relationships

Hypergamy doesn’t care,..

Hypergamy doesn’t care how great a Father you are to your kids.

Hypergamy doesn’t care how you rearranged your college majors and career choice in life to better accommodate her.

Hypergamy doesn’t care how inspired or fulfilled you feel as a stay-at-home Dad.

Hypergamy doesn’t care that you moved across 4 states to be closer to your LDR.

Hypergamy doesn’t care how ‘supportive’ you’ve always been of her decisions or if you identify as a ‘male feminist’.

Hypergamy doesn’t care about the sincerity of your religious convictions or aspirations of high purpose.

Hypergamy doesn’t care about those words you said at your wedding.

Hypergamy doesn’t care about how you funded her going back to college to find a more rewarding career.

Hypergamy doesn’t care how great a guy you are for adopting the children she had with other men.

Hypergamy doesn’t care about your divine and forgiving nature in excusing her “youthful indiscretions.”

Hypergamy doesn’t care about your magnanimity in assuming responsibility for her student loans, and credit card debt after you’re married.

Hypergamy doesn’t care if “he was your best friend.”

Hypergamy doesn’t care about the coffee in bed you bring her or how great a cook you are.

Hypergamy doesn’t care about all those chick flicks you sat through with her and claimed to like.

Hypergamy doesn’t care about how well you do your part of the household chores.

Hypergamy doesn’t care about how much her family or friends like you.

Hypergamy doesn’t care if you think you’re a “Good” guy or about how convincing your argument is for your sense of honor.

Hypergamy doesn’t care whether the children are biologically yours or not.

Hypergamy doesn’t care if “she was drunk, he was cute, and one thing led to another,..”

Hypergamy doesn’t care how sweet, funny or intellectual you are.

Hypergamy doesn’t care if you “never saw it coming.”

 

Add your own, I’m sure there’s more,..

Relationship Game – Wife Sex

At the risk of leaning too far into the Athol Kay demographic, over the weekend I had some thoughts inspired by the Wife Porn thread that I thought were relevant.

It never ceases to amaze me how readily divorced women (and sometimes thrice divorced) are to dispense tips on the makings for a great marriage. Or more fascinating, to hear pussy-whipped husbands parrot these same lines. A divorced guy’s marriage advice is usually “just don’t get married.” So allow me to toss in my two cents here.

In all the years I’ve been counseling men I have yet to have a guy tell me he’s getting more sex now than when he was single or dating his wife, but sex isn’t the issue here – desire is the root of the problem.

As I’ve stated in many previous posts, properly motivated, women will move across the country, crawl under barbed wire and out a 2 story window to fuck a guy she has the genuine desire to fuck. This applies equally to your wife of 10 years. Before marriage women look for ways to get laid with a guy they want to marry, after marriage they look for ways to avoid it, but it’s desire that motivates it.

Chris Rock says it best when he goes into sex after marriage –

“If you like fucking, marriage aint for you. I haven’t fucked in 8 years. I’ve had ‘intercourse’, but I haven’t fucked since I got married. I haven’t had a blow job in 8 years. I’ve had ‘fellatio’ but I haven’t had my dick sucked in 8 years.”

This is the essence of desire after marriage; it generally becomes another chore to add to a woman’s to-do list. Get the kids to soccer practice, go get groceries, fuck her husband and fold the laundry. Add a fulltime job to that list and sleep becomes the new sex. But it’s not about being tired or overwhelmed, it’s about desire. My wife used to work a night shift and if she came in at 2am and woke me up telling me she felt like having sex, I could be in the deepest of REM sleep and wake up to knock it out with her and be ready to go for two, because I want to have sex with her. Women love to play the “but I really want to, I’m just not into it now” card to counter this, but as always, never forget it’s her behavior that defines intent, not her words. Remember, a woman will fuck; she might not fuck you, she might not fuck me, but she will fuck somebody. She just needs to be properly motivated.

Desire Levels

All of those preconditions she had for you to accept YOUR offer of marriage – a good job, be a good provider, a good listener, be funny, have status, being reliable, a good physique; all of that does nothing to increase her desire to have sex with you. The single, bachelor is concerned with Interest Levels, the married man should be concerned with Desire Levels.

