Update Your Bookmarks (for realsies this time!)

All right, I've done my fiddlings with Wordpress and I'm going to be taking the blog over there on an ongoing basis.  The new url is:  https://beninphase7.wordpress.com/

URL Changes

On second thought, I've decided against changing the URL here for now.  On a couple of folks' recommendation I'm going to play around with Wordpress a bit before making a final decision.

If you want to be privy to my fiddlings, they're here:

http://beninphase7.wordpress.com

Pocket Aces

My friend is first to act.  He calls the big blind and raises.  He's an aggressive player who could be doing this with a wide range of hands, and it's not a suspiciously large raise.  But something about the too-casual way he tosses it into the pot makes me think he has a strong hand.  Pocket aces or kings.  Maybe queens or jacks or Ace-King suited, but probably not.  Probably pocket aces, the strongest possible starting hand.  Just a hunch.

He gets two callers, and it comes around to me in the small blind.  I look down at my hand and see a nine and seven of diamonds.  Nothing special compared to those mighty pocket aces that I suspect he has, but the bet's not that big and if I don't like the flop, I can fold to the next bet no problem.  I call.

The flop comes nine of spades, four of hearts, seven of spades.  Beautiful.  I have two pair.  I let myself look at the flop just a half-second too long.  Let him think that I have a draw to a flush or a straight and am counting my outs.  I check.

My friend bets, again a pretty standard bet size, around half the pot.  This could just be a continuation bet with two high cards or a semi-bluff with a flush draw, but I don't think it is.  Now I'm even more sure that he's got a high pocket pair.  The two other players clearly think it's just a c-bet, though, because they call.  Back around to me.  I hit him with a big check-raise.

He had clearly considered this possibility, because he doesn't think twice about it, just waves a casual hand at his stack of chips.  "All-in," he says.  Bingo.  He thinks I'm semi-bluffing with four to a straight or flush and is trying to bully me out of the pot rather than give me a chance to make my draw.  The two other players fold.  I snap-call his all-in and flip over my hand.  His face sags.

"Oh, man!" he cries, dejected.  "That sucks, I had--"

"Aces."  My face remains blank as I finish his sentence.  "I know."  He flips over his hand to show me that I was right.  I can't stop the next thing from coming out of my mouth, but I flash him a grin to ease the sting.  "Man, fuck your aces."  Then I apologize for being a dick, shake his hand, and rake in his chips.  My friend is knocked out of the tournament, and I'm one step closer to victory.

It didn't have to go that way, of course.  If I had caught anything less than a two pair-- if I'd only paired up the nine, for example--  I'd have had to fold to his next bet.  But I'd only have been out a few chips.  If I'd caught four to a straight or flush, I would have had to proceed a lot more cautiously, and even if my draw had come in I never would've been able to get all his chips into the middle with three connectors showing on the board.  But I took a calculated risk and it paid off.

I ran across a thread at the MMSL forums a while ago where a couple of guys were talking about their wives having "pocket aces" like it was a position of unbeatable strength.  They can always say no to sex, after all, and divorce law is overwhelmingly stacked in favor of women in a lot of places.  But the truth is, pocket aces get beaten all the time.  And some of the most lucrative hands are the ones where the other guy is convinced they're unbeatable and you get the chance to prove them wrong.

Lessons for today:

Don't let your own strength make you complacent.

Don't let your own weakness make you discouraged.

Be observant and learn to be aware of your situation.

Pick your spots.  Don't spend more time and resources than necessary on a lost cause.

There's always an element of good luck to every victory and an element of bad luck to every defeat.  Commit to acting wisely anyway.  Make the most of your good luck and lose as little as possible when your luck runs bad.

How I Got Here: Part VII

L Part IV:  The Pain Problem

I don't know how long it was after we started having intercourse that the pain problem reared its ugly head.  It wasn't right away; more than a couple months, less than a year is probably my best guess.

Man, that's depressing when I think about it that way.  Did I really only get a year of having a half-decent sex life after I put my leftover Catholic aversion to intercourse aside and before it started hurting her?

I think I'm still realizing how badly it fucked both of us up.  It's probably a miracle that it didn't fuck me up any worse, to be perfectly honest.  I mean, think about it: you're raised in the same Blue Pill environment as the rest of male-kind, taught that sex isn't something women really like, but they might be willing to do it anyway if you're a very, very good little Beta boy..  Then on top of that you're raised Catholic, meaning that you're taught from a young age that sex before marriage will get you sent to hell (with the less explicit subtext that it's, at best, a necessary evil after marriage).  And THEN, when you finally bring yourself around to the idea that maybe this thing that your Body Agenda has been screaming at you to do all along is maybe pretty okay after all, the person you love the most in the entire world informs you one day that it's been hurting her the last dozen times you've done it and she wants to stop because she's afraid she'll start hating your penis.

Thank God for the MMSL forums, seriously.  It's one thing to read Athol's writing about it, you know, and quite another to actually see the posts coming from woman after woman, wife after wife, wanting to be fucked by their husbands (or at least, some sexier, more Alpha version of their husbands), wanting it rough, talking about Pound Town like it's someplace they actually want to go.  To know that these women actually DO exist, they're not just a construct that men have come up with to populate our porn movies.

Which is not to say that L didn't like it that way too... when it didn't hurt.  Which was the most confusing part about it.  When she wanted it, she WANTED it.  Hard, deep, with wild abandon.  I couldn't do it hard enough for her.  But when she didn't want it?  There was no level of gentleness that would make it any good for her, no disguising that she just wanted it to be over.  Oof.  What a way to live.

So I stopped initiating.  For a while we would do other things-- it was back to the HJs and BJs and fingering-- and then that petered out, too.  Every once in a while she'd get up the gumption to ask a doctor about it, and the advice was always the same: take a break and see if it gets better.  It never did.  Sex was happening only when she initiated it, but that didn't seem to have any connection with the pain.  It was hurting her less only because we were doing it less: the overall ratio of good : painful stayed pretty much the same.

And that was the way it went.  Everything else got better, little by little.  We moved into a nicer apartment.  We started having enough extra money to take fun little vacations together.  I quit the longest-lasting of my various horrible jobs and found one that wasn't so horrible, a night job stocking shelves.  Which might sound still pretty horrible, but actually it wasn't half bad.  It was hard physical labor, which meant that I got all the exercise I needed.  The fact that it was at night wasn't great, but it meant that L and I had to make the most of the few hours every day when we were both awake and not at work.  There's something to be said for giving yourselves the chance to miss each other.  It was low stress and low pressure and I was working a day job that I actually enjoyed but that didn't give enough hours to be my primary job.  L and I were really good friends and really good roommates and there was even a lot of love there.

Oh, sure, we weren't having sex enough for me, but on my nights off I had plenty of time to myself while she was asleep, and there was always porno.  Oh, sure, our jobs still weren't great, but we were making enough to get by with enough left over for some fun, and in this economy, that was more than a lot of people.  Sure, her back still hurt and sometimes she had trouble sleeping, but those are things you can live with.  Sure, she wanted to move out of the crappy town we were in or go back to school or make something CHANGE, but it just never wound up happening, life would always get in the way.  Sure, I probably drank and smoked pot and played video games a little more than was good for me, but I didn't really have a PROBLEM, I just liked a good time.

And that was our status quo.  Nothing was exactly GREAT... but everything was good enough.

Until it wasn't.

Next time on "How I Got Here":  Temptation, the Breaking Point, and MMSL

So That's Done With

Saw L last night.  She's pretty on board with the idea that we're breaking up now.  Turns out that on Monday she went through my desk.  She was afraid I might be cheating and went looking for clues.  Can't find proof of something that never happened, but she DID find one of Athol's books, which led her to the MMSL and through it to this blog.  So, not exactly the way I would have chosen for things to end, but damn if it didn't do the trick.

I don't know if she's still reading this.  I'm going to continue as if she's not.  I hope she's not, and I don't think she is, but I didn't ask if she would.  It's none of my business any more.  I still need this as a way to get my thoughts out, so I'm going to keep going with it.

After that, the conversation stayed pretty much to practical things.  We're mostly in agreement on how things need to go from here.  As little contact as necessary to make the split happen as fairly and amicably as an be arranged.  We both agreed with some variation of "Maybe someday I'll get to a place where I can see you again... or I might never get there."  There wasn't any insulting "let's stay friends!" talk.  We both know ourselves and each other too well for that.

I offered to keep paying my half of the rent for up to three months.  She looked at me horrified: "I don't want to stay in that place for three months!"  I didn't figure she would, just thought that would be a good maximum beyond which she should be expected to be on her own.  She's hoping to get out by the end of October, which would be my ideal as well so I can start looking for my own place too.  She says she's fine with giving me both the couch and the bed.  She seemed kind of conflicted on the bed, and I can't blame her.  On the one hand, a bed's a pretty personal thing, and I can't blame her for not wanting to literally sleep in the middle of all those memories.  On the other hand, it's a REALLY nice bed.  She just asked that I let her keep it until she finds one sized for one person.  I figure that's more than fair.  Told her the offer was on the table to keep it if she changed her mind.

