So why did my marriage fail?

That’s a long involved question. There’s the version my wife gave me and then there’s what I really think. Without going into huge detail, the woman’s version is that I was too mean, didn’t show enough interest in her, became dull, and that she fell out of love. My version is I betatised and lost most of the qualities that had attracted her in the first place. I focused too hard on being the GQ / Esquire / Hollywood version of a perfect husband and that led me to become boring, home-centred, and to care too much about making the marriage work. I also found her increasingly unattractive as she aged and became masculine through starting a new job and Westernising. There’s alot more to it than this, but they are key trends.

The first six months of 2010 were weird for my game. I was getting lots of dates, lots of attraction, and lots of almost f-closes. Then suddenly in June everything fell into place. Most of that was down to getting my alpha shit together, but there have been lots of outliers that couldn’t be explained by lacking alphaness. I’ve had about a dozen girls crazily attracted this past year, to the point where they’d say things like “before I come out to meet you my heart is beating fast and I’m short of breath” and they’d be super horny. And yet I failed to f-close them and they drifted away, much to my bemusement.

So what gives?

At the end of my free one-hour consultation session with Skeletor, as he was packing his notebook away he teased “I think I know what the problem is.” Guess I better sign up for those paid sessions then,…… thing is, he actually delivered.

A week later we had a three-hour sit down in a casino cafe. Mostly he was pumping me with questions. Delving deep into my attitudes on men and women, on my attitudes to sexuality, the relationship my parents have, whether I was popular at school etc. Then after a ciggie break he reflected everything back to me and took me through the theoretical basis.

Now it’s common for overly-enthusiastic reviewers to talk about sessions being “mindblowing” or “shattering my reality”. A teacher can give you a whole new orientation towards the world and open up a panorama of new possibilities.

This one didn’t.

The most helpful takeaway from the whole session was that we actually agreed about 90% on how the sexual marketplace works. It was freakishly similar. We have different models and different priorities but we essentially agreed about what Game is and how to get it. What this told me is I’m on the right track. All that theoretical knowledge I’ve worked on in the past 18 months, all the worldly wisdom I’ve picked up in the past 35 years – nothing Skeletor said invalidated that.

So the session wasn’t too useful, you ask? Fuck no, keep reading. The mindblowing bit was far more subtle. I’d gone into the sessions deciding all my barriers would be down, all the shields turned off, and the phasers set to stun. People who know me know I am an exceptionally open person but also strangely guarded without realising it. I knew Skeletor was going to need a direct unfiltered look into my character to do his work properly. There’s no point trying to hold stuff back or reframing stuff to impress him (and lets be honest, I wanted him to respect me so the temptation to qualify was there).

I was handing him full disclosure in a way no-one but my brother has ever seen before.and hoping he could work some magic. What he did was take pretty much my whole personal history and current sticking points and explain everything as stemming from two character traits, then explained the detail, then explained how to fix it.

That’s mindblowing. Not boom!smash!bang! mindblowing. It was just incredibly perceptive and reductionist. The two traits are:

1. I lack soft dominance
2. I look to the world for external validation of my self image as a high value man [I’ll go into this in the next post – it was mostly from the second paid session]

Soft Dominance
A woman looks to a man to lead her safely through the dangers of a hostile world. He has the ability to impress his will upon the world (rather than the reverse) and build an impregnable fortress within which the woman is safe. This is hard dominance. The woman feels safe and protected both physcially but also in her social status, which becomes attached to the man’s. I do this very well. Bad boys do this too, but they also have fleeting attractiveness that eventually turns the girls away. Why is this?

Girls also crave a garden paradise within the walls of the fortress. A warm beautiful space to express their true character without risk of judgement and to let all their love flow. They need to feel cherished, to feel needed, and to feel romantic connection with their protector. Otherwise the fortress is a prison and the girl feels trapped in her relationship. The analogy we came up with in the session is of a motorcycle helmet; The shell is the hard dominance, the padding is the soft dominance. What happens if one is missing? If the man is a beta pansy the force of a crash impacts upon the padding and kills the woman. If he’s a bad boy there’s just a shell and while the road doesn’t kill the woman, the shell does.

As we talked about my attitudes it became clear not just that I lacked soft dominance but also why:

• My father is a spineless beta and now a kitchen bitch. My mother is a confrontational aggressive, barely empathetic shrew. Thus the male-female roles were reversed through much of my upbringing. Don’t get me wrong – my parents have had a successful 40-year marriage, are still in love, and I’m close to them both. But I rebelled against the role reversal and vowed I’d never become a wuss like my father, and never allow a woman to treat me like my mother did my father.
• Growing up as an intellectually exceptional student but athletically unimpressive, I always tended towards bookish hobbies and developed a sense of physical lacking. In my late teenage I went on an over-compensatory quest to become physically competent that led me into boxing, BJJ, and muay thai. This is now an extremely strong part of my identity. I’m not a wuss.
• I credited (rightly) much of the success of my relationship with my wife as due to being strongly masculine, aloof and badass. I blamed (rightly) much of the relationship’s collapse to us losing this male-female polarity. Thus I became determined not to be a wuss.

Notice the W-word coming up a lot? I believe many of the softer characteristics of a man’s dealings with women are wussy, and I’m not a wuss. You see the issue? This explains why I missed all those f-closes earlier this year, and why my wife’s complaints during the marriage weren’t simply the rationalisation hamster but actually stemmed from real unmet needs.

Skeletor went on to outline his models and how to work on the soft dominance. I promised him I wouldn’t steal his proprietary material so I won’t go into detail here. The basic principles however are:

• During the hypnotic scanning phase (usually on a date, in deep rapport) the man is scanning for genetic fit while the woman is scanning for identity. Thus it’s crucial to have the inner game fixed and to drop the mask. This is why routine-based and dishonest game ultimately fails with high esteem women, and why earlier this year I was getting day 2s that went nowhere. I was able to show an attractive mask for the ten minutes of the street pickup but on the Day 2 when we had to actually get to know each other I would either keep the mask on, or let the girl see into an inner game that still had broken pieces jangling around from the divorce. Either way, the girl didn’t connect.
• Good game is creating a strong identity in alignment with your masculine core, then removing all the barriers that prevent that showing through in your interactions.
• Men and women can each be characterised according to confidence / competence (men) and beauty / esteem (women). This create a dual hierarchy of 4 types each. Durable relationships occur when the man and woman are from matching types.

It’s surprising how much you can get through in three hours. So far Skeletor is living up to his rep.