Today marks a special day for the Ironwoods. Twenty-three years ago today, the future Mrs.
Ironwood and I were introduced to each other by a mutual friend. It wasn’t a carefully-designed attempt to get
two like-minded people together. We were
both on the rebound from less-than-stellar long term relationships, and our
mutual friend was a bartender. She thought it was an exercise in simple rebound
expediency.
The result was the present Ironwood family. The result of a one-night-stand gone horribly
awry.
The reason why our twenty-third anniversary is so important
(to me) is because it also marks the point in my life in which Mrs. Ironwood
has been in it more than she has been out of it. As of this point, we have both spent the
numerical majority of our lives enjoying each others’ company. That’s a massive accomplishment in this day
and age, one that we are both appreciative of.
I rarely counsel a man to marry, in our present
circumstances. The odds are not in his favor,
and barring exceptional circumstances he risks far more than he gains out of
the transaction. The differences between
divorce, marital misery, and domestic contentment represent the difference
between failure and success, and most men marrying most women are throwing all
their chips on black and hoping for the best.
In most cases, the payout is a mediocre marriage to an ambivalent woman
undermined by the knowledge that she has clearly settled for her husband.
Every relationship is different. But the success or failure of a good one is
dependent not just on the level of commitment each party demonstrates, but on
whether or not they possess the skills needed to negotiate the minefield that
is marriage. “Husband” and “wife” are
not just commodities on the MMP, they’re learnable skills and cultivated
abilities. One fault of feminism is its
antipathy toward marriage as an institution and its disparaging of the
cultivation of those skills that inform a woman’s contribution to the
functioning of the marriage.
In pursuit of corporate achievement or “changing the world”,
the women of the last two generations have been woefully unprepared, practically,
for the realities of participating in a long-term, committed heterosexual
union. Indeed, any such suggestion –
that a woman spend her time and energy preparing for domestic life – has been
met with scorn and derision by the feminist community at large. “Wife” is a title of shame and capitulation
to feminism, regardless of what individual feminists may declare. Cultivating a skillset contributing to a
successful marriage is therefore ridiculed by the feminist establishment.
Meanwhile, husbands have gotten a hell of a lot better in
developing their skillsets. The man
entering marriage in 2014 (if you can find such a rare and special creature)
does so with a much greater depth of experience than his grandfather had. More than likely he’s mastered (or at least
been exposed to) the
domestic chores and childcare responsibilities that the
Second Wave feminists complained so bitterly about.
Modern husbands are more hands-on fathers
than their sires, more involved in the housekeeping duties and household
purchasing decisions, and more socially aware and better-informed than their
ancestors. Men who feel inclined toward
marriage and family early have little trouble learning the things they need to,
in order to be an effective husband and father.
While that desire is limited to a few, compared to generations past, the
men who wish to be good husbands go out of their way to ensure that they can
handle whatever might get thrown at their families. That dedication comes across early on, if you
know where to spot it. There’s a reason
that the “good ones” get snatched up early.
My continuing series on discerning the potential of a
high-quality wife, Wife Tests, wouldn’t be complete without exploring one of
the fundamental factors in the success or failure of a marriage: loyalty.
I do not mean mere fidelity.
Simply not cheating on you is not the best metric for determining a
woman’s loyalty to you. Loyalty, in the
marital sense, means unwavering support for your spouse. That can be difficult, in the face of tough
times, and the weak-willed, poor-quality women will quickly start looking
around for a more-immediate better deal.
Thanks to feminism, marriage is no longer sufficient insulation from the
SMP, which makes it easy for a woman to entertain such ideas at the first hint
of trouble.
But you’re going to have trouble in a marriage. It’s inevitable. In the process of knitting together two
families and two family cultures, establishing proper boundaries and protocols,
there will be problems that will challenge the fortitude of any couple. Until you do, there’s no real way to assess
the strength of your union, sadly, and for some whose emotional constitutions
are brittle, it doesn’t take much to hit the
“this isn’t working” button. More than one man has been shocked and
surprised to hear these words after even a moderate challenge to the marriage. Another failure of feminism to modern women:
the inflated and often unreasonable expectation of marriage. Marriage is hard work. If you care about it, you don’t take it pass/fail.
So how does one determine a woman’s loyalty to you before
you encounter that Big Event that’s going to give you problems? It’s difficult. I’d say a telling factor, however, is just
how loyal a woman appears to be to you in a casual circumstance. It’s hard to construct a situation that tests
that, you must rely on observation and pay attention to subtleties. With Mrs. Ironwood, I can pinpoint the exact
moment when she passed the Loyalty Test.
We had been going out for a little over a year when we had
the opportunity to go out with another couple, friends of mine from
college. Nothing fancy, just a sit-down
dinner in a chain restaurant with a bar.
Bob and Karen had been friends and neighbors of mine for a couple of
years during my undergraduate career. He
was a Religious Studies major at Duke, and she was studying Medieval and Renaissance
studies. At that point they were
engaged, with Bob having aspirations of a career in law. At that point, I saw them as the Perfect
Couple.