There was a lot of cognitive dissonance going on in that conversation.  Usually whenever we have such a fundamental disconnect and then get it resolved, that's the time to start reconnecting and talking about our feelings and how the experience affected us.  But of course, any time we started to do that, it's like, wait.  The thing that we resolved was the fact that we're breaking up.  Duh.

The worst was ending the conversation and walking away, and I said as much.  "What do I do now?  Do I wave?  Do I shake your hand?  What a lame way to say goodbye to someone who's so important to me.  But I can't hug you either."  She said she'd been going through the same thing in her head.  "Do I hug him?  Fuck no I don't wanna hug him!  But I wanna hug him...."  I didn't hug her.  She said, "I think we already said goodbye last Friday.  I just didn't realize it at the time."  I nodded, and I turned awkwardly around and walked away.

Updates and Eye Game

Updates to my situation:

I am meeting L tonight-- NOT in private-- to finalize the breakup.  If it seems like we're calm enough, we may discuss arrangements for distribution of our shared possessions, moving the rest of mine out, how long we intend to keep the lease on the apartment and how long I'll continue to pay for half of the rent, things like that.  If not, it will be a short meeting, and that's fine too.  The details can be ironed out over email.

Tomorrow is moving day.  So that's happening.

Eye Game:

I've been hearing the term "eye game" kicked around a few places lately.  If there's some formalized Manosphere version of what the term means, I haven't come across it, so if I'm using it wrong, correct me in the comments.  (-:

Like, I imagine, a lot of guys with a history of nervousness around women, I have this bad habit.  When I see a pretty lady walking by, my eyes will generally start to take her in... and then the moment I get caught looking, they involuntarily dart away and dart back.  Invariably, by the time they get back to her, she's either giving me the "back off, creeper!" death glare or studiously avoiding looking at me.  Discouraging, to say the least.

Anyway, for quite a while as part of my MAP and as a way to increase my confidence, I've been trying to break this habit, and I feel like I've been pretty successful.  Standing and walking with good posture, with my shoulders back and my chest forward, and affecting a confident demeanor makes it feel much more natural to go ahead and look at a pretty lady without feeling awkward or trying to pretend that I'm not.  Now, instead of darting my eyes away, I'll make a conscious effort to make eye contact.  I'll smile-- not a big cheesy toothy grin, just a small quirk of the lips-- and maybe nod politely in passing.

And it's amazing the change in reaction I'm seeing.  Oh, I'll still get the occasional anti-creeper death glare or avoidance, but they bother me far less these days because they're the exception, not the rule.  Sometimes they don't notice at all, because I'm not acting shifty or out of the ordinary.  Most pretty women are probably used to being looked at, after all.  But way more often, she'll catch me looking, I'll catch her eye... and then it's HER eyes that will dart away, and then back, and now she's checking ME out.  Often I'll be rewarded with a cute blush or her eyes will lower in a demure way.  Apparently, I now make pretty women just as flustered as they used to make me.  It's a helluva nice way to feel.

Anyway, the thing that brings this to mind is that just now, on my lunch break, I happened to catch eyes with a pretty lady.  A guy's a guy, so usually when this happens it's her body I'm looking at.  In this case, however, she was obviously on break from her own job, likely something medical, since she was wearing scrubs.  Not the most flattering outfit ever, so it was her face and hair I was looking at.  She catches me looking, and it's not that nervous darting I usually get.  Instead, for a moment she just looks right back at me, taking me in the way I was taking her in.  And then she does look down, but slooowly.  And just as slowly, this pleased smile spreads across her face like melting butter.  She was a striking woman, this couldn't have been the first time she's caught someone looking at her, but the way she looked, it was like this one moment had made her day.  Like she'd just won the Miss America pageant instead of having caught the glance of some dude on the way back from lunch.  I tell you what, that smile?  A man could be forgiven for falling in love.

Beats the hell out of the Anti-Creeper Death Glare.

Update Your Bookmarks

Starting Monday, the new URL will be phase7.blogspot.com.  Update whatever needs updating!

How I Got Here: Part VI

L Part III:  The Old Apartment

Oy.  Speaking of breakup songs.  Who here likes Barenaked Ladies and knows what I'm talking about?

College was fun... and then it ended.  And, like so many clueless children of clueless middle-class parents, we were suddenly booted out into the world with liberal arts degrees that prepared us for absolutely nothing and no real ideas or aspirations for what to do next.  We talked about it, and our relationship was the most important thing that either of us had, so we decided that whatever we did, we'd do it together.  That was the easy bit.  The hard bit was figuring out the "whatever we did" part.

I graduated a semester ahead of L and moved out of the nice little college town to the shitty medium-sized city my parents lived in so that I could stay with my folks and look for a job and a place for us.  She came down on weekends to help me pick out an apartment.  I faffed about and sponged off my Dad for entirely too long before finally hunting up a terrible job with terrible hours at a terrible call center.  Her last semester ended and she graduated; we moved in together.

God, so much about those days just runs together like a bad dream.  We were incredibly young and incredibly poor and incredibly naive.  We knew the apartment was shit, but at first it didn't matter because it was ours.  At first.  But the fact remained that we had two people and two cats in a living space that MIGHT have served to be respectable for one person and no pets.  Maybe.  And the air conditioner was utterly unequal to the task of keeping us cool, and we moved right in the middle of a record-breaking nationwide heat wave.  Also, you know the phrase "a roof over your head"?  Well, ours didn't do so good a job of keeping the rain off.  As in, when it rained we busted out the pots and pans to catch the leaks like hillbillies in a Warner Brothers cartoon, then complained to the office, who would promise to fix it, and then file that promise under "Fuck You."

Also we couldn't afford a bed, so we slept on a futon that smelled like my old roommate's dog and hurt her back, then on an old twin mattress on the floor.

Also neither of us could hold much of a job.  She looked for work, I held a crappy job and paid the bills.  She found a job, I lost mine and she paid the bills.  I found another job, and it was even crappier than the last one, so I found a third and then a fourth.  In the space of a year.  Filing my income taxes that year was a fucking joy, let me tell you.  And we got to see our friends who had actually majored in practical things and planned out good careers get decent jobs and live in decent places.

She put on weight.  So did I, but I had the luxury of a better natural metabolism so it didn't balloon quite as much.  She complained about how fat and unattractive she felt and faffed around with diets and Weight Watchers but was never terribly serious.  I told her that I thought it was good to be healthy, but that I loved her just the way she was and she was just as attractive as blah blah blah God what a terrible Beta wimp I was.

I must still have had some Alpha left in me somewhere, though, because I remember one day very clearly.  I was cooking dinner, and it was taking too long for her, so rather than wait, she cracked open a can of one of those meal-replacement shakes as a "snack."  I told her, in my gentlest voice, "Dear, you know those things are supposed to REPLACE meals, right?  They don't work so well if you have one WITH a meal."

She says back, in this whiny voice that drove me nuts, "But I'm HUNGRY!"

Something snaps, and I tell her, harshly, "And that was the ONLY thing you could have had?  You couldn't have had a slice of toast, or some carrots or grapes, or just waited half a damn hour until the meal I'm cooking for us is ready?  Your ONLY option was to eat two meals instead of one?  Well, that's fine.  But don't expect any sympathy the next time you're pissing and moaning about how fat you feel.  If you want to lose the weight, then lose the weight, but if you don't want to do what it takes, then stay fat and shut up about it."

The moment passed, and I expected an explosion.  I don't know of what: anger, or tears, or hurt feelings, or SOMETHING.  But instead there was just... nothing.  But after that, I couldn't help but notice that she took it a lot more seriously.  It took her a couple years to actually learn how to shop right and cook right so that she could eat right, and find the right type of exercise that affects her body in the right way and that she finds fun enough to stick with.  There's so much misinformation out there that it's tough.  But it was only after that that she was motivated to put in the hard work to do it.

It did get better; there were bright spots.  Our job situations got more stable; eventually our paychecks were steady, even if they were too small and even if we both still hated what we were doing for work.  We saved up and bought a queen-sized bed together.  We took a few small vacations, and eventually a two-week trip to Japan that we scrimped and saved for the better part of a year to afford and was worth every penny.  I saved a couple hundred bucks on a new computer by building it myself from parts.  We got by.

Somewhere in the middle of all this I realized that my hesitance to move on from fooling around with HJs and BJs like teenagers to full intercourse when we were freaking living together was getting more than a little bit ridiculous, so on one of our anniversaries we scraped together some money for a night at a nice bed and breakfast and took care of that pesky virginity problem of mine.

Next time on "How I Got Here":  The Pain Problem

Titular Matters

So I've been sort of thinking... "LTRtistry" is a cute portmanteau and all, but it doesn't really fit any more now that I'm, well, single.  I'm thinking this blog could use a name change.

Right now I'm leaning toward "Phase Seven," but I'm open to suggestions before I flip the switch.  I don't want to do that stupid thing where you go see your friends' new puppy Eddie, then go back three weeks later only to find that he will now only respond to "Lord Eddard Bark."

