Why express your feelings?

I see advice repeated over and over again without clear justification for why we should behave this way. A classic example is the advice to express your feelings. I'm not saying this is bad advice. I suspect that there is something there but that we aren't given any compelling reasons for it.

Under pressure

I'll start with an example of really bad reasons. I've discussed this here before. In the 19th century and in the early part of the twentieth people often thought of the brain on analogy to a hydraulic system driven by steam power. They did that for the same reason that a lot of people imagine the brain working like a computer now. It was new technology and you could do some pretty amazing stuff with it.

One consequence of thinking that way is that pressure has to go somewhere. If your whole system is driven by steam power and you allow that steam power to keep building up it will eventually explode. If feelings drive our psychology the way steam drives a hydraulic system, then we need a pressure valve to blow off our feelings or else we'll explode.

The problem is that there is no evidence to support this. To the contrary, people who "depressurize" by blowing off their feelings actually get worse and worse at controlling them.

This bad thinking still lingers in the background when experts tells us that we should express our feelings.

Real, true, authentic?

Being in touch with your feelings will make you a better person as well as a better parent and partner. Being true to your emotions can’t help but make you feel better about yourself, for you’re able to be authentic.

That's Barton Goldsmith Ph.D. writing at Psychology Today. The old conclusion is still there—Goldsmith warns us not to "bury" are feelings because, he claims, bad things will happen when we do—he talks about "toxic energies", a concept that is more akin to the sort of pseudo science yoga instructors flog than anything someone with Ph.D should be talking about. Along with the old, bad argument, however, something new has slipped in.

Exactly what this new argument consists in is hard to decipher, not just for us but for Goldsmith himself.

When you express how you really feel (in an appropriate manner), problems get solved, relationship issues get resolved, and life is easier. In addition, you will like your life better because you’re not holding on to unhealed or confusing feelings.  

When you express how you REALLY feel. Okay. That makes a certain sense. You might say things that aren't true. Marie tells Aiden that she thinks he's a really sweet guy that she's sure someone will find attractive but she's not ready for a relationship right now when the truth is that she thinks he's a pathetic, spineless wimp. That's a good example of not expressing what you really feel except that, uh oh, it implicitly accepts that there might be good reasons to sometimes not express your feelings.

Goldsmith accepts this and argues there are times when feelings should not be expressed and that there are ways they should not be expressed. "The purpose of expressing your emotions is to convey your true feelings, and to be open and honest, not to embarrass or blast another human being."

And we're back to the idea of something "real" or "true" that is, well, where exactly? Inside us? Yes, apparently. Goldsmith writes about "what’s truly going on inside your head." Again, this is undefined. And what if these true feelings might hurt? It might well be that telling Aiden the truth will motivate him to change.

Oddly, Goldsmith also thinks that there good stuff and bad stuff going on inside your head that needs to be balanced. He argues that we need to get to be as good as expressing the good stuff as the bad. But if our feelings are what is "really" inside us, what difference does it make whether we express them or not? Are our feelings somehow invisible to us until we express them?

Actually, that sounds plausible to me although I doubt Goldsmith would agree. We use metaphors such as "what's really going on inside your head" but you can't look inside your head. Just try it if you don't believe me. All we have is thoughts and thoughts are just expressions. You can say "I feel sad" out loud or you can say it in your head just as you can read this sentence out loud or say it in your head. You can say it whether it's true or not.

If you take the time to read the whole article you'll find a confused jumble of ideas.

1. Feelings are natural things that spring up from some source inside me.
2. Expressing my sadness will help me get over it.
3. Learning to get as good at expressing positive feelings as negative ones will give us emotional balance.

The god inside me

A bad reason to express your feelings would be to manipulate other people into treating us in certain ways. No one else is responsible for your feelings. We could argue that we shouldn't hurt other people by saying things that will give them negative feelings and that is true in some cases. But it's not your job to make me happy when I'm feeling miserable.

Why do we even need to say this? Because of the assumption Goldsmith (and many others) operate on that feelings are natural, that sadness, joy, anger, relief, and so forth are things that just spring up inside us. Because they are natural, they can't be questioned. We can reasonably argue that people shouldn't shit in the kitchen but not that they shouldn't shit at all. The same logic has to apply to negative emotions if they are natural. That said, unless you did something to directly cause someone else's anger or pain, you aren't responsible to do anything about them and you have a right to expect them to only express these feelings in appropriate ways at appropriate times.

At the same time, expressing feelings is a huge part of what we human beings do.

I could go on circling like this for ever so I'll get off the merry-go-round. There is no natural source of feelings inside me. Every feeling entails a judgment, a judgment not about what is inside me but what is outside me.

Let's go back to Marie and Aiden. Why does she not tell him the real reason she doesn't want to enter into some sort of sexual relationship with him? There are a number of possibilities.

• She doesn't want to hurt him and she believes he is easily hurt.
• She thinks he should stop being such a wimp but she doesn't think he'd listen to her.
• She thinks he should stop being such a wimp but thinks it is up to him to figure this out for himself.
• She just wants to get away from him and this cringe-making conversation as fast as possible so she is brushing him off.

Marie need not be aware of which of these apply as she refuses Aiden. Anyone one of them or, indeed, all of them may apply. Or there may be some other reason such as that she'd actually settle for Aiden because she just wants sex right now but she's convinced a better option will be available at the party tonight if she can ditch Aiden now. The point is that the real reason is not something inside her but a choice she is going to have to make and live with.

And if that's rue, and I think it is, the key lesson about feelings is not to express them but to actually have them.

Mother's Day Special: Life will continue to hit you in the face but mommy won't always be there.

People I like and admire keep sharing well-meaning but dubious stuff on Facebook. To be blunt, my friend Lisa should probably have stopped herself as soon as she saw that the site she was sharing from is called "popsugar". She didn't for the simple reason that the site appeared to be backing up a view she already held. I'm not exactly immune to that weakness myself so I can't be too harsh with her. The article she shared is another matter.

Here is the argument.

This notion that boys can never hurt, that they can never feel, is so damaging to them long term. The belief that any signs or gestures of affection will somehow decrease their manhood — this pressure to always 'man up' follows them into adulthood where they struggle to fully experience the broad scope of love and affection. The only emotion they healthily learn to express is happiness and then we wonder why they are always chasing it.

Are boys actually taught this? The complaint is often made but I've yet to see much in the way of empirical evidence to back it up. But that's an argument for another day. What I want to do today is to apply one of my favourite analytic techniques to the text. That is to ask what actually happens. Let's strip away the analysis above and focus instead on what this mother tells us about what happened and what she did.

She was watching her 8-year-old play basketball and he got hit in the face. Here is what happens next.

I saw his eyes widen and then squint from the pain - he looked around trying to focus. I knew he was looking for me.

She knew he was looking for her! The article is ostensibly about what boys need but it's really about what this particular mommy needed.

Let's rewrite those two sentences without the narcissism.

His eyes widened and then he squinted from the pain—he looked around. I wanted to be close to him.

That may still not be accurate. I'm highly dubious that anyone would or could read and remember the exact facial expressions that way.

Here, according to her Facebook page, is what happened next.

"Max got hit in the face", I said to my husband as I instinctively jumped up from the bleachers. In that moment, I saw Max start to run around the court in my direction as the silent cry began. He couldn't catch his breath. My feet couldn't move fast enough. As soon as we connected, I got down on one knee. "Catch your breath buddy." He tilted his head back. "Max, breath. It's okay." He finally took a breath, and I wrapped my arms around him as he cried into my shoulder. A voice came from behind me - "You need to stop babying that kid."

Notice that it's (literally) all about her and what a great, loving mother she is up until the moment someone says something. And we might wonder about who says it and why. It's possible that this person is a complete stranger who spoke this comment in response to an isolated incident.  It's also possible that she's done this sort of thing before and that he was reacting to a pattern of behaviour.

The most important thing is this: no one, at any time in the incident as she describes it, told her or told her boy that boys aren't allowed to have feelings or that they aren't allowed to express them. All that was suggested here is that mommy needs to stop running to her child every time he gets hurt so he can learn to deal with it himself.

In the long run, this boy is going to start to hate his mother because she always has to be the centre of attention. He's also going to figure out that she is liar. Let's hope that he also learns how to deal with pain and embarrassment despite her.

Good advice: extract the greatest experience

Your goal is to extract the greatest experience of flavor from the rum, so don't be in a rush to decide whether you "like" a particular rum or not. Suspend judgment for as long as you can. The minute you decide that you "like" the rum (or not) you stop noticing the rum and start paying attention to your judgment. Your evaluation gets in the way of your perception and tasting is a game of sharpening perception. (from A Short Course in Rum by Lynn Hoffman)

That advice can be applied to a far-wider range of experiences than just tasting rum. I don't think you'd quite want to generalize it for reasons that most adults should be able to figure out for themselves.

