not inappropriate, when used to represent a marriage and a home.  The great R. Buckminster Fuller called houses “Machines for living in”, not unlike a space ship.  When you, as Captain, are deciding on whether or not to upgrade to a bigger ship, the needs and desires of the crew should be taken into account, of course.  But first the needs of the Mission need to be seen to.  And while you might be Captain and she the First Officer, the Red Pill reality is that the Mission is decided by consensus.

In my marriage both Mrs. Ironwood and I have busy, successful, interesting careers.  We’ve both devoted communal resources and made sacrifices on the basis of those careers.  But our careers are not the Mission.  The Mission is to successfully create three happy, hyper-capable, highly competent adult human beings who will successfully give us lots of grandchildren.  That’s the mutually-agreed Mission we both signed up for, and our careers are means to that end.  A sacrifice for a career or any other reason that has an effect on the Mission is a cause for suspension of the regular Captain/First Officer roles and mutual re-assessment of the Mission parameters.  Call it a Red Alert, if you want to be dramatic.

The ship (house) we currently have is vitally necessary to fulfilling the Mission, so when we went house-hunting when we discovered that Baby Ironwood #3 was coming, we very calmly and rationally had what could be termed (to torture the metaphor further) a “Mission Assessment”. 

We figured out how much we could afford to spend based on our jobs at the time.  We made a detailed list of requirements, desired amenities, and luxuries, as well as a list of deal-breakers.  And we made certain that neither one of us would push for a house the other did not find acceptable.  We listened to the glowing recommendations of the real estate people who pointed out just how much we could profit from buying and then selling in a few years (and their rosy figures were embarrassingly optimistic).  They gave us a number they told us we could afford.  We dropped it by a third and told them to look in that region.  Our requirements were far more important to the Mission than potential investment return.  We had to raise our kids there, for goddess’ sake, not fund our retirement. 

We lucked out and a friend of my mother-in-law’s who was an agent found us the perfect place, well within our price range, that fit 99% of what we wanted (no hot tub . . . yet): stately Ironwood Manor.  But the point of the story is that Mrs. Ironwood and I together agreed what the Mission would be, and then we pursued it together, as a team.  Had we been foolish or unfortunate enough to get in over our heads, we would have dealt with the consequences as a team – based entirely on what was best for the Mission.

Which brings me back to my title: there is a difference between Leading, as the Captain, and dragging your wife through your marriage.  Leadership is providing an ordered set of options for consideration, soliciting practical input, and then making a decisive policy choice that allows your First Officer and rest of the crew to cheerfully follow.

Dragging is when you make a decision with little or not consultation with your crew, you refuse to listen or take under consideration objections and concerns, and then forcing the issue past the point of dominance and to the level of dictate.  Dragging is when you see any resistance to your will as a Shit Test, and respond with stubborn authority.  And Dragging is when you refuse to acknowledge that you, as Captain, royally fucked up something important and refuse to deal with it.

There are times when such forceful tactics are helpful: earthquake, hurricane aftermath, fire, zombie apocalypse – but they are temporary assertions of absolute authority in an emergency situation.  When the Klingons are blasting away is no time to have a committee meeting on Mission Assessment.  But when you’re cruising along, day-to-day ship operations require a more artful hand.  Part of leadership is knowing when to relax and let your First Officer do what she needs to, and not get in her way as she does so.  You have to lead . . . and give your wife the time and room to follow.

Consider it in sexual terms: if you present an active Alpha presentation all the time, and keep stimulating your wife’s desire to have sex with you . . . but then you don’t give her time to respond before you pile on yet more Alpha, you will end up frustrating her.  Stimulus-response is a great thing, but you have to let her give the response before you give her more stimulus. 

And when you do make a mistake that imperils the Mission (say, buying more house than you can afford) then blaming the First Officer for a decision that you, as Captain, made is poor art and bad Red Pill practice.  She may have persuaded you to buy it, and you may have accepted her rationalizations for any number of reasons.  But it’s your name on the damn mortgage, and blaming her for the situation – even if she nearly bullied you into it – is no excuse for you trying to avoid the moral responsibilities of leadership. 

One of the reasons I so dearly love Mrs. Ironwood is that one of her favorite phrases is “It Is What It Is.”  I usually geekify the expression myself, saying Takada Na Gai (“it can’t be helped”, Japanese from the Red Mars trilogy.  Made my Nerd Roll!)  It’s her Red Pill mantra, an acknowledgment that blame and recriminations are inherently non-constructive, and that facing the realities of the situation is the only pragmatic and responsible course forward.  It’s a repudiation of her Rationalization Hamster.  It’s one of the things that makes her an outstanding First Officer, as well as an adept administrator, outstanding mother, and delightful wife. 

But it also means that she won’t let me get away with any bullshit, either.  While the Captain has a responsibility to set policy and then hold the First Officer to account, the First Officer has a responsibility to point out when the Captain has Really Fucked Up About Something Important, in a constructive way.  “Constructive” meaning without wholesale blame, without name-calling, without expressing anger (even when felt). 