How I Got Here Part V

College Part IV:  L Part II

After that fourth date, I stopped keeping track of how many dates we'd been on, because it was just assumed that any time we weren't in class or asleep or doing homework or had other plans, we'd be together.  I was still deciding how much of my Catholic upbringing I intended to retain, so I informed her that I wasn't okay with intercourse quite yet.  Wasn't sure if I was saving it for marriage or not, but I wanted to save the option of saving it for marriage, at least for now.  There was a lot of making out, a lot of heavy petting, a lot of HJs and some BJs and a lot of bringing her to orgasm with my fingers and some going down on her and a lot of lounging naked in bed together on weekend mornings.  I cooked her breakfast a lot, which no doubt kept her Beta Love Tank full.  I ran into the Batshit Crazy Ex at one point, who mentioned (as if it were no big thing) that she'd heard I had a new girlfriend who was better at blowjobs than she was.  I just smiled and hemmed and hawed and didn't deny it.  I could tell it was kind of a big thing.  I'm not entirely proud of how good that felt.  (-:

The Other Girl

A few weeks into this, before L and I ever discussed exclusivity, there was The Other Girl.  She was half American, half Chinese, and got most of the best features from each.  A solid 7, I suppose you'd call her now; she probably could have boosted to an 8 if she'd lost about fifteen pounds and dressed a little better.  We had an English class together, and I would watch her doodling in her notebook, in a sketchy comic book style that beat the crap out of a lot of the shit I'd see my art-major roommate working on for his drawing classes (he was a good artist, but paint, not pencil, was his medium of choice).  And she'd see me watching her and turn herself and her notebook toward me so I could see better.

Anyway, for whatever reason, she was quite taken with me.  And it was pretty well reciprocated, but I felt weird about it because I'd been seeing L for a couple weeks and really liked her too.  Which made me flighty and evasive with The Other Girl, which made her chase me all the more.  She was into horror movies and tried to get me to go see one with her.  I've never been much of a horror fan, so I seized on that excuse not to go, but she was persistent.  I think she must have cottoned on to the fact that there was another girl in the picture because it was framed as a group thing.  Oh, a bunch of us are going, we (I) really want you to come!  We (I) will be so disappointed if you don't show up.

Finally I acquiesced.  It's not really a date, it's a group thing.  Yeah, right.  (-:  As soon as I said yes, one by one all the other people who were supposed to be going mysteriously dropped out.  The clever bait-and-switching minx.  (-:  By the day of, it was down to her, me, and the Gay Chaperone.  And I reasoned that as long as the Gay Chaperone was there, it still wasn't really a date, so I showed up.  And the Gay Chaperone was nowhere to be seen.  Clever minx.

So we watched this terrible crappy slasher flick, and then we walked out into the parking lot of the theater, and I made some lame excuse about having to go see a guy about a thing, and she gave me a goodbye hug, and this was NOT a friendly hug.  This was a full-on boobs-squashed-against-the-chest, hips-forward-trying-to-see-if-there's-a-boner-there, I-want-you-to-take-me-somewhere-to-make-out-for-several-hours-now hug.

Now, if I had it to do over again?  I probably would've taken her somewhere to make out for several hours.  What the hell, I was young, it was college, everything was super casual.  L and I had only been dating for a few weeks and had never discussed exclusivity.  I really liked L, but the truth is I really liked The Other Girl too.  There wouldn't have been (much) harm in dating them both for a little while before deciding between them.

Instead, I said goodbye, got into the car, drove over to L's place, hung out with her for a while, got her naked and got us both off, and had the exclusivity talk with her.  As for The Other Girl, I took the coward's way out and started dropping the phrase "my girlfriend" into the conversation at every opportunity until she gave up.  Yeah, I was a bit of a pussy back in the day.  Oh well.  You live and learn.

Next Time On How I Got Here:  The Old Apartment

How I Got Here IV

College Part III:  L Part I

There was only one girl between Batshit Crazy Ex and L.  Not much to speak of, we went out a couple times, never got physical.  She had a little dog, and figuring that girls listen to their friends even when their friends are animals, I bought a packet of dog treats to give to him every time I saw him.  Then after a while I realized I didn't much care what this girl or her dog thought, so the rest of the treats went to my next door neighbors' dog so that he'd quit barking at me every time I walked past their fence to get to my front door.  There wasn't anything too terribly acrimonious or dramatic about it, we both knew there was zero chemistry.  She gave me the LJBF speech, which was a relief because it meant I didn't have to give the same speech to her.  She emailed me once a couple weeks later apologizing for being out of touch and saying she'd "been a bad friend," but I didn't bother responding.  I didn't need a friend, I needed to get my rocks off.  (-: All of this is notable only because it was a departure from my usual pattern of coming on way too strong way too quickly in all the wrong ways and being way more into whatever prospect I was courting than she was into me.

And then a few weeks later, there was L.  We met online, sent a couple emails back and forth.  I sent her a picture, she sent me one.  She fell right into the sweet spot: pretty enough to be pleasant, not quite pretty enough to be intimidating.  We decided to meet.

It's funny looking back at it now with the perspective of years and a little bit of Game education and seeing all the things I did right without realizing it, and the mistakes I made that she managed not to hold against me too much.  TL;DR version: like many young men, I managed to clumsily cobble together just enough Game to get myself into an LTR before promptly forgetting everything I'd sort of almost learned.

Mistake #1: I let her plan the date.  I was damn near broke and didn't want to be the first one to propose something cheap.  In retrospect: dude!  It was college!  We were all broke!  Who the fuck cares!  But instead I gave her the dreaded, "What do you want to do?" line.  Ugh.

Fortunately she came back at me with, "Well, it's not super romantic, but I've kind of been craving IHOP lately.  Is that cool?"  Waffles for under ten bucks a plate?  Fuck yes that's cool!  She gained a point in my book for not being high-maintenance right there.

So we met, and it just clicked.  She was relaxed and easy to talk to, we had enough in common to have something to talk about, and enough different that we could learn things from each other.  She was constantly playing with her hair through dinner, which in retrospect was a huge IOI, but at the time I just thought was this unique and endearing quirk that I hadn't really seen before.

We talked so long that we got kicked out of the IHOP at closing time.  It was going well and I didn't want it to end, so I suggested we meet back up for coffee and dessert at the only place in our tiny college town that was open 24/7, a Denny's.  I didn't know a thing about location-switching to create the illusion of long acquaintance, it just seemed to happen naturally.  At one point during the evening while I was half listening to her talk and half just watching her face light up and her lips move, I thought-- and I know everyone says this but I swear it is true-- "I'm going to spend the rest of my life with this girl."

And then I grabbed that thought by the throat, threw it to the ground, and ruthlessly stomped it out, because even then I had just barely enough self-awareness to know that thoughts like that were what kept getting me into trouble.

Finally it got late enough that even irresponsible college students in an all-night diner who didn't have class the next morning couldn't justify staying out any longer, so we reluctantly called the evening to a close.  I told her that I'd enjoyed myself and would like to see her again and that we should exchange numbers.  I gave her mine and sort of stood there like a schmo waiting for her to reciprocate.  After a couple awkward moments it became clear she wasn't going to, and I couldn't think of any way to prompt her without seeming pushy.

Suddenly there was this lump in my stomach.  Dammit, I thought this was going so well, and now she won't even give me her number?  What the hell?  Had she just been stringing me along?  For what purpose?  It had been a cheap date, and a Dutch one at that (her suggestion).  Was she blowing me off?  And I thought we'd been making such a connection!  My stupid neurotic brain was chasing itself around in circles.

And then just as suddenly it passed.  Don't be stupid, I told myself.  You just had a really nice first date, but this girl has still only known you for like four hours.  There are all kinds of creeps and rapists in the world, she has every right to be careful.  She's got your number and your email address, if she's interested, she'll let you know.  Let it go.  So I hugged her and told her goodnight and went home and went to sleep.

The next morning, there was an email waiting for me.  "Oh my God," she says, "I can't believe I forgot to give you my number!  You must think I'm such a flake.  Here it is:  (xxx) xxx-xxxx.  Give me a call, I can't wait to see you again!"

For our second date she invited me over to her place for burgers.  She was very careful to tell me that her two roommates would be home, which in retrospect was Dating Code for, "I know I am inviting you to my place, but I am not letting you isolate me yet.  Don't expect sex."  I was oblivious, though, just happy that she wanted to see me again.  I was coming down with a terrible cold and sex was the last thing on my mind.

I told her about the cold, and told her that I would stop by, but I probably wouldn't eat too much or stay too late.  In retrospect, this was probably interpreted as Dating Code for, "I am interested, but not too interested.  You're going to have to win me over, but I am open to being won," but from my perspective it was just the absolute truth.  Man, was I ever blind to subtlety back in the day!  I showed up, had a pretty good time, struggled manfully to be charming and wished like hell that I wasn't sick as a dog so that I could do a better job of it.  She cooked for me, another thing that I missed the significance of until years later: her Beta Love Language is Acts of Service, and since cooking isn't something that comes naturally to her or that she particularly enjoys, any time she cooks anything more complicated than nuking leftovers, she always intends it as a heartfelt gesture of some kind.

