2329. Suggestions for Raising Children — Part III

Strategic Parenting Shapes the Family Environment

Theme:  It’s the wife and not the mother that keeps a father in the home.

Whatever children learn well before puberty that makes them feel good about themselves, you can expect to last for life. If they learn and feel good acting as adults albeit immature, they are not nearly as vulnerable to teen peer pressure.

1. Organize first. Arrange family thinking around dual roles for each adult. That is, four roles and with this rank structure: husband, wife, mother, father. Each ‘reports’ to the one next left. The most vital role is the wife. Her responsibility is home and family. She catches it from both sides and is the only one capable and therefore most responsible for coordinating family efforts and trying to orchestrate harmony.
2. Start with good material. Good father-candidates are identified by their character and willingness to follow this model in the home: Husband bosses wife but mother bosses father. If husband has issues with the kids, he takes it up with his wife and not with the kids themselves. His leadership is most effective when he never imposes it directly except to back up his wife as she does her mothering thing. He stays above the fray of getting children to do what they’re supposed to do and not do. (I know you don’t like “bosses,” but nothing else works in so few words. Two cooks spoil the pie. Two bosses ruin an organization. Wife-mother is in the middle, so let her direct the home orchestrations to achieve harmony. She reports to husband for her performance in raising children, and expects him as father to help and not interfere with her ‘bossing’ them. IOW, husband tells wife what he expects and then as father he enjoys what mother has produced.)
3. Recruit a better-than-good man. One who has the patience to accept the reality that mom can’t immediately change a child’s excursions into what or where they shouldn’t go just to please her husband’s expectations. If he frustrates easily over small things, put him back in the parade. He likely will harangue his wife or their mother just because he’s irritated or angry with himself. Red flag.
4. Build the family attitude. Base and continually promote respect for each other first as person, then as male/female, then according to their respective roles and responsibilities within the family. Then, follow up the teaching and promoting with heapings of love spread evenly among all members. Without mutual respect first however, mutual love is seldom achieved.
5. Moms shouldn’t suffer. Mother has the hardest time earning mutual respect. She earns it easiest and best this way. a) She keeps the children advised that most importantly she’s the wife of and responsible to her husband. It’s easier to earn the respect of others when you live up to someone bigger than yourself. Such as wife up to husband and children up to parents. b) As mother, she’s responsible for the upbringing of her children. c) She has the constant approval of husband as the kids see it. As much as husband displays lack of respect for his wife, it weakens respect of children for mother. (It happens most easily when father sides with the kids against mom. He elevates father over mother and it undercuts his wife, which displays lack of respect and reduces kids’ respect of mother.)
6. Disagreement stifles. Effective parents never let the kids see them disagree over decisions about them. Permission to do this or that, for example. The first parent to make a decision, the other backs them. Parents subsequently take it behind closed door to resolve differences. Otherwise, children learn to play one parent against the other, which makes parenting much more difficult.
7. The right target beckons. Raise children to be good adults and they will turn out to be average or good children. Raise them aimed at becoming great children and they will turn out to be poor or less-than-average or poor adults.
8. The future beckons. Always focused on the future, mothers predominantly shape behaviors by shaping childish thoughts into more mature thoughts. ‘Stop that and learn this’ type of leadership. Parents do best by helping rather than directing a child’s aspirations and ambitions and aiming them toward adulthood instead of some earlier period in life such as adolescence.
9. Self-developers emerge. Children develop best when they and peers organize playtime activities. Parental organizing for play interferes with self-development. It demonstrates with action that kids are not trusted even in their own domain of play.
10. Guidance tops directness. Focus parental effort on guiding and encouraging kids and less on discipline and punishment. As self-developers, they develop aspirations and ambitions beyond the present. If well respected by parents and siblings, they dream about becoming adults. If not respected that way, they dream about earning self-respect through immature methods such as adolescent lures and behaviors, games and drugs for example. Respect compounded by parental love keeps their aims aligned as parents hope. Parental guidance is most productive by helping bring to fruition dreams for their adult lives.
11. Kids make mistakes. They learn quickly from experience. Prevent their making mistakes and over supervise and it slows or discourages their development. Enhance their self-development and you raise good adult-minded kids. Teach and don’t fight against their efforts to play-now-and-get-serious-later, or you raise poorly behaved children. Each child has ways of letting parents know when they over supervised. It’s not over-supervision that is the culprit but the child’s perception and growing conviction of it. Respecting each child as a person provides feedback for parents to determine when appropriate to guide or supervise.
12. Don’t become friends. Parents who would first be friends with their children abrogate leadership responsibility. They try to lead without authority they give away by making the child equal as friend, which the child sees as a huge competitive advantage and can’t resist using. When it doesn’t turn out as equal as expected and parent still governs the child’s behavior, the child rebels internally but not so evidently to the parent. The crux is here: The parent is well intentioned, but the child seeks advantages that inspire disingenuousness and even hidden dishonesty. The end result promotes disrespect for the parent that is overlooked because of their good intentions and conviction they are doing right. The child’s behavior out of parent’s sight deteriorates to the opposite that the parent hopes for.
13. Life ain’t easy. Don’t make it easy for kids. It teaches them to continually look for the easier way throughout life, and it later shows up harmfully as weak sense of family responsibility.
14. Assign responsibility. Match their maturity. Even toddlers should have something to do routinely. Nothing teaches character better than having responsibility and being held accountable. Responsibility assigned to match maturity. Accountability imposed seriously but gently and forgivingly by mom enables kids to learn they like to please her. As they mature it turns into liking to do their duty. First they learn to please mom. Next, they learn that they like to please her. The long range effect is a stronger sense of family responsibility. Finally, boys learn that they please themselves by pleasing mom. Girls learn from being gently and forgivingly held accountable that it works later for raising their children and coaching the man they love.
15. Worth repeating. Men thrive on responsibility, and so nothing raises boys into good men any better than an early-developed sense of duty. Don’t expect or teach perfection. Teach stick-to-it-iveness, finish the job. Kids understand completion or finish much, much better than perfection or adult standards or expectations. Respect them enough to let them determine the quality they can produce. Boys start by trying to outfox mom. When they see that inadequate performance doesn’t displease her, through repetition they teach themselves to do better. Think of keeping their room uncluttered or well organized. After awhile they do it well in order to please themselves for pleasing mom. It’s the same process by which they will later love their wives.
16. Mothers reward themselves. They routinely express their love and affection to a child they birthed or someone else. She feels better for just having expressed her love. Once the conscious mind opens and a child recognizes he or she is also a person, they can figure things out accurately as they sense it but immaturely for others. By mom showing trust as more important than her love, her child is more easily convinced of mom’s love. IOW, without respect mostly in the form of trust, even showers of abundant love can be unimpressive and unconvincing.

