Covert Contracts refers to an unspoken agreement that exists within your mind between you and someone else. It's what you expect someone to do, based on what you're doing for them or based on what you expect from a relationship.

In other words, it is the action of someone who expects a mirroring effect from the other party.

The implied:

“Scratch my back, I will scratch yours”.

You would think people would not need to have an overt contract to be decent towards someone else.

This only stems from women not wanting to feel the burden of reciprocation within a relationship and deflecting the blame to the man.

It is the other person's willingness to create a positive feedback loop for a constructive relationship.

Accepting this concept as a legitimate one from a guy’s perspective is allowing women to get out Scott’s free of any responsibility within the relationship realm.

The person leading it must not feel bitter that it is not reciprocated. He must take the lack of positive response for what it is. In that respect, it is the healthy response to it.

A person is not actually wanting to make the relationship work, thinking of themselves rather than the unit, and thus ejecting, because that “partnership” is just one person trying to plug the existing holes created by the sabotaging party.

Like with boundaries, the idea of an overt contract is just one of the latest symptoms of the contractualisation of relationships.

You can’t even expect to have someone being decent within a relationship, you need the contract to be overt.

Great. Do you want to be with someone who needs to be told: “hey we have agreed we like each other and we want to build something together, but I just want to make sure on paper that this is what is going to happen for this set of behaviours…” no flexibility, no on the fly compromise, no initiative, no insights.

You would expect the other person in the relationship to have goodwill, if not common sense, with you.

It is also funny to see people accepting as truth that relationships are transactional, but castigating covert contracts as a bad thing.

Transactional setups include explicit and tacit contracts. Not accepting the latter as valid is giving one person the plausible deniability of wrongdoing. And we know who loves plausible deniability to absolve themselves from accountability.

In other times, we had something called the Social Contract, inspired by French philosopher Rousseau: society exists because of an implicitly agreed-upon set of standards that provide moral and political rules of behaviour, which eventually had a ripple effect among individuals.

Things were not as fucked up as they are currently, back then, thanks to customs.

It is clear now that with the breakdown of traditions, it is a free-for-all, setting the base for the mess that modern relationships have become.

Championing the validity of the concept of covert contract within a relationship, as a man is admitting you traded your genitals for those of women to the benefit of women.

It is not a coincidence that modern couple therapists champion the term covert contracts as a means to denigrate quid pro quos through a set of constructive behaviours, when the vast majority of them are women (70%), when it is not closet cucks.

At the end of the day, as a guy, you should want a woman who seeks to understand and know your agenda that you don’t have to write down on a piece of paper, because she is unwilling or uninvested in you to discover it gradually on her own. In reality, a woman is invested by trying to appeal to the things you don’t say to get more of your goodwill. The term covert contract is to provide legitimacy for a woman not to do so and feel righteous about blaming the man for it.

The reality is that Quid Pro Quos become Covert Contracts the moment the woman is not willing to do her part, yet blames the man because she is not interested in working towards the relationship. So, the semantics are only there to shield the woman who does not want to own the part of the tacit contract she got herself involved in, and work towards the disintegration of the relationship. It gives her the time to build the resentment necessary to low-key give up on the relationship and emotionally drop the guy before giving the chop, when he is hanging on, trying to solve an equation and investing himself in the process even more. He will then find himself at a loss and self-criticise for behaving in a way which was constructive yet unfruitful, full of good faith when she was not.

The solution on his side is to detach when she is not willing to do her part, because one only collaborate with willing partners. Unless she tries to work again towards the relationship, it is a burden he does not need to bear. It is about creating the gap necessary for her to reinvest in the union.

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