Third date, my place, alone, a movie.  I think we might even have gotten through most of it before we started making out like the horny college students we were.  I was still getting over my cold so I could barely breath, but it was worth it.  And again, I was so dense I didn't even know that the third date is traditionally when sex happens, a tradition so old that it's passed into cliche.

Fourth date, her place again.  She'd caught my cold, and I felt so bad about giving it to her that I showed up with orange juice and chicken soup.  Acts of Service again, so it did the trick.  She loved it, and her roommates had been utterly charmed by me as well.  From then until last Friday, we were a couple.

You Can't Keep a Good Man....

...down, that is.

I've got this thing that I do when I'm under extreme stress, which is that I'll get into this really goofy and silly and jokey mood.  It's a way to blow off pressure, I guess.  I know that it won't last and doesn't mean I'm out of the woods or even necessarily past the worst of it, but it definitely beats feeling like shit, so I think I'm just going to ride it out and enjoy it.  I just flustered the crap out of some poor shy virgin over at the MMSL forums.  She's reading this right now and wondering if I'm just being an ass or trying to game her or what.  (Don't think I don't see you reading this.)  I'm a bad, bad man.  RedPillWifey knows what I'm talking about.

Maybe it's just the relief of having the uncertainty of the thing finally resolved, but I'm feeling pretty excited about the future again.  Maybe I WILL have to move into a crappier place without L to pick up half the rent, but it'll be MY place.  There's something to be said for that.  I'll have new neighbors to meet, get to meet new people in general, including new women when I feel ready, and I can take some time to figure out who I am, in and of myself, by myself.  There's something to be said for that, too.

That's all for later, though.  Right now, it's a matter of getting out of a bad situation while the getting's good.  Got some empty boxes from work, my sister getting L out of the house on Saturday, my Dad lending me his truck, and my brother-in-law lending me his ability to lift the other half of heavy things with me.  Hoping we'll be able to get the biggest stuff out of there, plus get a start on packing up some of the smaller stuff and get into the office to get myself taken off the lease.

Our two big pieces of mutually-owned furniture are the couch and the bed.  I'm thinking I'll offer her the latter and try to take the former.  I really, REALLY like that bed, it is quite literally the comfiest bed I have ever had the pleasure of sleeping on, but she's the one with back problems so she should probably have it.  And anyway, that couch is a really nice piece of furniture too.  Everything else furniture-wise is either obviously mine or obviously hers: my desk, mine, dining table and chairs, mine, TV and stand, mine, various end tables and cabinets, hers.  I don't anticipate any arguments there.

Not quite sure how to handle the pet custody situation.  Black Cat was her first love long before I came into the picture, so that one's a no-brainer.  White Cat came around about a year after we moved in together.  I'll probably wind up taking him.  He'll be heartbroken at being separated from Black Cat, but she'll be ecstatic: she hates him and he has Stockholm Syndrome.  He loves L too, but he's always been a total daddy's boy at heart.  Only problem is that my dad will NOT be happy at taking on another roommate, so I may have to seek out an interim catsitter until I find my own place, which carries additional problems; anyone I can think of who would take care of a pet already has one, and while he's totally fine with strange people, he does NOT get on with strange animals.

In other news, I bought a guitar.  Total impulse buy, totally irresponsible considering I should be socking money away for a security deposit on a new place, but what the hell.  I'm single, still pretty young, and I've got no kids and (pretty soon) no woman tying me down.  I can splurge on something stupid if I want, and a new hobby (something a little more Alpha than Torchlight 2) is probably just the sort of stupid thing I need.  In the abstract, I've always felt that everyone should learn how to play an instrument (even if they suck) and speak a foreign language (even if they suck) in order to have a well-rounded life, but I've done a pretty piss-poor job of following my own advice.

So that's my shit for today.  Check in with me tomorrow and I'll probably be a sobbing mess again, but whatever.  Gonna ride this mood out and see where it takes me.

Edit:  While proofreading this post, I received an email from L's father, who I jokingly refer to as my Father-in-Commonlaw.  It seems he's been in communication with L and it sounds like she's coming around to the idea that it really is over between us.  He was very kind and sympathetic.  There goes my stupid fake happy-go-lucky exterior, I'm tearing up again.  That's not always a bad thing either, though.  He and his wife have always been very kind and loving toward me and it's only right to grieve for the fact that my relationship with them will change as my relationship with their daughter ends.

Breakup Songs

Funny how when you meet someone new, suddenly it seems like there's a love song on every radio station, but when you break up, all of a sudden all you can hear are breakup songs wherever you go.  One of my favorite podcasts, NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, just did a whole episode about breakup songs and breakup scenes in movies and TV.  They missed a really good one, though:

I could get used to this.

This might mean a lot or very little.  Might just be the fact that I'm coming down off the endorphin high of a good workout right now, or the fact that I flirted a little with a very friendly SR8 on my lunch break today, or the relief of finally having taken ACTION instead of thinking and talking and writing and obsessing, but....

I haven't seen L in about 56 hours or so... and this already feels like the right decision.

It might be tough to hold on to that frame when I do talk to her again-- and I WILL have to, to split up our shared possessions if nothing else-- but I'm writing this down so that I can remember how I feel at this exact moment.

This feels right.  Being by myself right now feels right.  Not obsessing over every little interaction I have with the person I'm sharing my living space with feels right.  (Not that my Dad is the easiest roommate to live with either, but then, I'm not trying to fuck my Dad, ha ha.)  Playing with my nephew without having to look over at L looking at us like a deer at an oncoming car feels right.

I'm still leaving a lot behind... but I'm gaining a lot, too.  I'm starting to think it's a pretty good tradeoff.

I Get By With a Little Help....

It's good to have friends and family.

Yesterday we had my Dad's birthday party.  He's not much of a party kind of guy: I asked him what he wanted to do, bowling, go out to a restaurant, go to the park, whatever.  He said, "Why don't you kids [there are four of us, all in our late mid-to-late twenties / early thirties, but we'll always be "the kids" to him] all bring your cars over to my house and we'll have a car-washing party?"  Heh.  Okay.

So my nephew learned how to use the hose, and we had a grand old time.  He'd point to the grimy gray water flowing down the driveway and say, "Icky!"  And I'd tell him, "Yeah, the car is icky!  Get the icky!"  Then my sister, who he calls "Ti-Ti" because that's what he took away when we tried to teach him "Auntie," shows up.  "Payday," I tell him.  [That's my nickname for him.]  "Ti-Ti is icky."  Then I walked away and watched the fireworks.  (-:

Later on he comes running up to me with the birthday present I gave him last week, a box set of Dr. Seuss books, and asks me to read him "Ham book!"  So apparently that was a hit.  He got his book read to him while we put him down for his nap.  His mom (who's five months pregnant in addition to taking care of a 2-year-old, hence tired all the time) crashed out too, as did my Dad (whose excuse is that he's in his sixties).  I could've done the same right then, but it was not nap time: it was poker time!

[Boring Poker Talk That's Only Interesting To Poker Players]

I got crap for cards and played like crap on top of it, but everyone else sucked even worse so even given all that I still managed to squeak by in second place.  Actually, I had managed to pull almost even with the chip leader during 1-on-1, shoved all-in with a pair of Kings and four to a club flush with one card to come.  He calls, a really bad move considering that all he had was four to a spade flush without anything to back it up.  But he lucks out and catches his fifth spade on the river to knock me out.  If he has to call 3/4 of his stack on a suckout draw like that just to beat me, I consider it a moral victory.  Plus second place gets his buy-in back so I played for free.  Can't complain too hard about that.

[/Boring Poker Talk That's Only Interesting To Poker Players]

Anyway, it's really good to have guy friends.  I hadn't talked to any of my IRL friends about all the L drama I've been going through yet, just family.  Athol warns against asking friends for advice with marriage problems, because if they've got no Game then their advice is worthless, and if they've got Game, you just let a potential competitor know that your wife is right there waiting to be seduced.  I'd like to think that I could trust (most of) my guy friends better than that, but on the other hand, those few of my guy friends who DO have Game are "naturals" anyway, so it's not like they have a really good ability to identify what they're doing right and put it into words to help me out.

So my friend who hosted poker last night is one of those naturals.  I've known him since high school, and he never had any problem pulling 8s and 9s and the occasional 10.  What he DID have a problem with was constantly pulling 8s-10s who ultimately turned out to be batshit crazy bitches who would put him through the wringer before he would finally wise up and pull the plug on them.  So I don't really envy him his relative success with women: shit's tough all over.

Anyway, he did pretty good for himself at the end of the day.  Wound up getting married a year or two ago to a really sweet woman who's probably an objective 5 or 6, but has a staggering amount of Girl Beta, clearly worships the ground he walks on, and actually appreciates it when he treats her right.  He works in the hospitality industry so he's still surrounded by pretty young SR 8-10 hostesses and waitresses all the time, but if he ever gave any of them a second look after getting married, he's never let on to me.  And he WOULD let on to me if he did. So that's good.

