Men believe that love matters for the sake of it. Women love opportunistically.
Today’s pull quote comes from Xpat Ranting’s blog. The discourse there is brief, but insightful:
I really, really, really hope the myth that girls are the hopeless romantics gets kicked to the curb ASAP. Everyone needs to realize that men are the “romantics pretending to be realists” and women; vice versa
I found this particularly thought provoking – Men are the romantics forced to be the realists, while women are the realists using romanticisms to effect their imperatives (hypergamy). This is a heaping mouthful of cruel reality to swallow, and dovetails nicely into the sixth Iron Rule of Tomassi:
Iron Rule of Tomassi #6
Women are utterly incapable of loving a man in the way that a man expects to be loved.
In its simplicity this speaks volumes about about the condition of Men. It accurately expresses a pervasive nihilism that Men must either confront and accept, or be driven insane in denial for the rest of their lives when they fail to come to terms with the disillusionment.
Women are incapable of loving men in a way that a man idealizes is possible, in a way he thinks she should be capable of.
In the same respect that women cannot appreciate the sacrifices men are expected to make in order to facilitate their imperatives, women can’t actualize how a man would have himself loved by her. It is not the natural state of women, and the moment he attempts to explain his ideal love, that’s the point at which his idealization becomes her obligation. Our girlfriends, our wives, daughters and even our mothers are all incapable of this idealized love. As nice as it would be to relax, trust and be vulnerable, upfront, rational and open, the great abyss is still the lack of an ability for women to love Men as Men would like them to.
For the plugged-in beta, this aspect of ‘awakening’ is very difficult to confront. Even in the face of constant, often traumatic, controversions to what a man hopes will be his reward for living up to qualifying for a woman’s love and intimacy, he’ll still hold onto that Disneyesque ideal.
It’s very important to understand that this love archetype is an artifact from our earliest feminized conditioning. It’s much healthier to accept that it isn’t possible and live within that framework. If she’s there, she’s there, if not, oh well. She’s not incapable of love in the way she defines it, she’s incapable of love as you would have it. She doesn’t lack the capacity for connection and emotional investment, she lacks the capacity for the connection you think would ideally suit you.
The resulting love that defines a long-term couple’s relationship is the result of coming to an understanding of this impossibility and re-imagining what it should be for Men. Men have been, and should be, the more dominant gender, not because of some imagined divine right or physical prowess, but because on some rudimentary psychological level we ought to realized that a woman’s love is contingent upon our capacity to maintain that love in spite of a woman’s hypergamy. By order of degrees, hypergamy will define who a woman loves and who she will not, depending upon her own opportunities and capacity to attract it.
November 16th, 2013 at 12:00 am
[…] The notion that women have to be taught to love their husbands (i.e. something other than “opportunistic” love) is particularly interesting, especially since the admonition is missing for men to be taught to […]
November 23rd, 2013 at 5:47 am
Am two years late to see this post and swallow the red pill but this, a good evidence of romanticism in men affecting our health.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/elderhealth/9625818/Men-more-likely-to-die-after-losing-their-wife-but-women-carry-on-as-normal.html
November 23rd, 2013 at 7:57 am
Romanticism affecting health? You mean reliance on their supportive wives who take take care of them.
November 25th, 2013 at 1:53 pm
[…] […]
December 10th, 2013 at 3:42 am
[…] behaviour and then the documentary along with various other which touched this topic. Like this Women in Love | You would find almost every men in that site to agree with him. All these things created a wall in […]
December 12th, 2013 at 1:16 am
[…] want to optimize a balance in the ideal monogamous wife, supportive mother for his children, and a woman he (mistakenly) believes has the capacity to love him as he believes a woman could, and the dirty, porn star who represents unlimited access to […]
December 12th, 2013 at 10:02 pm
This was an interesting article. However, I think it’s more of a theory that kind of falls flat when put to the test. You have to look at men and women from a scientific point of view. Men think they want women to love them unconditionally. But that’s not men being “romantic” or wishing they can be loved for who they are. It’s biology. Men are ABLE to love in a way that appears to be unconditional, but it’s not. The conditionality is that women are women. All a woman needs to be is a woman for a man to love her because men biologically are driven to reproduce. That, (being a woman) an imperative in itself. All a woman needs to be for a man in order to be of value to him is a woman able to reproduce. Yes, women have practical imperatives such as feeling the need for a man to be able to provide for her and be a certain way because it’s ingrained in them biologically. Women can only reproduce every 9 months. It’s a much bigger risk for a woman to love a man than for a man to love and commit to a woman because if he decides to change his mind he can go to any other number of women and reproduce whereas a woman is stuck with a baby with the potential of not having a provider for her offspring. So I think a lot of it is down to biology. If women didn’t have “imperatives” then there would be a lot of cavemen women stuck with babies who weren’t provided for. My point is, emotionally men may FEEL like they’re loving unconditionally without imperatives, but the truth is they have an imperative too, but the nature of human reproduction has only made it so that they only need one imperative to pass their genes on (That a woman is a women because women can have their babies.) Everyone has biological imperatives that affect how they are “able to love.”