Strategically, the home environment is a complicated place. It’s run more by subconscious habits than conscious thought. Shaping and arranging personal habits to produce a harmonized setting for a good family is primarily the work of woman.

Men sense it to be true but low self-esteem, self-image, or both often cause husbands to interfere, which sends loud messages that wife is not respected, which means not truly loved. Also uninformed about making organizations function well, such men take literally the practice of submission and use dominance to interfere with woman’s work of raising children to become good adults.

Wife responds by fighting back to defend, protect, or win her way of doing things. It triggers disrespect from husband, wife responds with her own version of disrespect, and the war begins.

As children view it, their future turns bleak. Even they can guess groundwork being laid for parental separation. Instinctively they sense but probably don’t recognize that repeated disrespect foretells the likely death and prevention of restoring love.

Editorial comment is next at 2330 and Tactical Parenting: Guidance and Encouragement follows at 2331.

2269. Compatibility Axioms #891-900

891. Nagging doesn’t get more offensive than that which tampers with his sense of sexual significance. [298]

892. Marital longevity shortens under pressure of sexually accessible women outside the home. The sisterhood’s sexual freedom thus devalues marriage. [298]

893. To satisfy their self-centeredness and exercise their will over others, women use conditional love to manipulate their man and raise their children. The effect torments everyone. OTOH, both husbands and children appreciate unconditional love, which they know they don’t deserve. When wife and mother provide it, she earns magnificence beyond what she deserves. [298]

894. The more that women practice masculine-style sexual freedom, the more dedicated becomes the sex-chasing lifestyle of men. Things both marital and domestic lose their allure. [298]

895. Trying to change a man sours his affection for whoever tries. Her pressure for more affection produces the opposite of what she seeks. [298]

896. After split up, she’s the only one qualified to tell her how wrong she may have been. But listening to others tell of things she did right eases her pain. [298]