So how do you prompt this Desire? How do you get a woman who knows every intimate detail about you for the past 10 years properly motivated to fuck you like she did when you were 20-something? Women will offer the Oprah-correct, “more romance!” and men will roll their eyes and murmur “more alcohol.” Put out of your head right now all of these feminine-correct notions that you need to “rekindle the fire” or find some gimmicky ritual that will lead you back to that desire she picked up from some article in Cosmo – I’ve gone down that road before. ‘Date Night’ is a band-aid for a symptom of a larger ill and this is a prolonged lack of Desire. There is nothing worse than going through the motions of a pre-planned, pre-scripted, ‘date-like-you-used-to-have’ only to have your wife lay on the bed like a dead fish. No amount of opportunity (which is what a date night is, scheduled opportunity) will lead to her wanting to have sex with you.

It’s not about frequency, it’s about quality. Frequency declines after marriage, it’s just logistics (especially after kids), but spontaneity doesn’t have to. Would your wife fuck you in the car like she did when you were dating? Would she be up for fucking in the great outdoors if you were hiking together somewhere? Would she be down for anything kinky that she hasn’t done before or in ages, or is it all just ‘vanilla’ sex now? Here’s a list of things you should do from a a man’s point of view:

Make her want it
If you’ve been married for years, she probably feels pretty secure with you and whatever degree of control she has in regards to regulating the flow of sex. Make her uncomfortable. As counterintuitive as it sounds, this is the single most important advantage you can take. Begin to incrementally take the power that her intimacy has had sway over you for the past 10 years back from her. When you were unmarried even the slightest bit of anxiety that she may be put off for another, better, prospect than herself prompted that desire to fuck you better than the others.

Most important though is to do this covertly. If you go popping off about how you’re taking your balls back and she’d better shape up or you’ll be looking for a woman who is into fucking you, you’re dead in the water. You have to imply with your attitude and behavior that something’s changed in you. The best principle to remember in marriage is that you will only get what you’ve gotten if you keep doing what you’ve done before.

The power of the ‘takeaway’
In one form or another PUAs use the takeaway to shape desired behavior. This is behavioral psychology 101, reinforce the behaviors you want and punish the ones you don’t, all the time remembering that too much reward leads to satiation and cessation of the desired behavior. Don’t buy your wife flowers in order to get her to fuck you, buy them AFTER she’s performed accordingly and to your satisfaction. So many married men I know (even in their 60s ) still attempt to purchase sex from their wives by ‘allowing’ them to buy expensive things thinking it will lead to ‘appreciation sex’. In reality it will invariably lead to negotiated, obligatory and desireless ‘debt sex’. Remember, the pool boy that your wife cheats on you for didn’t buy her a goddamn thing to make her want to fuck him.

Your attention is your best tool in this regard. One thing I tell AFCs is not to give away the farm on the first date and that women are by nature attention craving. When you give away your attention without her having to seek it devalues your attention. This is a paradox in marriage because it’s understood that she ‘should’ have 100% of your attention and over the years there is zero mystery about you. When you begin to take away attention she’s grown accustomed to she will seek it. And again you must do this covertly as she will respond to it covertly. You have to be sensitive to the adjustments she makes in her attention seeking, in conversation, in posture, in habit and behavior, because she wont overtly tell you “oh please pay attention to me.” This will add to her desire to have sex with you in order to reaffirm this attention. Sex then becomes a reinforcer for her in this attention seeking which you can then use to modify her behavior – in this case being genuine desire.

Other forms of the takeaway may include certain regularities she’s grown used to over the years that she takes for granted. One of these is a regular kiss. I used this to a great effect with my own wife. I would regularly come home from work and go kiss my wife as soon as I saw her, she became accustomed to this and after a few years I came to realize that I was like a puppy dog in this regard, immediately seeking affection as soon as I got home so I began to take this away. Eventually she covertly recognized this and began to greet me at the door with a kiss. She was prompted to desire that connection by a takeaway.