That being said, I think everyone FEELS like they want to be loved “unconditionally.” They want their loved one to accept them no matter what. So what if they watch football? So what if they like to tango? So what if the pick their nose? They think that their loved one should love them no matter what and that this kind of acceptance is ideal. But 1. Men don’t love that way either. If they realize that the person they are with likes to run people down with cars in their free time, I’m pretty sure that might have an effect on how they feel about that person (Condition: I don’t love the fact that my wife runs people down with cars) and 2. If anyone loved someone unconditionally, then it wouldn’t matter WHO you were with. You could just walk out your front door and marry the first person you see because if you love unconditionally then what is there to get to know about a person that could change how you feel about them when there are no conditions? I’m pretty sure most men and women want to get to know a person before they commit to them, and that’s because no one loves unconditionally.
STILL, just because neither men nor women are able to love unconditionally, isn’t that kind of a beautiful romantic thing in itself? Sure, the idea of falling in love with someone no matter what is very poetic but isn’t it much more satisfying knowing that the person you’re with has CHOSEN to be with you because of WHO YOU ARE? It’s easy to say that women aren’t capable of loving a man the way he wants to be loved, unconditionally and without him needing to compromise or change his ways. But anyone who thinks women don’t have to change their ways or habits to be loved by a man just hasn’t been in many relationships or hasn’t quite gotten the inner workings of a woman in love lol All people have to compromise in a relationship. All people have imperatives. All people have to change (compromise) for the ones they love. It’s a fine line between healthy compromise and being untrue to yourself in order to please your partner. When you love someone, it’s a one way street. It’s not about what you get in return. When you love someone you WANT to compromise and better yourself. This goes for men and women. What’s more romantic than that? If you feel like you’re fundamentally changing who you are in order to keep this person’s love then 1. That’s not love at all, and anyone who bases love on financial status and ability to keep a job isn’t loving at all However, having a good heart is also a condition and an imperative, and what’s so wrong with that? 2. They don’t love you, they love who they think you are, 3. Women who require that of a man are emotionally unhealthy and genuinely don’t love you, imperatives or not, and 4. Everything said about women and their imperatives could easily be said about some men as well.
I think this article depicts how it seems men and women love on the surface but the fact is, men have an imperative too. Most of it is down to biology. People may grow up dreaming of Prince Charming being their perfect ideal and sweeping them off their feet or the unconditionally loving princess who accepts everything about her prince but as you get older and experience real love, which is full of compromise, you realize all that Disney fluff isn’t the good stuff. That’s the dream of two people becoming one, which robs both people of experiencing and appreciating each other as individuals. As soon as you let go of that idealized Disney dream of unconditional love you can start to really enjoy the good stuff, the meaningful stuff. If two people love each other “unconditionally” then what’s the point of being in a relationship at all? You could just sit around loving yourself all day if that’s what you want. A real relationship helps both people grow.
December 27th, 2013 at 1:51 pm
[…] Depending on how you read Rollo’s thoughts above on women and love, he is either entirely right or mostly right. One thing which is often lost in the discussion is that Rollo’s primary target in the quote above is not women, but men. Rollo reinforces this with his very next sentence in Women in love: […]
January 4th, 2014 at 3:37 pm
Women are not capable of love. At the moment you don´t enrich her life materially speaking, the clock has started ticking on your departure.
