Adultery can kill marriage dead. So can sexual withdrawal or the death of a child. Now attention is being drawn to nagging, the tool in trade of the self-entitled shrew.
Nagging—the interaction in which one person repeatedly makes a request, the other person repeatedly ignores it and both become increasingly annoyed—is an issue every couple will grapple with at some point. While the word itself can provoke chuckles and eye-rolling, the dynamic can potentially be as dangerous to a marriage as adultery or bad finances. Experts say it is exactly the type of toxic communication that can eventually sink a relationship. […]
It is possible for husbands to nag, and wives to resent them for nagging. But women are more likely to nag, experts say, largely because they are conditioned to feel more responsible for managing home and family life. And they tend to be more sensitive to early signs of problems in a relationship. When women ask for something and don’t get a response, they are quicker to realize something is wrong. The problem is that by asking repeatedly, they make things worse.
The thousand-yard stare. I like to call it the lifeless gaze of surrender. Or the optical tomb of doom. You see it all the time on the faces of beaten down men married one too many years to fat, insolent wives. Many are quick to blame nagging as a source for this post-mortal condition, but to understand nagging you have to get at the root of the problem: the emotional letdown that compels wives to nag in the first place.
Women don’t nag out of the blue. Nor do they nag when they aren’t “getting their requests fulfilled” as the experts like to claim. And women don’t nag because of some nebulous, ill-defined leftie assertion that they suffer under the weight of social conditioning.
No, the root of it is simple: wives nag because their husbands have turned beta. Less succinctly, their husbands have become weak, enfeebled, grasping, defensive, sycophantic, solicitous “yes dear” yes-men. Strong men — alphas, you bet — almost never elicit the nagging response from their wives or girlfriends, and they aren’t exactly bending over backwards to do 50% of the housework or scrambling to fulfill all requests in a timely manner. The difference is that women never feel a need to nag an alpha lover with innumerable trivial demands, because these women who are so lucky to be with willful men have not had their sexual attraction replaced with the cold, dispiriting mentality of a schoolmarm overseeing errand boys.
Any man who takes the “experts’” advice and begins promptly responding to his wife’s nagging, thinking that resolution of her frivolous demands will resolve their marital issues, will only get more nagging, and more firmly shut legs, in return.
On the other side of the equation, the deteriorating wife syndrome explains many cases of nagging as well. Wife gets fat, old and ugly, husband loses sexual and romantic interest, wife responds by nagging to provoke signs of life from listless hubby. And the therapists and counselors say “just do what she says and all will be better”. What fools. This kind of nagging will never go away until the husband makes clear, one way or the other, that his wife’s physical decline will not be tolerated by him. A happy wife with a good body and an alpha husband is a wife who will rarely experience the incipient female compulsion to nag.
[crypto-donation-box]