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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It's Equilibrium, Not Equality, That Makes A Marriage Work

Q: It is well know that Mrs. Ironwood is smart, well educated, and well paid. So obviously she is not playing dumb or incompetent in an attempt to make her man feel important. It would be interesting to know what she does to "be the woman" and allow you to "be the man" (generalities, not details - lol). 

A: What an excellent question!

When I read this at Stately Ironwood Manor this morning over my usual coffee-and-cigarettes breakfast (most important meal of the day), I went ahead and read it aloud to Mrs. Ironwood, who has better sense about how to begin her day and was eating a ridiculously high-fiber cereal.

She considered.

“Mostly, I stay out of your way and let you do what you do.”

She elaborated – one of the things I love about her is her keen insight into masculine psychology.  Basically she told me that she recognizes that there are things that are inherently important to a man, and that when it comes to those issues (insofar as they do not negatively impact the over-all Mission), regardless of whether or not she thinks she knows a better way to do it, or a better approach, or whatever . . . she stays out of my way and lets me do those particular things my way.

It’s a struggle, sometimes, she continues.  But just as she feels sensitive to the fact that I’ve assumed many of the “traditional wifely responsibilities” like laundry, getting the kids ready for school, shopping and cooking, things that she feels judged about by her mother and the other women in her personal Matrix, she understands that I feel sensitive to the need to assert my masculinity in other ways.  Like working in porn and hanging pictures and spending my off-hours relentlessly trying to get into her pants.  

If expressing my masculinity involves her getting laid with the frequency of a truck stop hooker, then she's willing to take the hit for the team.  One of her girlfriends hasn't gotten laid in over a year.  Another has hit a rough patch in her relationship and has slowed to once a month.  Mrs. Ironwood implicitly understands just how dysfunctional that is for a relationship, so if accepting eager and willing cunnilingus a couple of times a week will help keep our marriage running smoothly, she'll gladly make the sacrifice.

She's such a trooper.

It was a fascinating discussion – we've covered some of this territory before, but it was interesting to see it like this.  We’re very aware of our mutual interdependence and how important it is to a well-functioning ship, but we rarely discuss it in those terms.  She makes more money.  I do more housecleaning.  Yet the social expectations of both issues put a lot of undue pressure on us from outside.  That alone is often enough to put strain on a couple.

However, one advantage that we have over many couples is the fact that we long-ago accepted the fact that while our relationship and our family was perfectly normal, it was also destined to be utterly unconventional.  Striving to fulfill outside expectations – in any direction – has the potential to detract from the efficiency of how well the ship runs, and could compromise the over-all Mission.  If outsiders see it as a challenge to my masculinity that I take my daughter to Girl Scouts and the only professional sport I follow avidly is Ice Dancing (long story), then I know thatit is their issue, not mine.  The Mission states that the important thing is the happiness and welfare of the children is the highest priority, and if that means I have to skip down Main Street in a blue satin evening dress in order to make it happen, then I can take the hit.  My masculinity is dependent upon successfully fulfilling the Mission requirements, not on living up to someone else’s expectations of how I do so.  And Mrs. Ironwood is the only person on the planet empowered to offer me unsolicited criticism about how I fulfill the Mission.  Understanding that difference has given me tremendous emotional freedom in how I run the household.

So we’re both willing to compromise about stuff . . . but we try like the dickens to make sure that we don’t have to.  Luckily, we both are on the same page so much of the time that our compromises usually seem minor and unimportant when they actually happen.  Chalk it up to good wife selection criteria and a long vetting period.

But one fundamental that we practice is always being willing to communicate, within the dictates of the Rules of Engagement.  And we have both accumulated enough of a store of trust in each other that when one of us does something the other sees as dicey, then we’re willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to each other, even if we’re pretty sure the other person is wrong.  I may know for a fact that what she’s doing is a mistake, but if I do not give her the freedom and autonomy to make and learn from mistakes (provided they don’t imperil the Mission) then I’m not leading properly.  