Because of feminism, females have jobs, yet they are still hypergamous, which means they only have intercourse with RICH men, leaving regular men with no incentive to work, which will lead to the collapse of society
February 6th, 2014 at 12:04 pm
[…] to is Tomassi's description of what women are capable of: opportunistic clinging. Summary and link. Iron Rule of Tomassi #6 Women are utterly incapable of loving a man in the way that a man […]
February 21st, 2014 at 12:35 am
Men only “love” because they like keeping a woman around for regular sex. Take sex out of the equation, even for legitimate reasons like seriously illness or injury, and the man’s “love” and “loyalty” disappears very quickly. They will expect to be allowed to sleep around and eventually leave.
You can see this all the time in men who start to act like a girl’s good friend or when they get incredibly nice and supportive of women they are attracted to. They tell themselves that this will increase their odds of sex. The reality is that men are incapable of love, but will do anything for sex… even if it means convincing THEMSELVES that they are in love in order to make a woman happy.
And why get into a relationship and not just sleep around, you ask? Simple, because men can’t. The majority of men don’t have as many options as women. The rich older man getting lots of women is an obvious myth created by men to make themselves feel better. Most men are of average income and average looks, and like men, women are attracted to youth. Balding, sagging, and fattening aren’t attractive, and younger men are more attractive, active, and virile. So if a man doesn’t secure a woman he will end up alone and sexless. He only ends up sad or depressed about broken relationships because he knows he has to find another partner to convince to have sex with him again.
In short men are only as “loyal” as their options are, and will base the entirety of their “love” and “support” around how much sex they can get out of it. Most women know this, which is why so many are surprised that men selfishly demand idealistic love. Men are not truly loyal, so it’s illogical to invest idealistic love in people who see women as objects. (And yes, most men see women as objects, otherwise they would speak out against the objectification of women in media and otherwise. Instead they stay silent because they get enjoyment out of it. And if you really loved someone, you would want to empower them, not support poor portrayals of them.)
As for sex, men fail in this area as well. Men consistently complain that the sex drops off in relationships. But it’s common knowledge that sex feels incredibly good. So the only logical reason it drops off is because the men aren’t putting the effort into it. This is because, as stated above, men put their own sexual pleasure above anything else. It takes longer to give a woman pleasure, so they often expect her to go without it altogether to please him more often. Hence the reason men hear “I’m too tired” or “I’m not in the mood” or “I have a headache.” The men value their own orgasm and believe that their penis is the end all be all to pleasure. Once they have sex the feelings of “love” for their partner quickly drop off.
So men can’t love, and are usually inattentive with sex so they can’t bring pleasure. Then they complain that women don’t value them. Why should they? If a man wouldn’t get caught, he would cheat and this loyalty men pride themselves on when people are looking at them goes out the window. Instinctively women know that men are a negative investment, so will seek value in men in other ways.
February 22nd, 2014 at 2:59 pm
Not just in bed and in personal relationships, but generally. See: Are Women Less Selfish Than Men?: Evidence from Dictator Experiments
Catherine C. Eckel and Philip J. Grossman. The Economic Journal. Vol. 108, No. 448 (May, 1998), pp. 726-735
May 6th, 2014 at 11:02 pm
[…] 3 years of blogging and a book written, my three most popular posts have been the Love series – Women in Love, Men in Love and Of Love and War. Though my SMV graph gets the most link backs, these are easily […]
June 3rd, 2014 at 3:36 am
I read the article, I read some comments. And honestly I don’t know if I should be amused or angry reading your point of view on women.
We are capable of loving just as much as you say you would. Trust me, we are also romantic and we mean it when we say “I love you”.
We don’t just throw those words at very guy passing by us. I am not going round argue on who’s the most romantic, who’s the best lover. There is no point in that.
I am just saying that you must stop generalising. We also can give up everything for the guy we love, we will also be here till the very end for our beloved one. We love you for who you are not because you can help us reach something we are aiming for. That is not love that is lust.
The male are not the dominant gender simply because there is nothing such as dominant/dominee. We are all equal. And if you want your girlfriend/wife to understand you… talk to her. And don’t be that macho who won’t say anything because he’ll look weak…
Human needs each other to survive, in a couple I would love my partner as long as I live because that is how I see love.