Stay in shape
Nothing kills married sex faster than one or both partners letting themselves go physically. Most married Mothers who do so love to use their pregnancies as justification for their lack of motivation and obesity. Arousal is the important component to desire. If your wife kept herself in bikini model shape after she’d been overweight your desire to fuck her would undoubtedly increase. The same applies to you. Every day I’m in the gym I see countless 30 and 40 somethings straining and training as if their lives depended on it. Actually their sex-lives depend on it. For far too long we’ve been taught that “it’s what’s on the inside that counts” and how wonderful inner beauty is. Funny how hard men and women will train once they’re divorced eh? The question is, what is it about their situation that would make them take care of themselves physically that they wouldn’t while married? Before the divorce, they never had the time or motivation, but now it seems they have plenty of both.

By staying in shape – and by that I mean better shape than your spouse if possible – you send a message, not only of confidence, but a covert understanding that she’ll have some veiled competition for your attention via social proof. Thus you not only create genuine desire by physical arousal, but you simultaneously create a psychology of desire by prompting her natural competitive impulses (i.e. Dread).

Dont drive drunk
“It provoketh the desire, but taketh away the perfomance.”

Alcohol is NOT an aphrodisiac. I know that sounds odd coming from a guy who’s worked in the liquor industry for 8 years, but it’s true.  Alcohol does lower inhibitions and perhaps disposes your wife to lovemaking. After years of experimentation I’ve perfected the ‘pantydropper’ – that magic formula of just enough alcohol to get her going, but not so much as to have her passed out over the toilet bowl. Still, sex is better sober and the obvious setback of whiskey-dick isn’t going to improve her already dubious desire to have sex in the first place. Understand the dynamics of her sexuality too. Strike while the iron’s hot and be sure to be up and ready to go at the peak of her menstrual cycle. I have my wife’s period down to a science now and I know that she’s physically ready to rock & roll her best by week 2. Catch her right after a good workout and after I’ve come back from lifting and that’s the benchmark for ‘real’ genuine sexual desire. You simply cannot inspire her to a standard of desire if one or both of you have a depressant in your bloodstream. If anything you want to accelerate blood flow not impede it.

Spontaneous combustion
Predictable is BORING. There’s nothing more predictable than sex with the same person you’ve been getting busy with for 10+ years. Oddly enough the spontaneity principle is exactly why garbage advice like ‘date night’ and “keeping it fresh” articles in Marie Claire sell magazines and don’t save marriages. All of these “freshen it up” ideas are predictable. For all of the wacky ideas you can come up with for ‘new’ sex, you’re still fucking the same old lady you married 10 years ago. You’ve got to be willing to push the envelope with her expectations of predictable sex.  Suggest it when she least expects it. Tell her to flash you her boobs or some other cheap thrill when the opportunity presents itself at the beach or somewhere semi-public. Creating a condition of desire doesn’t have to directly and immediately lead to intercourse. Ask her for a hummer in the parking lot before you go to dinner one night. Even the asking is arousing. And even if she turns you down you can still use her rejection to your advantage since it implies that, perhaps at some point in time, she (or some other girlfriend you had) used to do this because she wanted to (assume the sale). When you do proposition your wife make it seem as if it just popped into your head at that very moment. Again, think covert, not overt. Overt requires planning and planning = predictable and boring. Covert implies spontaneity.

The Cardinal Rule of Relationships 
In any relationship, whether romantic, personal, business or familial, the person with the most power is the one who needs the other the least.

This may sound Machievielan, but it holds true, especially in marriage. If you are wondering who has the great degree of control in your relationship the answer is always her. Just like a good DJ knows, she must come to you. If you are the PRIZE and she recognizes this, you will inspire genuine desire. Women don’t want to marry other women (with the obvious exceptions), they want to marry men and you have to man up and be a man to do so. So many married guys I know have walked their entire married lives on eggshells because they put their wives in a position of being the gatekeeper of his own sexuality. “She’s got the vagina man, I don’t wanna piss her off” is the mantra they repeat to them and themselves. This then flows over into other aspects of their lives and places a woman (often unwantedly so) into becoming the authority in the marriage. Just as in single life, if her intimacy is used as her agency to get a desired behavior from her husband that’s the value it has. When you can prove to her that her pussy is no longer a rewarding reinforcer for her desired behavior of you, you remove this agency and reset yourself on at least a partial footing of your prior bachelorhood.