ANYWAY,  I filled him in on the broad strokes of what's been going on with me and L.  He'd pretty much known something heavy was going on with me for a while, but he's not the type to pry for more information than someone offers him.  He listens, doesn't say much other than to make the standard "that sucks, man" commiseration noises.  When I seem more or less finished, he asks, "So you think you're gonna work it out, or are you gonna call it?"  I tell him, "It's really looking like I'm gonna have to call it."  He nods understandingly.

Right around then his wife wanders into the room.  Without missing a beat, he calls over to her, "Hey, hon?  We're hooking Ben up.  Start thinking about it.  I'm thinking Sarah.  What do you think?"  She laughs.  "Yeah, Sarah sounds good for Ben."

I laugh too.  "I'm not anywhere close to thinking about that," I tell him.  "But when I am, I know who to talk to."

He claps me on the back.  "Yeah you do.  Nine years with one woman is a long time.  When you're ready, you get that dick wet with someone new.  You'll feel like a new man."

It's good to have guy friends.

Real, or the Man-Hamster?

She showed up on my doorstep yesterday.  Remember how I fliply told her, "Now write me a list of twenty things you're doing to get us to the point of having a kid"?  She actually did it.  I asked for a twenty-point plan.  She gave me thirty.  Everything I could possibly ask her to do, plus some stuff I never even thought of.  And then a lot of talk about how she wasn't letting me go after nine years without a fight and she doesn't want to live her life without me.  I listened until I couldn't listen any more and then I told her to leave.  I was in a really bad state.

She wrote me another email.  I wish I could just post it in its entirety here so you could see what I'm talking about, but that would be crossing a pretty clear ethical line, and I already feel iffy enough talking about all our private business here.

God, but she can be pretty damn convincing.  She's pretty much painting a picture of what my best-case scenario was for us planning to have a kid.  It's not totally ridiculous pie-in-the-sky stuff ("Oh my God I just realized turns out I totally want to make babies, how funny is that?"), she clearly acknowledges all her reservations and concerns, and then tells me exactly how she intends to go about addressing them.

Dammit, where was all of this two days ago?  Two days ago I would have heard all this and been overjoyed.  No amount of naysaying in the comments here could have convinced me that it was anything other than the turnaround I've been pushing for.  Now I hear it and keep thinking, "It took me leaving to get to this.  If I go back and she backslides and becomes negative and unproductive again, I can't just up and leave every time that happens."

She says she's not proud of how she's been acting the past two months, but that I've had thirty years of thinking about kids and she's only had two months and that she HAS made progress in those two months.  And that's true enough.  Two months ago it was, "I'd consider maybe adopting in about ten years.  Make a baby with my uterus?  No way."  Now it's, "You're right, I'll never want kids the way you do, where I have to have them no matter what my situation is.  I don't want 'kids,' I want OUR kid."  Apparently she's been reading pregnancy books.  I didn't know that.

She says she's not happy about the way this is starting either, but sometimes life isn't perfect.  She points to my nephew, who is a beautiful healthy happy 2-year-old with loving doting deliriously happy parents who are expecting their second in January, and who is also the result of a broken condom.

She's got an appointment on Monday to switch from her heavy hormonal cocktail no-period birth control pill to an IUD that gives a much smaller dose of hormones, no estrogen, and regular periods every month.  It was something we were going to do anyway to see if it improved her moods and libido, and the appointment happened to roll around while all this other stuff has been going on.  Not sure how or whether that changes anything.  Optimism Hamster is optimistic.  Tired Pessimistic Doesn't-Want-To-Deal-With-Any-Of-This-Any-More Ben sighs and wonders if it's just another red herring.

I find myself thinking, obviously I can't just drop this and move back home because she wrote me a pretty email and made some promises.  That would make me the Boy Who Cried Wolf.  Oh, Ben wasn't getting his way so he threw a tantrum and ran away until it was too cold and lonely and then he turned around and went home.

But, what if I gave us some time apart to try to calm down, with as little contact as can be arranged, and then check in with her in another two or three months?  See if she's still following through with her thirty-point plan.  See if she's still feeling positive about kids without me hovering over her shoulder and pushing my agenda.  See if the BC changes have had any effect on her moods.  And in the meantime, continue running my MAP, focus on improving myself and getting to know myself and who I am in and of myself, without her.  Try to kick the one-itis in hopes that when I come back around to check in on her in a couple months, I can judge where she's at with a little bit more perspective.

I don't know, is there something to that, or is that just my stupid traitor man-Hamster trying to give me false hope?

Phase Seven

Writing this from my Dad's house, where I'm staying for the moment.  We had the talk last night.  It went about how I expected.  There was a lot of talking, but the important part was this:

Me:  I can't stay for "maybe."

Her:  Then leave.

Me:  Okay.

I left the counselling session and packed a bag.

She's not making this easy for me.  This morning I woke up to find an email from her.  In last night's counseling session I said that any time she talked about having a kid, she made it sound like this burdensome price that she might be willing to pay to stay with me, never something that she was excited about.  That it was the exact opposite of how she acts with something that she wants, but still has serious concerns about (like buying a house); in those situations she acknowledges the difficulties and potential pitfalls, but focuses on the things she's looking forward to.

So this morning I wake up to find an email from her with a list of something like twenty things she'd be looking forward to about having a kid.  Remember what I said about my capacity for self-bullshitting?  Yeah, it's in full effect here, so I'd really like a dispassionate third party to reinforce or refute the following observations:

1.)  Interesting how this comes right after I leave her.  Where was any of this for the past month and a half we've been trying to make this work?

2.)  Everything in the list was written in the form, "If we have a kid...."  If if if.  This is still a whole lot of "maybe."  Can't stay for maybe.

3.)  All of the things she lists are things that can happen when a kid gets to be grade school age or later.  This is all still "abstract and far away."  This is a continuation of her pattern of acting hopeful when it's abstract and far away, but negative when we start getting down to planning out how we're going to actually make this happen.

Blah.  Going to go back to the apartment and pick up some more of my stuff now.  She's supposedly off on a 10-mile run this morning so if I'm lucky I'll miss her.  I'm not quite ready to deal with anything face-to-face right this second.  I know, not exactly manly and Alpha of me, but hell, I'm not trying to have sex with her any more so who am I trying to impress?

Addendum:  Ran into her back at the apartment while picking up some stuff.  Nuts.  Told her, "I read your email.  It sounded great.  Now change every instance of 'if we have a kid' to 'when we have a kid' and then add another list of twenty things you're doing to get us to that point, and we'll talk.  Anything else is just another 'maybe.'"

In retrospect, that was really dumb.  I should've kept my stupid mouth shut.  I need to remember that I'm not trying to game her any more, just trying to get out of this relationship with a minimum of drama and heartbreak.  Stupid.  Oh, well.  Live and learn.

Taking Stock of the Good Things

I'm in a place today where I could stand to take stock of some of the good things about my life.

1.)  I'm still young and healthy.

I'm 30.  By general human standards I'm in pretty good shape.  By fatass lazy American standards I'm pretty much Adonis.  (-:  I have no chronic health problems.  I can do things like lifting weights and hiking and rollerblading, things that feel good and are good for me.  I've learned to shop healthy and cook healthy so that I can eat healthy.  And I've got a good enough natural metabolism that I can even cheat a little bit now and then without blowing the whole thing.

2.)  I've got a decent job and no debt.

If I had things to do over again, I would've done them differently career-wise.  Specifically, I would've chosen a career instead of getting a worthless liberal arts degree and futzing around in a half-dozen go-nowhere crap jobs during my twenties.

Still, things could be worse.  And in this economy, a LOT worse.  I took a new job last spring, I get forty hours a week Mon-Fri, weekends off, full benefits, paid vacation, paid sick leave, all that good stuff.  They're grooming me for a promotion when one of my coworkers retires in the next few years that will be even better.  Do I wish I made more?  Sure.  But I can't complain about what I have either.  I'm supporting myself and pulling my own weight, with enough left over to have a little fun.

3.)  I'm surrounded by family and friends.

I've got a nice little safety net for myself here, both pragmatically and emotionally.  If my apartment caught on fire and I were homeless tomorrow, I can think of a half-dozen places just off the top of my head where I could crash until I got back on my feet.  When I'm going through some heavy shit, as I have been the last little while and will continue to be for the next little while, there are plenty of places I can turn for a sympathetic ear.  Not everyone can say that.

4.)  I have no kids.

I know this is pretty funny to say considering that I'm the guy who wants kids so bad he's currently screwing up his courage to end a nine-year relationship over it, but there is something to be said for the luxury of being able to put myself first.

5.)  I have the last nine years under my belt.

Again, pretty funny to say considering that I'm talking about leaving it all behind, but as hard as it got sometimes, I can't bring myself to regret a thing about those years.  They're what made me the man I am today, and I happen to kind of like that man.

And the hell of it is, until I dropped the kids bomb on things, following Athol Kay's MMSL blog and books and running the MAP really was doing a pretty nice job turning things around sexwise.  This summer was pretty much the happiest we've ever been together, certainly since we moved in together.  And I can't help but think that if I managed to cut through all the hangups (not just hers, either, not by a long shot) that were holding us back-- with some help and direction from the occasional Kiwi sex guru, of course-- then I can do anything.