897. When she abrogates her role as relationship expert, she loses strength for easing his dominance. [299]

898. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Finances—or more accurately for here, squabbles about indebtedness and spending—stimulate break up more than almost anything else.  [301]

899. Marriage vows express devotion to each other. Unplanned, unnecessary, and surprise spending and indebtedness can easily kill such devotion. [301]

900. The continual practice of spending less than income reinforces devotion to each other. Teamwork bonds. [301]

2266. A Man’s Love: The Reality of It

I define love as what holds them together as a couple. With her it’s emotional connections, obligations, and behaviors. With him, well…we’ll see.

I purposely bypass the importance of her attractiveness or the rest doesn’t happen. Also, I bypass the consequences of conquest as it may or may not affect the following.

A woman identifies the evident or imagined commitment and devotion of a man as his love of her. Men act differently. Not that her love isn’t appreciated, but manly love isn’t like female expressions of it.

A man identifies a woman’s love of him as the reciprocal of his love of her; it initiates in his heart and develops mutually or it isn’t love to him. His love is her likeability to him and his loyalty to her; plus his likeability to her and her loyalty to him. To his logical and reasoning mind, without reciprocity it isn’t his love. Also, he doesn’t remain in situations where his investment isn’t matched or bettered, so his love isn’t as anchored in deep emotion as that of a woman.

For a marriage to last, their mutual likeability and mutual loyalty should regularly confirm them as satisfied with their mating arrangement. It’s what a married man expects. It carries an ominous meaning for women unless they learn how to exploit their relationship expertise.

However hard and dedicated she tries, her love alone isn’t enough to sustain her marriage. It’s essential for her to show it or her love of husband fades, but it isn’t enough for him. Appreciated and perhaps honored, but not enough.

It begs the question: What else is needed? She aims her words, expressions of love, and other behaviors toward objectives that satisfy or confirm the following or at least don’t weaken or contradict them.

• Remaining likeable in his eyes.
• Keeping herself appearing loyal to him.
• Treating him as if he’s very likeable to her.
• Appreciating his loyalty to her.

All of which he should see in actions more than words. If she’s successful doing all that, he absorbs confirmation that their love is mutual and that he’s doing the right thing staying with her. Good return on investment of his independence.

Which of course begs this question: What does she get in return for her investment? Something other than separation and perhaps lifetime marital success. A better husband, which suggests she’s a better wife. Perhaps a man more enthused about family responsibility. Confirmation that her effort makes her important to their relationship. Being more easily loved and perhaps with a happier husband eager to display his affection.

The list could go on to greater satisfaction for her. She’s doing what it takes to keep her man directly involved in the mating scheme of life. It’s not likely to go wrong unless she begrudges doing what is required for success, which registers as her lack of likeability of and disloyalty to him and ends his love.

P.S. Men inherit at birth the way they love as described above. It’s up to the women in their lives—moms, chaste girls, bachelorettes, and wives—to teach them to love in ways more pleasing to women.

——

NOTE: There! It sounds again as if I alibi for men. No intent to do so. Just trying to figure out the truth of life. The more I figure out how men and women interact as couples, the more burdensome it seems for women. But, I’m reassured by this fact. It’s why they are the superior gender; they have all the talent, skill, and fortitude to shape their lives successfully in pursuit of their girlhood hopes and dreams. They just need to learn how to use their God-given, natural, and hormonal strengths.

Respectfully,

Guy

2260. Compatibility Axioms #841-850

841. When husband on his own senses that wife has an unresolved problem, his problem solving persona emerges. He wants to uncover it and help. But it may be a long time if ever before he detects she even has a problem. The female nature enables wife to help him sense it on his own. [286]

842. Her patience and soft-heartedness and respect and gratefulness for who he is and what he does show her understanding of him, just as he expects to see it. He’s much less likely to take offense about subjects sensitive to him. [286]

843. Devotion to her makes him want to pay attention and sometimes lavish affection on her. Thus, more devotion makes him more open to her wants, needs, and desires.  [286]

844. He expects frequent and convenient access to sex after yielding his independence for marriage. This may or may not make him devoted to pleasing her as she would like. Devotion arises outside the sexual arena. [286]

