Category Archives: Case Studies

March 31, 2015

Wives & Lovers

(h/t Zelscorpion for the screen cap)

In Women Behaving Badly I made mention of Dalrock’s standing assertions that the context of romantic love has superseded the condition of a committed monogamy – traditionally marriage – as an idealized goal-state. Essentially this represents a reversal of a previous intersexual dynamic that served as a check and balance of women’s innate Hypergamy:

What nearly all modern Christians have done is place romantic love above marriage. Instead of seeing marriage as the moral context to pursue romantic love and sex, romantic love is now seen as the moral place to experience sex and marriage. This inversion is subtle enough that no one seems to have noticed, but if you look for it you will see it everywhere.

Lifetime marriage, with separate defined roles for husband and wife and true commitment is what makes sex and romantic love moral in the biblical view. In our new view, romantic love makes sex moral, and the purpose of marriage is to publicly declare that you are experiencing the highest form of romantic love. Thus people now commonly refer to a wedding as “making our love official”.

The gradations we now apply to romantic love are symptomatic of the problem. We take great care to distinguish between “pure love” or “true love” and mere “infatuation” or “puppy love”.

[…] Because it is love and not marriage which now confers morality upon sex, sex outside of marriage is now considered moral so long as you are in love. Thus we have the modern harlot’s defense/anthem “but we were in love!”

I think what Dal was getting at with this (and I hope he’ll comment) has a much broader reach than just in Christian (“Churchian”) culture. I think this raising of romantic love to the highest order is more punctuated in a religious context because, doctrinally, it should be the reverse. In an objective secular context this reversal is all but taken for granted.

In an age of feminine social primacy women’s feelings of romance are at a premium. We matter of factly presume that it’s a man’s responsibility to not only invest himself in, and provide resources for, his wife and children’s wellbeing, but it’s also (almost exclusively) his burden of performance to stimulate and maintain his wife’s romantic interests.

I’ve argued the position that women (of today) don’t find the ‘good guy‘ – a man attempting to embody the best aspects of Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks – a believable role. My assertion is that women expect and desire those aspects in different men at different times as needed, however, the social narrative still places that “best of both aspects” burden on a man who does commit to a woman in the long term.

With the exception of only the most adept, affluent and exceptional of men, this expectation is a sisyphean recipe for failure. No matter which aspect he excels in the other aspect potentially becomes his personal flaw. Although his personal strengths may compensate, feminine-primary social expectations place him in a no-win position.

Wives Hate Sex

Badpainter and Sun Wukong had an interesting exchange in this week’s comment thread:

Badpainter:

Newgal states clearly women must be sluts for men to get laid. This also means women must be sluts for women to get laid. Why must that be true? Because Newgal alludes to a dirty little truth so ingrained in the social consciousness it’s a cliché: wives hate sex. Therefore women, sluts and otherwise, get married so they can stop having sex except as necessary to get pregnant.

Think about it.

The girlfriend provides sex good enough to motivate a desire in the man to commit. After the wedding is a period of at least adequate sex followed by a decline to little or nothing if she can get away with this. When the wife becomes suitably frustrated/disenchanted with the marriage she changes title to divorcée and is again free to become a sexual creature.

The source of the problem is that women have very little sense of self that is internally derived therefore they play roles defined externally. These roles are proxies for their identities which barely exist. In 2015 wives are not defined as sexually giving, or sexual at all except for the honeymoon period. If the sexual wife exists in this culture it as the adulteress giving herself to men other than her husband.

Sun Wukong

Oh absolutely. The wife that hates sex is such a “thing” now I really think it’s what makes even Blue Pill guys at least pause on their way to the altar. “Do I really want to put a libido draining fat license on her finger?” I think that premise is largely built out of feminine cynicism about settling for [Beta Bucks]. They all know the script so well that they assume they’re going to marry a guy they don’t want to fuck. Imagine that: assuming you’re going to hate sex for the rest of your life.

What a horrendously awful view of a man you haven’t even met yet. And he’s not even met you but assumes he’ll be happily making love to you for the rest of his life and you’ll do the same. What a disconnect. Oh well, at least the kids will be happy right? Anybody?

What Badpainter and Sun have illustrated here is the direct result of placing a romantic condition for love as the prime requisite for a committed relationship. It’s important to grasp that any relationship founded on genuine desire will necessitate genuine passion and not a small amount of feral lust, however, it is exactly this pre-commitment (Alpha Fucks) sexual chemistry that will later become the exclusive responsibility of a man in that commitment.

The character that is a wife is now socially and popularly expected to move into a sexless, passionless and unexciting condition by being married today. All Epiphany Phase rationalizations aside, marriage is viewed as the end of the party. Being a wife is boring by comparison.

I explored this in detail in Beta Fucks and As Good As It Gets, but what I find ironic in light of Dalrock’s assertions about romance-primary intergender dynamics is that the very pretense of that romantic “true love” context that supposedly legitimizes sex is killed within the confines of marriage. In fact, women expect and anticipate that the sexual desire they find so important in that romantic context will necessarily die once they become a ‘wife’.

The pretext of being a ‘wife’ is a socially excusable expectation of progressively losing sexual affinity for the man she’s agrees to marry, so what woman wants to be a wife? Women become wives due to the necessities an ever-decreasing capacity to maintain being a lover requires of them.

I expect that most women will disagree with me on a personal level; it’s not in women’s best interest to acknowledge that wives hate sex – perpetuating the belief that sex gets better after marriage is a necessity men need to internalize in order to commit. Whether or not this is true for a woman on a personal basis isn’t my point. The point is that the societal message is one that marriage will necessarily kill a couples’ passionate sexual connection in comparison to their single, romance-based sexual connection.

Why ruin a perfectly good relationship with marriage?

The Myth of Mismatched Libidos

Once married, there are myriad social conventions already emplaced for a wife to rely upon as she moves from exciting singleness into mundane, but necessary, long-term commitment. Most of these she’s already been conditioned to expect she can rely on. ‘Mismatched Libidos’ is a common refrain for women (and marriage counselors) who come to a point where they can no longer palate the “duty sex” they felt responsible for in the beginnings of their marriage.

Her husband isn’t expected to provide the ‘tingles, but he’s still responsible for the failure to create them. As I said, only the most exceptional of men can effortlessly inspire the admiration necessary to maintain a woman’s Hypergamous interest. If you have a read of the screen cap Zel provided us with for this post you’ll get an idea of how those pre-made social conventions work in tandem with men’s default responsibility of satisfying a woman’s endless discontent.

The deference is always to the feminine, thus any problem (particularly sexual ones) he has with her become his personal issues and flaws. Any deviation, any dissatisfaction, with the ready-made social conventions set in place to excuse the female sexual strategy are solely his responsibility and his character flaws.

The ship is going down, and I’ve only got three life jackets. Who am I going to give them to? John, you learned to swim a long time ago, right?

In last week’s post comments I quoted the following confessional from Love Shack:

My wife called me today and was all excited about some beachfront apartment she saw. She wants us to buy it for vacations and such.

Now here I am .. I just turned 50. My youngest is going to college this year and I guess I just realized that I’m no longer bound to her.

The last 20 years has been a long series of quickies and 3 minutes handjobs every 3-4 weeks. In between, I spent my prime sexual years mostly masturbating to get off. Now that I’m 50, my drive is still good, but it’s not what it was.

I had tried everything I could think of over those 20 years to get things on track. I was exemplary with chores around the house, I was attentive to her emotional needs as far as I could anticipate them, and even if I do say so myself – I’ve kept myself in outstanding shape (although that was more for me).

On the other hand, I look back and I can hardly remember a time that she spontaneously gave me a neck rub, or cooked something just for me as opposed to all of us, and certainly not even attempting to do something special for me sexually (yeah, I have a minor kink or two).

But when she asked me to buy a beachfront place today – my immediate reaction was annoyance. I realized then that I feel resentful. I have decided to leave her. There is absolutely nothing she can do now to change anything because the past cannot be changed.

This man’s situation represents the ending phase of a chronic lack of admiration on his wife’s part. It would be easy to point out his role is one of being the dutiful unconsidered provider in his wife’s Frame, however, consideration is never a motivator of genuine desire for a woman. Only admiration and an ambient imagination of losing the focus of it inspires genuine desire.

Girl With A Dragonfly Tattoo had a post recently outlining the expectations of women interested in “seducing” a man. On GWADT’s blog what’s implied is that this man is in fact her husband to begin with. What makes her points so difficult for married women to digest is that they should ever need to make an effort to do so. The reason this is so alien a thought to married women is because the men they wanted to seduce were the men they knew before they became ‘wives’. Wives have no use for seduction, and particularly so with the Beta men they settled for around their Epiphany Phase. Seduction, compassion, appreciation (such as can be expected of a woman) only become a necessity when women are subjected to a real preoccupation with losing a valuable man – a man they admire.

Even in Frank Sinatra’s time wives had to be told to be lovers too.