All right.  That's my optimism-bomb for myself.  Tonight is our last couples' counseling session together.  I've run the conversation through my head a dozen different ways, and I don't see any way that it ends with us still together.  And I don't mean that in a Phase 5 "physically present but checked out" way, but in a Phase 7 "my Dad has the spare bedroom ready while I look for a one-person apartment" way.  This is going to suck.  Wish me luck.

BBC: Blue-Pill Broadcasting Corporation

L and I watched the first episode of the new season of Downton Abbey last night.  It's a lovely, lushly-produced BBC period soap opera about repressed British people doing repressed British things.  If you like that sort of thing, it's probably the finest example of "that sort of thing" you're likely to find.

It's also absolutely stuffed to the gills with the bluest of pills.  (It rhymes so it must be true.)  In this episode, the Earl of Grantham breaks down in tears in front of his American wife because he put all of their financial eggs in one basket (what kind of repressed, conservative English gentleman ARE you?  Diversify, man!) with a hole in the bottom and may be forced to sell the estate.  She immediately switches to full-on mothering mode and just about folds him in her arms telling him there there, it's going to be all right, dear.  Good to have such an understanding wife, but I hope you weren't planning on getting laid with her anytime soon.

Meanwhile, in the latest development in the show's main romantic subplot, the earl's eldest daughter throws a massive fitness test at her fiancee, a distant cousin and the earl's heir-apparent, at the mere suggestion that he might have a moral problem accepting some money that could save the estate because it comes from the will of the father of a previous (decease) love interest of his, and it was clear that he was put in the will when he and Deceased Love Interest were still engaged and never taken out before the father died.

(Yeah, there's a lot of stuff about wills and British succession law.  It's that kind of show.)

Eldest Daughter seems ready to take the whole thing as proof that Heir Apparent is not "on their side" and call of the engagement.  Heir Apparent at first seems poised to just barely squeak through the fitness test with a pass: after some thought and a manly pep talk from his best man (a delightfully drunken Irish radical), he calmly informs her that the wedding is still on, that he refuses to fight over an inheritance that he's not even certain is his yet, and that they will no doubt have many such disagreements in the future but that he refuses to have their marriage called into question over each and every one of them.  Good man.

Then he bungles the whole thing by ASKING if he may kiss her, when she's been broadcasting "take me!" signals all episode long with such strength that in 4.4 years they will be detectable by aliens on Alpha Centauri.  Way to screw up a decent show of Alpha strength with exactly the wrong kind of weak supplicating Beta, Beta Boy.  Of course the show depicts the whole thing as terribly romantic.

Anyway, as far as events in my own life goes, I realized the other night that I'd gotten my calendar wrong.  Our last couples counseling appointment isn't NEXT Friday (to coincide with our last parenting class), it's THIS Friday.  So that alters my timetable a bit, because that last counseling appointment still seems like the best possible setting to point out that, if anything, L seems less inclined toward kids now than when we started this process nearly two months ago and that we could stand to start getting real about the implications of that when it comes to our future together (or lack thereof).

It's times like this that I think keeping this blog is a very good thing for me.  I have as great a tendency toward self-bullshitting as anyone else, and there are times when putting something down in writing acts as a wonderful bullshit detector.  When I started this post, it was going to be all about what a nice evening we had together last night, watching silly British TV shows and making snarky quips to each other about the characters while she puttered around the living room cleaning up and I puttered around the kitchen fixing dinner, and how little I wanted to give that up for anything.

And writing that down made it sound so pathetic.  Really?  Watching TV together?  That's what's so special that I can't stand to give it up?  That's what I love so much that even now I still hear a little voice way in the back of my head saying, "This isn't so bad, is it?  You can settle for this, can't you?  You don't really need to rock the boat by pushing this kids thing, do you?  Why not just give up and let her have her way so that you don't have to disrupt your comfy, cozy little existence?"?

No.  Time to man up.  I love her, and I love our life together, and I deserve to have that kind of life... but I also deserve the rest of what I want.  And sitting back and waiting for her to be "ready" isn't going to get me that.

Weekend Report: More of the Same

Saturday morning L had an individual counseling appointment.  I tried to ask her how it went afterward, but didn't get much out of her.

Saturday night was our date night.  Sushi, then drinks at the local comedy club.  She'd been there once years ago; I'd never been.  It was pretty neat.  Brick wall, spotlight, microphone.  Saw four different comics counting the emcee.  They were all pretty good, no huge standouts but no real stinkers either.  The audience was friendly thanks to the two-drink minimum.  It was a nice little break from all the heavy shit we've been going through.  Our enjoyment was kind of muted, though.  Three months ago it would have been a great night out on the town for both of us.  Now it was kind of a wistful, guarded, "remember how nice it used to be before?"

Sunday morning she asks me, apropos of nothing, "How many kids do you actually want?"  I took a moment to think about it, because I had my pat answer, but I wanted to make sure my pat answer was actually true and not just, you know, pat.  But upon reflection my pat answer and my desires still seemed to match up, so I said, "Two, max."  We talked about it a little more; what it comes down to is that I think that two is theoretically ideal for most modern couples; one could make the argument for three.  More than three is right out.  But speaking of our situation in particular, I'm perfectly comfortable having one, seeing how that goes, and only moving on to two if both spouses agree that we can handle it.  There are cons to being an only child, but there are also cons to being raised by a couple that's taken on more than they can handle.

(For the record, and I've said as much to her, but I don't think that I can handle even one child right this second, but I see myself as potentially being in a place where I could within the next few years, which is why now is the time to start thinking and planning ahead.)

As long as we were talking, I also asked her if she'd put any thought into what I'd said at our last couples' counselling session a little over a week ago, about bringing me a counter-plan so that we could see about trying to find a compromise that would encompass both of our priorities.  Long story short: not really.  I was able to draw a little more out of her: she wants to study history with an eye toward being a teacher.  Okay.  Fair enough.  Where?  When?  For how long?  Part-time or full-time?  I told her I didn't expect a Powerpoint presentation, it's only been a little over a week, just some indication of how serious she is.  And that apart from everything else, I like to hear her talk about what she wants, so that it feels like there's more give-and-take to the process than a constant string of me putting something forth and her saying some variation of either "No.  Do not want," or "I GUESS that would be okay."

She says that she's feeling so stressed out and depressed just lately that it's hard for her to "want" much of anything.  There it is, the D-word, her all-purpose "I do not want to deal with this" Get Out of Jail Free card.  That used to be my cue to drop whatever I was asking for and pour on the Beta.  Nowadays I just ignore it, which seems to do exactly as much good.  Hell, I feel depressed too.  A good hard fuck would perk me right up, but failing that, a trip to the gym will do.  She's got the same options at her disposal, with a much better chance of getting the good hard fuck if she decides that's what she needs.

Sunday night was my nephew's 2nd birthday party.  It was pretty much a repeat of last weekend.  10-point IQ boost-- he's progressed from single words to two- and three-word sentences, L making polite noises but seeming distant, the works.  My sister and her husband announced that her second (due in January) is a girl.  I'm happy for them: it's what she wanted, one of each, and they were planning to stop after this one regardless, so that works out.  Of my two sisters, the married-with-kids one was always the girly girl, and her husband is more than a bit of a jock, so they're going the full un-PC pink-and-blue clearly-demarcated-gender-roles route with their kids, which troubles my L with her feminist background more than a bit.

On the drive back, she jokes, "Okay, I give up.  I'll stay in the kitchen and make babies and we'll give the boys footballs and the girls Barbie dolls.  I can't fight it, so why try?"

I joke back, "Well, when I hear you say it with such passion and sincerity, how can I refuse?"

Signs Point to No

We had our second parenting class yesterday.  It got a little bit more specific, anyway: talked about development, especially brain development, in the first two years.  It's still not quite as practical as I'd like; I was hoping for more stuff on nutrition, breast-feeding versus bottle feeding, sleep schedules, stuff like that.  I mean, theory is nice, but what do you actually DO?  I guess that's stuff I can get from books and talking to my sister.  We'll see.  I'm not in a hurry, I've got years to figure this stuff out.

A couple days ago I mentioned to L that I'd noticed that she got really quiet and distant after seeing my nephew on Sunday.  I'd already had a pretty good idea of what was going through her head, and she pretty much confirmed it.  She said that she'd been having a fun time hanging out with my sisters and mother-- she gets along really well with my family, and one of my sisters (the one without kids) has become one of her best friends-- and saw me having so much fun with my nephew, and thought, "Look at this.  This is your future, or else you never get to see any of these people again."

I didn't say much to that, just gently told her that I know it's different for her and I'm trying to let her work through it in her own time, but it's hard for me to understand how anyone could not want exactly that future.  And that was the end of that conversation.

Then at the end of last night's parenting class, the instructor asked everyone to go around and say what their biggest takeaway from the class was.  When it came to L, she said something like, "That the first three years are totally crucial and any little mistake you make can screw up the child for life" in this resigned tone like, "Oh God, this sounds like such a hassle, why would anyone sign up for this?"  I didn't know what to say to that that wouldn't be a knee-jerk response to the pessimistic tone instead of the content of what she'd said, so I kept my mouth shut, but the cute redhead said something about how, yeah, if you're consistently neglectful during the first three years it could really screw up a child's development, but it's not like they're going to drop 50 IQ points because you were ten minutes late with their bottle once or twice.