But one thing I think we should do is to apply it to a lot of moral judgments about experiences. There is a tendency to make judgments about the moral worth of some activities very early in the game and, when we do that, we stop noticing the activity and pay attention to our moral judgment to our detriment.

Good Advice: peace or chaos?

I got this one from Waller Newell in his book The Code of Man.

It's really a question but it's a very important question to ask yourself: What is the natural state of human life? Is it peace or is it chaos?

If you think it's peace, then you'll be inclined to blame all evil on human action. You'll be inclined to believe that things would be just fine if people didn't keep messing them up. If you think it's chaos, you'll be inclined to think that it is only constant human effort that creates and maintains order.

These two views are not moral outputs. That is to say, they don't come about because of moral reasoning. They are, instead, assumptions that moral arguments are built on.

Many of us start of believing in the former. I'm not entirely sure why. Part of the answer is our mothers. Our mothers want us to behave so they convince us that our peace and happiness depend on our cooperating with them. If we don't upset mummy, we can have a trouble-free life.  Eventually, this gets expanded to include the belief that we can have a trouble-free life only if other people don't upset mummy either.

We also get a lot of it from popular culture. Star Trek's prime directive being a classic example. You'd also see it in the cynicism of M*A*S*H which had us believe that a couple on uncommitted layabouts could do more good by doing less evil. Both shows reveal that it doesn't really work by cheating all over the place. On Star Trek the prime directive is little more than a plot complication hauled forth when useful much like Captain Renault shutting down Rick's place for gambling. On M*A*S*H, the cheat was that the two cynical layabouts just happen to be brilliant surgeons who can rush in and save lives whenever it might otherwise become obvious that the whole show is a fantasy for men who never want to grow up. (If you read the books it was based on, BTW, you'll see that is exactly what it was to begin with.)

By now, you're probably thinking that you can guess how I'd answer the question and you're right. But go ahead and answer it for yourself—I'm sure you're mature enough not to be influenced by my thinking. (Once you have your answer, think about political theories and ask yourself which side they fit on. Some are obvious: Locke, Marx and Rawls are obviously on the peace side. Plato, Aristotle and Machiavelli are obviously on the chaos side. But what of Hobbes? At first he seems obviously to be on the chaos side but his solution to his own problem seems so easy that I suspect he really was a peace man.

Good advice: Blow up your relationship with your mother

The word "idolatry" conjures up images of funny little carvings of misshapen gods from distant, exotic places like Africa, India or the Pacific Islands. In truth, idolatry is something far closer to home. It looks like this:

Okay, Suzanne Somers is a twinkie who believes some utterly crazy shit so who cares that she decided to share this sentimental crap? Well, a lot of people apparently. Someone I know shared that on Facebook on the anniversary of her mother's death. She's in her eighties and she thinks of her mother as some sort of pantheistic presence.

That isn't healthy. It's a refusal to grow up.

I've spent a lot of time on this blog castigating those who give bad moral advice and not enough on the good advice. Today, I'm going to begin what I hope will be an ongoing series highlighting some of the good advice I've found out there. Beginning with this gem: Blow up your relationship with your and get one step closer to being the man you want to be.

That's good advice even if your mother is dead.

The advice they give: "It has an uneven, thick trunk with roots bulging out of it like strained veins."

I think Salon must be in trouble. Its page has become more and more embarrassing. The descriptions of the articles have become more lurid than the tabloids. The articles, like tabloid articles, are much less lurid than the teasers. The articles in tabloids, however, are at least about what the teaser says they are about even if the truth is disappointing. Salon articles almost inevitably turn out to be about the pathetic inadequacies of the people who wrote them.

The quote in the header above is from a piece in which a woman describes her experiences with a male sex surrogate. Good, trashy stuff. Any tabloid writer in the world could do something with it. Salon's writer cannot.

But indulge yourself. Don't read the original piece. Just read the bit I've quoted in the header. Where do you think that would fit into an article about a sexually inexperienced woman in her 40s visiting a sex surrogate and finding the experience physically thrilling and emotionally threatening?

Now read the actual context:

A. met me at the clinic, which is located on a quiet city side street. Most people walking past the clinic have no idea it is an oasis for the likes of me, because from the outside it looks like a law firm, or a dentist’s office. There is a huge, old ficus tree right in front of the entrance. It has an uneven, thick trunk with roots bulging out of it like strained veins.

From there, she talks about the woman who runs the clinic. She just drops this obviously sexual image into the text the way Homer Simpson drops radioactive material, utterly unaware of the power and potential in her own words. Did she not realize what she was doing when she wrote that description? It's possible. She wrote it after the sex, and she says she has had very little sex. She gets closer to describing what sex is actually about in that one sentence than anything else she writes. I'd judge her sex therapy a waste of time and money because all she seems to have learned is how to be evasive about her own experiences. 

If you want to make your own judgment, the piece is here.

Friday round up

1. The lonely lives of scientists*

There is a study that says FaceBook may (weaselly language alert) make women feel bad about their bodies.

Most spent about 80 minutes on Facebook every day. The most popular activities were reading the news feed and looking at photos, according to the study. 

Spending more time on Facebook was linked to a significantly greater likelihood that a woman would feel bad about her own body, the study revealed. It also was tied to greater odds that she would compare herself to others. 

That was especially true if she felt like she needed to lose weight, the researchers noted.

Unless, of course, the causality runs the other way. 

This should be obvious enough even for a scientist to figure out. FaceBook is the sort of thing that would appeal to women who already feel bad about their bodies; they can interact without actually being physically present to others. 

* I stole that headline from James Taranto

2. The advice they give

Slate's Dear Prudie column handles the case of a man who is asking his wife for a paternity test for an as-yet-unborn child. The advice Emily Yoffe, who writes the column, gives would certainly be good advice if the facts as are as reported. The problem is that we can't know that; we only have one side of the story.

Yoffe has a disturbing tendency to almost always take a woman's account of her relationship as true. It could be, as this woman claims, that there is no good reason to ask for a paternity test. Then again, who knows.

I'll tell you what would worry me in this case: this woman seems to really, really want a child. The man may be thinking that she really wants this child more than she really wants him. He may, as she claims, have no reason to suspect infidelity but he may also have noticed a significant change in her attitude towards him since the positive pregnancy test. It may be that the child is his but he suddenly feels pushed away. The woman asking the question tells us that this is the first serious relationship for her husband and it has led to marriage and children. If you were this guy, you might just be asking yourself how you got so far so fast given a previous track record like that. He probably hasn't thought things through but he has a sense that something isn't right and he started to fear this one thing because it's better to have a name to put to your problem than to be feeling scared of something vague and indefinable.

3. Identity theft?

The most fantastic element of the saga — the fact that Don stole the identity of a wealthier, more accomplished dead man during the Korean War and has lived it ever since — is there because it’s central to the series’ theme: that the American advertising industry is dynamic, but fake and inauthentic,because much of American society is just the same.

That is one of the 956,000 results that Google gives for the search string, "Don Draper stolen identity". The assumption that Draper stole his identity is widespread. It's not a claim that he stole his identity for it is made with far too much certainty to be anything but an assumption; the people who say this don't think they need to argue the point; it is as obvious to them as the fact that Don Draper has black hair.

I don't think it's true. At the very least, true identity theft means taking something that is someone else's and Dick takes almost nothing more than a name from Donald Draper and, except in cases of copyright, to take the same name as someone else in no way robs them of the full use of it.

The real Donald Draper was an engineer. Dick Whitman didn't set out to become him. He didn't set out to pass himself off as the other Don Draper. He didn't write cheques against the other guy's account, didn't apply for jobs on the basis of the other guy's record. Dick Whitman used Don Draper's name along with his serial number to apply for a driver's license and then went to work as a used car salesman.

I think Esther Perel, whom I wrote a post about a few weeks ago, describes perfectly what happened in the transition from Dick to Don when she described why people have affairs:

Very often we don’t go elsewhere because we are looking for another person. We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self. It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become.

When Don tells Anna Draper that he wants to get married, he suggests that she should meet Betty. She brushes the idea off. He wants to take care of her, says he owes her "this whole life". She tells him he'll have a family and that it will be good for him, "this is a chance at a whole new life".

4. Toxic Shame

One of the most popular explanations of why people behave like Don Draper behave the way they do is "toxic shame".

Toxic shame, according to the theory, derives from childhood fear of abandonment. Your parents didn't meet your needs and you blamed yourself. You convinced yourself that the way to please them was to appear to not have needs. This habit carries on into adulthood. These bad habits cause us to interact with others in ways that are ineffective.

I can't make up my mind about it. Part of it seems absolutely correct. I see my own bad habits match the theory. On the other hand, there have been long periods of my life when I have avoided these bad habits. I wonder if the problem is not that we have these childhood behaviour patterns but that a serious crisis of confidence can cause us to revert to them.