845. We can easily recognize that men should be more considerate of a woman’s sexual wants, needs, and desires. However, being married can interfere unless she accepts responsibility for sexual compatibility. [286]

846. The more she likes herself as a female, the more outwardly dominant she can permit a man to be, because of high confidence about ultimately getting him to accept her way about her needs, wants, and desires in their life together. [288]

847. Right doesn’t just arrive in her life. She turns the husband in her life into the right man, and the process lasts as long as he remains devoted to her. She adjusts their life together until they both age gracefully with him as her Mr. Right. [288]

848. Successful courtships belong to predominately hard-headed women who patiently and indirectly integrate two diverse interests into a bright future together. Virtual virginity best holds his attention, while she works the romance/affection scene into his habit and her advantage. [288]

849. In courtship it pays for her to have high regard for and associate with many other people—not necessarily dating though. He should not win her heart and mind completely until after they marry. The stick while courting, the carrot after marriage. [288]

850. Men grow their love for a woman from light-hearted feelings that he stumbles into—she’s attractive, fun, likeable, very respectable—and he slowly becomes magnetized by her other qualities. Such as Her Jewels as defined in article 59:

♥ Physical attractiveness marvelously enhanced by affordable attire and classy grooming.

♥ Sexual attractiveness enhanced by modest coverings to reinforce that other men are forbidden.

♥ Gentleness provided out of patience.

♥ Forgetfulness that follows forgiveness.

♥ Thoughtfulness that her mate deserves.

♥ Gratefulness for her man that shines as her being happy when he’s around.

♥ Submissiveness as her spirit of cooperation.

♥ Happiness that spreads infectiously.

♥ Joyfulness that inspires greater hope.

♥ Chasteness promised to him by modest display of breasts, rump, and legs.

♥ Generousness that smashes selfishness out of their lives.

♥ Delightfulness that makes him smile.

♥ Perpetual smiling countenance that shapes his comfort zone.

♥ Unselfishness that spreads as example for all.

♥ Neatness that inspires others.

♥ Goodness that sets a shining example.

♥ Faithfulness that inspires him to follow suit.

NOTE: Those qualities are born into the female nature, but most women are too busy, ego-stricken, or politically propagandized to use them. Of course her man may not be worth such effort, but it’s her jewels that make him the right man. It’s her behavior that makes him good, bad, indifferent, inadequate, or whatever, provided she didn’t mate up with a hopeless case to begin with.

2257. From Whence Comes Respect

Sir Eric at 2250 triggered this article. He said, “Before there was No-Fault Divorce, the wife’s behavior would have been legal grounds for a divorce, and now their husbands praise the same behavior!”

I quote from Wikipedia, “The earliest precedent in no-fault divorce laws was originally enacted in Russia shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution. …The purpose of the Soviet no-fault divorce laws was ideological, intended to revolutionize [transform?] society at every level. … California was the first U.S. state to adopt what are now called “no-fault” divorces in the United States in 1969.”

I hope to show that the damage to family stability and need of no-fault is caused by lack of mutual respect, in slight decline before no-fault but precipitously so ever since.

Men are driven to compete against Nature when it obstructs progress, compete with other men to enable progress, and shape and control human events. To the male mind, women aren’t part of that competitive world, just supporters, witnesses, or interferers.

The male competitive nature prevents men from respecting other men until they earn it by accomplishments that symbolize their significance in the male world. Significance, for example, in personal associations, professions, workplaces, fathering, sports, home. IOW, by value-added indications of accomplishments and personal significance, men earn the respect of other men; they earn mutual masculine respect by doing.

Women also have to earn masculine respect. Not in terms of individual significance for doing things, however, but by making themselves of significant value to supporting a man’s ambitions. Some mixture of success as female achiever and ambition-aiding significance—in competition with other women—earns the respect of men.

It enables each man to find, evaluate, and mate with the most respectful after evaluating the most respectable in his own judgment. Yes, selecting a mate begins with his respect of her before love ever invades his heart. (Selecting her based on respect also helps husband this way; how well wife is respected by other men adds to both his self-respect and respect of men.)

Thus, a man’s respect of men revolves around accomplishments that kind of generate a pecking order that varies and guides men through each competitive event and day. A man’s respect of a woman depends on her ability to accomplish significant things of lasting interest to him.

