Anonymous Mailbag

It’s Tuesday, time for the anonymous mailbag.

Send your anonymous mailbag questions to claytravis@gmail.com and I guarantee your anonymity.

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Okay, here we go with the anonymous mailbag.

“My wife and I have been married for 2.5 years. We live 100 miles from the nearest city of 30,000 people. So, yeah we are in the “country.”  We struggle with core value differences, me being pretty conservative and her being pretty liberal for example. Recently we both have made some serious mistakes. One night we were staying in the city near us and having a good time. We go home/where we are staying to settle down. I’m thinking sex to cap off the fun night we had out in the “big city.”

It’s 1:00am she turns me down for sex because she’s tired. I get a wild hair up my ass in my frustration, and call an Uber to take me to the closest bar to keep drinking. I don’t stop there. Bar closes, I head to a “Tokyo massage” parlor thinking I’ll get a happy ending of some kind. I chicken out and don’t even ask for the happy ending. Instead, I blow some money at the casino and come home at 5:00am. She’s mad and for good reason.

Two weeks later my wife goes to the big city alone for St. Patty’s Day. Come to find out, she gets drunk all day with her parents. She goes home, and that’s not enough. She wants to keep partying, messages an ex boyfriend to hang out. My wife ends up kissing her ex boyfriend that night and spends an exceptional amount of time with him. I have a confession of the kiss and she says nothing else happened. I believe that is all that happened.

My question to you is, what is worse? The intent to get a happy ending massage, or the intent to spend time with an ex and actually kiss him? Currently we’ve talked about all this and forgave each other. But, I’m concerned that these things can happen again (me included) and if my wife is padding the truth and actually slept with her ex, is this a divorce situation?”

In my opinion your wife’s behavior is worse, but, and this is key, this isn’t about who was worse. You aren’t in competition with each other, you should be working together to have a successful marriage, not trying to keep score about who is better. (Even though every person does this in their head, especially, women. Newsflash, you both always think you’re the better person in the relationship.)

But if you want me to break down this behavior, she was worse. Now let me explain why. You just wanted to get off because you were horny and you went to a massage parlor. Those places exist for men who have no interest in any kind of emotional interaction with a woman at all. (By the way, the fact that you paid for a “Tokyo massage” at 3 AM and didn’t even get a happy ending out of it is pretty awful. Does that masseuse have no sense of decency?!)

Men totally understand this desire for emotionless sex, but most women don’t. Because men, more often than women, are able to divorce the act of sex from the emotions of sex. So you were willing to physically cheat, but you weren’t emotionally cheating. (Plus, you didn’t even follow through with the physical cheating). Your wife was both physically and emotionally cheating. Which, in my mind, is “worse.”

Now I understand this is a controversial opinion to some, but I think if women slept with their boyfriends and husbands more, there would be much less male cheating. Since, again, this is my belief, most male cheating isn’t done out of emotional desire, it’s done purely out of physical desire. For instance, in your above example, if your wife had slept with you then you would have never left the house again that night. That would have removed your trip to the massage parlor from your night’s activities. So my advice to women who worry about their boyfriends or husbands cheating on them is this — SCREW THEM MORE!

Having sex more won’t handle the emotional issues you may have in your relationships, but it will make men less likely to physically stray which is, I believe, the primary reason most men cheat. So if you are worried about your husband or boyfriend straying, bang them more.

Here I totally get why you were upset. You spent all day out with your girlfriend and expected to cap off the night with sex. Which, let’s be honest, probably takes five to ten minutes total, and then you would have both gone to sleep. So that gets me to your wife’s decision, why did she not want to have sex with you that night? Was she really just too tired to wait five or ten minutes to go to sleep — no offense, but I’m guessing you guys don’t have porn star movie sex — or was she trying to send a message to you about her discomfort with the status of your relationship?

I’m guessing it’s more likely that she was trying to passive aggressively send you a message about being upset about something because most women send passive aggressive messages all day long about everything.

Your average man, who wants sex all the time, is genuinely baffled by your average woman wouldn’t want to have sex as much as they do. The answer is, biology. Men, filled with sperm, are machine guns firing indiscriminately in all directions, women, filled with eggs, are targeted assassins.

