The Ironwood Collection of Alpha Moves (15 page)

You see, it’s very easy, especially in a cohabitation or marriage situation, for you and your woman to take each other for granted when it comes to a lot of the daily chores and minutia of living.  Often it’s a matter of the female becoming dependent on the male for certain chores, and a few days of her being forced to be self-reliant and miss you is a good way to remind her just how valuable you are in her life.  And a few nights with no one snoring next to her is sure to inspire some anxious thoughts.  Inevitably, those late night what-would-I-do-without-him? internal monologues are great ways to make her think dreadfully without you actually having to employ Dread.

Think about it: women have a deep-seated need to communicate, and they thrive on being able to give regular updates about their
social matrix
to you on a daily basis.  Being deprived of that is kind of like suddenly being deprived of the freedom to masturbate, for a dude.  You start to get backed up.  When you keep her from being able to give you updated reports, it makes her reflect more powerfully on your role in her life.

(Or your absence provides a perfect opportunity for her to cheat on you . . . as well as a perfect opportunity for your recently-hired private investigator to follow her around and catch her cheating on you, if you’re at that stage of the relationship.)

But the real point of the Road Trip isn’t about your relationship with her, although that is the beneficiary.  No, the point is about your relationship with yourself, and your own sense of masculinity.

It’s oft been said that
Girls Become Women Naturally,
But
Boys Must Be Made Into Men By Other Men, reflecting the importance of male mentorship in the maturing process that turns an adolescent male into a functioning adult Man.  Women enjoy a biological edge to their maturity, and apart from the occasional hint about how to get blood stains out of an all-white sofa, a woman’s body largely takes care of providing her with what she needs to become a full-fledged, reproducible adult.

For dudes, however, that process is far from automatic, and usually a culture has developed an entire suite of rituals and customs to usher the boys of the tribe into manhood. 

But what is rarely discussed is the importance of being able to regularly renew that sense of primal masculinity, either through challenge and introspection or through competition and camaraderie with your fellow men.  Men, as a rule, borrow each others’ masculine power the way women borrow each others’ purses.  If we don’t have a chance to wallow in testosterone with our buds every now and again, we get wimpy
and start watching
Dancing With
The Stars
even when our wives
aren't
around.

There are many essential elements to a ball-busting cross country hellride: a working vehicle (recommended) at least two fellow men around your own age, a pocket full of gas money, and a destination.  Discussion of all pertinent Manosphere topics are fair game, with no lasting blame or recrimination being levied for voicing unusual ideas (unless it’s just too good to pass up, like the way Dennis has a thing for girls with little boobs), and with the tacit understanding that No One Talks About Fight Club.  What happens in the car, in other words,
stays in the car.

The discretion involved in an all-male roadtrip is one of the foundations of the Bro Code.  If Steve talks about how he felt up his cousin once, then it stays there – you don’t want your buddies’ deepest, darkest secrets to become fodder for the
Matrix
-- that's the clinical definition of "the wrong hands".  No one likes a gossipy dude, and betraying male trust at that level is hard to forgive and forget.

This includes any lengthy discussion about sex, women, sex with women, women with whom we’d like to have sex, and sex with that one chick that one time.  It also covers any women you see, meet, or flirt with.  All such discussions are protected.

Alcohol is often involved in these endeavors, as are drugs of various sorts.  See:
The Hangover
.  Your Masculine Cone of Silence extends to this area. 

NOTE: You should without fail do your best to AVOID INCARCERATION when it comes to a Road Trip, as this just eats into Fun Time, and has a tendency to turn Beer Money into Bail Money, and that’s just not very much fun.  (Bright side: you might get the opportunity to live out that homoerotic
“gang raped in prison” fantasy on your bucket list). 

But even the talking and drinking aren’t the important parts of this Alpha Move.  The important parts revolve around how you, yourself, reclaim your masculinity.  That starts with distancing yourself from your relationship. 

This is hard, particularly if your friends all refer to you and your wife by a collective name.  But if you cannot establish and protect your own individual identity from your wife if you don’t go out and be your own man for a change.  And if you don’t remind yourself how to be your own man . . .
you won’t be.

The temptation to invite your honey along on your adventure is great, but you should resist.  Sure, having theoretical access to your favorite ladyparts is a great idea, but the whole point of this endeavor is to give yourself some perspective and an unmitigated  dip in the testosterone tank. 

Hell, don't even call her more than once a day, and don't text, either, if you can possibly help it.  It’s not just whether or not you can manage to feed, bathe, and clothe yourself properly without her assistance, it’s about how you carry yourself around strangers, how you behave when you meet new women, how you act when no one around you knows jack shit about you but what you tell them.