But when the subject of parenting and fatherhood came up,
Karen – who I’d been crushing heavily on since I’d known her, and who knew me
as a fairly hapless Beta – was surprised at the future Mrs. Ironwood’s
willingness
to “let” me take charge of our future children, if any. At the time it appeared that she would be the
primary breadwinner – my writing career had taken off, but paying gigs were
still few and far between. Therefore our
plan was that I would be primary childcare, should we have kids. That early in our relationship we had already
begun seriously evaluating each other for suitability, and had discussed the
possibilities even if we hadn’t committed to them.
“What? You’re
actually going to trust Ian with your babies?” Karen asked, aghast at the
suggestion. That was more than a little
insulting, on a personal level, but my attraction for her and my respect for
Bob had kept me firmly in Beta position.
I was about to joke my way out of it when the future Mrs. I leapt to my
defense.
“Are you kidding? Ian
will make an outstanding father! I’ve
never met a man better-prepared emotionally or practically for taking care of his
children. He’s responsible, intelligent,
and caring. Whether or not we’ll stay
together or have kids together remains to be seen, but I know for a fact that I
would not have any reservations about Ian raising our children!”
Bob quickly changed the subject away from the awkward
subject, and dinner continued.
Afterwards, as we were walking back to the car the future Mrs. I reiterated
just how upset she was at the suggestion that I was unfit to raise babies
with. It wasn’t just Karen challenging
her choice of boyfriend, a catty standard of the Female Social Network, that
she was responding to, I realized. She
was genuinely offended that anyone who claimed to be a close friend of mine
would make such a horrible (and to her mind unearned)
pronouncement.
It wasn’t a big deal to either Karen or Mrs. Ironwood, but
it was to me. It was at that point that
I checked the “loyalty” box on the Wife Test.
When your wife defends your character to your closest friends, that’s a
pretty profound statement of her belief in you.
I watched more carefully after that, and I was gratified to see her
stick up for me in similar situations.
She knew enough not to get entangled with the rough teasing between my
brothers and I, but when she told my mother that she was wrong about my
inability to handle household finances, for instance, I knew I had a potential
keeper.
While loyalty gets tested in the strangest of ways, but they
all revolve around a woman’s unprompted reaction to a perceived attack or
injustice on you. Ideally her response
should be independent of her interests, perhaps even against them, in some
circumstances.
If you had to engineer a situation artificially to test her
loyalty, consider having one of your (good) friends speak poorly about you behind
your back but in her presence, and report what she says. If she
plays along with his downgraded assessment of you, you might have a
problem. If she sticks up for you, you’ve
got a loyal one.
But even that isn’t the
ideal test of her loyalty. Even better
if you can hear one of HER good friends launch a catty attack on you. If she can tell her BFF to shut the hell up
because she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, you’ve got a winner. The woman who will endure someone speaking
badly about her mate is one whose loyalty is questionable from the beginning.
The true test, of course, will be when the world is falling
down around your ears; your very self-identity is challenged as your life is
wracked with the inevitability of misfortune.
A loyal wife will remember that
she bet on the horse, not the race, and
support you. If she’s skilled enough she
might even know how to do that. During a
true loyalty test, she has a clear choice of a life in support of you and a
life not in support of you, and she freely chooses the former not out of
obligation or a sense of duty but because she has genuine respect for you in
sufficient quantities to invoke her loyalty.
Twenty three years after she saw me reading a book in a bar
one night (The Two Towers – I’m a hobbit-head) Mrs. Ironwood is still fiercely
loyal of me, and I have taken great pains to vindicate her on the subject of
fatherhood and husbandry. But understand
that such loyalty is not monolithic. It’s
a laminate of countless small acts and quiet statements made in support and
appreciation over the years, an aggregate of pride and love stronger than the
petty forces of fate that conspire to tear it down. The end-result is a cultivated Oneitis,
wherein your mutual loyalty and support give you the personal security and
belief in your marriage you need to go out and slay dragons on a daily
basis.
Twenty-three years. It’s
not impossible to marry a Western woman and still have a fulfilling life as a
husband and father. But you have to
start with the right woman, carefully nurture the relationship, and avoid the
sinkholes that Marriae 2.0 inevitably throws at you, and disloyalty is
certainly a big one. But . . . twenty three years.
And from now on, she’ll be in my life more
than she’s been out of it. That,
gentlemen, is what happens when you’ve properly constructed Happily Ever After.
And that's a key point as well: the first rule of the Red Pill is that you don't talk about the Red Pill. Except in certain key situations. This is one. Make certain that they understand that rule. The goal here is not to start a bunch of derpy campus organizations for men to counter the feminist inclination to do so, get their names in the news, and start a nasty op-ed war in the campus newspaper. The goal is not to organize our demands and insist that they be met. 
