The Fuckability Traps

No one said this would be easy. Oh wait, actually I did say that.

This is the 5th installment of the Optimally Fuckable Husband Project’s implementation guide. Check out the first post, What is the Optimally Fuckable Husband Project?, if you want to start from the beginning.

When I first started The Optimally Fuckable Husband Project(TOFHP) my life improved dramatically and it was suspiciously easy.

It felt like our universe actually was a simulation, and I had discovered the cheat code (Rosebud !;!; but for sex appeal).

I was regularly exercising, my house was clean, my screen time had dipped below 45 minutes a day, I was loving hanging with my kids and my wife was taking to the changes in my project very well. It was everything I thought was going to happen. I was feeling the immense benefits of transforming my life in all the ways I had wanted, and I felt that my marriage had improved too.

But around month 3 of TOFHP I noticed something was off in my marriage. We were fighting more than ever, and not long after I started to feel incredibly down about myself.

Which was fucking terrifying. I had just overhauled my life and marriage and for some reason both were suddenly shitting the bed.

And I’m not alone. Having spoken to other men who have taken on TOFHP, many found themselves with the same problems.

Turns out that as simple as the project may seem, without the right framing, there are some serious traps. For every positive change you’re making, there’s a dark opposing side you have to counter. Flip too many coins at once and plenty of them are going to land on the dark side.

But fear not, fellow fuckable (still deciding what to call ourselves). Getting to the other side of these traps, there are enormous benefits to both you and your marriage.

Trap #1- The Nag Trap

TOFHP is as much about improving yourself as it is about improving the lives of the whole household. But as it turns out improvement is just a form of change and change is stressful.

I’m not just spewing bro-science here either. Hans Selye is the Father of stress research, an Endocrinologist popularized the word stress in psychological language. Hans basically noted two types of stress; distress (negative demands) and eustress (positive demands). But here's the kicker; your brain treats both of them as stress.

Put simply, I changed shit, and that stressed the house out.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t hide this on my wife. I told her about this project months in advance and originally she found it both hilarious and sweet. But now, a quarter into it and we bickered endlessly.

She'd be annoyed that I loaded the dishwasher wrong.

I'd be annoyed that she did things I promised to take care of.

She'd get onto me for doing things my way.

I'd get onto her for not letting me do them mine.

And once we finally sat down to figure out what the hell had happened, we realized the cause.

By taking on a much larger role in the house I had blown up our previous silent agreements. The steady calm of knowing who was going to do what when was gone, and now no one knew what to expect.

Even if things were done for you, the stress was still there. My wife, a woman of routine and habit had the anchors in her life cut from her boat and now she had no clue what to expect.

We didn’t fix it in that one conversation, but we did fix it. We needed to renegotiate the expectations in the house.

Some of those expectations are how things are done. Sometimes my wife had a point as to why something needed to be done the way she wanted. Other times she was wrong to be so adamant that they go her way. But every fight became a signal that we had not discussed expectations.

Before kids, these things were easy. Then with 2-kids under 4, we had never out loud discussed the expectations we had for one another. It was uncomfortable but solving this trap left us better off than we started.

Trap #2 - The Resentment Trap

This one was a doozy. Another series of fights and entirely of my own making.

The entire premise of TOFHP is that while you’re using your wife’s libido as the north star for decision making, you’re ultimately not making any changes to get laid. You take on TOFHP because you want to make these changes for you. Becoming a Fuckable Husband isn’t about sex, it’s about becoming the person you want to become, by becoming the person your partner wants you to be.

But because so much of this identity is built around benefiting your wife, it's easy to fall into a trap. Without appreciation, you start questioning why you're putting so much effort into someone else.

For my wife and I in particular, this was not a covert contract. I discussed the plan with her before ever starting. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t mistakenly create expectations. I at the very least wanted to be appreciated for all of the changes I was making.

Sometimes I wanted that appreciation to take the form of sex. Sometimes I just wanted to be told that she noticed my efforts. But she had her own things to work on, she wasn’t going to be absolutely on the ball 24/7. She couldn’t read my mind on when enough appreciation was enough.

But once that seed of resentment is planted, every action for my wife without adequate appreciation dumped fertilizer into the soil.

For weeks I let it stew, trying to push it down because I was doing this project for me anyway. The bickering picked up, until we had a huge fight.

It’s not a fight I’m proud of. I was wrong to have started it. Sure, my wife could have thanked me more, but she thanked me plenty. And often she thanked me in ways I didn’t quite detect.

Nearly every husband I have talked to who has done TOFHP for more than 6 months has had this fight. But the good news, is if done right, there is a benefit on the other side.

It sucks to not feel appreciated. But when we finally came to the table, ready to talk about this problem, with the goal of solving it we opened up an untapped reservoir of opinions on what it takes for both of us to feel loved and appreciated.

She agreed, she could have been more appreciative. But I also could have just talked to her sooner.

The danger is that you're convincing yourself these changes are for her, when they were always supposed to be for you. The good news, is that this is a stage of TOFHP. In the long run you build disciplines and systems where you are fully doing these things for yourself, but until then, you have to be prepared for the Resentment Trap.

Trap #3 - The Unfuckable Ego Trap

I’m in sales. The fourth quarter of the year is soul crushingly stressful. And in month 9 of TOFHP, I started to slip.

All of my focus was on work. I would start work at 7AM, I’d work until 6:00PM and then I’d check emails all evening. I was still doing my best to keep up with my commitments to the project, but there are so many hours of the day, and I started to slip.

My wife and I had worked out nearly all of the previous traps. She’s been down this road with me before and was understanding about my intense focus on work. But because I had built my identity around being a Fuckable Husband, to fail at that identity was to be an Unfuckable Husband.

If you’re a man reading this, you probably feel how much that identity is a kick in the balls. If you don’t, well, it’s a kick in the balls.

TOFHP sets an incredibly high bar, and then declares anything beneath that bar as one of the most terrifying identities a man could label themselves.

My desire to drink went up, my heart raced during the day. Not only from the stress of work, but from the deep feelings of inadequacy that I simply could not rationalize away.

I didn’t reason my way out of this trap. I didn’t find a clever reframe. My feelings of being a fuckable husband came back only after I was able to commit again to the project full force.

TOFHP is powerful. It helps you summon the missing pieces of your motivation to do all the things you wish you would. But when the flip side of your identity is Unfuckable, every slip feels like a high-stakes tightrope walk.

It is, of course, not true. Failing does not make you an Unfuckable person. But if you try to authentically create the Fuckable identity, you’re accepting that the opposite identity exists.

The good news, is striving for Fuckability is just as powerful as avoiding becoming Unfuckable. You will make mistakes. You will fall off the horse, but TOFHP makes it hard to just fade away from the project. You’ll always be pulled towards Fuckability, and pushed from Unfuckable.

What this means for TOFHP

These traps sucked. I bumbled into each with no idea how I got myself into them. But on the other side of each my marriage came out stronger, my wife and I know what makes the other feel loved. And now, over a year later I’m still steadfast in all the changes I’ve made not-so-secretly for myself.

TOFHP is more of a renovation than a makeover. You have to break down walls and tear up floors. It's messy before it's beautiful. But when you're done, you're the house you always wanted to live in.

Next week we’re going to continue the TOFHP implementation series by discussing the levers of your wife’s libido(with science!), so you can best figure out how to design an authentic Fuckable identity around them.