A woman’s respect of a man emerges differently. She loves first and learns to respect later. His accomplishments are not the root of her respect. It accumulates from his success helping her confirm her sense of self-importance as person, woman, mother, friend, girlfriend, fiancé, bride, companion, and the other roles she fills in their life together.

Now watch this ladies and tell me if I’m wrong. She respects him as the result of her making him important in her life. To the extent he doesn’t fit well in her plans for shaping their relationship, she doesn’t respect him. IOW, for the most part, if their relationship sours, it’s his fault and he doesn’t deserve for her to respect him.

Therein lays one root of early divorce. He respects and loves her. His habits and faults hit her wrongly, don’t meet her expectations. She tries to change him and he resists. She becomes frustrated, which makes her feel incompetent, which makes her feel unimportant in his life, which stimulates her to not show respect for him, which he sees as reason to depart if she hasn’t already filed for a no-fault.

Consequently, mutual respect depends on wife finding and keeping respect for husband and not letting his behavior diminish her appreciation for their relationship.

Perception is reality in such cases; whatever appears to be, is. Immature women and those who lack patience judge their man too quickly as not respectable enough. They act accordingly, hubby detects it as ingratitude, her likeability begins to fade and his love to weaken. All of which kills mutual respect.

Women expect her and his love and men expect mutual loyalty and likeability to hold their relationship together. The common denominator, however, is respect. And unless it grows into mutual respect, the no-fault is not far behind.

2231. CAUSES and EFFECTS — Group 02

1. A husband’s expectations for the present outweigh his wife’s expectations for their future together. It’s more his dominant nature than disrespect or lack of consideration for her. IOW, he automatically chooses his preference for now except given logical and non-emotional reason to accept her desires for later. It’s one hurdle that indirectness clears by ‘forcing’ her to deal logically and non-emotionally with him.
2. Men really don’t want to fully understand their woman. They expect her to be loyal and thus agreeable without his having to work for it. It’s a ‘labor-saving’ benefit that imaginatively comes with his giving up his independence. That’s enough. If she’s other than agreeable to his wishes, men don’t really care to know about her reasons. It might cause guilt, which men dodge because it begs for action and they have limited ability or incentive to take action based on guilt imposed by someone else. Men end up ignoring or forgetting such impositions of guilt and thus bypass getting to know her as well as she desires.
3. If you want to appear as a chaste single woman (CSW) these days, get your hair done in a beauty parlor. It sends a message—at least to you if not everyone else—that you can’t jump in and out of bed and shower with a quick rinse and dry. A short, well-coiffed, parlor-fixed hair-do sends the opposite albeit subliminal message.
4. Women habitually go in public wearing sweats and clothing designed for comfort, which encourages overeating by suppressing feedback. The results reduce masculine appeal, which men acknowledge with much less attention. Money spent on attractive clothes discourages spending money on high calorie foods.
5. If you have little or no interest in making yourself clean, neat, and attractive just to pick up your spirits, why do you expect men to take a liking to a missing feminine spirit?
6. The potential for multiple orgasms makes women interested enough and available for impregnation but flexible enough to live with infrequent sex. It fits in with their natural adaptability and survivability, which enables the species to survive and thus makes females the superior gender. Men aren’t so sexually fortunate, but they have the freedom which promotes hit and run and wham, bam, thank you ma’am and better fits their nature.
7. The nature of men is to look for the most efficient manner to gain frequent and convenient access to sex. When women enable it without marriage, they change ‘men’ to ‘women’ in this Henry David Thoreau quote, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

2176. Dating in Mid-life — Part C9: Prepare Against Submission

Gotcha! Prepare against submission? Yes, and do it while dating. No legal, moral, marital, or biblical injunction makes you submit. In fact, both sexes have free will, both are made to be compatible as mates, and to submit means that one side loses. However, superior relationship wisdom enables women to generate win-win regularly if not every time. Your relationship expertise ranks with adaptability and survivability as cardinal traits that enable the irresistible force to move immovable objects.

Your man may not have been taught any better; he might try to enforce submission. You may have to teach him. Indirectly works smoothest and leadership by example works best. Your examples can be absorbed as logic, reason, and the compatible nature of mating. Men look for logic and reason and love the likeability afforded by compatibility.

Marital common sense to teach such things is embedded in the female nature. Not in you? Not to worry. I’m here to help. As you will soon see, submissiveness is the hub around which revolves most of the important family interactions.

