The Married Man Thirstzone

One of the more amusing private pains-turned-public spectacle to leak out of an internet pustule recently graced the combox of Reddit (/r/relationship). A sexually deprived married man (but I repeat myself) crafted a meticulous spreadsheet documenting the number of times his wife denied him sex and the excuses she gave each time. He then emailed this “unspread”sheet to his wife while she was away on business (red flag right there). She went public with it, hoping to both shame her thirsty hubby and to trawl for advice from male feminists that would rub the fur of her hamster with the grain.

at least she didn’t use “i have a headache”

For those keeping score, that’s three marital congresses out of twenty-eight attempts, for an 11% successful lay ratio.

An 11% lay ratio is pretty good for the average single beta male picking up girls (1 out of 10 approaches yields sex), but horrible for a married man who pledged his freedom, natural polygynous urge, and HALF to a woman who presumably loves her husband unto death, and who tacitly agreed by signing the marriage contract to offer her body on a regular basis to him.

But as visitors to Chateau Heartiste know, marriage is no respite from the perpetually clanking meat machine of the sexual market. If you recline into complacently dull beta maleness, you will lose your wife’s desire to please you as readily as you would lose a girlfriend’s, or a fling’s, desire. Worse, if you make the mistake of thinking that marriage will energize your wife’s sexual cravings beyond the limp gestures she had exhibited toward you pre-marriage, you’ll learn soon enough that the line that is dotted is not the ‘gine that is prodded.

No marriage contract in the world is sufficiently coercive to wrest sexual desire from the limbic node of a woman’s arousal center. Sexual desire is an animal instinct that predates legal fictions or social expectation. If the animal slumbers, “talking it out” or making it promises won’t rouse it to rutting; the animal must be confronted on its own terms, with equally primal cues that waken its instinct to mate.

The trope of the married man reduced to begging for sex from his wife stricken with yet another “headache” is a stereotype for a reason. These things hardly ever materialize out of thin air. But exactly how many married men labor in the purgatory known as the thirstzone? Numbers are hard to come by, although General Social Survey wizards have played the contrarian and dug up data suggesting married men have slightly more sex on average than unmarried men.

The problem with that survey data, beyond the inherent flaws of self-reporting and social expectation bias (and burning shame), is that the huge swell of omega and lesser beta single men who suffer involuntary celibate lives greatly skews the stats to promote an illusion that married men enjoy a cornucopia of sex (with one woman, let it be reminded). This incel ballast must be jettisoned to get a truer picture of what kind of sex lives married men actually enjoy. If the typical married man gets laid once per month (as our pubic flogging victim above has documented), then a more accurate assessment of his bounty would come from comparison to unmarried men who aren’t hopeless sex market rejects.

Compared to an incel, once per month married sex sounds like a pretty good deal. Compared to single men with girlfriends, fuck buddies, and flings tossed in for flavor, once per month sex sounds like painful blue balls. Ask any single man what a year-long relationship with a hot girlfriend is like, and he’ll tell you it’s a copulation carnival. His married buddies will turn green with envy.

As often surfaces on megafeminist sites like Reddit, hackneyed hackers and bromide belchers rush to fill the void of useful advice with Hivemind-approved diagnoses that abjure the wife of even the tiniest bit of responsibility for her role in her husband’s desperate sexual deprivation. Two common refrains — the husband isn’t doing enough to “support” his wife, and the wife has “low libido” — receive rounds of applause from the benighted.

These are handy rationalizations without a scintilla of realistic relevancy. In the real world, husbands who support the shit out of their wives are often less sexually rewarded than husbands who follow a program of benevolent sexism. And no scientist has yet, to my satisfaction, proven that there is an epidemic of pathologically low libido among married women. What is much more likely is that married men are, or become, less sexually stimulating to their wives, and the infamous “low libidio” of their wives is nothing more than selective female libido. Divorcee tell-alls revel in confessions of rejuventated sex lives once the beta provider hubby package was sent adrift.

A married man stuck in the thirstzone is not without options. Mistresses have traditionally been outlets for such men, and the culture used to give a wink and a nod to such arrangements, because the culture used to have a healthy and normal appreciation and acceptance of innate sex differences, before everything turned to poopytalk and hamster fuel.

There, too, is the advice offered by this very outpost of recivilization: A dab of dread will make legs spread. The poor sexless husband who attempted to shame his wife into fulfilling his most basic need in a marriage has, by accounts, ended all contact with her. Radio silence, while not the ideal solution to such crises of the cunt, is better than abject mewling and prone apologia. It has, at the least, made his wife think so hard about her lack of desire for her husband that she has taken to an internet forum full of spergs to find serenity now.

Dread game works, but only if the timing and execution occur before betatization has metastasized. A husband who repulses his wife is in a sorry position from which no remedy will work within a time frame not measured in years. The unspreadsheet man had undoubtedly been suffering months, perhaps years, of sexual isolation from his wife before he became so desperate that he felt it necessary to painstakingly chronicle his pain and accost her with it while she was at a hotel bar thinking about unleashing her inner bed fiend with a business associate.

At that late stage, any active effort to reverse his misfortune would be perceived as spite by his carnally estranged wife, stemming from a place of hurt and neediness. Perception is king in the mating arena, and butthurtness is kryptonite to women’s horny levels. The proper dose of dread needed to be delivered earlier, under circumstances less likely to be confused for vengeance.

The most effective punishment for a sexually withdrawing wife is punishment that can be construed as inadvertent. A woman is validated equally by intentional punishment as by intentional reward; both tell her “I’m so desired I rouse my husband to flattery and to retribution.” And a validated woman is an unpliable woman.

But punishment that appears almost “off-hand”, or apathetic and callous, is gold. This is the kind of punishment of female misbehavior (and, yes, denial of historically regarded marital duties counts as misbehavior) that strikes wee hamster nerves. It’s the punishment of indifference that follows when a husband’s mind has started wandering to thoughts of other women. The classic “late night phone call to wife with girls laughing in the background” ploy is an example of indifference punishment.

Wives can handle being punished when it validates their higher status. Cause-and-effect kneejerk punishment won’t rattle their self-possession or shake them into suddenly renewed desire. But no woman, wifed up or not, can handle being an afterthought to her man without compensating for her perceived demotion with reinvigorated lust.

This type of “punishment by gradually escalated indifference” of wayward wives/girlfriends — what a reader suggested can be called the “De-escalation Ladder” — will feature in a future post.

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PS: Here’s an example from real life of “accidental” dread game in action.