Here’s a big question you didn’t mention: did you tell her about the massage parlor? IF SO, WHY?! Because if I’m her there’s no way I’m thinking you went to the massage parlor and paid for a massage and got nothing out of it at all except a massage at three in the morning. Even if that story is true it doesn’t sound true.

My additional question is this, why did you send your wife out drinking all day on St. Patrick’s Day by herself — even if it was with her parents at first — in the “big city” when you knew she was still mad at you? Why didn’t you go with them?

Like you, I find it unlikely that she just kissed her ex-boyfriend. Think of it this way, if you were the ex-boyfriend, would you come over to hang out with a drunk ex-girlfriend and just kiss her and then leave? If you’re kissing, you’re probably banging too. Since at that point you’ve already cheated. (Plus, they have already slept together too. So it’s not as big of a decision to do it again.) To me, if you’re willing to kiss someone and you’re over the age of 25, or certainly married, you’re probably also willing to sleep with them.

So why would they have stopped at a kiss?

As for whether you two should get divorced — you should decide now before you have kids whether you still want to be with this person for the rest of your life. If you don’t, go ahead and end it. Because trust me on this, KIDS WILL NOT MAKE THINGS EASIER BETWEEN THE TWO OF YOU.

Having kids to save a relationship is like lighting the house on fire because it’s cold at night. Kids are jet fuel for any relationship, whatever smoldering embers of discomfort existed will turn into a raging conflagration once you have kids. And then you’ll be getting divorced with kids, which is a billion times more complicated than getting divorced without kids.

Good luck with your decision.

“I was just at Disney World with my wife and sons.  Pirates of the Caribbean was closed the entire week we were there so the hot redhead (is that wrong to say about an audio animatronic?) they were previously auctioning off to the pirates could be converted into a pirate herself. Am I wrong to be pissed off that this ride – literally in a theme park celebrating make-believe – was closed just so they could PC the redhead?”

I’m stunned that it took this long to end the hot chick pirate auction at Disney World.

We were down there last year on the ride and I turned to my wife and said they’d pull it before long. Turned out it took one more year.

I’m not as troubled by this in a general sense — it was pretty risque to have a wench sex auction in a kid’s pirate ride if you really think think about — but how ridiculous is it that they have to shut down the ride for your entire vacation just to fix it? Were there really that many people upset about this scene? And why couldn’t they have fixed it on one long overnight on a day when they close earlier than normal?

Also, I’m going to go out a limb here and say there weren’t very many female pirates so does historical pirate accuracy mean nothing?!

This is what happens when you let women wear pants, eventually they want to be pirates too. If this keeps up pretty soon they’re going to even want to vote.

“So my wife and I disagree on pretty much everything politically, and it gets to the point sometimes where we get mad at each other when we discuss politics. We now have established that we won’t talk about politics with each other when we are at home, but this brings up issues when I want to do something such as purchase a gun, and I have to explain to her why I want/need to, but then it always gets back into the politics of it and she gets mad and the issue never gets resolved. How do I explain to her that I just want to use my second amendment right to protect myself and our family, when she is completely anti having a gun and doesn’t want to hear it?”

I totally get the desire to avoid discussing politics with a spouse — or significant other — if you guys disagree politically. But I have found that it’s pretty hard to disagree on everything. Most people, even with very different political opinions, overlap at least some places.

So what’s her issue here with the gun? Is it that she believes all guns should be banned and no private citizen should own one — which is pretty extreme — or is it because you have young children and she’s afraid one of them will get the gun and injure themselves?

In other words, the reason for the disagreement matters.

If it’s because you have young children, I don’t see that as particularly political in nature. In general young children and guns are a bad mix. So what steps are you willing to take to ensure her that the kids never end up with the guns? If she’s just completely opposed to all guns for all reasons then I think that’s a more difficult and intractable battle. I’m not sure how you resolve that.

But I’m betting a gun safe or some other compromise might work.

Finally, do you actually live in a dangerous neighborhood? She may be, rightly, looking around your neighborhood and correctly diagnosing a gun in the house as way more dangerous than someone breaking into your home and doing harm to your family.