367 Comments | tags: Alpha Fucks, alpha widow, Beta Bucks, blue pill, dread game, evolutionary psychology, feminine imperative, feminized men, gender relations, hypergamy, intergender relations, male perspective, manosphere, marriage counselors, rational male, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, sexual market value, SMV, social conventions, the rational male, therationalmale | posted in Alpha, Case Studies, Game, Hypergamy, Operative Social Conventions, Relationship Game, Sexual Market Value, The Feminine Imperative

March 24, 2015

Betas In Waiting

By Rollo Tomassi

I came across another familiar story on the TRP Reddit this week. It’s familiar because this story is becoming increasingly more common as Hypergamy becomes a more open secret that women can no longer keep under wraps.

For the better part of 2014, and in Preventive Medicine, I explored the social trend of Open Hypergamy and the impact it’s beginning to effect on contemporary western(ized) culture. In that exploration I published Saving the Best (another TRP link), a story which revolved around the increasingly more common post-Epiphany Phase “regrets” women have when their Party Years indiscretions are made evident to the Beta men who committed to them in monogamy or marriage.

Have a read of Saving the Best before you continue here, you’ll see the commonalities immediately. I’m going to dissect this “confession” a bit as I go, but bear in mind this woman’s predicament is the direct result of the unintentional Red Pill awareness that Open Hypergamy has brought men to – even uninitiated Beta men.

An update, for those asking for it. Here’s the link to my original post although the text has been deleted? Before I get into the details, I’d just like to say I greatly appreciate the support this community extended me. Believe it or not, I read every response.

As of this morning, we still hadn’t slept in the same bed or spoken more than 10 words to each other in passing. As I was waking up, he was walking in the front door with two coffees. He sat me down at our kitchen table and finally opened up to me.

Basically he feels that he was “conned” (his word) into the marriage, saying that he wouldn’t have even dated me, let alone married me, if he’d known what he knows now. His view of me has been irreparably changed and he no longer sees me “as someone worthy of being [his] wife”. (quoting him here… fucking prick) Beyond the sexual aspect, he says he no longer trusts me because I “kept something this big” from him our whole relationship.

One of the primary disconnects women are conditioned to believe during their Epiphany Phase is that a “good man” will be willing to forgive and forget her past indiscretions. On their journey of self-exploration and discovery women are encouraged to adopt a finely tuned cognitive dissonance with who they conveniently become and what should be the consequences of their pasts. While men are expected to live up to their responsibilities as men, and are expected to own up to the consequences of their failures, at the Epiphany Phase women are encouraged to convince themselves that they become someone else – someone who was “so different” from who she was in her Party Years.

Her husband feels “conned” because he was conned; conned after discovering the dual personality of his pre and post Epiphany Phase wife. What we’re expected to believe here (courtesy of the social conventions emplaced by the Feminine Imperative) is that her husband is some prudish, moralistic throwback unwilling to accept and embrace the “real” her – the one who was trying to “get it right” by turning over a new leaf with him. This is the easy, ready-to-use shame that women have available to them; if a man becomes indignant over a woman’s sexual past it translates into his insecurities as a man. His feeling conned over his bait & switch marriage is redirected to being his problem.

Men aren’t off the hook with that convenient convention either. There’s a moral high ground many men want to claim and cast the actions of a guy in this circumstance as virtuous and a proper revenge for being mislead. While that may feel good, men in this situation aren’t disillusioned with their ‘unworthy’ wives from a moral pretense, but rather that they believed they would be entitled to their wives’ sexual best reserved for him. As I quoted in Saving the Best, they “marry a whore who fucks like a prude.”

Subjectively that may or may not be the case, but it’s the freedom and genuine desire with which their wives had sex with prior (Alpha) lovers; desire that wasn’t based on material provisioning, emotional investment or the logistical hoops women expect their post-Epiphany “good men” to perform to in order to merit their sexual and intimate attentions. That’s the disconnect, that’s the con; Alpha Bad Boys get her 3-Way genuine sexual abandon with no investment expected, while he’s got to maintain ‘multiple businesses’ in order to get a prosaic sexual experience with her. The Bad Boys got her sexual best for free, while he’s expected to accept her as the ‘new’ post-Epiphany her…

Nothing I could do or say could convince him that these were past mistakes and not reflective of who I am today. He wasn’t angry with me, didn’t call me a slut or anything like that. Never once raised his voice. Part of me wishes he did, although I can’t exactly say why right now. It felt like I was being laid off from a job.

As I mentioned, the expectation is for her husband to accept “who she is today”, yet who she was ten years ago had a more genuine desire for less established, but sexually arousing, lovers. I’m going to speculate here, but it’s likely that a man who owns multiple businesses spent more of his time diligently and (I presume) responsibly cultivating those enterprises than the men his wife took as lovers ten years ago. Again, we can see that as a moral virtue on his part, but there’s a root indignation of what her past represents within the context of his (I assume) responsible past.

And like a good business owner he plays the confrontation calmly and collectedly. The part of her that wishes he’d raised his voice is the same part that got excited by the Alpha indifference of her former lovers.

So that’s it. We are getting divorced. My supposed life-partner turning his back on me without a second thought. He didn’t even have the decency to discuss it with me first – apparently he visited his lawyer during the week and “the process is in motion” (his words). Knowing him, there is absolutely no changing his mind.

My husband owns multiple businesses and wouldn’t get married without a prenup. I signed it, honest-to-god thinking we’d never, EVER have to use it. Well, he had the fucking document with him this morning. He said he’d pay off the remainder of my student loans, which he isn’t “legally obligated” to do. While I appreciate that, I am going to meet with my lawyer this week and see if the agreement can be challenged in court. We have built a life together, I gave him 5 of the best years of my life and I’ve been 100% faithful to him – I don’t fucking deserve to be tossed out like a piece of trash.

So that’s it. My life turned upside-down in the span of a week, over something I did 10+ YEARS AGO BEFORE I EVEN KNEW HIM. It’s fucking asinine. The thing is, even as I wrote the original post, in the back of my mind I knew he was through with me. He’s ended friendships and business partnerships over less.

Ghosts of Epiphanies Past

In Preventive Medicine I go into a bit of detail about men in this increasingly common circumstance. There is a subconscious expectation on the part of Beta men who find themselves at or just past women’s Epiphany Phase, that predisposes them to believing that what they’ve become as a result of their perseverance throughout their 20’s has now come to fruition and the women who ignored them then have now matured to a point where he’s the ‘sexy’ one at last.

Unless men have a moment of clarity or a Red Pill initiation of their own prior to this, what they don’t accept is that this expectation is a calculated conditioning of the Feminine Imperative to prepare him for women like this; women who can no longer sexually compete for the Alpha Fucks they enjoyed in their Party Years. The Feminine Imperative teaches him that he can expect a woman’s “real” sexual best from the “real” her – why else would she agree to a lifelong marriage if he weren’t the optimal choice to settle down with? Why wouldn’t she be even more sexual than in her past with the man she’s chosen to spend her life with and have children with?

That is the message the Feminine Imperative used to subtly and indirectly imply to Betas-in-waiting. Now with the comfort of Open Hypergamy this message is published in best selling books by influential women:

“When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.”

― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

Not to belabor Sandberg yet again (she has been hocking the tired out Choreplay meme recently), but this is essentially the outline of the script we’re reading in this woman’s lament. She’s essentially followed Sandberg’s advice only to find that her Beta-in-waiting bought into the same script too. The problem for her is that he took the “nothing’s sexier” part to heart only to find that someone else was sexier long before she’d convinced him otherwise.

For what it’s worth, fem-centrism has far less to fear from the manosphere revealing the ugly Red Pill truths about Hypergamy and more to worry about from pridefully self-indulgent women gleefully explaining it to the general populace themselves. Roosh had a tweet this week with what would likely have been the attitude of our subject wife ten odd years ago:

To the "victor" goes the spoiled vagina pic.twitter.com/ks7CbEg8xe

— Roosh (@rooshv) March 24, 2015

The more common Open Hypergamy becomes and the more proudly it’s embraced by the whole of women the less effective shaming men into acceptance of it will be. However, I thought it was entertaining when the counter-comments on Saving the Best questioned how common this situation really was or else thought it was trolling.

I think it’s much more prevalent than most men would like to admit. Perhaps not as dramatic as this example, but far more common for a majority of men who’ve tacitly accepted that the woman they married (or paired with) gave her best to her prior lovers and are too personally or family invested to extricate themselves from her after they’ve realized it. That investment necessitates them convincing themselves of the pre-planned memes the Feminine Imperative has prepared for them – that they are doing the right thing by forcing that dissonance out of their minds.

A lot of Betas-in-waiting like to claim a personal sense of vindication about their successfully pairing and breeding with women who they believe are (and were) their SMV evaluate equals once those women have “got it out of their system” with regards to self-discovery and Alpha indiscretions. In a sense they’re correct; often enough these are the men who gratefully embrace a woman’s intimate acceptance of him precisely at the point when his SMV has matured to match this woman’s declining SMV. I call this crossover the comparative SMV point in my SMV graph.