Stop criticising women, talk to them.
June 3rd, 2014 at 4:08 pm
Mimi,
Women can love. But can they commit? Generally – no. Of course they can commit to their children. But to a man?
So what keeps a woman interested? The interest of other women in “her” man. The 80/20 rule pops up here. 80% of women are interested in 20% of the men. The interest of other women is a very important signal.
Don’t discount biology. Because none of this is rational on a thinking level. It is rational biologically.
June 3rd, 2014 at 4:43 pm
@Mimi, it’s about how much women love, but rather how women love in respect to the way men believe women can love.
Read the rest of the Love series:
http://therationalmale.com/category/love/
June 23rd, 2014 at 11:47 pm
This is such a crock of shite!
July 1st, 2014 at 5:21 pm
[…] what men tend to want in terms of love and relationships and what women are able to provide. (read this[1] , then this[2] , then this[3] for more detail) Taking the red pill involves the […]
July 4th, 2014 at 9:38 pm
I’m so pleased to see how swimmingly your translations of ancient medieval texts by isolated monks who’d never had any contact with women into modern English is going. Top notch, you really got the bitter dehumanization of women and spiteful generalizations down pat.
July 5th, 2014 at 2:06 am
Jane,
So glad to hear you are not like them. And you must know so many more women so much like yourself. Excellent!
What is the divorce rate in the country you live in?
July 12th, 2014 at 4:09 am
Men who are too pathetic to get women and turn t around to blame their shitty attitudes on women. Classic. Pathetic.
July 12th, 2014 at 9:22 am
Claire,
Were you speaking to me? Or was that a general comment?
July 25th, 2014 at 8:01 am
Interesting and very true.
I think the key is that men are more spiritual and rational and women more emotional and earthly.
This explains exactly why ‘men are the “romantics pretending to be realists” and women; vice versa’.
‘Realism’ is earthly, practical. Women are more in tune with what is physically necessary. Men are more in tune with what is desirable.
Love is a function of the Spiritual, where all love comes from.
Men are in the world to give love, not to receive it. The only way a man can receive love is by being with the Spirit. The only way he can give love is by getting it from the Source first.
Women cannot love (or at any rate have a much lower capacity for it), all they can do is emotionally respond to stimuli. If they are loved (including what that practically entails), a woman can create good feelings, both for herself and her man.
The difficulty these days is that our society is now degenerated, that many women are severely traumatized by the time they grow up. Feminism obviously incredibly damages any female capacity.
As a result, it is very, very difficult to love them so much that one can break through the trauma and reestablish contact with the womans core.
July 25th, 2014 at 5:16 pm
[…] Women in Love, Men in Love […]
August 24th, 2014 at 8:53 pm
I have been reading quite a few people over on /r/theredpill trying to throw up the pill and plug back in rather than reject the Disney illusion.
These are [Cyphers](http://therationalmale.com/2013/05/29/artificial-joy/) but this bit of scripture brought it home to me from John 6:60.
>Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is hard teaching, who can hear it…. He said unto them, Doth this offend you….the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life. 64But there are some of you that believe not…From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.
September 10th, 2014 at 7:08 am
[…] Women in Love […]
September 29th, 2014 at 12:34 am
[…] particularly hard revelation I had to disabuse myself of was understanding that women love differently than men. That was tough to embrace because the old hope I was struggling to realize was based on the […]
September 29th, 2014 at 6:53 pm
idk but i think there may be a difference to how some women love and what others need from a man…i admit im a very, very insecure woman, extremely because of abuse etc. i think most of us women are very insecure at a deep level but some more than others because of abuse. if u haven’t had love or decency…u need a man to really emotionally connect w/. not that he’s gonna hold ur hand for every little thing but he needs to be understanding when u have deeper needs than the average woman….the average woman may really crave the “bad boy” and i admit i also like the bad boy, but his testosterone, or just how he’s the opposite of my femininity, its intriguing and its exciting….a woman wants the opposite of herself, and a man wants the opposite of himself…we dont need to be interchangeable at all…but many times i get the feeling that being alpha means u have to be mean and very aloof.