When you marry and husband expects you to submit, you steal his thunder by revealing a submissive spirit that shows him how smartly he married. Submissive, it’s an adjective describing you as volunteering; you don’t do mandatory. Why volunteer? Are the following 16 reasons enough?

1) A family can’t stay together with two leaders, too bosses equally yoked to the same undivided responsibility. They eventually fight for dominance. 2) A man won’t conscientiously honor and fulfill his responsibility unless he appears to dominate control of it; it’s his nature and often more ego than logical. 3) You are more flexible, the relationship expert, and the only one capable of balancing and harmonizing all the challenges inherited with family life. Without you taking the home load off of husband, he’s not free enough to earn a good living. 4) Two bosses can be successful only when they agree to having separate responsibilities, and a separation of powers empowers and rewards them both. 5) Children can’t function much less develop successfully, if they have unequal standards and expectations to which they must respond. It causes confusion to reign, teaches rebellion, and kids learn to play one parent against the other. Everyone functions better with only one boss, and kids respond best to mom with backup from her husband. 6) You can’t manage the home without husband’s recognition and acceptance that it is your responsibility, which places you in the follower’s role wherein submissiveness pays off with greater success for both parties. 7) A successful organization needs both a chief executive officer and chief operating officer, CEO as ultimate authority and COO to administer CEO policies. 8) The ultimate authority is no better than the chief operator below who promotes the respect due him, protects his reputation, and preserves his dignity even when he doesn’t deserve it. 9) The next-to-ultimate authority does best when looked upon as supporter and facilitator of CEO’s expectations. 10) Men are satisfied and significant—happy in your words—when someone weaker proves to be stronger in surprising and dedicated ways. 11) Whereas husband can’t do it at least by his nature, you can bring the superiority of your gender into the home—especially adjust-ability and survivability—in ways that everyone benefits. 12) He’s not naturally willing; only you can find ways to balance his dominance against getting your way sufficiently to fulfill your hopes and dreams. 13) Converting from courtship to marriage, you’re capable and understand the wisdom of shifting from the competitive mode of protecting yourself to the cooperative mode of fulfilling your marriage. 14) He’s generally unwilling to do something about it, but you are well enabled to find ways to smooth the rough edges from his dominance. 15) With his constant focus on the present, and your focus more in the future, you’re better situated to adjust to his present-day needs than he to your future aspirations. 16) Submissiveness enables you to impose a rank structure that calms family leadership jitters. In rank order, this works well: husband, wife, mother, father, and children, which splits adult roles into four separate responsibilities for better, more efficient, and more easily acceptable decision making.

Accomplishing all those things fits naturally into your marital persona. He’ll see all the merit once he’s taught by you. Success starts with your submissiveness that so clearly matches up with your relationship expertise and the other blessings you inherit at birth. Then you can fit him into your nest. (You may find other benefits at Female Blessings at Birth at blog top.)

To prepare for dating, I suggest you study those 16 items above for the different roles that you and future husband will fill. Then, measure each man against your imagination of how you two will fill those roles. That is, imagine how his personality would fit yours in this situation, just for example. As his wife and ‘second in command’, you hold him up as more important than the kids. Yet, as their mother, you fight him in favor of the kids. Can and will he help fulfill your hopes and dreams and be Mr. Good Enough? Or…?

You might deny it, but I view it this way. Mystique mystifies you, vanity promotes you, modesty protects you, marriage insures you, and submissiveness elevates you to kingpin in the monogamy-sphere. Nothing else produces a more successful family. You see, when you know what you’re doing, you do everything right for everyone. It’s your superior conscience. That, darling, is what the submissive spirit enables you to do. To give it a fanciful name, I call it sterling wifeliness.

——

P.S. For background material, you may wish to review the 12-part submission series that runs with interruptions from 2043 to 2058. (Or, two dozen other articles with submissive/submission in title plus a chapter in my book.)

 

2175. Dating in Mid-life — Part C8: Her Past, A Simpler View

You can’t shape the dating atmosphere to your advantage without anticipating what is likely to come up. This post is aimed at reinforcing the more practical side of a subject and admittedly aims more at younger than more mature women.