Even women on the down-slide of their SMV like to encourage the idea that their post-Epiphany decision to marry the Plan B Beta provider (long term orbiter) is evidence of their newly self-discovered maturity. How could they have been so foolish and not seen how the perfect guy for her had been there all along? That consideration gratifies the ego of a Beta who’s been hammered flat by rejection or mediocre experiences with women up to that point.

The primary reason I spent the last year compiling Preventive Medicine was to help men see past the compartmentalization of women’s phases of maturity, but also to help them see past their own immediate interpretations of those phases as they’re experiencing them. Long term sexual and intimate deprivation (i.e. Thirst) will predispose men to convincing themselves of the part they believe they should play in the social conventions of the Feminine Imperative. Their own cognitive dissonance is a small, subliminal price to pay when they believe they’re finally being rewarded with a woman who’s now ready to give him her best.

What inspired me to this post was reading a cutesy photo-meme on Facebook. The syrupy message was “My only regret was not meeting you sooner so we could spend more of our lives together” superimposed over some kids in black & white holding a rose. Then it hit me, this was a message a guy was posting to his girlfriend; the one he’d met after his second divorce was finalized. What he didn’t want to think about was that if he’d met her sooner she’d have been too busy “discovering herself” to have anything to do with him.

490 Comments | tags: Alpha Fucks, alpha widow, Beta Bucks, beta guy, blue pill, Choreplay, dread game, feminine imperative, feminized men, gender relations, hypergamy, intergender relations, male perspective, manosphere, Open Hypergamy, Preventive Medicine, rational male, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, sexual market value, Sheryl Sandberg, social conventions, the rational male, therationalmale, women | posted in Biomechanics, Case Studies, Hypergamy, Operative Social Conventions, Sexual Market Value, The Feminine Imperative

March 16, 2015

Making Up for Missing Out

By Rollo Tomassi

Back in February I had an interesting exchange with commenter TuffLove. The conversation focused on his recent singleness due to his wife of 20-some years feeling the call of the Alpha and decided cheat on him, later divorce him and then take up with an even more Beta fellow not long after her ‘fling’ (his story). You can read the whole exchange here if you like, but what TuffLove describes is a textbook example of the Alpha re-interest impulse that defines the Development and Redevelopment/Reinsurance phases I outlined in the Preventative Medicine Series.

Not to rub salt in the wound, but you and your ex’s story is a cliché now. It’s the “making up for missing out” story. Woman marries early, cashes her chips in before she knows better, lives vicariously through her single girlfriends until such time that the “Alpha” she knew at 20 is the hapless Beta she’s saddled with at 39.

Divorce porn media convinces her to bail out and get with the Alpha she’s always missed for all that time. She did everything in reverse – Beta comfort and dependability through her party years, to be traded for Alpha excitement before it’s too late.

I was inspired to sift back through my comments for this conversation, because I was also made aware of a new example of both this phase’s dynamic and the divorce-porn industry that will inevitably find some very fertile soil to plant itself in.

This example comes to us courtesy of Robin Rinaldi, author of The Wild Oats Project. This book and the “experiment in cuckoldry” such as it was, centers on, you guessed it, a 40-something woman who abandons her marriage for one year to bang the random men she was prevented from fucking by being married to her dependable, unexciting Beta husband. Granted, the husband didn’t want children and this contention resulted in him getting a vasectomy – his only act of Alpha with her as far as I know. Her childlessness is of course her go-to victimization card she hopes will endear feminine sympathy for her taking matters into her own hands for a year.

The de rigueur rationalizations and appeals to womanly “self-discovery” are handed out like the M&Ms any Red Pill man will come to expect, but I’m drawing attention to this book because it has the potential to be the next step in the 50 Shades of Grey evolution of Open Hypergamy:

Get ready for “The Wild Oats Project.” And not just the book. Get ready for “The Wild Oats Project” phenomenon — the debates, the think pieces, the imitators and probably the movie. Get ready for orgasmic meditation and the Three Rules. Get ready for “My Clitoris Deals Solely in Truth” T-shirts.

On a social scale it seem like the next deductive next step – blend a justifiable Eat Pray Love narrative with the more visceral (yet unignorable) sexuality of 50 Shades and women will readily consume it. I expect there will be the same hamster spinnings of NAWALT and most women respect their marriage vows, but it still wont wash with the overwhelming ‘guilty pleasure’ popularity that 50 Shades exposed on a large scale.

Writers like Rinaldi and E.L. James have tapped into the Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks anxiety rooted in women’s primal insecurity inherent in doubting their optimization of Hypergamy. If appealing to visceral sex sells products to men, appealing to the inherent ‘you-only-live-once’ insecurity of feminine Hypergamy sells to women – and women being the primary consumers in western society, sell it does.

Commenter jf12 related something Ballista posted on his blog recently:

Ballista asks, on his site, “why is divornography (divorce pornography) marketed exclusively to women? Why are there articles in women’s magazines and romance novels for women like Eat Pray Love that glamorize divorce, but nothing of the sort exists or is marketed to men? Why is there no male divorce porn, no stories of men divorcing their obese, aging harpy wives, liberating themselves from their marriage vows, and ending up living happily ever after banging large-breasted 21 year-old lingerie models?”

Can you imagine the uproar? Can you feel the Love yet?

Since the start of the sexual revolution there’s been a social undercurrent of excusable, justifiable comeuppance for any gender related imbalance women have been taught to believe that men are enjoying or benefitting from. Whatever male-specific indignation that would reflect negatively on men becomes a form of empowerment for women – particularly if that indignation facilitates men’s sexual strategy at the expense of women’s. Thus a woman taking a yearlong break from her marriage to bed as many men as she cares to indulge (fully expecting to come back to her dutiful Beta husband afterwards) is cast as an iconoclastic hero for casting off “patriarchal sexual repression.”

Furthermore, it’s only a small step to wipe the accountability of her actions off on the horrible man who wont cooperate by doing his duty to fulfill her sexual strategy. There is no more permanent a devotion to the male sexual strategy than to get a vasectomy and thus deny a woman the ultimate culmination of her own. If you ever want to experience just how close to livestock the Feminine Imperative considers men to be, just try getting a vasectomy before you’re married or without a wife’s explicit and written consent. Legally it’s easier to geld horses or neuter dogs.

It’s important to consider how the doubt over past hypergamous choices effects a mature woman. When a woman has passed through her Epiphany Phase and become a never-married woman into her late 30s the mindset becomes one of self-justification. This is similar to the Kate Bolick effect whereby a woman has very little choice but to live with her past intimate decisions and convert necessities into virtues. She embraces a ready-made empowerment narrative wherein she convinces herself that her choices were the bold, unconventional ones she needed in order to grow.

Next and most commonly is the woman who consolidated on a man’s commitment once she’d become less sexually competitive just prior to 30. I can’t be sure, but it’s likely that Rinaldi falls into this demo, the schedule more or less plays the same.

From Preventative Medicine IV:

Redevelopment / Reinsurance

The Redevelopment phase can either be a time of relational turmoil or one of a woman reconciling her hypergamous balance with the man she’s paired with.

The security side of this hypergamous balance has been established for her long term satisfaction and the Alpha reinterest begins to chafe at the ubiquitous certainty of that security. Bear in mind that the source of this certainty need not come from a provider male. There are a lot of eventualities to account for. It may come from a ‘never married’ woman’s capacity to provide it for herself, the financial support levied from a past husband(s) or father(s) of her children, government subsidies, family money, or any combination thereof.

In any event, while security may still be an important concern, the same security becomes stifling for her as she retrospectively contemplates the ‘excitement’ she used to enjoy with former, now contextually Alpha, lovers, or perhaps the “man her husband used to be”

The Soul-Mate Mistake

Vox had an astute observation about this phenomenon not too long ago:

Alpha Widowhood is a description of an observed behavior, not a cruel invention of the Game theoreticians meant to plague BETA husbands and give them sleepless nights:

“Steve has been with me for the past 50 years and Ron for 47. Neither is the man I am married to, nor have I seen or spoken to either since our love affairs ended in my 20s. All the same, there is no denying they have both messed with my marriage to Olly, the man who has been by my side for the past 40 years.

I found myself thinking about them both as I read recent research that suggested women who played the field before marriage are unhappier with their lot than those who entered matrimony virginal.
Angela Neustatter has often questioned what life would have been like had she married another man

Angela Neustatter has often questioned what life would have been like had she married another man.”

I think it’s important to remember that an Alpha Widow doesn’t even necessarily need to have slept with a man she considered ‘Alpha’ from her past to feel the Alpha Widow effect:

Five minutes of alpha — even worse, five minutes of alpha rejection — can fuck with the heads of even the most desirable women. And continue fucking with them years later. In comparison — if the reports are to be believed — women who divorce beta schlubs after years of marriage pretty much forget them before the ink is dry on the papers.