The same goes for me: if I’m indulging in a masculine fit of do-it-myself, say, fixing the porch or painting a fence, then Mrs. Ironwood has the brains to recognize that the important issue is not whether or not the fence gets painted, it’s that I am painting the fence as an expression of my masculine power to Order the household.  And because painting a fence is well within my capabilities.   She trusts me to do the job to the best of my ability, and then knows that the proper feminine response – regardless of the outcome – is to praise the effort, not the result.

Admittedly the praise is higher when I don’t fuck things up, but she never – NEVER – tells me “I told you so!” when things go wrong.  Indeed, even if I do fuck things up (it happens) she thanks me for my efforts and encourages me to think positively about it.  She doesn’t use my failed attempt as a crowbar to leverage in a subsequent relationship discussion.  

That’s a rare and special gift.  Some folks think that marriage means that both husband and wife can relax into a perpetual casual relationship in which the little things don’t matter because of the strength of your love, but any OMG will tell you the opposite is true.  Extending basic courtesy and politeness to your spouse is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to keeping the ship running properly.

Remember, Captain and First Officer are positions with a lot more ritual and protocol implicit in them than “wifey and hubby 2.0”.  Ignoring basic courtesy because you’ve happened to see your spouse busting a grumpy in the bathroom is foolish.  And ignoring her accomplishments and her efforts is twice as foolish.   Remember, the performance of the First Officer is in part contingent on (and is a reflection of) your abilities as a leader.  If that means calling out your spouse for praise more often than you probably would a casual acquaintance then remember that a) you likely did not exchange profound vows with a casual acquaintance and b) in most cases a casual acquaintance is unlikely to provide you with fellatio.

Mrs. Ironwood earns compliments from me every day – and note I said “earned” not “deserves”.  It doesn’t matter whether or not she deserves the compliment – the fact is, she is a superlative wife who earns the praise I give her, and I would be a stingy husband to withhold it.  And she reciprocates, often surprising me with “One of the reasons I love you is how you ….” at moments when I least suspect it.  This has the dual effect of increasing my attraction to her (we’re always more attracted to those who offer praise and respect toward us) and rewarding good behavior on my part.  The reward system works both ways, after all, and Mrs. Ironwood has learned how to work it to our mutual advantage.

Mrs. Ironwood also made this valuable point that I hadn’t considered:

“When you really are set on something and I think it’s a bad idea, and I’ve told you I think it’s a bad idea—”

“You let me do it anyway,” I finished, smugly.

“Well, not exactly,” she hedged, much to my surprise.  “Just as you have the masculine power of Ordering, I have the feminine power of Persuasion.  And in cases where I really think something is a bad idea, and you aren’t listening to my cogent and well-reasoned arguments, then I use my feminine wiles to distract you from the issue until you decide to do it my way.”

“Hey!  That’s not fair!” I protested.

“It’s perfectly fair,” she disagreed.  “Look, I respect your ability and willingness to be the leader of the household – I have too much leadership crap at work, the last thing I want is to be on the hook for the decisions that run the house.  And in most cases, yeah, I can let you do it your way, anyway, and I stay out of your way.

“But if you are dead-set on doing something utterly bone-headed, yet doesn’t imperil the Mission, then I feel well within my rights to distract you away from it and give you some perspective.”

“Distract me how?” I asked, a little alarmed.

“With sex,” she shrugged.  “And attention.  I get you focused on one of your other little tangents, or I ask you about work – back to sex again – or I take you to dinner, or I unload my work issues on you for advice, and you get so wrapped up in helping me out that you often forget about the thing you were going to fuck up in the first place.”

“And if I don’t?” I asked, warily.

“If sex doesn’t work to distract you,” she reasoned, “then that tells me that whatever it is Really Matters to you, and I can either let you go or get in your face about it.  But usually you’re open to being distracted.”

I frowned.  “Am I really that easy?”

She snorted.  “Why do you think I married you?”

There were plenty of potential responses to that, but I found myself going in an unexpected direction.  “So, does it bother you that our marriage isn’t based on the principal of equality?” I asked.