“Constructive” also means offering suggestions for corrective action, agreeing that the problem is a mutual problem, and offering whatever support or resources possible to aid in that correction.  And “constructive” means, ideally, offering support by voicing confidence in the Captain’s leadership even in light of the Important Thing that got Fucked Up.  As in, “Honey, we’re screwed.  But I know that we’ll find our way out.  I have every confidence in you.”  That one phrase can do more to help the situation than a spontaneous blowjob.

Okay, perhaps I exaggerate . . .

To summarize, the Captain/First Officer dynamic is not a simple “Me Alpha, You Jane” play, like Single Game.  Married Game requires a more sophisticated application of Alpha and Beta, and in general a more complex tool kit than Single Game.  Both are Red Pill roads: they require an awareness of the realities of the situation and a willingness to take needed action, even when unpleasant.  But Married Game in its ideal form also requires you to work in concert with your wife as part of a team on the same Mission, leading, not dragging her through life.  And that takes patience, art, and humility as much as confidence, authority and discipline.

It's the difference between being Fred and Wilma . . . and Fred and Ginger.

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Anatomy of the Perfect Red Pill Date: Phase VIII Coda

Continued from Phase VII Sex And Stuff

Coda

It's all to simple to want to sit back and rest on your laurels after pulling off the perfect Red Pill date.  I mean, after buffing your SR through the roof and then spending several passionate hours enjoying the fruits of your labors may seem like sufficient recompense for your expense and time.  And if this was a one-night-stand or a booty call, you might be right.

But this is my wife -- the woman who will someday likely drive me to the doctor four times a week for treatment for whatever is going to kill me when I'm 80.  You can't pump and dump your wife -- it's poor form and reduces your SR.  Even just soaking up the vibe of fulfilled contentment, while alluring, isn't what you need to do the next morning.  When you're married, after all, the date is still going on.

I got up the next morning at a ridiculously early hour for a weekend, but I had a mission yet to accomplish.  With Mrs. Ironwood still snoring contentedly away, I snuck out to the kitchen and began making her breakfast in bed.

Aww, I can hear you saying, How trite, contrived and cliched!

Well, yeah.  But there's a reason it's trite, contrived, and cliched -- it works.  And as with so many things, it's really about how you do it.

I took our leftovers out of the fridge and began preparations.  First the coffee -- and for this morning I chose a recent Honduran coffee which won the SCAA's Golden Cup award.  Now you might prefer Duncan Donuts brew (It's not bad -- 100% Sumatran Organic) but I wanted something special, and I knew the man who roasted it, personally.  And while the coffee was brewing, I began an omelet.

Now, a lot of men are intimidated by the omelet, mostly because it is reputed to be a difficult and elaborate dish.  In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.  Omelets are easy, if you know a few secrets.

First, start with eggs as close to room temperature as possible, so get the eggs out BEFORE you make the coffee.  Then beat three eggs well with a wisk or fork in a bowl.  Add 1-2 tsps. of COLD WATER.  The rule goes, if you want eggs that are fluffy, add milk (protein).  If you want your eggs to coalesce and remain intact as you fold it around like you do with an omelet, you use cold water to thin the proportions of protein.  

Next, get out whatever you're going to stuff the omelet with.  This can be just about anything you like with eggs, but I wanted to reprise the night before, so I grabbed Mrs. I's leftover steak (the one with the Roquefort and balsamic vinegar glaze) and sliced it as thin as I could.  Then I sauteed it in a pan with some mushrooms, onions, a few jaunty asparagus tips, splashed in a tsp. of white wine to deglaze, and a 1/4 tsp of white truffle oil before I took it off the heat and set it aside.

NOTE: Truffle oil, white or black, is for my money the single easiest way to impart a mad amount of flavor to a savory dish without incurring a big fat/sugar penalty.  You'll spend about $10-$15 on a bottle, but you'll only use it occasionally and it should last you at least a year.  But the aroma and the flavor it adds to any dish is amazing.  I've put a few drops in plain Kraft Mac & Cheese to take to a function and had people RAVE about my incredibly wonderful fare.  Truffle oil is such a strong but delicate flavor it's hard to go wrong with it.

Now, to the omelet: Stir up your egg mixture a bit, put a saute pan or omelet pan on the stove on Med-High heat, and spray with a non-stick cooking spray, and as soon as it's hot, dump the egg mixture in and turn the heat to MED.  Then wait a few minutes.  You'll notice, of course, that the eggs around the sides get hard and cooked pretty quickly, but that there's a huge pool of liquid egg still in the center.  So you take your spatula and you gently pry-up the edges of the omelet as it cooks and allow that liquid to seep under the cooked egg, where it will cook and add itself to the omelet one layer at a time.  You continue doing this around the edge of the dish until there is almost no liquid left.  

Then you dump all of that stuff you sauteed earlier onto one side of the circular egg disc in the pan.  In my case it was really good steak, mushrooms, onions, and asparagus.  I also added about 2 oz. of chevre goat cheese -- it's like cream cheese only much, much better.  At this point, one side of your omelet should look like a pizza, kinda, and the other should be bare.  This is where you gently force your spatula under the empty side and flip it up over the top of all of the stuffing.  Let it cook a few moments while you're preparing to plate it up.