Sometimes being an Alpha Widow means hypergamic ‘rumination’ over a better Alpha option a woman missed or was rejected by in her past in comparison to the guy she “settled on” for marriage. This is particularly significant if that guy was a woman’s Plan B husband. It’s not just the actual Alphas she banged back in the day, you’re competing with an imagined ideal and the more women are empowered and encouraged to feel secure in exploring their hypergamous options (i.e. correct their ‘soul mate’ mistake) the more you’ll read stories like this.

However, for all intents and purposes my instincts tell me Rinaldi falls into the “making up for missing out” demographic. On whole this demo of women can eventually become the worst self-inflicted Alpha Widows in their latter years. I let Rinaldi explain…

“I refuse to go to my grave with no children and only four lovers,” she declares. “If I can’t have one, I must have the other.”

If you’re wondering why that is the relevant trade-off, stop overthinking this. “The Wild Oats Project” is the year-long tale of how a self-described “good girl” in her early 40s moves out, posts a personal ad “seeking single men age 35-50 to help me explore my sexuality,” sleeps with roughly a dozen friends and strangers, and joins a sex commune, all from Monday to Friday, only to rejoin Scott on weekends so they can, you know, work on their marriage.

[…] One of her oldest friends calls her out. “How is sleeping with a lot of guys going to make you feel better about not having kids?” she asks. Rinaldi’s answer: “Sleeping with a lot of guys is going to make me feel better on my deathbed. I’m going to feel like I lived, like I didn’t spend my life in a box. If I had kids and grandkids around my deathbed, I wouldn’t need that. Kids are proof that you’ve lived.” It’s a bleak and disheartening rationale, as though women’s lives can achieve meaning only through motherhood or sex.

As I illustrated in Preventive Medicine, there’s a root insecurity inherent in women’s Hypergamy. From an immediate perspective this can manifest itself as a battery of women’s psychological and sociological filtering mechanisms for Hypergamous optimization with a man she’d just met, to the husband she’s been married to for 20 years. However, it’s vitally important for men, particularly married and LTR men, to understand that the confines of a committed relationship is never any insurance against Hypergamy in the long-term, and the rationalizations of that Hypergamy evolve as women mature.

Of course the first, best advice is the simplest “just never get married”, but even if you are a single man entering your 50s you will encounter women who’ve experienced (or never experienced) a crisis of Hypergamy and the incessant drive for Alpha optimization of it. If you are a younger man dealing with an older woman (why, I don’t know) you will likely encounter women like Rinaldi and women with similar mindsets as Robin Korth. It’s important to know what you are, or will be, dealing with.

224 Comments | tags: 50 Shades of Grey, Alpha Fucks, alpha widow, Beta Bucks, beta guy, blue pill, dread game, feminine imperative, feminine psyche, feminized men, gender relations, hypergamy, intergender relations, male perspective, manosphere, marriage vows, Preventative Medicine, rational male, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, Robin Rinaldi, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, sexual market value, SMV, social conventions, the rational male, The Wild Oats Project, therationalmale | posted in Alpha, Case Studies, Game, Hypergamy, Inter-gender Communication, Psychology, Relationship Game, The Feminine Imperative

February 15, 2015

End of Life Issues

By Rollo Tomassi

I had an interesting experience this weekend with a man I used to do peer counseling with almost ten years ago. The guy’s wife had heard I’d moved back to northern Nevada and asked if I’d spend some time with him as he’s been suffering from cancer, and honestly, he’s in death’s waiting room. He’s late 70s now but when I first started counseling the guy at university he was one of the tougher men I knew in trying to expose to what’s now the Red Pill.

He’s never really accepted the fundamental truths and for literally his entire life he’s been struggling with the frustration that Blue Pill men all do when they simply don’t understand that the set of books they believe women – particularly older women from his generation – should be playing fair by. It was particularly disheartening to listen to him still complain about his wife’s lack of sexual interest in him.

For her part she’d completely checked out of anything intimate with him beyond the perfunctory duties of being civil with her husband years ago. As his illness has progressed he’s become less mobile and more resentful of her indifference to him. From my perspective, coming back into this story after almost ten years, it struck me how a Blue Pill conditioning solidifies into a man’s life in his later years. Revealing the Red Pill truths as to what’s brought him to where he is now is almost too cruel to torture him with, and honestly he wouldn’t accept it.

I’ve always advocated that unplugging men from the Matrix is like triage, save the men you can, read last rites to the dying. For those who don’t come to terms with the Red Pill and the true nature of the realities of the sexual marketplace at least there’s some hope that eventually they will experience something similar to what the Red Pill defines for them and they’ll have pause and insight to reconsider those truths. That’s the bitter taste of the Red Pill – there’s no going back once you start to see the behaviors and relate them to Red Pill principles.

I read guys on the TRP subreddit forum who are newly unplugged who really have a tough time coming to terms with that new reality. They get pissed off, they want to cling to the “it’s not really that bad” or “not all women are like that” conditioning and throw their hands up in disgust with the Red Pill and move on.

Only they can’t. Four months later they come back to the forum after having a woman behave exactly as the theories predicted they would. There’s a manosphere saying that women hate the Red Pill because it more reliably and accurately predicts human behavior than feminism ever has. That Red Pill awareness and predictability is tough to shake for guys who want to go back to the comfort of believing there’s still hope for them in a Blue Pill world.

This Old Man

I realize this is going to get depressing here, but it’s important to consider the totality of what a lifetime of Blue Pill ignorance represents to a man at his end. There are going to be men who will never accept Red Pill truths. They will never make the connection that the rule book they think everyone is working from is a plan with the intent of consuming him all the way to his death-bed. For whatever reason anything counter to their preconception of how women and men ought to relate to one another simply doesn’t register for them.

I’ll continue with my story about this man, but before I do I think that for anyone to have a complete understanding of how what we call Red Pill awareness affects our lives as men we need to consider how that awareness plays out across the span of our lives. Red Pill awareness, what I call positive masculinity, and the counter to a social order founded on the Feminine Imperative is still in its infancy. Some guys want to characterize it as a return to what was once conventional masculine ideals, and while I think that has some merit things simply aren’t going back to what men romanticize they were with women.

In the ‘sphere there’s a particular focus on how men can get the desired results they want in their personal and intimate lives by applying what Red Pill awareness helps them to reasonably predict. That’s fine for PUAs, maybe MGTOWs, and in the meantime MRAs will channel the parts of the Red Pill they do accept to increase awareness of men’s issues. But all of these branches and all of their interests are applied in the now.

My father died from complications of Alzheimers in 2010. My brother and I had him provided for in an assisted living facility for the last year of his life and it got to the point he couldn’t recognize either of us or his grandchildren. It was very difficult to watch my Dad who was a brilliant man, but a life long Beta, decay to a shell of himself. However even while suffering from memory loss, he was still clinging to the behaviors his Blue Pill conditioning taught him would make him appreciated by the other women in the facility.

My Dad taught me the meaning of the Savior Schema throughout most of his life – if that post seems poignant to you it’s because I learned it well from my old man. His ‘dating’ methodology was always based around a strategy of what he could do to better solve, buy or otherwise alleviate the problems a woman had in the hopes that a reciprocated appreciation of it would result in intimacy. The old set of books, he had them memorized.

I mention this because even with his mind addled by dementia some part of his subconscious still expected old women, women he had no idea what their names were, to reciprocate their love and intimacy for doing their gardening or fixing something for them. He couldn’t remember my name, but he could remember being slighted by women not giving him a kiss or patting him on the back ‘for all he did for them.’

This is just one example of the extent and consequences of Blue Pill conditioning. Using Red Pill / Game to pick up or live a better life with women, or extending that awareness to other aspects of one’s life is commendable and a betterment to a man’s life, but appreciating that betterment is incomplete without acknowledging the consequences of what a Blue Pill life path looks like.

When I agreed to spending most of my day with this man I had a kind of idealistic want to create a memorable time for him. He’s still pretty together mentally, but physically the guy can’t walk for more than 30 yards without getting winded. I took him out to the casinos, he hung out with me and some of the guys I snowmobile with, we drank good bourbon and I had hoped he’d get out of this self-pity by just doing something different for him.

He wouldn’t have it. All he could talk about was his resentment of his wife’s treatment of him “after all he’d done for her over the years”. He’ll be gone inside a year or two and he complains about Blue Pill frustrations as if there’s a chance he might live a better life in the future.

Last April I lost one of my most prized greyhounds to osteosarcoma. He was only 8 years old so it was kind of tragic, but I’d had him x-rayed and caught the signs early enough to manage his pain for an extra month before the pain was too much for him. Literally the day I had him put down, to the hour before, he insisted on going outside to walk in the grass and breath the air, he leaned on me like greys do, but it was an acknowledgement of him knowing it was his time. That dog took the last train home with more dignity and self-awareness than this man will.