5. Me too!

Wish I'd written this:

“Mr. Campbell, who cares?” is one of my favorite moments of the show and maybe even of TV history. There’s so much about it that’s brilliant, from the way that it instantly subverts a seemingly very important plot point to the way it cuts to the quick of every thematic point the first season has been building. We’ve been trained for so long by television to look at these sorts of big, character-defining mysteries as the only things that matter, and on most shows, the revelation of Don’s true identity would have had serious, world-shattering consequences. Here, it’s just a thing that Bert ultimately doesn’t give a shit about. For the most part, nobody is ever as interested in us as we are in ourselves, and that’s a hard lesson to learn. Pete expects Bert Cooper to behave like a character in a story who really cares about the protagonist’s big secret; Bert Cooper is just a man who’s old enough to know everybody has secrets.

Read the whole thing. 

The author of the above piece makes the very good point that one of the bad story-telling habits of our time is to make everything hinge on the big revelation. This reflects a popular psychology that says that getting the truth out will make it possible to progress. Having everything build up to this moment only to have nothing change is more like what actually happens in life.

The advice they give: Affair-proof your marriage/relationship in eleven steps

You have to love the stuff you find on the Internet sometimes. I just love the WikiHow page, How to Get a Man to Leave His Wife. In eleven steps! With pictures! This is so wonderfully perverse it is refreshing.

The key point to get here is that what is good advice on one side of the column, is equally good on the other. Think of it as double entry accounting: every credit must be matched by an equal amount in the debit column. Once you grasp that, you can see that this isn't a lesson for the woman having an affair with a married man, she is either a pathetic loser or she is a killer shark who is out to get what she wants. (That's a wonderful experience, by the way, I was once on the receiving end and it remains to this day the very best thing that ever happened to me.)  To get back to the point, any lesson of use to the other woman is going to be more useful for the wife. (Look at the ads on the page if you don't believe me: the top ad when I logged on was, "How to stop your divorce" Advertisers always know who the content is really for.)  I know, that seems like a crazy way to approach the problem but the sad truth is that you couldn't write an honest advice column to a woman in that situation because our culture will never accept that a woman in that situation might partially or even largely be to blame for her situation. We all, especially her, know that she is, but you can't talk about it.

The reverse isn't the case. Men are told over and over again that it is their fault if their wife cheats on them, loses interest et cetera. That isn't a problem so much as a powerful clue to how relationships actually work. More on this below.

Anyway, read the original and then come back.

Tick, tick, tick ...

Here is how to rewrite the advice for the other woman as advice for the wife:

Step 1

Original: Stop having sex with him

Rewrite: Stop using sex to mollify, pacify or cheer him up. He wants a woman who wants him. This is basic. Fail at this and you deserve to be cheated on. 

Step 2 

Original: Don't try to convince him or manipulate him to leave.

Rewrite: (you shouldn't need my help on this one) Don't try to convince him or manipulate him to stay. Conversation won't help and neither will therapy.

Step 3

Original: Treat yourself as the prize.

Rewrite: Treat yourself as the prize. 

This is the whole lesson in one step. This can be hard for women to see because women and men operate differently when having affairs. When women have affairs, they tend do so with men whom they believe to have higher status than their husband. (They aren't necessarily right in thinking so, but that is what they believe when they start an affair.) I know, you wouldn't have an affair, but if you did, it would be with someone you saw as a step up in some way. Men don't work like that. We marry the woman we believe is the best we could want—you are the prize.  If he has an affair, it will be with a woman whom he believes has lower status than you. 

The point here is this: don't project your outlook onto him. The other woman is to be pitied not feared. As difficult as this is to grasp, he doesn't go looking for things you can't deliver better. He is firmly convinced that you are the best at giving him what he wants. You already are the top prize in his eyes. What he wants you to do is start acting like it really, really, really matters to you to be the prize.

Caveat: Which isn't to say that you can't make your worst nightmare come true. Stop believing in yourself and he will too.  If you start thinking of yourself as no longer worth pursuing, then so will he. What makes it hard is that to really think of yourself as a prize, you have to work at being a prize. You know, like you did back when you were dating? (BTW: The picture that goes with this step on the WikiHow site is worth a thousand words. Does it offend You? Too bad, for a man, marriage is a sexual relationship and if you didn't figure that out before getting in, you don't deserve to be married.)

Step 4

Original: Figure out what benefits he is getting from staying in the marriage. After listing some possibilities—children, money, emotional support, reputation, mutual friends, having someone to do stuff with, her cooking and cleaning—the original text goes on to make two rock solid points. "There is no point in competing with the wife in these areas. Don't make the mistake of wasting your time trying to be a better 'wife'." 

Rewrite:  Figure out what benefits he is getting from staying in the marriage. In case it isn't obvious enough, the lesson for the married woman is, don't try harder at the things that are already working for you. Don't make the mistake of wasting your time trying to be a better "wife". Now go to step 5

Step 5 

Original: Figure out what his wife isn't doing right. The original goes on to say, "Most likely the wife has emasculated him over time, and therefore he is no longer attracted to her. There are a lot of articles and books on what this means. Do your homework to find out how to make him feel more masculine (and you to feel more feminine)."

Rewrite: Figure out what his wife isn't doing right. Oh yeah, that's you.  I couldn't put it better than the original, so I won't try. I will add, however, that the key phrase here is, "do your homework". Don't sit around over-analyzing your situation, you need to look outside yourself for ways to make him feel more masculine and you more feminine. There are lots of books and articles. Read them!

Step 6 

Original: This means getting to know him as a person

Rewrite: Look back at step 5. See the bit about emasculating him? Getting to know him as a person, means getting to know him as a man with power. Power is scary because a man with power is capable of anger, destruction or of having an affair. You may think that you will be more comfortable if you convince him to surrender those things for "the sake of the marriage" but you're wrong. A man without power isn't a man anymore.

This is doubly scary because letting him take back his power puts you in a vulnerable spot. Marriage and affairs are not an either/or situation after all; he could do both; a man who has recaptured his power is man who is going to realize that it is in his power to have an affair. You may not want to be in a position where you have to live with the knowledge that the only thing keeping him from cheating on you is his continuing to choose not to. That is why the emasculation starts; it feels more secure if he has as many restraints on him as possible. 

The first step along the path to emasculating your husband is to treat his power as a problem to be solved. But if he can't cheat on you, then he can't be faithful to you either. Or, to put it positively, faithfulness is only possible for a man who is capable of cheating.

This would be so much easier if only depraved or damaged people cheated on their spouses. The disturbing truth is that good people, loving husbands and wives who are also good fathers and mothers, area capable of having affairs and sometimes do. The only thing you can do about it is to trust and trusting means being prepared for the possibility of trust being broken. He has to live with the same risk; you should get over it!

Step 7 

Original: Date others.

Rewrite: Well, no. Nothing will make it easier for him to rationalize cheating on you than your doing it first. But read the original text and you will hit this line, "Men like to compete." He wants to win you and no matter how many times he has won you in the past, he will not tire of doing it again. (Or, rather, he will not tire of it if you are following the others steps, especially step 1 and step 3.) Don't be scared of stepping out a little and being the sort of woman who other men might pursue. Hell, let them try a little and let him know they are trying.

Step 8 

Original: Don't be needy.

Rewrite: Be wanty and not needy. Wants are sexy; needs are a chore. And yes, that is fair! Children and puppies have needs. Adults have wants. Be an adult.

Step 9 

Original: Don't be jealous of his wife or angry. It is good to feel compassion for her. It is not her fault. Don't be insecure.

Rewrite: Don't be insecure, jealous or angry. I appreciate that this may seem stupid at first. You may think, "I can't just turn my emotions off". And, no, you cannot but you can control and direct them. Direct your emotional energy elsewhere. Instead of being insecure, treat yourself as the prize. Jealousy is what needy people feel, desire is what a woman who is worth pursuing feels. Anger is a bit more complicated because there are different types of anger and the type you are most likely feeling towards your husband is resentment, which is the type of emotion we have when we feel like we cannot or should not retaliate. That makes you feel helpless and, again, needy. Feel your power and make him compete for you instead.

Step 10 

Original: Don't become his therapist or marriage counselor. .... Trying to "fix" things is a masculine trait. He has to do it himself in his own way.

Rewrite: Don't push solutions on him.  Instead, you should have the courage to be the problem or, if you prefer, challenge. Be like Russia:

"I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest." Winston Churchill

It doesn't matter if you hide your "national interest", nor does it matter how many chains and locked doors you put between him and it so long as you have a national interest and a strong one at that, and sex had better be part of your national interest.

