The Habit of Love

A wife will often feel frustrated that she must constantly remind her husband of what he needs to do. The husband, on the other hand, often perceives these reminders as nagging. Neither is happy with the situation.

Wife led marriage offers a solution. But while it can be fun to seduce your husband into submission to your will, it requires a lot of thought and work in the beginning. Essentially, what you are doing is teaching your husband new habits. So it helps to think about this in terms of habit training.

What is a habit? A habit is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously. The more subconscious the behavior, the more likely that it will become natural and consistently repeated. Habit makes virtue easier.

Habit is usually contrasted with willpower. For example, you might require your husband to clean the table and do the dishes after every meal. If you must constantly remind him to do this he may perceive this as nagging. If he must rely on his willpower to do this chore then he will be inconsistent and exhausted by it. But if the cleanup becomes habitual, then you won't need to remind him and he won't even need to think about it. He will just do it.

But habits can be more than routine behaviors, they can become rituals. When a habit becomes ritualized your husband will not only do it routinely, he will enjoy doing it, even anticipate it as an enriching opportunity.

Given the power of habit, it's worth your time to learn how to teach your husband new habits. You can read a lot on the subject but the basics are these: cue, routine, and reward.

First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. In our example, the cue is a finished meal and dirty dishes.

Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. The desired routine in our case is cleaning the table and washing the dishes, pots, and pans.

Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Your husband will not naturally feel rewarded by clearing the table and doing the dishes. You must supply the reward initially.

Introducing the reward is a simple as putting the dirty dishes in front of sex. If, for example, it has been you who routinely does the dishes you simply leave them undone and initiate the routine for sex stopping at the last moment to ask your husband to first do the dishes. Upon completion then the sex resumes and he experiences the reward.

But you can also achieve much the same with more subtle rewards. You can use sexual touching and kissing while he does the dishes to reward his behavior.

Over time, this habit loop--cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward--becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become intertwined until a powerful sense of anticipation and craving emerges. Eventually you can reduce or even remove the artificial reward of sex and the habitual behavior will continue on its own momentum. In part this is because the habit is now subconscious but also because the chore itself becomes associated with sex. It becomes its own reward.

You may need to refresh the habit from time to time but if this is part of a larger program of housekeeping training then it will eventually fall naturally into place. He will acquire the habit of keeping the home of which doing the dishes is simply one part.

Indeed, ultimately what you want to instill in your husband is the habit of obedience. When your husband subconsciously seeks to obey then your will find him anticipating your needs even before you have articulated them.

For a little effort, and fun, upfront, you can achieve a lasting solution through the power of habit.