I'm really trying to be more stable about this process and not pull back from her every time we have a little setback, but it's hard not to take incidents like that and add them to a little mental tally under "Signs That She'll Never Really Want Kids No Matter How Hard She Tries."  And she IS trying, I'll give her that much: she isn't consciously trying to talk me out of it, and these classes were her suggestion, and she does talk about what our future with kids would be like in more hopeful tones sometimes.

In other news, she's been complaining of sleep problems and back problems just lately.  In retrospect, those have been her twin Get Out of Jail Free cards any time she's wanted to get me to pour on the Beta and ease up on wanting my needs met for the majority of our relationship.  Well, she's getting some Beta anyway-- I planned a nice date night for us this weekend-- and I reminded her of that when she texted me yesterday complaining of stress, and I added, "I also offer certain other de-stressing services available upon request (-:".  But I'm not planning on making it all about her the way I used to: she can come with me on fun date night or she can sit home alone and be miserable, that's up to her.

As for easing up on getting my needs met, I gave initiating sex the old college try last night after class.  She replied that she felt like shit.  I told her lightly I had a feeling she might say that.  Sometimes when she makes it clear she's not down for intercourse I'll try and get an HJ out of her on the MMSL principle of "a little sex is better than no sex," but last night I went the NMMNG "don't settle for bad sex" route instead.  Because, to be honest, any sex she tried to give me right that moment was going to be worse than just taking care of it myself real quick, which is what I did.

When I got back to bed, she snuggled close and put her head on my shoulder.  I couldn't tell if she was trying to make up for not being DTF or just trying to get some comfort for herself or both.  I let her do it.  It did feel nice.  "Did you get what you needed?" she asked.  "I got what I needed so that I can sleep tonight," I told her.  "There will be other chances to get what I REALLY needed."  I kissed her on the forehead and we went to sleep.

So I'm feeling pretty lousy today.  Not break-down-crying end-of-the-world lousy, just kind of pessimistic about this whole process.  We've got two more of these parenting classes, then another couples' counseling session the day after the last class (the last such session that will be covered by my insurance; anything else we do comes out-of-pocket).  That last class + last counseling session is looming in my mind like a deadline, because at that point it's sort of like, okay, we did these things that we said we were going to do to try to get more perspective on this whole thing: now what?

I'm trying not to treat it like a foregone conclusion, but more and more I'm thinking that the answer to "now what?" is, "I leave."  And I'm not sure what could possibly happen in the next couple weeks to change that.  So that's depressing.

Fun With Keys

Last night I went out to dinner with my dad.  I feel bad; I kind of dropped an emotion-bomb on him when all this ultimatum / kids stuff with L started, and then dropped off the face of the planet and didn't really update him on what was going on with me.  We've never had the closest relationship, but at the time I needed another man to talk to and he was there for me and I appreciate it.  Neither of us are necessarily the best about reaching out, but I'm trying to get better about it and damned if he isn't too.  So it was good to catch him up a little on where I'm at, and also swap some chat about poker and movies and our interactions with the women and children in our little clan (my sisters, that is, and my nephew, and my mother, who is his ex-wife).

Anyway, as we were wrapping things up, I get a text from L, who had decided to go for a run after work and then go to a friend's house to watch a movie while I was out with pops.  Well, she got her run in, only to get home and discover that at some point her house key had slipped out of her pocket and likely wound up in a ditch by the side of the road somewhere.  So she extended her run by a mile and a half and just jogged straight to her friend's house instead of going home and showering up and driving there like she'd planned, and just wanted me to let her know when I got home and she could be let back in the house.

This is one thing I like about her: she could've demanded that I drop everything, disrupt my plans, come straight home, let her in the house, and solve her problem for her.  Instead, she got it solved for herself to the extent that she was able.  She's a good chick that way.

So naturally, I decided to drop everything and solve her problem for her anyway, without telling her I was doing so.  (-:  It really wasn't that much of a hassle: Dad and I were done with dinner anyway, swinging by the hardware store to get two extra keys made (one to replace the lost one, and one to give to her friend so that we'd have someone close by with a spare, which is something we should've done long before now anyway) was only one extra stop, and swinging by her friend's house to drop it off was right on the way.

(Also, I have to admit, I'd been reading cautionary tales of adultery on the MMSL forums all day and was sort of looking for an excuse to pop in on her unannounced and make sure she was where she said she was.  I've never had any reason to suspect her of anything, and now I have one extra point of confirmation to add to that tally.  Works for me.)

So I ring the doorbell to have it answered by L, fresh out of her friend's shower, wearing a borrowed set of her friend's clothes, with no one in the house but her and her friend, just like she said.  Good deal.  I hold up the freshly-minted key.  She reached for it.  I teasingly pull it just out of her reach.  "Who's the best boyfriend* in the world?"

"Umm... I guess... you are?"

"She GUESSES.  Well then, I guess you don't really want this brand new key that I had made just for you."

"You already got a new one made?"  She'd thought I was just giving her my key, which made her confused about how I planned to get into the house myself, but NOW she got it.  Big hug, ten second kiss (first one we've had in forever that's been initiated by her, not me), some appreciative cooing from her friend.  All for making one extra stop and spending two bucks each on a couple of extra keys.  Not bad.

Side story:  Remember a couple posts ago when she left her house keys at the mechanic's with her broken-down car?  Well, I guess these things really do come in threes, because this morning I managed to lock my keys in my car with the engine running after getting to work.  All the AAA guy got when he came to bail me out was a thank you and a firm handshake.

*  For about as long as we've been dating, I've struggled with what to call L.  I hate "my girlfriend" because it sounds so high school and doesn't really encompass that fact that we've been together for nine freaking years.  For a long time I said "my lady friend" or just "my lady" because I thought it sounded nice and old-fashioned and chivalrous.  Since getting into this Red Pill stuff, I'm no longer sure chivalry is all it's cracked up to be (this particular anecdote of mild White Knighting balanced by some Alpha teasing notwithstanding).  Around the MMSL forums for a while I've been saying "my woman," but just lately I've been taking the easy route and just saying "my wife."  We stopped correcting people who just assumed we were married years ago, and we've talked about it lately and agreed that labels be damned, what we have is basically a marriage without the paperwork or the ceremony, and if we break up over the kids thing, it won't be a single bit less painful than a divorce.  But on this particular occasion, yeah, I slipped up and said boyfriend.  What the hell, nobody's perfect.  (-:

Weekend Report

No major developments, but I didn't want to leave those of you still following along with my story hanging.  Went out to dinner on Friday; nothing big or fancy, just some nice time spent together.  Went hiking together Saturday morning.  Tried to get something going in the shower after, but she was having none of it.  Didn't really expect it; we were tired and she had a bridal shower to get to.  But what the hell, nothing ventured, nothing gained.  I kind of overdid the "playful persistence" aspect of it and pissed her off.  They say if you don't come across as an asshole every once in a while, you're doing it wrong.  Well, I'm pretty sure I sort of came across as an asshole.  Oh, well.  At least I managed the "unaffected by rejection" bit better than I usually do.

She did her bridal shower, I did Risk night with friends.  Risk turned into cards and beer and pizza.  She got home while this was going on, I invited her to join us, she declined.  Eventually the friends cleared out, I cleaned up a little and got into bed.  She came to bed and started reading.  I had reached that familiar crossroads: I could either wake up enough for sex, or crash.  So I asked her if she wanted some sex.  I wasn't particularly Alpha and attraction-create-y about it, I'm afraid, but what can I say, I was tired. She gave me mixed signals, said she might be interested but really wanted to read her book for a while.  (And not in a flirty "talk me into sex" way.)

I decided that "maybe" means "yes," shook the sleep off, and playfully told her, "Okay, no problem, you can read your book.  You do what you want and I'll do what I want" and started getting grabby.  I figure either she gets into it and puts the book down or gets annoyed and gives me an actual "no" instead of this hard-to-get shit.

Well, she put the book down and got into it.  (-:  There was some last-last-minute resistance when she interrupted me partway through the foreplay process to tell me she was irritated by my shower shenanigans earlier in the day and that she'd been interested in some sex earlier that evening but I'd filled the house full of guys and pizza.  I didn't explain or justify or apologize, just let her get it out of her system and then went back to work.  That seemed to be all she needed, just to get it out of her system.  Sex was good, no pain, no trouble reaching orgasm for either of us.

Every once in a while, not often mind you, but every once in a while, I could swear I'm getting the hang of this.

We did talk about her "irritation" with me the next day; I played it reasonably cool, told her that I know I come on strong sometimes, I'm still searching for the right balance, and it's good of her to be patient with me.  Didn't apologize, just explained that.  She said she knew that being annoyed that I was hanging with my friends right when she happened to want sex was immature, it was just how she felt in the moment.  I told her it was good that she realized that and was wiling to work through it so we could get back to having fun mutually-orgasmic sex.  Felt like we left that talk in a good place.