Step 11 

Original: Don't confront the wife

Rewrite: Don't confront him about his "issues", or whatever other meaningless psychobabble you care to conjure up. If he is unhappy, the very last thing that he wants is to talk to you about it or, infinitely worse, argue with you about it. He doesn't want to justify his wants, he wants you to recognize them, treat them as legitimate and do something about them. 

Instead, try this: imagine he is seeing a therapist who makes him feel at ease so that he can talk freely about what is missing from his marriage and you have bugged the therapist's office. If you want to make it really painful, imagine him telling his lover! The thing is, you can do it. Think about it! You already what he would say. You even know the things he feels but would never dare say to you.

The advice they give: Abbie Cornish

I have no idea who Abbie Cornish is. Her sole qualification for giving advice seems to be that she is smoking hot and that she is, apparently, some sort of celebrity. She is doling out relationship advice at the request of the editors of Men's Health in their March 2014 issue.

Before getting into the meat of the matter, how pathetic is this? Fawning over babes is not what a man does. Never mind that Abbie has zero qualifications for dishing out advice beyond winning the genetic lottery, are you so unobservant that you can't figure out a woman from, you know, actually observing her behaviour? Okay, you've made mistakes, we all have, but are you incapable of learning from those mistakes? And if you aren't, trust me, no amount of advice will help.

Anyway, here is the bit of Abbie's advice that leaped out at me:

If you're going to dump her, she wants a truthful explanation
"Do it face-to-face, gently, and with honesty. So many people look back on past relationships and feel they messed up or something went wrong. It's nice to look back and go, "That's what this relationship taught me , and now I know how to make my next relationship better."

First thought: Abbie is telling us a lot more about herself here than she realizes and one of the things she is telling us is that she is morally and emotionally insecure. I know I'm not the first person to say this, but please do note how little happiness (meaning eudaimonia) being a smoking hot babe has purchased for Abbie. She's just another insecure girl-woman.

Second thought: notice how self-centred all this is. I'm going to provide this information so her next relationship can be better than the one she had with me? How very selfless of me.

I can grasp how I might want to be kind on the general principle that it is good to treat other people well. I'm not sure why I want to invest a lot of effort in her personal growth after I've decided to dump her. To tell you the truth, I can't even think of a reason to invest any effort in her personal growth project while we're still together.

I don't mean that I won't support her if she decides that she needs to work on her personal growth. But that is her project. I wouldn't even be dating her in the first place if I didn't think she was good enough just as she is.

The blunt truth is that if she doesn't know why you are dumping her, then she either didn't deserve you in the first place or you having been sending her such confused signals all along that she has no idea what you want and need.

I'll take the second point first. There are, of course, guys who don't know what they want or aren't willing or able to express their needs and, therefore, don't send clear signals about their needs and desires before and during a relationship.  Know what? These guys rarely dump anyone; if anything, they get dumped; more likely, they spend years, and maybe the rest of their lives, in frustrating, difficult relationships because they won't express their needs.

If you are not one of those guys and she has been paying attention to you and what matters to you, she should have been able to see what the deal breakers were without any help from you. She should have seen it coming. If she didn't, it's somebody's fault and it's unlikely that your efforts to provide an explanation when you dump her are going to help because one of the two following explanations must apply:

1. either she didn't care enough about you to meet your needs after you expressed them (and that expression need not have been verbal),
2. or you were so bad at making them known that she couldn't figure out what they were in the first place.

If the first applies, then explaining now isn't going to help. If the second applies, you aren't going to be any better at explaining now than you were during the relationship.

Now a woman reading this might say, what if I don't want to be the kind of woman he wants? To which I say, then you should be with someone else. And so should he.

(That said, perhaps the problem is that you have never found a guy who wants the kind of woman you really want to be. In that case, I feel your pain and good luck with your problem. I would point out, however, that no one is busying themselves feeling sorry for men who are determined to be the sort of man they want to be and never mind what women want. As Homer says, life is tough in any case but it's hard to feel sorry for the people who make it worse.)

Final thought:, Abbie says,

It's nice to look back and go, "That's what this relationship taught me , and now I know how to make my next relationship better."

If you are in a relationship with the sort of ditz-brain who says "go" when she means, "say", you need to dump her right away and, no, the fact that she is a smoking hot babe is not even close to good enough reason to overlook this problem.

The advice they give: Studies that prove things about sex that we'd rather not face

There is a video over at the Wall Street Journal that has been in the top five most viewed things at their site all week long. The subject: What Motivates Married Couples to Have Sex? That alone tells you something important, namely that a lot of married men want to figure out how to encourage their wives to be more motivated about sex.

If you watch the video and read the accompanying article carefully, you'll notice that the research the experts are citing makes them a little uncomfortable. They go to great lengths to talk around the subject. Right from the start, the author of the article, Elizabeth Bernstein, classifies these reasons as "positive" and "negative". She says that "people" who have sex, "to feel closer to their partner", have good sex and people who have sex "so their partner won't be angry" have not so good sex. (The authors of the study used the words "approach" and "avoidance" rather than "positive" and "negative".)

Well, you could classify those reasons as "positive" and "negative" or "approach" and "avoidance" but I don't think that gets you very far. The "negative/avoidance" reason could just as easily be phrased in a positive way. You could just as truthfully say that "people" who have sex, "to feel closer to their partner", have good sex and "people" who have sex "so their partner will be happy" have not so good sex. Now they are both positive/approach reasons! Feel better?

Now I'm going to put it yet another way with the intention of making you uncomfortable: What this study really says is that married women who have sex with their husbands for selfish reasons have better sex. Because that is what that result really says. Mary says that she wants sex because she wants to feel closer to her husband.

But, but, but, selfishness is bad isn't it? Well, maybe. But you might also say that there are good selfish reasons and bad selfish reasons. If Mary says she wants to have sex because she wants to feel closer to her husband that is one kind of selfish and if she says she wants to have sex to conceive a child because that is the only thing she ever really wanted out of this useless marriage in the first place and she is damn well going to get what she wants before she divorces that bastard and makes him pay child support so he isn't around here getting on her nerves all the time that is another kind of selfish reason. Put yourself in the position of her husband and ask yourself which one you want. You can measure the "selfishness" of your actions in terms of how you feel inside when you do them or you can measure it in terms of the actual effect your actions have on other people.

By the way, you may have noticed that I said women rather than married people in general. Well, look at this little vignette from the case of a Julie and Rob Binton mentioned in the article that Elizabeth Bernstein wrote about the study and see if anything jumps out at you. Julie, we are told, just wants to zone out in front of the TV at the end of her day.

But some nights, her husband, Rob, reaches over to rub her shoulders and offer her a back rub. And then Ms. Brinton thinks: "Has it really been three weeks? I guess we should probably have sex."

"I will do it for him," says Ms. Brinton, 34, who lives in Mesa, Ariz.

Mr. Brinton, also 34, appreciates his wife's gesture. "But afterward," he says, "I always feel guilty, that I've been selfish."

Yeah, it's not "people" that we are talking about but women people. This study establishes that women who have sex for selfish reasons have happier marriages than women who, as Julie puts it, "Do it for him". This shouldn't surprise us because other studies have found the same thing.

We should also take a closer look at the "positive" reasons that the authors of the study are so keen to have us see as the real cause of happiness. Bernstein gives as an example of a positive reason the woman who says that she wants to feel closer to her partner. Okay, now read how Julie describes the feelings that actually worked for her.

About a year ago, Ms. Brinton decided she and her husband needed to work on their sex life. "I thought, 'I want to enjoy sex. I want to feel connected to my husband. I want to reclaim my sexuality.'"

So she started doing things to make herself feel sexy: She bought new lingerie and started reading erotic romance novels.

She wanted to "enjoy sex". She wanted to "reclaim her sexuality". She wanted to "make herself feel sexy". And she wanted to "feel connected to her husband". Only one of those statements is about her husband. Three are about her. (And notice that the words "approach" and "avoidance" are just stupid in this case. They are just two more examples of words that people use when they want to make what is really a discussion about the pursuit of human virtue, in this case womanly virtue, appear clinical and scientific.)

Again, it's "selfishness". It's good selfishness when we consider that Julie might also have accomplished her goals by finding another sex partner. What redeems her selfish goals is not only that she decided to pursue them within the marriage but that it also met his selfish needs by solving his problem of "But afterward, I always feel guilty." He doesn't have to feel guilty if she wants to feel sexy.

The advice that should be given to women is that if they want a happy marriage they should work on claiming or reclaiming their sexuality. They need to figure out what works for them—what really works for them and not what they feel, because of peer pressure or "morality", should work for them—and apply it to their lives.

I think the key question here is, as I noted above, what is the actual effect our actions have as opposed to how do we feel inside. Suppose I buy you dinner at your favourite restaurant as a gift "for you". All through the meal I'm focused on you and your happiness but you can't help but notice that I toy with my food and take no pleasure in eating it. Can you really enjoy that meal? You'd get more pleasure if you left me at home and went out and paid to have that meal with someone who really enjoyed it.