I’m not a big fan of Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs, but I do accept his concept of having ‘peak experiences’. I think there is a Blue Pill presumption that those peaks are only peaks if they include their ONEitis girlfriend or wife along there to experience it with them. This is a tragedy because it disqualifies those fantastic life experiences (even stressful ones) because that Beta want of a mutually shared love precedes the capacity to recognize those great peaks.

It is important from a larger meta-life experience to understand just what the implications of a Blue Pill existence are and rise above them. Red Pill awareness isn’t just about getting better and hotter women, it’s about living a better life – when you’re 22 and 92.

142 Comments | tags: Alpha Fucks, Beta Bucks, dread game, gender relations, hypergamy, intergender relations, manosphere, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, the rational male, the Red Pill, therationalmale | posted in Case Studies, The Matrix, Unplugging

January 30, 2015

Father Knows Best

By Rollo Tomassi

I received the following from Mark Minter in this week’s comment thread. Regardless of what your or my opinion of Minter is, I will admit this is an area I haven’t explored before:

I have a request for a post. It is for a rework of a Rational Male post sometime back about sons of divorce that try to be “better than dad”.

I would think you might have more to say on the topic since a couple of years have passed since you posted it.

Or perhaps how a newly red pill divorced father might approach his son, especially if there has been a period of estrangement.

I have a “date” for a phone call with my son after quite a long period. You might imagine my relationship with my “old family” is sort of “interesting”, to put it euphemistically. My daughter has dropped my last name from social media accounts. My son calls himself “Younger Minter” and his assumed “middle name” is “Fucking”. Sort of a throwback to mine back in the day, but he seems quite pissed though.

I have been told these things can be quite emotional, and then a flurry of contact, but then a “backsliding” away from contact. Inevitably and probably rightfully so, he has innate loyalty to his mother. And he grew up in one of places that is so liberal it is often referred to as “The People’s Republic of …”

So the question is “How to bring him along?”

If by “bring him along” you mean convince him you’re not the asshole he’s convinced you are, that’s really subjective to your personal history and how amenable he is to listening to your side of the story. That said, there’s a world aligned against you that’s likely conditioned your son not just to hate you, but to loath his own sex by association with your past decisions and circumstances.

My intent with this weekend’s discussion isn’t to run Minter up the flagpole, but rather delve into a tough Red Pill area – reestablishing a lost or misguided connection with a son or daughter, from a post-Red Pill awareness perspective.

The post Mark is referencing was Promise Keepers. In that post I hit this situation from the opposite side:

Slay the Father

One common theme I’ve encountered amongst the more zealous beta White Knights I’ve counseled over the years has been this determination, bordering on fanaticism, with outdoing the life-performance of their asshole fathers. Before I go on further, many of them had legitimately rotten, alcoholic dads, who were abusive to them and their mothers. Others had the perception of their fathers colored for them either by their ‘strong independent®’ single mothers, or by watching their fathers resolve their own beta tendencies in a post-divorce life. Whatever the case, each of these guys had a mission – to be a better man than their father was, protect their mothers, and by extension the future mother their girlfriends and wives would become for them. His father’s personal failings would be his personal triumphs.

Being the father in this scenario and attempting to reestablish an after-the-fact, positive connection with a son is a very tall order. It’s almost easier to address the particulars of a daughter with ‘daddy issues’ who’s absent father contributed to her ‘victim status’ condition than it is to consider the upbringing and feminine conditioning a boy receives in his father’s relative absence.

The difficulty being that a son will have every negative perception of his father reinforced for him by a feminine-primary social order. Even in the rare instances when an insightful mother doesn’t resentfully color her son’s negative perceptions of his father during his formative years, there is an entire world of feminine social conventions pressing and affirming that impression into him.

From Daddy Issues:

Matrix Fathers

Have a look at postsecret this week. It’ll all be gone by Sunday so have a look while it lasts. This week’s thread is the usual fare for Father’s Day, a hearty “Fuck You Dad!” or “You’re the reason I’m so fucked up!” interspersed with a couple ‘good dad’ sentiments so as not to entirely degrade the feminized ideal of fatherhood – wouldn’t want to discourage men’s perpetual ‘living up’ to the qualifications set by the feminine imperative. There has to be a little cheese in the maze or else the rat wont perform as desired.

I always see a marked difference in attitude between mother’s day and father’s day, especially now that I’ve been one for 14 years. I was listening to a local talk radio show on the ride home Friday that was opening lines for callers to express their ‘gratitude‘ for their fathers, as they’d done the previously in May for mother’s day. Damn near every caller had the same “fuck you dad!” story about how shitty their lives were because of their father’s influence or his lack thereof. One girl had called in to bleat out her story about how her dad had left her mother 30 years ago and for the last 10 years she’d sent him a father’s day card with a big ‘FU’ on it to tell him she’d never forgive him. Another guy called in to say how horrible his dad was for leaving his mom and how he sends her a father’s day card because he thinks she fulfilled a masculine role for him that he owes some gratitude for.

Father’s Day is a slap in the face for me now – not because my wife and daughter don’t appreciate me as a father, but because it’s become a big “fuck you” Mr. Man. It’s now a reminder (as if we needed a special occasion) that masculinity, even in as positive a light as the Matrix might muster, is devalued and debased, and we ought to just take it like a man and get over it.

It’s a difficult task to unplug a man who’s a friend and open his eyes to Red Pill awareness. That guy has to be seeking answers to really be open to having his ego-investments in his conditioning challenged and realigned – you can’t really make a man Red Pill aware, he’s got to come to it in some fashion. This is a very important distinction to make when the man you’re attempting to unplug is your own son.

A father in this predicament has the double jeopardy of clearing his name as a father and as a representative of masculinity – the representation of all the negative aspects the Feminine Imperative has ever embedded into him about the taint of his own masculinity. As I mentioned in Promise Keepers, some of the most ardent anti-conventional-masculinity crusaders I’ve ever encountered all had the common denominator of a ‘bad dad’. There are no ‘deadbeat mothers’.

Minter’s not the first father to ask me for advice about this. One of the more painful aspects of waking up and accepting Red Pill truths is coming to terms with the consequences of basing your past decisions on a Blue Pill paradigm. I can empathize with younger unplugged Betas getting angry with themselves for having wasted part of their lives with the effort of chasing after the carrot of Blue Pill goals, but it’s an entirely different anger older men feel after coming to realize that their lives and the lives of their children (the only reason to get married, remember?) are the results of their Blue Pill decision making.

Fortunately I had my Red Pill awakening prior to my daughter being born and had the foresight to live by example. However I know enough men in similar straights as Minter to see what an impossible task it is to untangle the past Blue Pill version of themselves with the Red Pill aware men they’ve become. I do not envy them.

I think the questions for the weekend are obvious:

I understand that Mark is seeking reconciliation here, and it may not even be warranted, but what would advise you men in a similar situation?

Attempting to unplug a friend, even one in a trauma that makes him ready to hear Red Pill truths, is a difficult task, but when that man is your own son how do you go about it?

Bear in mind I do understand that raising your son by a Red Pill example would be ideal. I’ve written about it before. What I’m asking is how to approach a young man already steeped in a Blue Pill feminized conditioning for the better part of his life and make him Red Pill aware? That kid may be a son who’s made it his life’s mission to be a “better man” than you based on the definition of a feminine social doctrine that’s taught him to hate you, his own sex, or at the very least would prefer he remain confused about masculinity until after he’s committed himself to useful Beta provisioning when a woman needs it most from him.

I’ll give my own response in the comments.

Related:
Dreams of the Future Past

159 Comments | tags: Alpha Fucks, Beta Bucks, deadbeat dad, dread game, father son reunion, father’s day, fathers and sons, feminine imperative, feminized men, hypergamy, intergender relations, male perspective, manosphere, Mark Minter, masculinity, rational male, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, the rational male, therationalmale, white knights | posted in Case Studies, Communication, Idealizations, Positive Masculinity, Unplugging

January 27, 2015

Loyalty & Hypergamy

By Rollo Tomassi

I actually had another post warming up for this week, but I received the following correspondence from a reader whom I’ve promised to keep anonymous. I don’t do ‘guest posts’ on Rational Male, however I do repost some comments and email I receive on occasion, and in light of the recent discussions on the male concept of love and shit tests I thought I’d let this stand on its own today:

Rollo,

I know it’s been a long time since you posted your piece, “Soldiers”, but it struck a nerve with me. I’m not sure what kind of new insight (if any) you can get from my experiences, but I left the Air Force 6 years ago and have found the transition to civilian life much more difficult than I had expected. After reading your post and reflecting, I also realized that the values the military instilled into me set me up for a lot of difficulty with women down the road. I only wish I had something like your blog as a resource when I was 21.

I went to one of this country’s military academies at the age of 17. I am 31 now and am still friends with some of the guys I went through basic training with. The basic training experience was 6 weeks long, and physically and mentally very tough. At the academies this environment gets drawn out (in modified form) through the entire first year, where we are plebes and function as sort of second-class citizens beneath all upper classmen. There is a lot of adversity, a lot of animosity directed at you in such a system, but you come to realize later on it’s a kind of “tough love”. These experiences forced us all to bond with each other, and help each other out through some very rough times.