As I stated, women don’t want to marry other women, neither do they want to marry themselves. In becoming accommodating for her by allowing her sexuality to dictate their behavior, men often see identifying with a woman as the best course of getting laid in marriage. And like in single life this ends up putting a man in a sort of married ‘friends zone’, with which a woman feels obligated to have sex occasionally. You’ve got to avoid these traps by maintaining a stubborn sense of your own identity and actively protect against identifying with her.

Wife Porn

I once had an interesting conversation with a married friend/counsel of mine that sort of opened my eyes to something that’s becoming an interesting trend which prompted me to come up with an experiment for the married and formerly married men who read my blog. It should also be educational to see how single guys (or those in LTRs) view this too. So rather than go into complete detail right now about the subject of our conversation allow me present two scenarios for your consideration. Bear in mind these are sexual fantasies and you could easily add details to them that might invalidate them, but the illustrations and guy’s (as well as women’s I suppose) perceptions are what I’m curious about:

Scenario #1
Suppose for the moment you are single, if you’re married now, with no attachments. You and a wing go off to a party to do a little cooperative sarging where you know a good number of attractive women will be present. After an hour and a half you successfully kiss close an HB9 and she’s definitely given you enough IOIs and AIs to know she’d be a great same night lay – the stuff of dreams. Picking up on this, you propose heading back to your place for whatever made up reason you can think of on the spot. On the drive to your place she is feeling you up and all but fucking you right in the car, maybe even giving you head a bit before you arrive. Once there, she strips down to a small bit of lingerie and proceeds to grind and tease you. She then removes everything but her stockings and heels, climbs on top of you and has her way with you, finishing you off with a mind blowing hummer.

Scenario #2
You’ve been married to your wife for five years (or longer). While at work she calls you one afternoon and tells you that if you’ll come home early she’ll “make it worth your while.” You happen to be freed up enough at work to take off early and head home. When you arrive, your wife is standing in the kitchen making spaghetti in nothing but a g-string, babydoll and a sexy bra. She has a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses set to one side and informs you that the children are at her mother’s for the evening. She’s still easily an HB 7 (closer to an 8 in the nightie) inspite of having kids, and her ass looks fantastic in the g-string. After a glass of wine she tells you how hard you’ve been working lately and it’s time she shows you some ‘appreciation’. She begins to give you head in the kitchen, after which you go down on her on the counter top. You take her standing up and she frantically claws your back before she drags you to the livingroom where she rides you in a frenzy rivaled only by the sex you remember having with her when you were both single .

I apologize for the graphics, but it’s necessary. If you’re a married or divorced guy consider these questions:

  1. Which scenario do you think is more likely to be actualized and why? In other word’s which is the more likely scenario to come true in reality?
  2. Which scenario would you rather participate in in reality? Why?
  3. Which scenario do you think would make for the best sexual experience?
  4. Has a woman ever seduced YOU whether single or by your wife?

Single guys can respond to this too since it’ll show a depth of experience, but married/divorced guys, think hard about this. You’re realtively anonymous here so be honest.

 

Now then, the reason I started this experiment is because the friend I had prompt me to this gave me a link to one of the fasest growing sexual fetish (if that’s the proper term) porn sites and this is, believe it or not, married sex. No, I don’t mean cheating housewives (that’s been done to death), but actual married sex between couples that is in fact well done and pretty hot. I wont post the link, but you can Google Housewives 1 on 1 or the like and see what I mean. In each fantasy scenario the husband’s wife (all porn star hot) seduces him with a combination of lingerie, dirty talking, and at least a pretty convincing display of actual desire/lust/passion for having sex with him. After watching the trailer videos I couldn’t help but think that the reason for this becoming such a popular genre of porn is due to an unbelievability that in all rights should be believable, if not desirable. How pathetic a statement is it to think that within all of our over eroticizing society that we should come full circle and have made hot, married sex into sexual niche fantasy?