Now, the Lemon Girl likes Vietnamese food and I don't. I, on the other hand, like satay dishes a lot more than she does. We can both meet these needs by going to different restaurants. Why not do the same thing with sex? People do cheat sexually, of course, but very few people start off meaning to cheat or casually agree to "go to different restaurants" every now and then.

I think the reason for this really jumps out at us if we look at another study that was written up in a really short article in Salon. That "really short" part matters. The headline reads:

Study: Non-monogamous couples as happy as other couples

And then we get this paragraph from which I have removed one word:

Researchers looked at consensual non-monogamy — relationships in which both adults agree to have multiple sexual or romantic partners — among ___ couples and found nearly identical levels of satisfaction as those in monogamous partnerships.

Convinced? Here is the quote with the missing word back in:

Researchers looked at consensual non-monogamy — relationships in which both adults agree to have multiple sexual or romantic partners — among gay couples and found nearly identical levels of satisfaction as those in monogamous partnerships.

Well, that kinda changes things doesn't it? Lest you think I'm making a point about same-sex relationships, ask yourself whether you think lesbian couples would be as happy with non-monogamy. (That's a rather odd word, don't you think; it's sort of like saying "non-truthful" so as to avoid saying "lying". It should tell us something that humanity has gotten along for several millenia now without ever having had to come up with a word for "consensual non-monogamy".)

If we read on, we find that "consensual non-monogamy" is a lot like anal sex—meaning that despite positive press in outlets like Salon, the vast majority of people decide they don't want to do it. "People" here again acting as a stand in for "women".

There are very few studies on consensual non-monogamy out there, perhaps because it appears to be so rare. Currently, between 4.5 to 10 percent of all relationships fall into this category, but the number could be higher.

If the vast majority of people choose not to do something it's usually for a good reason.

That's also one very weaselly paragraph. Yeah, the number could be higher. It could also be lower. And that there is a variation of more than 100 percent in the cited numbers tells us that we should be very dubious.

And I would want to know a lot more about how consensual non-monogamy works out in practice before reaching any sort of judgment. For starters, what's the break-up/divorce rate among these couples. And how does the power relationship work? Or, to put it more graphically, who does most of the sleeping around? It's one thing if Mary agrees to non-monogamy because that is what she really wants and another thing altogether if she does it because she thinks that is the only way she can keep her partner from leaving her.

To get back to my main point, sexual faithfulness means not holding yourself back. Doing something "for the other person" is to withhold yourself. Your spouse could get the same deal from a prostitute and probably feel slightly less guilty doing so. You are also telling them that you see sex as purely a physical outlet for them by doing this.

Jesus famously said that a man who looks at another woman lustfully has already committed adultery in his heart. He was deliberately using hyperbole to shock us when he said that and not saying that looking really amounts to adultery. You could make an equal hyperbolic claim that a woman commits adultery when she walls off her sexual life. That, in my experience is what women who cheat do. But it is also a betrayal if you wall off your sexuality but don't take another partner. You may feel better about yourself because you're not betraying him by having sex with another but you are withholding yourself.

The advice they give: female insecurity meets male insecurity, mutual satisfaction ensues

Her insecurities

Angelica wants to know why young guys are ogling her. She posted the question on Yahoo. Here is how she describes herself:

I am a woman in her mid-30s and decent looking. Decent, not drop-dead gorgeous by any means.

She apparently didn't notice anyone ogling her when she was younger and now, at a period in her life when she doesn't feel as ogleable as she used to feel, she is noticing it. She says she wants to know why? I say "she says she wants" because I don't think she is being entirely honest.

But that is okay, because her less-than-honest question gets a less-than-truthful answer from someone named "Dalrock".

They see you as in their league so they are more bold in checking you out than they would be with a woman who wasn’t in their league. You are at the intersection of the male and female curves for sexual attractiveness. Young women are the rockstars of the dating world, while young men are fairly low in the pecking order. As women age their attractiveness declines, while as men age their attractiveness tends to increase until around their mid 30s (where it starts to decline as well). As your attractiveness has declined, you now find yourself roughly at par with late teens/early twenties young men. See the article from OK Cupid linked in the sources for data on how age impacts attractiveness for men and women.

The really significant thing here is that, of the answers she was given Angelica picked Dalrock's as the best. (Although that's a lot less impressive than it might sound if you go read the, very few, other answers she got.)

Now, as I've said many times before here: They aren't lying to one another but to themselves. 

Let's start with Angelica because she is the easiest to explain. She got five answers. Three mocked her and one praised her (the praise came from another woman). One of the mocking answers suggested that she is just bragging and, well, yes, of course she is. But only to a point. She is doing a limited hang out. She brags that guys are ogling her but, because she is a woman insecure, she cuts it down quite a bit by describing herself as just decent looking. Dalrock then comes in and gives her the answer she wants. You might think, well, why would she want such a cynical answer? But the point is that, however cynical his take, it validates her. A seemingly cynical guy took her claim that she is being ogled at face value and that is what she really wanted.

And everyone's happy.

His insecurities

Okay, we've discussed female insecurity, lets look at the other side of the rock. I'm sure Dalrock really means and believes what he said but his answer is crap. First read the first sentence of his answer:

They see you as in their league so they are more bold in checking you out than they would be with a woman who wasn’t in their league.

Now, let's ask all the men who have  held back from ogling a woman because they thought she was out of their league to raise their hands.

Yeah, there is your problem right there. In fact, any time a guy ogles a woman, it's a dead giveaway that he feels sex is such a low probability that he may as well go ahead and ogle her because he has nothing to lose by doing so. That could be, and sometimes is, because he doesn't think he has a chance. That's not the most likely reason though. The primary reason guys don't pursue women they find sexually attractive is because they can't stand the thought of putting their pride on the line. Failure has a huge impact on self worth and most guys won't/can't take that chance. They want opportunities for sex to drop in their lap, unearned.

(And there are other risks too. He may already has a girlfriend. He may be too worried about the consequences of sex to actually pursue it ...)

But the most likely reason, by far, is that he isn't willing to risk the personal capital.

Now we can go back to Dalrock and what motivates him. Angelica has handed him a  gift.  She has given him a chance to pretend that men like him hold more cards than they really do. She has done this by making it possible for him to describe the act of ogling a woman (a behaviour trait that is pretty reliable a low-status marker)  as if that is something that someone with real status does.

You can prove this for yourself anytime you want by simply following (discreetly, of course) a hot woman as she walks down the street, across the campus, through the mall or whatever. Don't look at her but at the way others look to her. You'll quickly see that the men that ogle her are the creeps and losers.

Sorry to pick on poor Dalrock, but the more we dig into his answer, the more ludicrous it gets. For who here thinks that ogling a woman is a way to get a date?

Ogling is an end in itself; it's like scratching an itch. You do it to respond to a felt need and for no other reason. It's a way of getting a sexual charge out of a woman that you will probably never talk to never mind have sex with. Not that the man ogling her knows this. All he is really aware of as he ogles her is her sexual power. If you thought you had power, if you were honestly convinced you might be taking her bra off in the future, you wouldn't need to ogle her breasts right now. You know that, she knows that, we can all stop pretending.

So the honest answer to Angelica's question is that guys are ogling her because they are getting a sexual charge out of it.

But it isn't even an honest question to begin with. The real point was to get someone to respond as if her feeling that she is being ogled is plausible thereby validating her self worth. That acceptance of plausibility gives her more of a  sexual charge than any actual ogling. And, despite her protestations otherwise, she didn't need that validation when she was 19. She does now.

I'm pretty certain, by the way, that she is not imagining she is being ogled, that men actual are looking at her in a sexually appreciative way. In fact, I'd bet that a lot more men look at her and think of sex than she realizes. She's probably noticing the younger men for two reasons: 1) because young men aren't subtle and 2) because she, needing validation, is paying more attention to how she is being looked at than she felt the need to do when she was 19.

She'd probably be disappointed if she actually tried to entice a young man she caught ogling her into sex. He'd most likely run in fear. He'd run because he feels powerless towards her in the first place (that's why he is ogling) and second because the risk to his self esteem would be too great. In addition, he will almost certainly be convinced that she has more sexual experience than him and will be terrified that he will not be able to impress her. His right hand is far more likely to get a workout than she is out of this. (The arrogant and cocksure young man who'll just "nail some woman" given the slightest chance is more of a female fantasy than a male reality. And it is a fantasy that, and this tells us something important, is equally useful to both the woman  trying to reach orgasm and the woman who hates men and sex.)

How to ogle a woman correctly

Short answer: just don't. (Although I have done it myself in moments of weakness.) Glance, don't ogle. You won't get away with it either way. No matter how discreet you are about glancing down at her body, she'll notice. But she is more likely to appreciate, rather than resent, a few glances; that is, unless you "glance" down at her breasts every two seconds.