perhaps for most women who’re not abused or traumatized? yes in this country lots of women are very spoiled and need to be put in their place, however i have met men who take the caricature of alpha to mean they can act like cavemen w/ no true caring of the woman’s feelings taken into account. i myself need lots of care and some men out there who think they’re alpha really are just jerks, and dont realize that women are more emotional than they are, and INSECURE. sometimes i feel as if i always need to know if a man loves me every day! im thinking “he loved me yesterday, but will he still love me tomorrow?” and so there’s my “shit-test”…is it possible that women “shit-test” because we just need to know if the guy loves us since we haven’t had consistent love and don’t truly love ourselves? well…i guess i can only say that for women like me, “needy” women (i dont act needy though, at least anymore, i’ve learned me lessons). perhaps “regular” women who have been coddled all her life really needs an aloof man to keep her interested….but i definitely need a man to be there for me…
the way i love a man is wanting to help him in every way, especially emotionally…i really need someone i can talk to about everything and who accepts me for me. an “aloof” man is only gonna keep me at arms length and that will make me feel very unloved. i think SOME women can love a man the way he really needs…that is if she herself is appreciative of the love she gets and is an unselfish person, a giver…i dont think there are many women out there who are givers especially in this country….so i do understand this post, however…there are women out there who want to give as much as they can get and find pleasure in it. its a wonderful feeling to give and make someone else happy, because u feel that void inside and now how it feels to be unloved and dont want anyone else to feel that either…except i know im a weirdo when i say this, especially for being a woman….
September 29th, 2014 at 6:59 pm
I don’t think you’re weird Lulu. In fact you’ve just written a very accurate illustration of how women love, probably without even realizing it.
October 6th, 2014 at 8:50 pm
[…] Women in Love December 27, 2011 link […]
October 7th, 2014 at 7:42 pm
[…] Women in Love, Men in Love […]
November 2nd, 2014 at 10:26 pm
[…] romance with a woman – a want for a love that requires a mutual definition with a woman lacking the capacity to realize this with him. And it’s within that idealized desire men lose Frame and excuse the behaviors of Alpha […]
November 4th, 2014 at 2:49 pm
[…] romance with a woman – a want for a love that requires a mutual definition with a woman lacking the capacity to realize this with him. And it’s within that idealized desire men lose Frame and excuse the behaviors of Alpha […]
November 17th, 2014 at 7:29 pm
[…] and esteem. I’ve elaborated in the past about a man’s burden of performance or how women’s concept of ‘love’ is based on a passive opportunism of what a man is (rather than who he is), but you get the picture […]
November 21st, 2014 at 8:58 am
[…] Chasing after an intimacy defined by the feminine suffers from the same misdirection of presuming women’s concept of love (opportunism) agrees with men’s […]
November 23rd, 2014 at 9:54 pm
[…] I wrote Women in Love and the followups, Men in Love and Of Love and War, I described men’s concept of love as […]
December 6th, 2014 at 9:18 pm
I feel compelled to respond. It’s funny as in strange: I fell in love at age 23 with my husband’s intellect. No physical attraction whatsoever but Momma said that was normal. So I married him. I gave in to his every request and fantasy, trying to be the perfect wife in God’s eyes. But when the violence entered, i shuddered, woke up 27 years later, heading for divorce. I want my freedom. I want to respect, appreciate, and trust men but I will never again believe in love. It is a lie, I thought. But after reading your article, I know now- we just had different definitions of love. I may have been opportunistic at 23 without realizing it; but at 51, I am not looking for a genius- just a man who shares my idea of what a romantic relationship is. It’s so hard to define and yet now I would call it loving for the sake of loving- something you say only men can percieve. Thank you for letting me share.
December 24th, 2014 at 4:13 pm
People….it’s called communication, regardless of what the expectation is Damn, why has a nation become so focused on being lazy.
December 25th, 2014 at 7:35 am
corsicanlulu
September 29th, 2014 at 6:53 pm
The only way you are going to get what you need/want is to find a worthy man and surrender to him. The first is very difficult. For you the second may be near impossible. It is not in a woman’s nature to surrender and the abuse you have suffered multiplies the difficulty.
What may work for you is to find a woman and a man willing to love you. The woman may give you enough security for you to surrender. Those kinds of relationships tend to be unstable. They are VERY rewarding while they last.
I knew this lesbian and her girlfriend once…..