Getting an omelet out of the pan without destroying it's essentially sandwichy nature is actually pretty easy.  Instead of screwing around with a spatula in an effort to lift the entire thing to a plate intact, try inverting the plate over the pan with the folded omelet, then flipping both until the more-cooked side of the omelet is on the plate -- voila!

Now I could have stopped there, but I also had a half a cantaloupe and fresh strawberries.  I served the latter with a dollop of sour cream and sugar -- really, try it.  Add some whole wheat English Muffins and the coffee, and you've got a highly impressive breakfast in bed in about as much time as it takes to whip up some scrambled eggs.  

So I woke up Mrs. I the next morning with a steak-and-asparagus omelet, fresh fruit, and coffee.  Needless to say, I was greeted in heroic fashion.  I elected to sit with her while she ate (I rarely eat breakfast) and enjoy my truly exquisite coffee while we discussed the details of the previous evening.

Now, why did I bring her breakfast in bed when I already got my cookies?  Well, for one thing the goal was to inflate my SR and keep it inflated, and by re-engaging her the next morning I quickly kill any idea that I just wanted to get my cookies, and I did, in fact, have an incredibly good time going out with her.  

The other advantage to this is that its a great DHV if done properly and unexpectedly.  She knows I can cook and it's hard to impress her with that.  But taking dinner leftovers and re-inventing them as breakfast, that impressed her.  Enough to decide after breakfast (and an extended period in the bathroom) that she was ready for more cookies.

By Noon (yes, Noon -- Pagans don't usually make it to Church on Sunday) we were both thoroughly sated in body, mind, and spirit.  She managed to call four girlfriends, her sister and her mother while I was cleaning up the kitchen, informing them all of her incredible evening, and getting gasps of envy from her best friends.  Her single friends were incredibly jealous, but so were her married friends.  As a mutual friend of ours just mentioned yesterday, "Dude, you done fucked it up and raised the bar for every married man here!".

Preselection and Admiration Buffs: SR +4 (reaction of friends and relatives)

Alpha Wolf Buff: SR +1 (reaction of MY friends)

By treating her thus, I raised Mrs. Ironwood's personal status within her female peer group significantly.  While that group does include more ostensibly attractive women, as well as other women in relationships and plenty of single women, the fact that I a) romantically dated my wife b) spent a LOT of money on the date and c) was not hesitant in the slightest about bragging about it to my male friends (too often as men we feel discouraged about bragging about our romantic conquests, particularly if we are married and there is only one "land" you can legally conquer -- brag about your romantic prowess to your fellas in front of your wife and you get additional points for alphatude), nearly every woman in her group has to admit that her current relationship is not, in fact, that successfully romantic.  Which means I look that much better, and so does she.

But inflating her status and SR was one of the goals -- because as long as she feels good about the date and it meets with the approval of her female peers, then the likelihood she will respond positively to future sexual advances goes up significantly.  

IN CONCLUSION: The Hooker Math

Now, some of you might be literally shitting bricks over the idea of spending $500 on a date -- not a whole weekend, but one date.  It seems outrageously extravagant, and I'm sure you think I'm being a chumpish ATM about the whole thing.  But to use the venerable Athol Kay's concept of "hooker math" (dividing the number and types of sex with a woman by the amount of money you spent on her, adjusted to conform with the price list of the median price of said sex acts by local professionals for the same service), I stand behind my investment.  Because you can't just count one night into the occasion.

It has now been over two weeks since the Big Date.  But it is still paying dividends.

The weekend after, we ended up going to a semi-formal PTA auction, and reprised our outfits from the previous week.  We both looked hot, I in particular got some attention (we have more single mommies than single daddies at our elementary school) which added to my preselection buff, and it certainly helped Mrs. I's status with the other mommies by having me on her arm, and bragging about the previous week's date.  This brought back a complete reprise of the feelings of the previous weekend, and we spent another post-date evening rutting like crazed weasels.  And this time it cost me about $15 in drinks and the purchase of a custom-made hula hoop.

But wait, there's more . . . 

This past Saturday, we had yet another series of events.  First the Cub Scout Blue and Gold Banquet, and later that evening a friend's 40th birthday party.  Again we reprised the outfits, re-lived the date, and got all warm and fuzzy again.  Again I caught a lovely preselection and admiration buff.  And, yet again, there was a lot of sex involved, inspired by the date.

So as far as Hooker Math goes, after putting $500 into it, I essentially quintupled the value of my money.  So for an evening out I arguable got over $2500 worth of hot, steamy married-people sex and a wife who thinks the sun rises and sets in my ass.  It wasn't the money -- hell, that was one of the points of this exercise, to do a date without worrying about money.  It was the experience.  I wanted to do it, I made it happen, and I reaped the consequential rewards -- and continue to do so.

Factoring that into the equation . . . that was one of the best $500 I ever spent.

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