I spent too many years of my life hoping that I could find a relationship with a woman that would be on par with the relationship I had with my male military friends in terms of honesty, loyalty, trust, forthrightness. I ended and/or sabatoged a number of relationships with women because I was looking for this kind of “love” I had for my brothers and could never find it. I had always assumed that I would find a form of “love” that rivaled all other relationships I’d had previously. Loyalty was (and is) a major virtue for me, and I never felt like I was finding that with the women I dated. In the military I developed a pretty keen eye for bullshit, and every relationship I had with women, even the best ones, I found my bullshit alarms going off at some point. Now I realize what was tripping my bullshit alarm—hypergamy. Hypergamy is directly opposed to the concept of loyalty. I could tell when women were being shifty.

Part of the reason I could tell is because I had actually swallowed a version of the red pill as a cadet, though I’d never actually heard the term before. A few of my friends are what they call “naturals”. They helped to undo a lot of the extreme blue pill notions that I had been raised with.

Years of movies and TV and guidance from authority figures had trained me to look for “that special girl”. One of my friends in particular introduced the idea of being “kind of an ass” to girls, and only showing the nice side later (because I really was a nice kid). Never lead with your nice side, he advised me.

We also fucked a lot of girls with boyfriends. I saw some of the most disloyal and underhanded behavior out of women during that time. I remember when my friend was urging me to make a move on a girl we’d been talking to in a bar for some time. I said, “oh she has a boyfriend”. He asked, “well did she bring him up in conversation? Unless she brings it up it’s fair game. And you don’t address it either. Don’t say anything about the boyfriend, just keep the conversation elsewhere for the entire night.” It worked. Tactics like these worked over and over again, and while I enjoyed the hell out of this new found power, I was becoming more uncomfortable about the nature of women. It’s only due to my sense of morality and loyalty to other men in arms that I didn’t fuck the wife of an army guy who was deployed. I felt too disgusted with myself to go through with it… she, however, didn’t seem the least bit troubled by her marriage.

Fast forward to my adult life, I decided that I should be looking for a good woman to settle down with. See, I had never swallowed the Red Pill completely—I resisted the harsher implications of it. I told myself, NAWALT, and that I just needed to look for a good girl. The One. I understood so much that so many other guys don’t get, but I was still holding out hope for The One. I figured I would find this One at some point in grad school. After all, this is where all the smart, motivated, good girls are, right?

In two relationships the girls wanted to be exclusive with me. I said yes quickly, because exclusivity was what I wanted too. It wasn’t too long after that that my bullshit alarms got set off. One girl, leading into Christmas break, said she was going to a techno show in a city about an hour away from our school. I was planning on studying for a final, so I didn’t bother trying to go. As the date neared I realized I felt comfortable about the final and I wanted to go out that night. I asked to go with her—she said no. And this is where I could see the hamster frantically spinning its wheel.

All her reasons were obvious bullshit. I know when a girl is seeing another guy, because I’ve been the other guy. I know what the stories are like. I ended it. I was heartbroken. I wondered constantly whether I had made the right call. I missed her desperately, and I constantly questioned whether my radar had been off. My male friends (now thoroughly blue-pill, as I was attending a liberal civilian grad school) told me I was overreacting and being paranoid and jealous and not respecting her space, blah blah blah… A whole year later a girl I was friends with let slip that my ex actually was meeting another guy in the city, and fucked him the day after I dumped her.

No surprise—but I was quite upset that a few other girls I was “friends” with had known and never told me. They could have saved me a lot of grief. But then again, they were women—I don’t quite get it, but it’s like all the girls were sticking up for each other and covering for each other, even though they weren’t really close friends. It’s almost as if they felt they needed to cover up the tactics that women use, and keep the men from knowing about them—as though there was a driving need they had to keep men in the dark as to the true nature of women.

In fact, I have never been steered in the right direction in relationships by any woman. And this will bring me around to my next point—the feminine dominated civilian environment—especially academia.

The second grad school relationship followed a path that was remarkably similar to my first—in fact, looking back, I have had three major relationships, with girls who wanted to be exclusive, and they have ended because the girls were becoming involved with other men.

University life was especially difficult to adjust to. There was a lot less voicing of opinions and a lot more concern over offending others—that was one of the first things I noticed. I also noticed that many of the men seemed timid compared with my male military friends. See, this grad school was almost an extension of high school.

Approval by the females was very important, you could not anger them. The men were incredibly concerned with their popularity, and with getting to know the right people. I figured out early on that pissing off one of the cuter girls could lead to social death. And even apart from the girls, the men didn’t seem to act like men I had known.

There was a hierarchy in the school, and these young men followed the rules of this hierarchy. They would not challenge any male who was deemed to be “socially superior”. This blew my mind, because my military friends would never have accepted such a thing. We had a group, a crew, and we could always stand our ground, and if push ever came to shove then we might have to fight someone—if it meant protecting our dignity. I also figured out that physically standing my ground wasn’t socially acceptable in this environment.

I realize I may sound like some sort of thuggish asshole with a persecution complex, but I was responding to some blatant disrespect that shocked me. In the military, the men I knew wouldn’t openly disrespect or ridicule a man—unless they were looking for a fight. Actually, in the military I recall a lot more general respect between the men than I found in grad school. The grad school men felt like women to me—gossipy, petty. Overall, the male virtues that I had learned in the military became unimportant in the culture I found myself in.

Other values took priority, and I think this may be the Feminine Imperative you spoke of. Conflict was always to be avoided. Drastic effort must be taken to avoid offending others. Most of the men were willing to undercut each other for just a chance to be with one of the prettier girls. And the pretty girls—they walked on water, constantly had a harem of beta males tending to them. Actually, I watched several of these girls cheat on one boyfriend only to begin dating his friend. The social power of the prettier women cannot be overstated. I dated and dumped two pretty girls in a row (for the reasons I stated above) and quickly found myself on the outside of most social events.

I saw a lot of truth in your thoughts about military men. Some military men are some of the most Alpha dudes I’ve ever met. My military friends changed me from a dyed-in-the-wool beta to an Alpha that could fuck other dudes girlfriends with far too much ease, and stand up for himself (a modified pseudo-alpha, obviously I wouldn’t need to write this letter if I was a true natural alpha). But a lot of military men, Alpha though they are, have not actually swallowed the red pill completely. Somehow, I’d like to be able to get that message across, because there’s still a lot of NAWALT and One-itis in the military culture, even though it is a predominantly alpha culture. I am just grateful that I came across your blog.

After two failed relationships I was feeling like shit. I had tried looking for The One, and tried to have an Open and Honest relationship with lots of Communication and it failed dramatically. Now that I’ve found your blog I’ve come to terms with a lot of what had been plaguing me about women. I’m back to spinning plates, and I really do think it’s the best option for any male in today’s society. I’m still a little bitter about these red pill truths, but I’m no longer trying to fight against them.

I have a good correspondence with men in the military and it’s one of the more humbling aspects of writing what I do. I’ve had men on deployment send me pictures of their worn copy of The Rational Male on the barracks bed and I get chills. I’m glad I can help these guys transition from the idealism they have in the military to the often tragic Red Pill realities they encounter when they’re discharged.

This reader makes an interesting point I hadn’t considered in the Soldiers posts; there is a modicum of loyalty and respect men develop amongst themselves (even between different branches of the military) while enlisted that they believe will be relatable and respected by the women they encounter after their time in the military. They believe that the idealistic male concept of love (and in this case love for their military brothers) is the same concept women will share when they enter civilian life.

Young men entering into military life out of high school have (in most cases) 4 years to learn an idealism based on the Old Set of Books, is it any wonder they become suicidal after they are forced to come to terms with the disillusionment of that idealism in the face of the feminine-primary reality they enter when they’re discharged?

22 Veterans per day take their own lives.

278 Comments | tags: beta guy, blue pill, dread game, feminine imperative, gender relations, hypergamy, rational male, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, the rational male, therationalmale | posted in Alpha, Case Studies, Hypergamy, Idealizations, Positive Masculinity, Unplugging

January 18, 2015

“She turned on me”

By Rollo Tomassi

In the last comment thread Rational Male regular, Glenn, had an interesting exchange that went like this:

My marriage exactly. And she really did turn on me by the time my daughter was 2, also having two miscarriages. It was as though a switch went off and she simply fucking hated me. In my case, I had too much dignity and many women who were interested in me who seemed quite fine, so I put my foot down and my ex then just began an affair with a Plan B she had in the wings (hotties always have a Plan B guys, especially wives). She married him and destroyed him too, but it wrecked my relationship with my daughter along the way. So much destruction and pain.