Sunday morning we had brunch with the family, saw a bunch of my nephew.  I swear he jumps 10 IQ points every time I see him.  His vocabulary has exploded, he's got everyone's name (or at least a toddler-talk variation) down, plus colors, plus a dozen each of his favorite foods and games, plus "poop" for when he needs his diaper changed.  He'll be ready for potty training soon; my sister and bro-in-law are excited about that.

These little things called "children" are amazing.  And you say the way you get them is by having sex?  Dude.  Sign me up.

Sunday afternoon I smoked my friends in poker.  I'd love to credit the victory to my amazing skills, but the truth is, I was just on a card rush.  It's not hard to play well when you never show down anything worse than a three of a kind and every flush and straight draw comes in (and brings with it an opponent with an ever-so-slightly lower flush or straight who's only too happy to get into a betting war).

Since poker got out early, L and I went out to dinner again.  She seemed pretty quiet and distracted all night, and then before bed when I offered her some more of that good sex she said she "wasn't in a good place emotionally" for it.  I resisted the Beta urge to ask her what was wrong; if it's something I need to know, she'll tell me.  If I had to hazard a guess, it probably had something to do with seeing me have so much fun with my nephew and knowing that this kids thing isn't going to go away.  I think she's still feeling pretty conflicted about the whole thing.

It's still a dark cloud hanging over everything we do, and eventually we're going to have to deal with it, but I'm trying to take things one day at a time and enjoy life as much as possible.  Trying not to avoid the topic with her, but not obsess about it either.  It seems to be working well enough for now.

Parenting Class

(Before I begin, a bit of an addendum to yesterday's post.  To be perfectly fair, for the majority of our relationship, it's been L who's been pushing me to consider our goals and our plan for the future, and me who's been dragging his feet.  Things are fine the way they are, why are you rocking the boat, I'm too stressed to think about this right now, all that crap.  So I bear at least as much responsibility for setting that tone in our relationship when it comes to this sort of thing as she does, probably more.  I think I've done a pretty good job of turning that around within the past year, with the unfortunate side effect that it turns out my goals don't have all that much overlap with hers.  So I can't say I harbor too much blame or resentment toward her now that it's me setting the pace and her having trouble keeping up; I know what it's like to be on the other side of that.  That doesn't mean I'm going to put any less pressure on her to get her shit together and either get on board with my plan or come up with one of her own so we can see if it's possible to mesh it with mine.  It's just that it's easy to read that last post and think of her as the wishy-washy one and me as the together one, while the reality of the situation is more nuanced than that.)

L and I had our first parenting class together last night.  It was okay.  A little heavy on the theory and light on the practical details, but I'm hoping that that's just a matter of the first class being more of an overview, with the nitty-gritty to come later.  It's the nitty-gritty I'm interested in.  I've come to realize that to me, having kids is a priori.  It's something I have to do or I'll always regret it.  The rest is details.  But some of those details are pretty important, and I've spent too long looking at it as something far away or something I might have to learn to live without.  Now I need to roll up my sleeves and get a better idea of what exactly I'm getting myself in for.

Didn't get much of a sense of what L took away from it: she agreed with me about hoping it gets more practical, and when I asked what she thought of it other than that, she just said, "it gave me a lot to think about."  Whatever that means.  I didn't press; we've got four weeks of this stuff to go through.  I'll get her thoughts as they come.

It was interesting seeing the other people taking the class:

There was a single mom with an 11-month-old; not too hard to see why taking it is a good idea for her.

There was a couple that was expecting; mom-to-be looked to be getting into the third trimester, starting to get that real "ready-to-pop" look to her.  That one made sense too, although it came out that he has an eight-year-old from a previous relationship, she has a two-year-old from a previous relationship, and that neither of them ever really see the kids they already have.  I have to imagine there's a hell of a story there, and I can't pretend not to be super curious, but it's not my place to pry.  Can't help but think that with that kind of history on both sides, the odds are against them, but they seemed very much in love and committed to doing it right this time, so here's to beating the odds.

There was another couple there with one kid (hers, but not his).  He didn't talk much.  She did.  She alluded a lot to her own upbringing, which sounded like a real horror show: Mom in and out (sounded like drugs), mostly raised by grandparents, never knew her father.  She talked a lot about "breaking the cycle."  More power to ya if you can.  Hell, somebody has to.

And then there was this cute, well-dressed little redhead, maybe mid-twenties, no kids.  If she had any immediate plans to get  to making some, she didn't mention them, and if there was a man around she was interested in doing it with, he wasn't there at the class with her.  If I were a free man, it would be a question of greater urgency, but one thing at a time.  (-:

So that was the first class.  All else aside, it felt good to be doing something with a schedule and a timetable to it.  Class happens every Thursday for the next little while, so I'll keep posting my thoughts.

With great power....

L and I had another counseling session last night.  It was a pretty good session.  A lot of men whose experiences I've followed have had mixed experiences with marriage counseling; some have complained that the counselor has a bad habit of taking their wife's side too often, feeding the Hamster, etc.  Ours has been pretty good, though.  What's surprised me is that she (the counselor) doesn't seem to do nearly as much mediating as I'd expect.  The truth is, I can totally dominate the sessions if I choose to.  For example, at one point the question was raised about whether I'd do my fair share of the work of raising kids.  Classic fitness test: prove to me that you've got enough Beta for me, Beta Boy!

It was almost too easy to turn that one around.  Didn't have to raise my voice, didn't have to puff up my chest.  Just calmly said that I found it frankly insulting that it was just assumed that the one with the Y chromosome wouldn't pull his own weight.  L says that she's seen it happen to her friends.  I say, are you married to any of your friend's husbands?  Then they can do whatever they want, it's got nothing to do with us.  Counselor says that maybe she just needs some extra reassurance.  I say that if the past seven years that we've been living together aren't reassurance enough that I pull my own weight around the house, then I've got nothing to say.  By that point the Hamsters were spinning almost entirely in reverse, rushing to assure me that of course they hadn't meant to ACCUSE me of anything, of COURSE I was totally committed to being a father, that was the whole reason I was here, nobody was calling that into question, as if they hadn't been doing exactly that about four sentences ago.

(To be perfectly fair to the counselor, she was raised in a different generation, when raising kids and keeping house really was considered "women's work" more often than not, and she doesn't know me from Adam, so she doesn't know that our domestic situation is plenty egalitarian and that there's no reason for L to have any doubts that that would continue.  So it's not that I blame her for bringing it up.)

So yesterday we were talking about the things that L wants to do-- go back to school, move away from the city we're in-- that she's afraid she won't be able to do if we have kids.  I tell her those things and kids don't have to be mutually exclusive, but that I can't put my priorities on indefinite hold because she vaguely wants to do these other things someday.  I've given her my plan and my timetable, which includes taking a year or two to buy a house where we're at, get settled, and work on our relationship and our careers (I just got a new job last spring, and am being groomed for an even better position that will be opening up when a coworker retires within the next few years) to the point where we could support a kid morally and financially, and then think about things like moving and school another five or six years after that when the kid is getting into grade school.

If that doesn't work for her, it's on HER to bring me a counter-plan that puts her priorities higher up on the timetable so that I can decide if it's a compromise I'm willing to get on board for.  But that needs to be a real plan, not just a "we can't do this because it doesn't let me do X," and it needs to include details like what degree or certificate are you going back to school for? What semester would you start?  What job would that prepare you for?  Would that job be good enough to be worth moving for, pay enough that we could afford to?  Etc.  Not just, "But I wanna go back to schoooooool / but I wanna moooooooove!"

She says that she doesn't feel like any plan she brings to the table would be good enough for me.  I tell her that's hardly fair, considering that she hasn't brought a plan to the table at all.  She gets that stubborn look on her face and says that she hates the idea that she has to get my permission to do the things she needs to do to be happy.  I tell her, "You don't need my permission to do those things.  You only need my permission if you want to do them with me."

The room falls silent.  Because that's what it comes down to, isn't it?

After the session is over, we talk a little more.  I tell her that I DO want her to do the things she wants to do.  Of course I want us to be able to have it all.  And to my own surprise, I find that I'm telling the truth.  I do want to see her happy, and I think that some of these things have a pretty good chance of making her happier.  I just no longer want it so much that I'm willing to prioritize it over my own happiness.  She's been talking about going back to school and about moving for years, and I've been "yes-dear"ing her the whole way.  But by giving her so much leeway to choose the time and place and way she goes about it, I've also been enabling her to not make it happen.

Now I'm putting a much tighter timetable and an enormous amount of pressure on her to actually DO something.  And paradoxically, I think it might actually give her the kick in the ass she needs to form a real plan.  Which, double-paradoxically, would make me a lot more inclined to want a kid with her.  I'd rather my kid have a mom who rose to the occasion and made that shit happen than one who gave up on her own goals and settled into a comfortable routine of doing what I wanted and quietly resenting me for it.  For a moment, I allow myself to hope that we can actually do it, have our cake and eat it too.  What the hell, people do it all the time.  Why not us?

Well, it's either that or she doesn't come up with a plan for herself and I, rather than continue to enable her, put on my walking shoes.  No guarantees.  But it was nice to have that moment of hope.