December 31st, 2014 at 5:19 am
This entire theory is of course complete bullshit, which I’m sure you’ve heard about a trillion times. Generalizing the capacity to love of an entire gender based on your bigoted, absolutely unverifiable presumptions is absurd. But carry on. It’s interesting to see how men who are extremely threatened by women that are more intelligent, powerful, and are inherently stronger and better looking than them behave and think.
You are not capable of fathoming anyone else’s capacity to love. Not one single other human being on this earth are you capable of making this claim about, much less all people on earth. Your grandiose delusions about yourself and all males are riveting to be sure, but only for their sheer lack of depth, logic, and basic reasoning. It’s like reading the musings of the average 9 year old about things like organic biochemistry. You get a pat on the head for trying, but no cookie because you certainly didn’t nail it.
January 2nd, 2015 at 1:49 pm
[…] this day my most contentious post (and chapter in the book) on RM is Women in Love. This is primarily due to first time readers taking my assertions to their literal extreme. […]
January 10th, 2015 at 3:38 pm
[…] ‘Alpha Female’s’ comment on this week’s post since I was already aware of her previous foaming rant on the Women in Love post under the telling monicker of ‘The Best Thing You’ll Never […]
January 13th, 2015 at 8:32 am
“men who are extremely threatened by women that are more intelligent, powerful, and are inherently stronger and better looking than them”
Just out of curiosity, are you interested in men who are less intelligent, less powerful, weaker and worse looking than yourself?
January 29th, 2015 at 11:48 am
I don’t understand. This is just rambling. There are no examples of how a man needs to be loved, or how women are incapable. He posits a theory and then provides absolutely no proof.
January 29th, 2015 at 12:20 pm
Read the series:
http://therationalmale.com/category/love/
February 14th, 2015 at 5:22 pm
Rollo,
I read this when you wrote it. I knew you were on to something, but I disagreed somewhat, and after more than three years and many discussions with friends I have finally thought about this topic enough to have found the right words.
http://davidvs.net/hobbies/masculinity-romance.shtml
Thanks for initiating a lot of productive thoughts and discussions.
February 15th, 2015 at 1:25 pm
[…] “Men have been, and should be, the more dominant gender, not because of some imagined divine right or physical prowess, but because on some rudimentary psychological level we ought to realized that a woman’s love is contingent upon our capacity to maintain that love.” (quote) […]
February 16th, 2015 at 8:48 pm
I have never seen a man as callous, aloof and cruel, as the average woman. They are truly empty inside but only feign being otherwise. They only play the mythical, idealized woman. That IS the essence of the nasty Scam. We all fell for it unfortunately.
February 17th, 2015 at 1:45 am
Tony232
February 16th, 2015 at 8:48 pm
If she thinks you are the best and you can get her to surrender – women can be very pleasant. Enjoyable even. But it will require a LOT of training.
Getting women to acknowledge their own nature is very difficult. They don’t like it. Well the vast majority don’t.
February 27th, 2015 at 7:30 am
There seem to be plenty of women on here commenting with the usual “rant” (must be fresh out of the Women’s Studies classes). If they actually took the time to read the article (and the series linked throughout the comments section), then they would find that the whole dynamic is explained in the series (not just in this one article).
For all of the remarked “intelligence” by these women, they need to sign up for the second round of a reading comprehension course. Either that, or it’s easier to spout off about what the FI has been feeding them for so many years. I can’t remember when it became a crime to disagree with someone.
Why do women go to such lengths not only to disagree but to show their true identity (fangs, claws and colorful language) when things don’t pan out the way they believe they should have from the start?
I’ll give you a little help. The article actually put some of the blame on men for expecting women to love them in a certain way – but many of you women missed it because you were too busy looking to hang men on everything (as usual). Men must take all of the blame (as taught in your Women’s Studies courses or see any program on TV, today).
Start holding some of your female counterparts accountable (You all did want equality, right?). Being responsible and being held accountable is part of that deal.
March 23rd, 2015 at 8:09 am
[…] This is an unedited sample. There are errors, but this is a taste of what you’re going to learn how to resolve in these two volumes of “The Rational Male” by Rollo Tomassi. Find Rational Male Rollo Tomassi at http://www.therationalmale.com […]