But let's suppose you're looking (whether glancing or looking hard) at a woman and you suspect that she has noticed what you are doing. What do you do then?

Here is the most important thing: Don't look away! That is death. If she resents the fact that you are looking at her, she will do so even more if you look away; that makes you aggressive and weak in her eyes instead of just aggressive. If she is insecure, she will take your suddenly looking away as rejection, and brutal rejection at that. If she is even remotely interested she'll take your looking away as proof that you're a pussy and she doesn't need another one. No matter what the circumstances, looking away is a big-time loser move.

So here's the first tip, train yourself not to look away when a woman notices you noticing her. That is difficult to do because your natural instinct will be too look away. It's that personal capital thing I was talking about above. And it's triply difficult because the odds that a woman who happens to look your way isn't interested no matter what the circumstances. If you've been looking at her, she most likely is calling you on it and expects you to stop. Even if you looked like George Clooney, most women aren't going to want the attention most of the time. (Which is why no one, male or female, sees ogling as an opening move to "dating"; anyone smarter than a Poinsettia knows that it is highly unlikely to succeed.)

Second, keep looking where you were looking. Your checking out her legs and you think you see her reacting in your peripheral vision? Keep looking at her legs. Don't look up! Move your eyes up her body deliberately from wherever you were until you meet her eyes. Don't hide the fact that you are enjoying the view. As my grandmother used to say, "You may as well get hung for a sheep as a lamb." No, she isn't necessarily going to love this. And even if she does like it, she isn't necessarily going to see it as a prelude to sex. But that doesn't matter, because you have absolutely nothing to gain by quickly glancing away or guiltily shifting to meet her eyes. Those moves are pure chickenshit.

Third, once you have eye contact, hold it.

At this point there are four possibilities.

1. She gives you the finger or mouths something offensive at you. In which case, you laugh at her and turn to your friends and talk about anything but her. 
2. She gives you a look that says, "I'm calling you on this", in which case you shrug, smile, raise your glass and turn away. (General note: if you are the sort of guy keeps paying attention to women who give no indication of any interest in you, I have some very bad news for you.)
3. She looks away furtively. In which case, you look down at your drink and smile appreciatively but don't look back. Don't worry, she'll steal a second furtive glance your way and see your smile. The chances of anything coming of this are better than your chances of winning Olympic gold but that is about all you can say for sure. And, hey, you got a good look and she'll appreciate that smile and neither of you have lost a thing. (If you cross her path that evening or the next day, however, say hello and introduce yourself. Don't however, try to make it happen.)
4. She continues to look at you. In which case, you continue to look back. At her eyes! Wait until she looks away. It's a  really good sign if she looks down. Smile appreciatively, look down into your drink and swirl the ice cubes around, take a drink and then wait as long as you can stand it (which won't be long), then count to five slowly, pick up your drink and walk over to her and introduce yourself. Do not, even for second, look down at her body again. If you later find yourself taking her clothes off, you can look but not before.

You're welcome.

The advice they give

Update: the comments below feature some harsh language that I regret. I regret it mostly because I detracted from my own point that we go to great lengths to avoid holding women morally accountable for affairs by using it (an argument that is mostly strengthened by the other comments). However, I did say it and then it was later commented upon so it would deeply dishonest to remove it now.

Here's the question:

A few months ago, my husband uncovered an affair I was having with an old flame. He moved out and initiated divorce proceedings, but in the time since, I was able to convince him that I am truly repentant and to give our marriage another chance for the sake of our children. The problem I have now is that he says that if we are to stay married, he wants it to be an open marriage. I've tried to tell him that I've gotten that out of my system and I don't want to be with anybody other than him, but he says there just isn't any way he can ever trust me again, he doesn't feel an obligation to be faithful to me anymore, and at least this way we're being honest about it. Prudie, it makes me ill to think about him being with another woman. I just want things to go back to how they used to be. How can I convince him that we need to be completely committed to each other in order for this to work?

Prudence, whose advice column it is, is rather hard on this woman and good for her. The level of selfishness displayed here is mind-boggling. That said, it's pretty typical for modern liberalism. This should remind you of the Clinton years: "Okay, I did it, now can we just move on!" Emily Yoffe (AKA "Prudence") quite rightfully castigates this woman for just wanting "things to go back to normal" but that's all Prudie herself has to offer. She is full of self righteousness but that is all you'll get from her.

What do I mean? Well, look at Prudie's advice. She gives some way at the bottom of the column when she finally finishes heaping moral abuse on the woman who wrote the question I cite above. If we isolate that advice, we can see how utterly useless it is:

It could be that you and your husband should simply be separated for a while—without the threat of divorce hanging over your heads—to see how each of you feel about this new status. While you do that, I will naturally recommend couples counseling. It sounds as if you both need a third party to help you communicate and to hold a mirror up to the consequences of each of your actions.

Tell me, how is there separating a little while "without the threat of divorce hanging over your heads" different from open marriage? "Just go away for a while and then come and start fresh," is all Yoffe has to recommend. And if that doesn't work, you can try a marriage counselor.

The thing that is missing from all this is actual stuff that the wife might do. And that is what is needed. The first point here is that she screwed up and it is up to her to beg forgiveness. He has no obligations towards her at all. He certainly isn't obliged to actually forgive. Forgiveness that isn't freely given is no forgiveness at all so he has to be perfectly free to dump her or else the whole exercise is pointless.

And if you notice one thing about this question and the advice given by Yoffe in response it is that neither woman is willing to give this man the dignity of granting him the moral freedom to forgive or not forgive. From the very start this woman acts as if he is under some sort of obligation to her, to their marriage and to their children. She is the one who betrayed his trust and destroyed everything their marriage was supposed to be and yet she hammers over and over again on his responsibilities.

Just read the narrative carefully and you can see this. Let's pull out all the "I" statements:

1. I was having [an affair] with an old flame. 
2. I was able to convince him that I am truly repentant and to give our marriage another chance for the sake of our children. 
3. I've tried to tell him that I've gotten that out of my system.
4. I don't want to be with anybody other than him ... it makes me ill to think about him being with another woman
5. I just want things to go back to how they used to be. 
6. I [want to] convince him that we need to be completely committed to each other.

That's the real story. It's the story of what she did, what she wants and the real reasons she wants these things. Everything she says about him is some responsibility she wants him to accept. Everything she says about herself is something that she wants or once wanted.

Look at #2 for example: he is under a moral obligation to work at the marriage for the sake of the children.

Look at #3: It was something she had to get out of her system! In #2 he was under a moral obligation to forgive her but she doesn't see her affair as a massive betrayal of trust but as something she had to "get out of my system".

#4 It makes her ill to think of him with another woman? Then why the hell isn't she groveling in front of him? She should be begging and pleading for a chance to win him back; begging not to get him back but just to be given the chance to try and win him back.

What should she do? Here's the alternative narrative she should be living.

1. She should tell him that she doesn't want an open marriage but she understands perfectly that he is going to need some time and space if he is going to get over this. It's only been a few months since this affair! 
2. She needs to make it clear to him that she understands that even if he leaves her she still owes him a long and grovelling apology because she betrayed him
3. She should tell him that she will be perfectly faithful to him and she should make it clear that she will make her life perfectly transparent to him so that he will be able to rest easy knowing that he will never have any reason whatsoever to even so much as suspect that she is seeing anyone else.
4. She should make it clear that she is going to cut this old flame completely out of her life and that she won't even acknowledge this other man's existence if their paths cross.
5. She should say that while it would torture her to think of her husband with another woman, she understands that she has destroyed the trust between them and that she realizes she has no right to expect fidelity from him now.
6. She should promise that she will begin, as of right this moment, proving that she loves him by giving him the best sex he could imagine without any expectations of a commitment from him.
7. And she should say that she while she is pleading for forgiveness and will continue to do so so long as he doesn't completely shut the door that she understands that it is entirely up to him to forgive or not to forgive.

If he forgives, they can return to the sort of mutual obligations, especially sexual fidelity, appropriate to marriage but for now all the responsibility is in her court.

Manly Thor's Day Special: The sex advice they give to women

It's not just sex advice being given to women but sex advice being given to women in our name: the teaser for the article promised it would be all about five things women do in bed that men hate. Does your mileage match these "men's"?

My response is that these five things are really only two and that those two both boil down to women not understanding themselves and, consequently, not learning how to respond during sex.

1) The first candidate is a classic example of burying the lead (which some pretentious people spell "lede"):

Having sex only in the dark. Unless you've lied about your gender, you have nothing to hide during sex. He can feel your body, and he's been looking at it since you met. If he really disliked it, you wouldn't be making love right now.