I often look back on my marriage now from the RP perspective and have started to blame myself for not being more dominant and not seeing shit tests for what they were etc, but I also wonder if there was anything I could have done? She was hot, there were always good looking guys willing to fuck her – I mean, is it just inevitable for some women?

As I’m finishing up the final edits of the next book, I’m once again reminded of its main purpose – a cautionary explanation of what men can expect of contemporary women at the various phases of their maturity. In Anger Management I detailed the anger men direct at themselves, not at the women who followed a natural predictable ‘flow’ of rationalizations and social conventions they can be expected to as their conditions in life dictate. Naturally any anger a man may deal with or express in this regard is always presumed to be directed towards women. A feminine dominant social order is one founded on the innate solipsism of women.

Now, before I dig in a bit deeper here, I want to make clear that while Glenn’s comment started my thinking process about this week’s topic, what I’m going to get at here isn’t a reflection on anything personal. His story of being “turned on” by a wife he believed was playing on his team is a very common one related by many a post-divorced man using the hindsight of a Red Pill lens.

I’m adding this caveat since only Glenn can really say for himself whether his mindset at the time he first met, and later married, the wife who turned on him was colored by Blue Pill idealism and / or a Beta self-perception. My guess, as with most men in his situation, was that he actually had what was a realistic expectation of a reciprocal relationship based on what he thought would be her genuine appreciation of his efforts and merits.

Betas at the Epiphany

I’ve discussed in several prior threads the Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks strategy women use in both the short and long term. What I think needs a bit more explanation is the long term effects of that strategy on the Beta man’s mindset as a result of his fem-centric conditioning.

When a woman approaches and enters into her Epiphany Phase, she has a limbic understanding that her genetic chips need to be cashed in with a man who has ‘proper’ long term provisioning potential. For the greater part, those men are at least expected by women to have a Blue Pill, Beta conditioning that will make them more compliant with, now, what’s becoming an unignorable open Hypergamy.

These are the men Sheryl Sandberg describes as,

“…someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home.”

These are nice euphemisms used to describe a man willing to accept his position of powerlessness in the grand scheme of feminine-primacy and open Hypergamy for his participation in realizing women’s dominant sexual strategy.

The Beta man encountering this new found attraction convinces himself that women’s interest in him is genuine and organic. In a sense it is, but although this attraction (not to be confused with arousal) is perceived as genuine on the part of women, it’s an attraction born of necessity. That necessity is the need to consolidate on monogamy with a man who’ll willingly ignore not just her past Alpha Fucks indiscretions, but participate in what he’s been conditioned to believe is his duty as a man from society and start to build a “mature adult” life with her.

A Beta at the Epiphany phase believes his ship has finally come in and his self-righteous AFC strategy of patience and perseverance will be rewarded. The social conventions at the time make him believe he’s to be more lauded for ‘forgiving’ a woman’s past, irrespective of whether he can expect praise for looking past her misgivings.

The Alpha Widow or carousel riding wife-to-be may then convince herself that she in fact actually sees an Alpha potential, or a potential for long term success, in ‘settling’ on that Beta in the long term. While I have had men relate horror stories about women knowing that they were settling and being insecure about their futures before or at the time of their wedding, I’m going to suggest that this foreknowledge is rarely a conscious aspect of women’s insight. “Turning” on their husband-to-be later in is life rarely a preconceived plan, but it is a predictable outcome for men who persist in a Beta mindset throughout their marriages.

Getting Her Settled Best

Saving the Best continues to be a seminal post on Rational Male, not the least of which because so many men could relate to the experience. However, this may not have been the experience of discovering a sexual past his wife had no intention of ever allowing him to share with her , but rather the expectation men have of receiving a woman’s ‘sexual best’ in marriage. That may not amount to the sexual experimentation she had in her Party Years, but for a Beta who believes his patience and virtue are to be rewarded at long last it is an expectation of enjoying the same or better sexual urgency his wife-to-be shared with her past lovers.

That Beta believes it’s his turn, because why else would a woman commit to a lifetime investment in a man she didn’t think was her best option?

Remember, during the Epiphany Phase a woman’s rationale for choosing the Beta for a long term investment is because she’s “experienced it all” and finally “knows better than to keep dating the Bad Boys who don’t appreciate her.” Thus the Beta believes he must be the best option for her by virtue of her investment in that belief.

And if she’s finally come to realize he’s the best option, why would she not expect to enjoy her best sexual performance with him? After all, even Sheryl Sandberg said, “…in time, nothing’s sexier.”

For the Alpha Widow marrying the Beta-in-waiting, the comparison of his sexual appeal with prior lovers conflicts with her need to finalize the long term security she couldn’t with her previous Alphas (or the men she perceived as Alpha). Thus comes reserved, self-restrained and self-conscious sex with her new Beta provider. She knows that sex with her Beta lacks the intensity of her prior lovers, but falls back on her Epiphany Phase rationalizations that she’s “doing it for the right reasons this time”.

That right reason being of course getting pregnant to further consolidate long term provisioning.

Our Beta simply lacks the same sexual experience as his wife-to-be to know any better (unless of course he finds proof of that experience later), but he gradually suspects her progressive lack of passion, reservations and self-consciousness by comparing it to porn or some of the other women’s he’s had sex with.

Social conventions abound for women to rely on as they become less incentivized to have sex with their Beta after the first child. Body image considerations, ‘mismatched libidos’ and “well, sex is supposed to taper off after marriage, everyone knows that” are just some of the prepackaged tropes ready for use.

The Turning

Once the first (and possibly second) child arrives, a woman’s order of intimate priorities changes, “turns” to that of the child. The sex “reward”, the ‘cookie time for good boy’, for desired behavior or performance ‘turns’ off, or sex is used as an intermittent reward for desired behavior (i.e. Choreplay). Sex becomes a utility; a positive reinforcer for her Beta increasing his provisioning capacity rather than the true visceral enjoyment she had with her past lovers.

This new functionality sex represents to a wife becomes ‘turning’ on her husband who believed he would always be her most intimate priority. In the instance of a woman marrying her ‘Alpha Provider’ this may in fact be the case, but as with the hierarchies of love that Alpha doesn’t have the same concern with, and didn’t marry his wife under the same pre-expectations a Beta does.

For the man who persists in his Beta mindset (or the guy who regresses into that mindset) this ‘turning’ becomes more and more pronounced. The turning comes out of the bedroom and into other aspects of their relationship – finances, familial ties, her expectations of his ambitiousness, his asserting himself at work or with their mutual friends – on more and more fronts he’s compared to other men and the ghosts of the Alphas she knows or has known.

Even though the Beta is aware his children are now his wife’s true priority, his Blue Pill conditioning still predisposes him to sacrifices. Again, he meets with ready-made social conventions that shame his discontent; “Is sex all that’s important to you?” It shouldn’t be, because it’s really “what’s on the inside that counts”, but he can’t shake the feeling he’s slipping out of her respect.

This is when Beta Dad doubles down. His Blue Pill expectations of himself require an all-consuming, self-sacrificing predisposition. The horse will work harder. His wife may have lost respect for him by this point, but his sense of honor and duty press him on. He doesn’t want to be like his oppressive or non-present father was. He wants to ‘out-support’ his father’s ghost, or what he believes ‘other guys’ would do when their marriages get tough.

So he waits it out, but she’s ‘turned’ on him by this point. It wasn’t planned, but all of his martyr-like determination only makes her that much more resentful for having settled on this Beta. After a certain stressing point, her disinterest or indignation goes even beyond his capacity to stay committed to a losing investment. These are the guys who tell me, “Damn Rollo, where where you when I was 30? I wish I’d known then what I know now.”

Do all marriages and relationships follow this schedule? No, but it’s important that men know the signs, understand what’s really expected of them and know when they’re being settled on despite all a woman’s self-interested refutations of that. It’s important they realize that performance isn’t limited to how well they meet a woman’s expectations, but that performance means ignoring those preconceptions and exceeding them because he has a passion to excel on his own, and for himself.

It’s important that he lives in his own Frame and that any woman, wife or otherwise, participates in his Frame at his pleasure. Beta men rarely have those expectations, beginning from a position of scarcity and a preconditioned responsibility to forgive a woman’s sexual strategy while still being gushingly appreciative that she chose him to settle on.

677 Comments | tags: Alpha Fucks, alpha widow, Beta Bucks, beta guy, blue pill, contemporary women, dread game, feminine imperative, feminized men, gender relations, hypergamy, intergender relations, male perspective, manosphere, rational male, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, scarcity mentality, Sheryl Sandberg, social conventions, the rational male, therationalmale | posted in Alpha, Case Studies, Hypergamy, Idealizations, Operative Social Conventions, Unplugging

November 28, 2014

Rational Male – Q&A

By Rollo Tomassi

SoSuave and Rational Male reader compleks had a few questions about what he read in The Rational Male book. Since I’ve been doing these weekend questions lately I thought these might make for some interesting discussions. Hopefully they wont distract you from family time this holiday weekend, but maybe they make for some interesting dinner table talk.

