Wifehack #15: Does your adoring husband occasionally exhibit dangerous, unwanted, or downright unpleasant behavior? In my previous book Or Else: 101 Creatures With Which To Threaten Your Child, I suggest that the “Do what I say or the ghost will get you” tactic could potentially be applied not just with children but also in other close relationships which have high enough Bloodschmidt Trust Indices. I’d like to take that a step further here. If you’ve followed the steps I outlined in chapter 4 (Cultivate Worship, pg. 78), your partner is already eager to suspend his disbelief when you invoke his palpable devotion to you. However, “Do what I say or the ghost will get you.” is still an unreliable tool against anyone but children without providing concrete evidence to back up the claim (although voicework can help with this; See my book Omniscient Diction: Speaking Your Truth for more on this.) I suggest a small but effective syntactical shift: “Do what I say or the ghost will get me,” with “me” being the key word. By shifting the threat of vague occult repercussion to yourself, you will find that you can easily bypass your spouse’s reasoning and trigger his Chivalric Synaptic Impulse (see chapter 8: Wife as Squire, Dragon & Queen, pg. 311). The more personal and vivid details you spin when describing the ghost the better. It doesn’t have to be believable; he need only believe that you yourself believe it to be true. This simple change of approach has proven extremely useful to many of my patients, and I can also personally vouch for its reliability; I regularly employ it against several of my own husbands. Give it a go!
— from Wifehack 2: 101 More Evil Tips for a Tolerable Marriage, by Dr. Delia Bloodschmidt