It’s an opportunity for soul-stretching adventure, for testing yourself and your limitations, for redefining who you are and what that means.  It’s about how you have to sometimes rely on unreliable people to finish what you started, and how to go about doing that.  It’s putting yourself in a controlled crisis situation and watching yourself react and perform.  It's a reminder of those tests-of-manhood you endured in your youth . . . and why they were so important then.  Surprise surprise, they're still pretty important.

I’m not saying you have to go running with the bulls, diving the rift, or run some crazy cross-country rally race – but a road trip with a bunch of dudes is a unique and vital way of feeding the masculine soul, and one that is incredibly fulfilling, even when the trip just sucks.

And of course, when you do return, don’t screw around with any “So how was your trip, honey?” bullshit.

You walk in the door, you start taking off your clothes and bellowing for your woman.  If she isn’t utterly happy to see you, and eagerly looking forward to the trip to Pound Town you’re about to give her . . . well, maybe she needs a couple more days to miss you more.

Alpha Move: Break the Television and Play a Game

It sounds like a no-brainer (doesn't a lot of Red Pill advice?), but the fact is that if you and your wife are having a hard time "connecting", that part of the problem is probably that you aren't playing with her enough.

Human beings need play the way they need sleep, food, sex and shelter.  That is, you can go awhile without it, if you have to, but the lack of it is eventually telling on your system.  Our brains require recreation from time to time in the form of carefree, apparently pointless enjoyment in a structured activity. 

We know this instinctively as children, but as we go through the rigors of puberty and the maturing process, we abandon the concept of "play" as childish.  We instead begin to cling to the concept of "relaxation", and too often conflate the two when they are two very different things.

It's no accident that part of the Paleo diet that is growing in popularity is the idea that adults should do one hour of physical play a day.  The idea is not just to exercise our bodies, but to put the mind at ease with physical recreation.  It's a serious stress-reducer.

Some adults feel like they can substitute golf or working out or Zumba or basketball or other "grown up"
activities for real play, but for far too many these recreations end up being sources of stress themselves. I've seen men get more worked up over their golf game than missing a promotion opportunity.  When your "play" starts being more aggravation than it's relieving, then you aren't really playing anymore.

But one other important aspect of play is its social function.  When we play, we like to play with others, and we end up socially and emotionally bonding the other people we play with.  We play cards with our friends, or videogames, or go bowling, or play
Dungeons & Dragons
, or any number of things with our buds. 

We can enjoy the thrill of competition in a controlled, ultimately meaningless setting in a way that replenishes our emotional deficits and encourages us to feel more kindly to our fellow man.  We like to play games, give it our all, and then enjoy the camaraderie that results afterwards.

So . . . when was the last time you played a game
with your wife?

Seriously, even those adults who are committed to playing are often reluctant to engage their spouses, for fear of initiating a conflict unnecessarily.  But what these folks are missing is that through the interaction of play, we engage parts of our spouse's intellect and emotions that we're often ignorant of experiencing.  Let me give you an example.

Mrs. Ironwood, as you all know, is a brilliant workoholic who is doing her damnedest to make the
World A Better Place
.  That means she puts in a lot of hours and gets home late sometimes.  And a full day of emotional investment in your job (while thinking about all of the domestic issues you're letting slide) followed by a brief but intense family experience when you get home (while you're thinking about all of the crap at work you're letting slide) often leave you emotionally drained at the end of the day. 

Needless to say, this is not conducive to nookie.

Mrs. Ironwood's chosen post-work de-stresser is television.  She needs her "brain candy" fix to help get her mind off of work and into a neutral enough place just to sleep, much less have sex.  I'm sure many of you can relate.  And it does help -- to a point.  A half-hour of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert is usually enough, or reruns of
Big Bang Theory,
or maybe even (in the right season) a new episode of
Bones
or
Castle
or
The Mentalist
. . . and she falls right asleep afterward.

Of course that often leaves me at odds, having anticipated nookie all day.  I'm not a dick about it usually -- if Mrs. Ironwood is wiped out from her day, I can certainly understand and let her rest.  But when those sorts of days start piling up in great consecutive heaps, that becomes a problem.

So a few years ago we got into this rut where she would come home from work, tell me about her day, eat dinner with the kids and engage with them until bedtime, then a combo of working on her laptop in bed and zoning out until she couldn't keep her eyes open any longer, then pass out, rinse and repeat.  Needless to say, after a while the rut seriously cut into my
savoir faire
, and I began to resent the television.  Oh, I resented her work, too, but the TV was what was sapping her of any emotional energy to engage.  No matter what I did to try to distract her she clung to her comfort-zone of routine.  Six weeks, seven weeks, the ennui and lack of attention was starting to bug me.  And then it started to get me frustrated.  When I caught myself starting to get bitchy about it, I realized I had to break the cycle.