Just a side note here, I’m deliberately leaving my own answers less detailed than I normally would so as to inspire your owndiscussions:

If The Rational Male was recommended to me as a book about game, I probably wouldn’t have read it. But my friend who put me onto it basically described it as a life altering piece that would forever change the way I viewed the world of inter-gender relations.

Big sell!

So I read it.

Being freshly unplugged I’m still just awakening from that groggy comatose/confused state. However I feel as though I have a slight head start on at least some of the material. Just by sheer chance, rather than any real research into the subject.

I’ve only ever been in one LTR (2years), and it was with the girl I first hooked up with (she let me sleep with her, better hang onto this one!). Anyway, I ended that (5-6years ago) and have been single ever since, with no desire of entering another relationship.

I started ‘spinning plates’ about a year ago, just through a natural realization that any moral/ethical objection was actually completely unfounded. Not just my own (programmed) objections, but objections from the feminine perspective, which I guess are one in the same. I thought I must have been ‘wired’ differently because I had no desire of settling back into a LTR. I actually argued my case on multiple occasions to avoid it happening.

This book was eye opening and definitely shed some light on issues I never would have even thought to question.

If you care to keep reading I’m just going to spew some thoughts/questions having just finished the book. Keep in mind this is from a very rudimentary understanding of the text.

QUESTIONS

1) Does ONEitis best Hypergamy?
We all know a girl (either personally or anecdotally) who is in a committed relationship with some deadbeat. Everyone knows she can do better, but you can’t possibly convince her to leave him. What factors are at play here? Does SHE suffer from ONEitis to the point that her hypergamous tendencies have been shut off?

Or could it be a case of low self esteem and lack of self worth, so much so that she believes he is the best she can do? Or could he actually just be an Alpha male (albeit a bad example of one)? I’m sure there’s a grey area or middle ground here with many factors potentially at play depending on the specific scenarios. But it’s a pretty common scenario and I’d like to hear what you guys think.

I get this one now and then – “What about this one great looking girl I know who’s stuck on this complete douchebag, deadbeat, scumbag, suckup, :insert invective here:?” While I’m not sold on the idea that women ever get ONEitis for a guy, I am thoroughly convinced that women being 1-2 SMV points below a particular man they’re involved with develop a strong attachment for him.

For women, oftentimes that attachment gets paired with the soul-mate myth. I’d separate that “spiritualism” from the ONEitis a man gets for a woman, but it’s still rooted in the same dynamic – the subconscious realization that this person is the ‘best they can do’ in the SMP.

The reason I’d make the separation between how men experience ONEitis and women is due to the concepts either have when it comes to love. Women’s concept of love is rooted in opportunism as a result of their innate drive towards hypergamous optimization. All this ‘deadbeat’ needs do is be perceptually 1-2 levels above her own perceived SMV and the Alpha prerequisite for Hypergamy is met.

Most guys looking from the outside of that perception in realize the guy’s a fuck up (even Alpha Buddah, Corey Worthington is an example), and we can’t understand why that subjectively hot woman can’t use reason and rationality to see that he is, but then, this is due to our own self-perceptions and our mistaken belief that women’s reason can be appealed to.

2) Genuine Inter-Gender friendships?
Okay, so i don’t have the book with me. But I remember reading a sub-section on inter-gender relationships. It didn’t sit well with me when I read it, but it’s probably something I will have to re-read. I have a lot of female friends. Friendships that go back 15 years. Some of these are very close friends in a completely non-sexual way.

I’m closer with some of these girls than I am with many of my male friends.
Initially these friendships may have blossomed based on the fact that I was a shy kid and didn’t have any ‘intimate’ relationships with women till I was 19. But they are now concreted as some of my most valued friendships.

What is your take on Rollos opinion of inter-gender friendships (as outlined in the rational male)?

My take in the book, and still is, is that men and women cannot be friends in the same way and to the same degree of intimacy that same sex friendships develop.

Men and women cannot be friends in the way or to the degree that most people perceive same sex friendship to be. Now the natural response to this is “I have lots of female friends” or “what are you trying to say, I can’t have female friends, they all haffta be enemies?” Which of course is the standard binary (black or white, all or nothing) retort and the trained AFC thinks anyone suggesting that men and women’s relations as friends could be anything less than equitable and fulfilling is just a neanderthal chauvinist thinking. However, they are incorrect – not because you wouldn’t want to actually be a woman’s friend. There are fundamental differences in the ways men and women view friendship within the framework of their own sex and the ways this transfers to the concept of intergender-friendship.

Quite simply there are limitations on the degree to which a friendship can develop between men and women. The easy illustration of this is that at some point your female “friend” will become intimately involved with another male; at which point the quality of what you perceived as a legitimate friendship will decay. It must decay for her intimate relationship to mature. For instance, I’ve been married for 18 years now; were I to entertain a deep friendship with another female (particularly an attractive female) other than my wife, my interest in this woman automatically becomes suspect of infidelity – and of course the same holds true for women with man-friends. This dynamic simply doesn’t exist for same sex friendships because the sexual aspect is inconsequential.

I should add here that the presumption of an equatable degree, character or quality of intergender friendship (platonic) being the same as a same-sex friendship is a product of the same “we’re-all-the-same-with-different-plumbing” naive equalism that deliberately ignores complementary differences between the sexes.

This presumption is actually a vetting mechanism for women’s control of sexual selection and Hypergamy. The social convention that promotes the idea of equitable concepts of friendship only serves women’s imperative of being able to hold the attentions of multiple male orbiters until such a time that she can optimize both sides of her sexual strategy (Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks). The longer you’re rapt by the idea of an equal intergender friendship, the longer she has to consolidate on whatever side of hypergamy she’s prioritizing at the phase of life she’s in. In other words, the longer you’re in the bullpen, the longer you’ll be a Plan B prospect.

3) Religion vs Evolution vs Habit?
This is a bit abstract. But in terms of a decayed loveless marriage, what would you say are the factors holding these marriages together? Neither party is happy, but they are also unwilling to do anything about it.

One clings to a religious frame as reason to not leave/divorce, as the children are all old enough now that “staying together for the childrens sake” no longer applies.

The other seems completely indifferent and stuck in the routine. Both are mid 50’s and have been married for 30 years and probably just scarred shitless of being alone. But what would you make of this from an ‘unplugged’ point of view. (might be a stretch from the realm of this book, but just curious).

What you’re describing is akin to the phenomenon of Grey Divorce. In the time line from my Preventative Medicine series, I briefly outline what’s known as the 20 year itch – the period of life, usually after 50 around the time a long-married couple becomes ’empty nesters’ and the binding responsibilities of raising children is at, or almost at an end.

It’s around this phase that a reassessment of one’s partner takes place and the prospects of living out the rest of a life with that person gets serious consideration. This is a phase that’s very telling of the overall prospects of marriage as an institution on whole and how either sex really considers their idealistic, loving union from very mater-of-fact practicality, when there is no longer a mutually cooperative goal (childrearing) as the centerpiece of that relationship.

Religion and/or a conviction that children are better raised by an involved two parent (male and female) family who are both mutually invested in the success of their kids is generally a bond that both parties mutually agree to as the cornerstone of their marriage.

Once that goal has been met (or termed out) then that relationship must be reestablished and based on a genuine interest and desire for the other person. For a man this may involve his realizing an understanding of tenets of the Game that he’s, until then, unwittingly been a party to. For women this may be a longing for renewed interest from extra-marital (but not necessarily infidelity) attentions and desire from other men.

It’s kind of telling how men’s idealistic concept of love endures beyond his late-life Epiphany stage. In spite of having experienced the consequences and all-downside risks men face in their prior marriages, it’s still overwhelmingly men who want to remarry and take another shot at that idealism.

It is women, in either their veiled pragmatism or their aging, unrealizable opportunistic concept of love who are more or less indifferent to the prospects of remarriage.

“Most currently divorced or widowed men are open to the idea of remarriage, but women in the same circumstances are less likely to be,” says the report, which draws on figures from a survey it conducted in May and June. Almost two thirds of men either want to remarry or would at least consider it, while fewer than a half of women would.

These stats alone are more than enough to verify my assertions of how either sex hold different concepts of love.

Men still dream of an idealistic love, and women have find precious little use for men beyond the practical when presented with the prospect of having to optimize Hypergamy at an age they are no longer capable of intersexual competition.

111 Comments | tags: Alpha Fucks, alpha widow, Beta Bucks, beta guy, dread game, evolutionary psychology, feminine imperative, feminine psyche, friendships, gender relations, hypergamy, intergender relations, male perspective, manosphere, rational male, rational male year one, rationalmale, red pill, relationship, relationships, Rollo Tomassi, rollo tomassi the rational male blog, sexual market value, sosuave, the rational male, therationalmale | posted in Case Studies, Game, Hypergamy, Idealizations, Inter-gender Communication, Operative Social Conventions, Psychology, Sexual Market Value, The Feminine Imperative, Unplugging

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