The reason I proposed the two scenarios was to llustrate just the unbelievabilty of the 2nd one in comparison to the first. The 2nd one being a rough description of one of the vignettes from a particular ‘married fantasy sex’ site. I have a pretty good sex life with my wife, who still looks like a fitness model even after our daughter’s birth. That said I can tell you that nothing would shock me more than to have my wife even remotely concoct a sexual tryst with me like these. It’s not that I have a problem with our sex life, far from it, but it’s that it would rarely cross a married woman’s mind that she would want to seduce her husband.

The default female reponse to this is that it’s the burdens of married/family life that interfere with acting something like this out, or that the man should shoulder the responsibility for keeping married sex passionate. I have to then go back to my conversations with virtually every married man I’ve ever counseled telling me that they are almost universally the initiators of sex with their spouses and this is a point of contention between them. Their initiating – by way of doing all of the romantic preparations their wives tell them is necessary for them to “get in the mood”  – then ends up becoming the catalyst for one more form of stress, since it then conditions her to think that the very behaviors she described as being conducive to her becoming aroused are now associated with obligations of sex. Essentially negotiating sex by proxy. We have to remember that women communicate covertly and when she feels the need to overtly tell a man (what she thinks he ought to know anyway) how to turn her on, sex becomes predictable and routine; the opposite of spontaneous and exciting.

That as an aside, the intent of this was to illustrate that the reason this form of sexual fetish is exciting for married men in particular is that it is out of the ordinary and unbelievable, yet painfully ddesirable. These are hot fantasies because they seem to feel right, yet would rarely (if ever) cross a married woman’s mind that she would have a desire to seduce her husband and make special preparations to do so unexpectedly.

The Surrogate Boyfriend

From a soon-to-be-unplugged 30Darren from the SoSuave forum:

I made a big mistake and got involved with a coworker. We dated for a little about a year ago but it never went far. Never slept with her. We became close friends though. We would hang out, Go to movie, Get dinner go for drinks and just hang out. We always talked even late with text and everything. I liked her a lot and she seemed comfortable with me.

I guess i felt i always had a chance with her because when we hung out she always flirted with me and having sex with each other seemed to be the topic we most talked about. She even mentioned shooting a porno with me. I don’t know if it was just mind games or if she was serious. Right now i don’t know what i was thinking, i should of let actions speak louder than words. But i really felt for her so i grasped on anything that made me feel like she was interested in me. This went on for about 8 months.

We had up and downs. I’m not completely stupid, there were times where i was trying to leave her alone and let each other move on but then she would get this increased interest in me and id fall back in line. I would leave her alone when she would have her little flings but eventually she would gravitate towards me again.

This week was a crazy week though. We went out had she took something i said completely the wrong way. We decided to give each other space (which i did) but then she was all over again when i gave her no attention. She started telling everyone i was her best-friend and then when we went out for drinks with co-workers she started calling me her Man. I didn’t play into and give that too much attention because i felt it wasn’t real. Two days later she is completely ready to end it with me. Said she was blocking my number from her phone and to not expect to hear from her again. she said it was “time for her to spend energy talking to a guy she actually likes more than just friends and that she’s not attracted to me and cant force herself to be, good-bye”. Ill admit. That really hurt. So abrupt and harsh. And remember i work with her.. What am i to do and how do i act. Is it a power game or is this is.

Women have Girlfriends and Boyfriends. If you’re not fucking her, you’re her Girlfriend.