Having sex only in the dark is the symptom not the problem. The problem is her narcissism. (I'm not slagging women particularly here: we live in a narcissistic age and that means we all have narcissistic traits.)

I know, it would seem that the problem is her self-criticism but it's actually her magical thinking, a prime behaviourial trait of narcissism. Think of the problem in flow chart terms. If there is something about her body she doesn't like then she can either do something about it or she cannot. If it really bothers her and she can do something then she should do something. If it really bothers her and she cannot do something about it then she should get over it.

To wait until you are kissing her and loving her and then denying you the opportunity to appreciate all the things that are wonderful about her is her way of making the things she won't face magically disappear.

The vast majority of women have something beautiful about them; usually, they have a whole lot beautiful about them. It says a lot that at the precise moment when she might be sharing these wonderful gifts with you as an act of love, she suddenly turns off the light or cuts off your compliment about how beautiful her body is to you to tell you about some aspect of her body she hates.

This isn't just something guys hate, it's a mind-bogglingly selfish thing she is doing, narcissistic in fact.

2) The second bad habit is another misdirection:

Not asking for what you want and not interrupting what you don't want

I know that sex "experts" think they are being wonderfully useful when they advise women to tell their partners what they do and don't like but it's the single worst piece of sex advice ever dished out. There are times when a little well-placed advice can be a very good thing. I will be forever grateful to the girl who said, "Move your finger in small circles instead of up and down." But note that is advice about what you might do better rather than about what she does or doesn't like.

Here is the thing, women who are really good in bed don't have to tell you what they do or don't like because what they do or don't like shows in their response. Pardon my arrogance, but if you really want to be great in bed, practice responding.

Here's an experiment. Imagine eating your favourite food. Imagine putting it in your mouth and giving no signs at all that you are enjoying it. I ask you because you could do that if you wanted. There is nothing about tasting, chewing and swallowing that you cannot do if you suppress all the sounds and actions that go with enjoying food. (There is a feedback loop with eating and, ahem sex, however, and sighing or arching your back or groaning will increase your pleasure, provided, that is, that you practice making these responses to match your feelings instead of faking them.)

Now carry it the next step and watch other people eat. Some people really get into it. Some people show no signs at all. Some people obviously fake it. Here is the thing: all three of those are learned responses.

It isn't easy to learn how to respond. For starters, it involves acting in front of someone else. And yes it's acting. Which brings us to the second problem, you can either act in ways that reveal your desires or you can act in ways that mask them. And revealing your desires makes you vulnerable.

Sex is a social skill. It applies in every aspect of your life. How you dress and interact with others out of bed is sexual activity. How you respond to the way men look at you and to what they say to you tells them what to do next. They initiate, you respond and your response tells them what to do next (and what not to do next).

And the cruel truth is that a lot of women are really bad at this. They get very good at sending sexual signals, such as wearing push-up bras or leggings, when they want attention but don't get very good at interacting with the particular boy they particularly want to interact with (bring back dating!). They never get a chance to practice interactions such as meeting glances, looking down shyly, sighing appreciatively, intentionally positioning their bodies in ways that are more or less receptive depending on what they hope he will initiate next and so forth. Never having gotten very good at this outside of bed, they fail in bed.

Any time you have to break this dance and explain is a sign of failure on someone's part. It's unavoidable that there will be some failures, of course, but advising people to tell others upfront what they want as a matter of course is like advising them to go to court before they even try and work things out otherwise.

3) Number three is just number one repeated in different terms:

Protesting whenever he says you're sexy

4)  And number 4 is just number 2 repeated in different terms

Focusing on intercourse more than you want to

It's the "more than you want to" that gives it away. And I have nothing more to add on that front.

But there are two related issues that the good Dr. Klein doesn't deal with that I'd like to touch on.

• Why is sex that just proceeds along to intercourse disappointing to men? After all, entering a woman is one of the most pleasurable things this life has to offer. Why would a guy not like that? Well, what he doesn't like is the feeling that we have gotten this far with no sign that any of this is doing anything for her. Sex ended up here because this is the natural place for sex to go and that is no different for someone who is just going through the motions.
• "But he wants sex all the time and sometimes I'm willing to please him even though I don't want it much right now?" The key thing here is that what we are discussing is a gift. Gifts only work if the context is set such that it really is a gift. If you are going to have this kind of sex, then you should initiate it and it you should make it clear to him that you want to do this for him. A gift he has to ask for isn't really a gift. Neither is pretending to do this for your own pleasure. (Of course, it will sometimes happen that you do something just for him, paying no attention whatsoever to your needs and unexpectedly find yourself getting very aroused and ... well, that opens a whole lot of complicated issues doesn't it? That is the tricky thing about responding honestly, it makes us vulnerable.)

5) Number 5 isn't really a tip about sex per se but is rather revealing in a political sense:

Being less than 100% responsible about birth control

Really? Women aren't always 100% responsible? I thought men were always the problem.

Wow, next you'll be telling me that women behave in very ambiguous ways about these things or even that some women, when very in love and uncertain about whether this love is returned might get a little careless about things. And perhaps some women are inconsistent in their own feelings about pregnancy and unwilling to be honest with themselves about this.

Or, here is a really crazy one, maybe there is some set of genetically driven responses that make women worry much less about getting pregnant when highly aroused and that this genetic impulse might have collateral effects such as making women discount other risk factors as well. And she might even bitterly regret things she did the night before in the cold light of day. And she might even blame the guy that these things happened!

(A response I don't have any problems with myself, by the way. That said, there are all sorts of other things that would go with this. This would imply that sex would have to be something that only took place within relationships based on trust and commitment. And we'd spend a lot more time dating and a lot less time casually hooking up.)

Learn from losers? (part 2)

Carrying on from what I was saying earlier about marriage advice based on the experience of divorced people, I'd like to pull out some interesting tensions in the piece. All of these tensions exist over the same fault line.

1. For example, there is an interesting reversal that occurs in the advice given by Terri Orbuch. Here is how the WSJ article opens the discussion of showing your love:

Of the divorced people, 15% said they would give their spouse more of what Dr. Orbuch calls "affective affirmation," including compliments, cuddling and kissing, hand-holding, saying "I love you," and emotional support. "By expressing love and caring you build trust," Dr. Orbuch says.

Now look what happens in the very next paragraph:

She says there are four components of displays of affection that divorced people said were important: How often the spouse showed love; how often the spouse made them feel good about the kind of person they are; how often the spouse made them feel good about having their own ideas and ways of doing things; and how often the spouse made life interesting or exciting.

 In one paragraph we went from the person who wishes they gave more love to their former spouse who to the perspective of the person who wishes they had  received more love! How did that happen?

 2. There are other odd things. Consider this, for example:

The divorced individuals didn't specifically identify sex as something they would have approached differently, although Dr. Orbuch says it is certainly one aspect of demonstrating love and affection.

Okay, but it might be worth asking whether the fact that they didn't identify sex as an important issue is not worth investigating all by itself. The single best predictor of failure is poor risk assessment skills: people who fail at things tend to do so mostly because they don't see risk factors or don't attribute enough importance to the risk factors they do see. I'd say that while Orbuch is right that sex is" certainly one aspect of demonstrating love and affection" she isn't giving it nearly enough weight.

Consider the advice you'd give to someone who wanted to be a lifeguard. A lot of it would overlap with the advice you'd give them if they told you they wanted most other jobs but you'd absolutely insist that they be a strong swimmer to be a lifeguard! Sex in marriage is like swimming to a lifeguard. It's not an incidental thing, it's not "one aspect" of expressing affection. It's right at the centre of your marriage. If you can't, don't or won't put a lot of time and effort into expressing love sexually, then don't get married.

3. There is another anomaly when we hit blame. Orbuch is being very even-handed in her approach but her own data makes it painfully clear that the people who need to handle blame issues better are mostly women and she won't come out and say that.

In the study, 65% of divorced individuals blamed their ex-spouses, with more women blaming an ex-husband (80%) than men blaming an ex-wife (47%). And 16% of men blamed themselves, compared with only 4% of women.

I'm sorry but there is a divergence of attitudes here that is not just marked, it's breathtakingly marked.  If we can admit, as we do admit, that more men than women sabotage their marriages by having affairs, why can't we admit that more women than men sabotage their marriages by complaining too much?

The article goes on to give advice about how to blame in a healthy way but why blame at all? If you're always unhappy with your spouse, the problem is you. Step back a moment and try to imagine what it feels like to be married to someone who is unhappy and complaining all the time. Fix it and stop blaming the other person!

4. Okay, but what about legitimate complaints then? Well, a huge problem is that Orbuch never confronts the issue of legitimacy of complaints. She just goes from "you have a complaint" to "how to express it" without ever passing through a stage of "is your complaint legitimate". And the advice she gives on expressing these feelings is bad advice.