“Equality?” she asked, just as surprised.  “Look, it’s a marriage, not a suspension bridge.  We’re not two equally strong pillars both holding it up equally.  That’s a stupid metaphor.  Marriage is a fluid, plastic, constantly-changing thing, especially with kids involved.  Forget equality.  What we have is a teeter-totter.  A see-saw.  You’re at one end, I’m at the other.  The goal is equilibrium, not equality.  It’s not about what is fair to you, or fair to me.  It’s how we both can dance along the length of the lever in order to maintain equilibrium.”

“Explain,” I directed, intrigued.

“Look, if I’m having a shit-week – like this week, for instance,” she added.  “I’m so stressed out about work that I can’t even think about you and the kids, and that makes me feel like a bad wife and mother.

"But then I come home after bitching about it to you on the phone, and you have dinner cooked and laundry folded, it's like a Dido song.  That still makes me feel like a bad wife and mother, but I also feel so loved and supported that you adjusted your side of the see-saw to compensate for my shitty week, it makes me forget about what a shitty wife and mother I am and just drop to my knees in gratitude . . . like I have time for that.  And then next week, after I get my grades posted, I’ll re-adjust my position, spend a few evenings doing you like it’s prom night to show my appreciation and assuage my guilt, and we’ll be headed back into equilibrium.  You can’t do that trying to keep both people ‘equal’.  Someone’s always going to be up and someone’s always going to be down, but if both of us are trying for equilibrium in good faith, then we can appreciate the relationship better over time because we understand the process.”

“So to extend this metaphor,” I said, enthusiastically, “what happens if someone fails to adjust to compensate?”

“Then one of your asses is going to hit the ground with a decisive thud,” she replied, smoothly.  “That happens.  It’s happened to both of us, many times, in the last twenty years.  As long as the other person doesn’t get off the other side, you’re both cool.  But when you get off . . . well, it’s decisive thud time, only permanent.”

“So how have we avoided that, all these years?”

“You’re willing to dance on your end, I’m willing to dance on mind, and we’re both committed to the pursuit of equilibrium to affect the success of the Mission without being selfishly obsessed with equality.  It might not be as stable as ‘two pillars of equality’, but we sure have a hell of a lot more fun around the fulcrum than those couples stiffly holding up their relationship.  And then there’s the alternative . . .” she said, trailing off meaningfully.

“What alternative?”

“The thing that's really keeping me dancing on my end,” she confessed.  “Besides, y'know, true love and shit.  If one of us did step off, have you seen what’s available as replacement parts these days?  Jesus, I think I’d enter a convent before I’d start dating again.  No matter how bad you get – and you really don’t get bad,” she assured me, hurriedly, “don’t get me wrong, but no matter what a pain in my ass you are, you’re MY pain in the ass.  There’s a security in that that allows me a lot more emotional freedom than my friends.”  I was no good judge of that – that’s Matrix stuff – but I was willing to take her word for it.

“Seriously,” she continued, “half of my friends are obsessing about their lack of a boyfriend or husband, and the other half are bitching about their existing boyfriend or husband, and none of them are complaining that they aren’t being treated as an equal partner or they're getting laid too much.  I get asked all the time why I don’t bitch about you the way other women bitch about their husbands, and it really is because you don’t give me a reason to bitch.  In fact, I spent almost the entire conference talking about how great you are with the house, the kids, and me that I pissed off some people.”

I guess that’s a good thing.  “So you aren’t worried that I’m treating you like a slave, dominating the relationship, relegating you to second-class status, all that bullshit?”

She patted my knee warmly.  “Babe, my priorities are raising the kids well and keeping my family happy.  That includes you.  That’s where I find fulfillment.  Yes, I have a career -- everyone needs a J-O-B -- and I'm lucky enough to have married a man who was willing to put up with all of that school and abject povety so that you could let me make a career out of making the world a better place in a really crappy industry.  But you don’t let me make that my life.  You keep me grounded about what is truly important to me because you know me.  You get me.  And I so appreciate that about you.”  Awww!  More praise!  “So to answer your reader’s question, I’d say that I stay out of your way, let you be a man, and focus on my job as the woman in the relationship.  And I don’t let other people define for me what that is.  Not my mom.  Not my sister.  Not even you.”