When it comes to single life men are the 1 seed and women are the 16 seeds. Everything works to the male advantage. You’ve got birth control, abundant and easy sex, and no financial or long term commitments. But once you flip to married life women become the 1 seeds and men become the 16 seeds. In other words, notwithstanding UMBC and Virginia, many men don’t want to get married because they have all the benefits of marriage with none of the responsibility in single life.

This guy lives with your sister and gets everything a married man gets with none of the married man obligations. The balance of power completely favors him. Sure, he may really like your sister, but what if a better option ever reveals itself? Then he has nothing preventing him from splitting up with her and picking the new girl.

Without kids and without marriage, he gets substantial amounts of sex, probably without even using a condom because she’s on birth control, and he also has a woman who helps defray his life expenses and makes his life easier than it would be if he lived by himself. In his head he may well think he’s going to marry her, but why rush it? In other words, what does he gain from marriage compared to what he loses in giving up being single?

Men have no issues with our biological clocks and most of us have never even spent time thinking about at what age a woman needs to get pregnant if she’s going to have (insert number of kids here). I mean that seriously, most men don’t do math on relationships like women because we have no biological time constraints. I’m 38 years old and if I were still single right now I wouldn’t be concerned at all about having multiple kids; if I were a woman, I’d be freezing my eggs and going insane.

That’s just basic biology, men can be fathers for their entire lives, women can only be mothers for a comparatively short period of time. It drives far left liberals crazy to hear this, but sex motivates men and modern societal sexual trends benefit men more than women. Before everyone had premarital sex, lots of men got married so they could have sex. Now, to be honest, most men want to preserve their options for as long as they can and have sex with as many different women as they possibly can. Again, modern sexual mores favor a man’s biology more than they favor a woman’s. The irony here is that feminism, at least sexually, has basically given every man what they’ve always wanted, sex with no strings attached.

Regarding your particular situation, your family can’t get involved because that’s way too awkward and would be counterproductive. But your sister, and other women in the same situation, needs to give their men ultimatums. She probably isn’t willing to do this because she knows he has good options — after all there is nothing restricting his movement and she’s seen how her girlfriends look at him some times — and she doesn’t want to start all over again with a new guy. (The only thing worse, to many educated women like your sister, than being in a long term committed relationship at 32 or 33 is being completely single all over again at 32 or 33. She’s thinking, I guarantee you, “It took me this long to find this guy, how long will it take me to find a guy this good again? I don’t want to run him off. I’ll just stay here until he’s ready to commit.”)

But that’s why I’d counsel women to have direct conversations with men. Don’t hint, don’t be passive aggressive, give them the math. Sit them down and threaten them with the idea that you might leave and have better options, “Look, I know you haven’t thought about this very much, but it’s probably going to take me six months, at least, to get pregnant for the first time when I come off birth control. If it takes us a year to get married and then we take another year, at least, to have a kid, that means at the absolute earliest I am going to be 34 when I have my first kid. (Assuming your sister is 32. You can do the math yourself depending on your actual age.) Figure two or three years for a second kid and I’m going to be 36 or 37. And if we want to have a third kid we’d have to do it really fast after that. I’m not trying to pressure you, but I do need a decision. Do you want to get married to me or not? Because if you don’t, I love you, but I love the idea of having kids and a family more and I’m going to have to find someone else to spend the rest of my life with. I’m young, hot and smart, it won’t be hard for me to find a guy.”(She should lie about the last part and pretend it’s not hard to find a new guy. If the guy really likes her and she’s hot, he’ll think it will be much easier for her to find a guy that she likes than it actually will be.)

Essentially your sister, and other women, need to jolt the men out of their comfortable, non-committed lives. they need to believe they can lose their girlfriends to someone else.

I understand some women don’t want to do this because they have the fantasy of being surprised. “Oh, my gosh, he proposed! Look at the ring!” But your sister has already lived with him for three years. She needs to stop being emotional and make a business decision here, either he’s with her or he isn’t. Most men will appreciate the directness and the logic behind her case for marriage. If he’s not willing to commit to marriage after this conversation, then he’s probably not ever going to do it.

Good luck to her.

…

Okay, I’m off to the beach with my boys.

Thanks for reading the anonymous mailbag and send your questions to claytravis@gmail.com