How do you blame in a healthy way? Say "we," not "you" or "I." Say, "We are both so tired lately," not "You are so crabby." When you remove blame, it's easier to come up with a solution.

To see how stupid that is, consider any real-life problem. May wants Jim to stop cheating on her, do you think it helps for her to say, "Why are we so unhappy?" She doesn't mean that for a second. It's a lie. Jim is doing something she wants him to stop. The problem is "him" and not "we". What possible good will it do to lie and pretend it's something we need to work on together?

Worse, this approach simply opens the door to some of the worst passive-aggressive tricks. If you've ever dealt with passive-aggressive behaviours in others or analyzed your own passive-aggressive subterfuges, you will know that shifting from "me" to "we" is always the first evasion.

Terry tells Karen he is unhappy with their sex life and he has evidence to back it up because they've only had sex three times in the last four months. Karen looks chastened when he points this out to her. If Karen plans to do something about it, she will apologize and set about improving. If, on the other hand, Karen has no intention but can hardly argue the point in the face of the evidence, the move that any passive-aggressive person will make at this point is to is to immediately shift from "me" to "we" by saying something such as the following:

Yes, you're right but I am going to need help fixing this. We have to work on getting me to a place where I can be more relaxed, where I don't have to worry about ....

If Karen says something along those lines, what she really means  is "No!" If Terry takes Orbuch's advice and approaches this as a we problem, all he is doing is handing Karen the knife so she can stab him in the back with it.

The problem with the we-instead-of-you approach is that it begins with a lie. Putting things in less-threatening terms in an attempt to be more effective at changing them is just a polite way of describing how to be a manipulative jerk.



The missing element in all these things is truth. Before we talk about what are good and bad ways of expressing blame, for example, we need to talk about whether blame is justified. For everything changes when you know it is justified. You can be damn sure that Orbuch would never tell a victim of domestic violence to approach her husband with "Why are we so unhappy?"

Here is an analogy: suppose Sue tells us that she doesn't think the thing that caused her accident is her being a bad driver but that she was "simply driving too fast". How do we test that claim? We'd start by considering the evidence. She was driving over ten speed limit? How much over? Most people drive over the speed limit and most people don't lose control of their car. Sue only has a point if she was driving way over the speed limit or if she drove into a curve much faster than was reasonable.

But notice how that changes the way we see the driver. If Sue was driving way over the speed limit we are more inclined to ask, "What the hell were you thinking?" And if she drove into a curve much faster than was reasonable, we might ask what's wrong with her judgment that she either can't figure this out or was she simply not paying attention and didn't see the curve coming. And the problems we will see here may begin with technique but ultimately they point to problems with Sue herself.

The same is true of advice about how you might handle issues that arise in marriage. Yeah, this advice is valuable to a point but there is also a point where you start wanting to ask, "What is wrong with these people that they couldn't figure this stuff out for themselves? Why do they need to be told how to better relate to another human being in the first place?"

And that, to go back to the point in my earlier post, is the real issue: are you good enough to be successful at marriage? It all comes down to that: Are you good at being a man or good at being a woman? That's what it takes to make a marriage work.

"Want to learn how to succeed in life? Ask a loser."

I take it that it's pretty obvious that is bad advice. At least it is when you put it baldly like that. And yet, the formulation is so tempting:

Want great marriage advice? Ask a divorced person.

That's the opening of a piece by Elizabeth Bernstein in The Wall Street Journal. And it's just strange. Maybe because it's in the WSJ it acquires a weight it wouldn't otherwise have. I don't know. We could put it differently: "See that bitter, unhappy person over there? She failed at marriage and she could teach you a lot about how to make yours work."

Bernstein's argument, which she takes from Terri Orbuch, "a psychologist, research professor at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research", is that divorced people sit down and analyze their experience in an attempt to learn from their mistakes and we can all learn from paying attention to what they have to say.

Some of what she has to say is, in fact, good advice. And some is not. But I think there is a deeper problem here and that it is that she focuses on changing behaviours rather than changing who you are.

It's an open question whether anybody learns much from their mistakes but the first reservation I have is that I am especially doubtful that divorced people learn much from their mistakes. (As a group that is; there will, of course, be individual exceptions.) The divorce rate for second marriages is much higher than the divorce rate for first marriages. And you would think that if there were lessons to be learned from observing marriage failures that the children of divorced parents would know them but children of divorced parents are much more likely to divorce than children of parents who did not divorce.

All of which says that if you really want to succeed at marriage, or anything else, your best bet is to find someone who succeeded and model yourself on them.

But we don't want to do that do we? These days we tell ourselves that we want to succeed at things but we want to do it on our own terms. We want the marriage but we don't want to be like the people who have the successful marriage.  The problem was well put by Leslie Loftis: "The old advice focused on how to be a good woman. The new advice, however, focuses on how not to be a bad person." Tell someone that they have to model themselves on successful role model and you are telling them they have to change who and what they are. No one wants to do that, so we prefer to seek out advice about how to simply replace our bad habits with good habits.

To get back to my main point, how can you put advice such as the following into practice:

Communication style is the No. 1 thing the study's divorced individuals said they would change in the next relationship (41% said they would communicate differently). 

Notice first how the scope has been narrowed down by the expression "communication style". The implication is quite clear: "You don't have to change yourself, you just have to change the way you say things". That's not completely crazy because the way to change yourself is begin by changing the things you do. But it needs to be clear right from the start that we are aiming to change ourselves.

There is a huge difference between, "I want to stop acting like a bitch," and "I want to stop being a bitch". To embrace the first is to effectively say, "I think I am just fine, I just want to change a few things about how this otherwise fine person behaves" The second starts with a profound self accusation.

The outward behaviour that goes with the two approaches will look pretty similar. To stick with my example, the person who doesn't want to be a bitch doesn't click her heels together three times and think how much she wants it. She begins by acting the part of what she wants to be. Fake it until you make it. But the goal is different and that is important.

More to come ...

In which some of Jasper's advice is vindicated

The Season of Brideshead
Et in Arcadia Ego, Chapter 3
As we begin a new chapter, we see some of Jasper's advice come back to haunt Charles a bit. Charles learns the lesson but he does not here acknowledge the source.

Here is what Jasper advised back in chapter one:

And go to a London tailor; you get better cut and longer credit.

And here is the lesson learned in chapter three:

I had started the term with my battels paid and over a hundred pounds in hand. All that had gone, and not a penny paid out where I could get credit.

This may take some explaining for anyone under 40. With Visa and Mastercard, your ability to buy on credit is dependent on the reputation you have with one of those two firms. Pay your credit card bills regularly and you have credit anywhere those cards are honoured. That is a relatively new thing in finance. Before credit cards became universal (this happened over the 1970s), you had to build up a reputation for reliability with different merchants. Every single business you dealt with was a relationship to establish and cultivate. The better a customer you were, the better the terms you got. (A lot of business-to-business finance is still carried on this way.)

Charles has failed to build any relationships. If he had, he would have less of a problem than he does here. He could simply go to people whom he had proven that he was a reliable customer to and say, "My allowance gets paid to me in two months, may I buy on credit now?" And he'd probably have been told that he could because the Ryders, while not as rich as the Flytes, are wealthy.

Now, Jasper's advice was about more than just money. It was about living well so as to get something that would serve you the rest of your life out of your time at university. Credit with debtors is a metaphor for much, much more.

With that in mind, we can read on:

There had been no reason for it, no great pleasure unattainable else; it had all gone on ducks and drakes. Sebastian used to tease me—'You spend money like a bookie'—but it all went on and with him.

Now there are a couple of things we might note here. The most obvious is that Sebastian is sponging off of Charles even though Charles is the less wealthy of the two. This is the first of many indications we will get in this chapter that one of the two lovers is giving a whole lot more than the the other, and I'm not talking about just money here.

The other thing, however, is the gambling metaphor. Remember that part of Charles' answer to Jasper was, "... that to love one other human being is the root of all wisdom". [Emphasis added by me] University is an opportunity to learn. Jasper is actually quite liberal (and truthful) in his saying that that learning need not necessarily be the stuff they teach you in the lecture hall. But Charles has bet everything on Sebastian.

The expression used to describe the situation where a gambler  has everything riding on one game is to say, "He has a big bank running." Charles has a big bank running on Sebastian.

Oh yeah, discussion questions:

1. Is loving one other human being the root of all wisdom?
2. Does the language that Charles uses here ring any bells? I mean the phrase it "all went on and with him"? Does it maybe call to mind this phrasing: "Per ip sum, et cum ip so, et in ip so."*

* Trans: "Through him, and with him, and in him." For non-Catholics, this is the way the doxology begins that forms the dramatic high point at the end of the rite of consecration in the Canon of the Mass, leading up to what is called the great Amen. It is second to only  the consecration, which immediately precedes it, in importance. Only God's priest may say these words during the mass.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.