One of the more heinous crimes inflicted upon the men of Generation AFC is the curse of the Emotional Tampon. Hapless Betas being cast into the role of perpetually having to be “supportive” and emotionally available for a woman he’s enamored with all in an effort to prove himself the ideal boyfriend is an 80’s Brat Pack movie plot cliché now. Oh, if only she could see past the hot jock jerks and find the true love that’s been here all along,…swoon,…

Typically when I read classics like this it’s on the high school forum at SoSuave, and for good reason; usually all it takes is one or two passes at this experience for young men to come to an understanding that they’re being manipulated. As we progress through adolescence and into early adulthood (if all goes as it should) there are a series of valuable learning experiences that teach us (albeit harshly) a mature adult set of social skills. This is generally where I begin when I assess particular intergender situations – are the participants using an adolescent social skill set? Has some factor retarded this maturation (such as premature monogamy, or a stubborn clinging to Disneyesque ideals) into an adult social skill set?

What makes Darren’s situation interesting is the pseudo-relationship he’s entertained with this girl for 8 months. For all the shit slinging about Three Strikes or the sex never being worth the wait for a Wait for It girl, it amazes me how readily and willing a majority of Beta men will be to entertain a sexless, quasi-monogamy. I’d like to blame the girl for her playing along, but I can’t – she’s only doing what women do when they pursue their pluralistic mating strategy. Don’t blame the Doberman for eating the juicy steak. It’s Darren’s failure to consolidate, and consolidate early, on ratcheting up his sexual interest in the girl that’s the primary issue.

In addition, Darren still doesn’t want to acknowledge that he never had a relationship with her, instead wondering if her ‘abrupt'(?) rejection is some kind of power game, and hoping against hope that he can salvage a monogamy that only existed in his head. What his part really amounts to is a Buffer against the very real rejection he could potentially experience by putting himself out into the real world by spinning plates. The longer her perpetuates his pseudo-relationship, the longer he forestalls having to face potential rejection.

The Surrogate

Darren was playing surrogate boyfriend, voluntarily accepting and internalizing all of the responsibilities and accountabilities of being a woman’s exclusive, monogamous partner with no expectation of reciprocating intimacy or sexuality. It is the ideal situation for a woman in the same manner a Booty Call is for a man – all sex with no expectations of monogamy, commitment or emotional investment.

You essentially become a surrogate boyfriend for her – fulfilling all the emotional availability and security needs the Jerk isn’t providing with no expectation of reciprocating intimacy on her part.

How Cruel?

From the standpoint of a guy who’s aware he’s become a surrogate boyfriend, and those who can objectively see that he is, it seem incredibly manipulative and deliberate for a woman to put a guy whom she knows has a definite interest level for her into that role. I would argue that, more often than not, a woman doing so has done so repeatedly in the past so often that it becomes normalized for her.

Is she aware of it?

On some level of consciousness perhaps, but it’s comfortable for her to do so because she’s unable to have both her emotional / security needs paired with her physical needs in the same guy. So her coping mechanism is to entertain a Nice Guy (sometimes multiple Nice Guys) from whom she gets emotional support and a security response from, while wallowing in the physical rush and the resulting drama caused by the Jerk. I go into this splitting of needs in Schedules of Mating:

There are methods and social contrivances women have used for centuries to ensure that the best male’s genes are selected and secured with the best male provisioning she’s capable of attracting. Ideally the best Man should exemplify both, but rarely do the two exist in the same male (particularly these days) so in the interest of achieving her biological imperative, and prompted by an innate need for security, the feminine as a whole had to develop social conventions and methodologies (which change as her environment and personal conditions do) to effect this.

Maintaining a series of surrogate boyfriends is one of the most directly observable manifestations of women sexual pluralism.

Women get off on perfecting a gestalt boyfriend from both the Nice Guy and the Jerk, but relatively few are aware of it, and among those who are, even fewer will expressly admit to it. They’ll quite happily allow a surrogate to continue in his qualifying himself to her in his efforts to “be a good listener” and “be there for her” until such a time as he grows frustrated and he becomes a liability in his own right, or a liability to her Jerk sex / drama interest. The hot guy who uses her up and leaves her on the bed wanting more will always take precedence over the emotional surrogate because they’re so easily attracted and entertained.

That Damn Dog!

From my real-life friend Good Luck Chuck:

“Is it just me, or does anyone else get seriously annoyed with women and their dogs?

It’s NAUSEATING how they treat these annoying fucking overgrown rats.