Perhaps the toughest test of your worth to Mr. Good Enough, can and will he accept you without knowing the details of your past sex life? He has four interests: to determine his comparative value as a lover, to prevent his embarrassment as your lover, to determine the likelihood of you cheating, and what really intrigues him: Promiscuous? With his friends? With someone he knows? Mistress? Shack up? Cheap? Easy?

It’s his nature; he’s born that way. Men begrudge anyone who went before them, and the begrudging varies with who are the individuals. Husbands can be forgotten as legitimate earners of your favors (unless you bring it up)—but not the others and some measure of too many or too much reflects harshly against not just you but more importantly him.

CAUTION: The Manosphere loudly broadcasts that women are equally entitled to sexual freedom and their history is of no concern to advocates of Game philosophy. Don’t fall for it, darling. Their philosophic values are founded on the supreme superiority of men over women to the extent that respect for women is non-existent. Their philosophic flavoring floats on Feminism, tends toward homoeroticism, and leans on Islamic values. Overall, it contradicts anyone’s interest in sexual discretion and monogamy.

Here are a dozen pointers to help shape the dating scene to your advantage.

1. Your known past generates suspicions that override acceptances and assurances. Your unknown past generates fewer suspicions to eat away at the mutual trust you hope to build.  [241]
2. Men seek and others often advise full disclosure. When men actively pursue more about your past, they can’t ignore and not use the information to shape their thinking. Talked into full disclosure, women expect fairness and equality. The male nature does not originate fairness for sharing sexual assets, and equality is a female concept that men don’t normally consider in human relations. [241]
3. People argue that trust cannot arise without full disclosure. Hah! Trust arises from convictions drawn from beliefs and speculation about a person. Trust does not arise when specific knowledge prevents such convictions. [241]
4. Full disclosure comes out uneven, unequal, un-repairable, because the male nature values a woman’s chastity far more than the female nature finds interest in a man’s sexual history.  [241]
5. The harder a man works to draw details out of your sexual past, the more likely he will use it against you sometime, someway. Perhaps latently, indirectly, or vengefully. It’s available to hold over your head and to rationalize or recover from his own mistakes. [241]
6. Forgetting your sexual past with lack of knowledge is far easier than forgiving what Mr. GoodEnough learns from full disclosure. The more he knows, the more he thinks. The more he thinks, the more he looks for the bad or unacceptable. The more unacceptable, the less forgetting. The less forgetting, the less forgiving. [241]
7. Feminine intuition trumps full-disclosure. While not easy, you are blessed with the skills and expertise to withhold who, what, when, where, why, and how of what he doesn’t already know. Withholding information is not dishonesty. Disclosure means candid, accuracy means honest. [302]
8. His spirit and willingness to give more than he takes may indicate his ability to honor your decision and help qualify him as Mr. GoodEnough. However, if he’s more of a taker, he may not honor your other expectations either. Such as these after marriage: Have kids even though he agreed. Or your desire to stay home and home school, when he wants more income in the home. Or support you in caring for a sick parent. [327]
9. Your undisclosed sexual past defends your relationship, because his ammo box lacks your historical bullets to fire back in domestic squabbles. [327]
10. The forward-thinking woman convinces all her female friends to never leak anything about her past to her dating partner, boyfriend, husband, or any other man. But this may fail too, because friends betray friends. They steal dates, boyfriends, lovers, and husbands, don’t they? Consequently, the wisest woman keeps her sexual history as secret as possible even from friends and family. [327]
11. Former relationships may be known to your man, but no mention should be made or comparative details disclosed. It’s toxic in any relationship for you to disclose the relative sexual worth of one man to another, regardless of who’s the better. [302]
12. Don’t think you can outsmart him by claiming he’s your greatest lover ever. You opened the door to his inquiry about how and why he’s the greatest, so you’re trapped into telling what you’re best off not to disclose.

The more that Mr. GoodEnough knows, the more likely he will make you pay some price for your past. Couples do squabble. You may never know or understand what’s happening. Yet, he may strike back because of your earlier sexual events. It takes very little for reminders of your past to grow into humiliation for him. Your history affects his sense of significance, whether you know it or not and accept it or not. 

I know this subject has been perhaps overheated and difficult to accept. Too much of a good thing can still be boring. Tomorrow’s subject is also a tender one that needs to be reviewed for mid-life dating. It’s submission, even though we all know that subject doesn’t apply before marriage. Preparation is easier than recovery, which is the not just everything but quite often the only thing.