Okay, I could accept that.  “And you persuade me with sex,” I added.  “When cogent and well-reasoned argument fails.”


“Right.  Do you feel threatened about that?  About me ‘using sex as a weapon’?” she asked, curious.

It was a fair question.  I mean, a lot of guys accuse women of that, and I’ve seen it employed thus over and over in other relationships.

“No,” I decided.  “Because you don’t use it as a weapon.  You use it as a tool of engagement.  When we have sex, it’s a non-verbal extension of our continuing intimate conversation.  Sometimes you use it to say ‘Honey, you’re wrong, you should see my point’.  I can handle that.  And sometimes you use it to say ‘Babe, you did a really good job – more of that, please!’ and I can handle that, too.”

“And sometimes I just want you to throw me down, rip off my clothes, and do me hard,” she reminded me.  “Just what do I have to do to persuade you to do that?”

The rest of the conversation would only be of interest to the voyeuristic and the aficionado, so I’ll leave it to your imagination.

But that’s her answer.  To misquote Star Trek, “The needs of the Family/Relationship outweigh the needs of the Spouse . . . but the Spouse’s needs are part of the needs of the family/relationship”.   We both have to dance along our side of the see-saw to keep the thing up in the air.  Every now and then we arrive at a point that’s not ‘equal’ . . . but it is equitable. We're striving for equilibrium with the understanding that we'll never quite reach it, and that's okay.

To this I will only add that Mrs. Ironwood does take care of her appearance, for work as much as for me, but she also doesn’t hesitate to doll up for date night and indulge in shameless PDAs in public. She is quite comfortable with her femininity – she knows she’s not winning any beauty contests, but that isn’t the point.  She dresses up to show respect for me, because a wife dresses up for her husband on date night.  She goes out of her way to ensure I get masculine down-time with my guy friends (I had to get her to stop calling them ‘play dates’ for the sake of my masculine dignity).

She treats me like her captain: with respect and honor and genuine loyalty.  She takes care of me, and acknowleges that that's part of her job description as much as fixing cars or cooking dinner is in mine.  She looks after my grooming and appearance, my skincare and whether or not my shoes are decent, and she tells me when I look hot enough to fuck.  And she doesn’t hesitate to show me off, use me as arm candy, and brag to her pals about just how lucky she is – whether I’m there or not.  

I understand part of that is just ‘marking her territory’, but, honestly, I find I don’t mind so much.

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Just A Little Bit.

"Inside every big fuzzy white boy, there's a little black woman screaming to get out."

That sounds like a loaded statement from six different directions, but in this context, it means something very specific.  Growing up in the South gives one a musical heritage unparalleled in other parts of the nation -- the South was the birthplace for the majority of American musical forms, from folk to jazz to blues to rock to gospel to country.  In different places the influence of a particular style of music can be powerful.  Where I grew up, the defining style wasn't rock (though Chapel Hill had an impressive Indy rock scene), it was Blues.  When I hit college I spent my drunk-and-happy moments crooning R&B standards in the back of a smoky bar.  When I made my fumbling early attempts at seduction, my signature move was to put on a John Lee Hooker CD, eschewing the usual Led Zepplin box set.

Of all my favorites to badly belt out, Aretha Franklin's Respect is one of my all-time favorites.  I don't sing it well, but get four beers in me and stand me in front of a karaoke mike, and you may weep and you may laugh, but you will never forget me singing.

I bring all of this up because Susan over at Hooking Up Smart has an outstanding post concerning the role of Respect in a man's life.  While the post itself is powerful, the comments are exquisite.  You want to know what a man really wants, ladies?  Read them, and you'll have their most sincere thoughts.  If we every want to reclaim masculinity, Respect has got to be on the short-list of must-haves.  For all the wounds feminists have dealt us, undermining our culture's willingness to respect masculinity and the men who wear it is amongst their most profound.

Respect.  Find out what it means to me.
Respect.
Just a little bit.

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