OYS #1
Age 33, wife 30. Married 7, one kid 2.
This post is your standard introduction babble, in the hope it can provide context for future posts. I'm hoping to focus future OYS on specific events from the week, and use them to set out my thoughts and generally solicit advice. In the spirit of not talking about fight club, I don't have any real-world space to discuss any of this stuff.
Lifting
I'm a metric guy, Freedom Units in parenthesis for this intro post. Weights are working sets, mix of triples and doubles for the most part.
Stats: 176cm, 78kg (172lbs).
Deadlift: 160 (352)
Squat: 120 (264)
Bench: 90 (198)
OHP: 65 (143)
Weighted pull-up: +20 (44)
Lifting for years, good discipline. Currently cutting down from ~83kg a couple months back. BF is in the annoying 16-18% interval where I can see some abs but it's all a bit muddy. Was a fat kid and I've never really had the patience to lean out completely. This is my primary focus at the moment, as never getting sufficiently lean means never being able to commit to a bulk, and so never really making significant progress. Hard to admit, but I've basically spun my wheels for a decade at this point.
Reading
Read MMSLP & MAP (the former is way better). Currently about half way through NMMNG, The Rational Male and SGM. All three started out good but have lost my attention by the half way mark, need to push on through I guess. I've also found a lot of the archived content on here to be very useful.
Red pill status, story so far.
I'm an experimental scientist by training, so I generally don't believe anything until I've had a chance to check it out for myself. I found MRP two months ago and I've seen enough confirmation from my day-to-day that I accept most of the principles now. It's been a fairly easy swallow for me, as I have always been something of a moral relativist -- I really don't feel any differently towards the men and women in my life looking at them through this lens. My boss has jokingly called me an "apologist" more than once.
I did have a couple of key events that rocked my boat, though. One was the unexpected break-up of a cousin's marriage, which really hit home just how far a woman will go to fulfil the hypergamy agenda. And the other was closer to home: my wife and I, sitting on a sofa, reflecting on another sexless weekend. I knew she was ovulating, and can't remember her exact words. But I remember her sadness, and feeling sudden, icy clarity: she isn't attracted to you at all, dude.
We've been together for ten years. If I'm honest with myself (and I am trying to be honest with myself), I have been asleep at the wheel. Putting aside for the moment how the fuck I attracted her to begin with, I've always had a sort of "hey let's just point the boat in this direction and see what happens" attitude towards life. While it has generated a relaxed, fun ride it's also caused me to allow plenty of things to "just happen", without proper care and attention. This now apparently includes getting hitched to a woman who isn't attracted to me, and having a son with her. I suppose they don't call it "hard mode" for nothing.
I think we had our first "dead bedroom" argument about five years ago. Things improved a bit, but of course it amounted to negotiated affection and we all know how that goes. Relapses and arguments roughly once every six months, lots of resentment and covert contracts. Somehow we ended up (deliberately) getting pregnant, which generated approx 10 months celibacy pre- and post-partum, then back to a sort of awkward once-a-month drip feed. When our boy was about a year old, we had an argument in which I told her I would be checking out as soon as he hit 18 as I wasn't prepared to live the rest of my life without sex. After a day of angst and accusations, she suggested once-a-week scheduled sex (called "date night", hilariously) which I thought at the time was something of a breakthrough. This was the first time she'd suggested any proactive behaviour on her part, and it worked well initially. We had fun with it, setting up mood lighting in the lounge or spare bedroom once the baby was asleep. Shopping for silly lingerie on taobao or aliexpress. Things didn't feel too forced, and we progressed away from starfish for the first time in years. But then she took an extended vacation to visit family with the baby, and by the time she got home we were back to the dead bedroom. I think we've had sex about five times since July.
So I've spent the last few weeks working on me, trying not to do an Archer-style Rampage. Started with the low hanging fruit: be more attractive. Bought some new clothes, started getting my hair cut more regularly, switched to an aggressive cut and immediately dropped water weight and looked better. Started catching up with friends after work without running it by the wife, basic stuff. She accused me of having an affair within about 3 weeks, which I clumsily tried to AM my way out of. She blew up, I acknowledged my limitations and did a little DEER backpedalling. I interpret this as me apparently ramping up dread too quickly and not having the tools to own it. Progressing a little more cautiously now, but trying not to relapse completely. I have more or less taken "sorry" out of rotation, tried to stop taking anything she says seriously, etc.
Where I'm struggling at the moment is leadership at home. We are moving out of our apartment in December, and currently looking for a new one. This is proving way, way harder than I anticipated and it's taking an unexpectedly harsh toll on the wife. I guess it hits her right in the momma "nesting" instincts, threatening the security of her cub and so on. Predictable in hindsight, obviously. The problem is that the local market doesn't seem to offer many good options in our price range. I have done what I can to increase our budget, but short of immediately finding a higher paid job I'm restricted to just trawling through online listings and setting up viewings. This takes up almost all of our spare time and energy, to the point where I don't think I've seen a single shit test in weeks. Failed plenty of comfort tests though. No easy way out of this one and worse, I don't see an effective way to "lead" here. It feels like something we just need to get sorted so we can both move on with our lives.
Other talking points.
My situation is complicated by the fact that we are expatriates, living in a South East Asian capital. This means visas contingent on our continued marriage, and a ~11,000km separation between us and family. Career and life in general are good out here, so in terms of being prepared to scuttle the ship, divorce would be really fucking inconvenient. I can go into the practicalities if anybody's interested, but it's just messy as hell. Lesson for the other folks: emigrating together is a bigger step than marriage itself. Seriously.
I'm viewing this as an interesting challenge, and I look forward to documenting via OYS what impact (if any) this sort of lifestyle has on Red Pill methodology. Keen to hear from other guys in similar circumstances: please feel free to DM me if you want to compare notes. It's probably all to easy to dox yourself with specifics.