Spend the night at a chicks house and even if she’s kind enough to close the bedroom door behind her leaving little Dolce in the living room inevitably every hour on the hour some leaves rustle outside the front door or the compressor on the fridge makes a noise and “killer” has to start yapping his little head off.

I was out with some friends tonite, one of them was a girl I dated a couple of times awhile back. Not like we didn’t have anything INTERESTING to talk about, but the conversation veers toward her new sh!tzu puppy. She’s SOOOO proud of her baby! He learned how to climb up AND down the stairs, and he’s now potty trained! YAY!

As if that weren’t enough, the blackberry comes out and we have to look at pictures of her adorable little “child”. Isn’t he cute with the little bow in his hair? AWWWWWW!!!!!

Christ…..these chicks wonder why they can’t find a man who will stick around? It isn’t bad enough that they want to be a MAN themselves in everyday life, but then they want to come home and play mommy to a 10 pound mop that has to be walked every few hours and leaves “surprises” on the floor every couple of weeks.

I was recently talking with a friend about the absoulte psychotic mess the girl I used to date in my 20’s, and I got to recalling some of the more annoying aspects of that miserable relationship. One of the most aggravating things I found myself wrapped up in was her obsession over this little Westhighland Terrier she had. I hated that fucking animal; and I don’t mean your garden variety hate, but the how Satan-hates-God kind of hate.

Even after 17 years of having put this mess well behind me, I still get a violent twitch in my eye whenever I see someone walking a dog like this.

Now you’re probably wondering why I have such contempt for this otherwise innocent and cute little breed of dog. It’s not that I dislike Westies per se, but it was her insane, psychotic devotion to this pet that she would lavish on it in preference to paying attention to me or even her friends at times.

When I was finishing my degree I did a bit of research to see if this phenomenon had a psychological parallel and interestingly enough it does. I got to thinking about all of the people I knew who gratuitiously and excessively spent inordinate amounts of time and money on the wellbeing of their pets. These were universally women – I can’t think of one unattached, single man I know who even has a dog, much less gets up early to drop it off at ‘doggie daycare’ on his way to work and picks it up on his way home. Neither do I know a man who would spend the kind of money ‘gourmet dog biscuits’ command from a store dedicated to nothing else, nor a guy who would buy ‘Frosty Paws’ dog ice cream treats, but I do know women who will. I know women who will spend $1,500 for their “little precious'” to spend a day at the doggie spa. I know women who will pamper and coddle thier pet even after it shits diarrea on the living room carpet and in the same breath berate their husbands for leaving the toilet seat up.

However it’s not just the degree to which some women will go in their devotion to their pets, it’s the indifference they display toward the human beings of importance in their lives, in preference to their pets, that crosses the line. There is a current field of study in this psychological transference of emotion to pets. Nothing terribly conclusive has been set in stone of course, but the theory goes something like this; People (mainly female) having a tendency to dote exhorbitantly over their pets also tend to eschew meaningful interactions with significant people in their lives. It goes on to say that the pet becomes a ‘self-proving’ device that enables the individual to internalize that they are capable of loving while minimizing their own reciprocation of affection to another human being.

In otherwords when she sits there with little Pookie and dotes over him rather than engaging you in even limited communication or affection it may be indicative of a more complex problem – a definite red flag to be sure. Of the examples of women’s behavior I used in this essay, all of them were in some unsatisfying relationship that they were uncomfortable discussing yet would do nothing about. However, when prompted with conversation about thier pets they were always very talkative.

So what does this mean to the Game-aware then? Beware. Part of an accomodating AFC nature is a disingenuous desire to identify with a woman in order to barter his identity for her intimacy. Nothing will bring a guy down faster than allowing this pet devotion dynamic to become a part of this identification.

*****

Disclaimer: I love dogs, I do not hate them. I own three purebred racing greyhounds and I foster and recondition retired and active track dogs. I do not dress them in stupid costumes, nor do they sleep on canopy beds. I have more respect for them than to subject them to that and they are expensive enough to keep healthy under normal circumstances. That is all.