How Middle Manager Marty Expects Spousal Appreciation

I’m on a roll with random posts today that begin with anecdotes, so I will do that again here.

I got divorced in early 2017. Thereafter, I had a brief fling with a woman I used to work with. That was over so quickly that by January 2018, we never spoke again. I did once write about this.

Well, before any of that happened, and when we were both married to other people, we sometimes had overlapping projects at work. I was in Texas and she was in Seattle, so all of our comms was on Yammer (ha! remember that?) or Microsoft Teams. I would not say it ever got “steamy,” because let’s recall I just said we were both married to other people at the time, but we did talk about relationships.

So, I remember one time in probably early 2015, my marriage was struggling for various reasons, most of which I could assignate to myself in hindsight. Me and this woman in Seattle were talking about relationships and she said something to the extent of:

“It’s important to do little things to serve your partner and make them realize you care.”

In that moment, she gave the example of going to get water for her husband (believe his name was John), who was also working at home at the time. Seemed like a cool anecdote, if basic. I honestly think I got home before my ex-wife that day and I made her a snack before dinner. Look at me, learning.

OK, now we can get steamier before I get to the actual point here. Once we were both divorced and had this fling, she told me a couple of other, slightly-more-salacious stories.

First one was she used to appear in the doorway of her husband’s home office when they were both WFH and just say, “Got time to fuck me?” Thought that was cool.

Then she told me a decent one with a long set-up, but I’ll try it here. Basically, her and her ex-husband (she’s now married again, I believe) go to Jamaica or someplace. They get in tons of fights while there. They fly back to Seattle and it’s clear this relationship is on the rocks. They put their kid to bed and have a big, relationship-future discussion. Four hours later, they decide to split. Big, seminal moment. What did she do? She went and initiated sex. I asked her “Why?” She said: “In that moment, I needed to serve him.”

I’ve actually asked a few other women who have been divorced this question, and a lot of women did initiate sex either that night or the night after.

I felt screwed over in this regard, as I think my ex-wife and I broke up around March 4–5 of 2017 and I don’t think we ever had sex after. Ah, well.

That’s all a long intro to this idea of “serving” or “showing love.” I just saw it come up in this kinda-sorta Red Pill video:

Again, ignore the thumbnail. It’s clickbait.

If you get to the end of that video, there’s a British-type lady talking about “small gestures of love,” which I think is the right narrative. But she alludes to the elephant in the room: a lot of men cannot process small gestures, and would prefer penetrative sex to, say, holding hands. Not all men are like this, no, but many men are. This is a fundamental dichotomy of “love languages” or “how to receive love” or “small gestures,” because a lot of men think in bigger, impactful pictures — for better or worse — which is also why so much of our sexual slang is so violent, i.e. “I smashed that.” Did you smash it? Would made love to it be a better term? I’m just trying to bring you back to Earth, Kyle.

Obviously, if you’ve ever been in even a moderately-successful long-term relationship, I think you realize that small gestures and moments of teamwork matter more than mind-blowing sex and huge car/home purchases. The former is the glue, and the latter is kinda the reward for the former. I think I explained that right.

In that same 2017 period, I was absolutely lost socially for a while and was gradually realizing I didn’t have many people who cared that much about me in the world. April 2017 was especially hard on that front. I was living across the street from a bar, and I used to go there basically every day just to find someone to speak with.

I hung out with this kid maybe six times, and by “kid” I mean I was 36 and he was maybe 25 at the time. Good dude. I liked him in moments. He was dating someone at the time; they never got married but had a kid together. Now they’re no longer together. If you want a quick snapshot of maybe why they’re no longer together, he’d come to the bar and sit next to me and open with: “(name redacted) played with my cock for 40 minutes last night, bro.” It’s like, cool. Awesome. And eventually that 40 minutes was a kid. I dig it. But we never talked about any small gestures or minute moments between him and her. Maybe some did exist and we never covered that at the bar.

All I know is now there’s a kid in the world shuttling between two people, and I’m sure the series of discourse I had with him at the time is part of that.

You can also take this with a grain of salt, because one time in April 2017, I was so drunk that the bartender just started giving me water and I was drinking it claiming it was a beer. So, yea.

I do think it’s important to find those small moments, apart from the big gestures and the skin-to-skin, that define you in a relationship or marriage. In fact, I’d argue one of the declining features of marriage in the last two decades is the erosion of the long-held “sex for stability” model, and that’s on both genders to an extent.

One reason I don’t really like the “trad-wife” return is because it goes back to “sex for stability,” but also it prioritizes grand gestures — “Buy me a nice house and you can get laid” — over the actual moments that make relationships worthwhile.

Your take?