The Mate Guarding topic of last week’s post made for some lively debate. It usually does because it’s this behavior, and the root motivators of it, that gets to the heart of dynamics such as an Alpha / Beta mindset, the Scarcity Mentality, Hypergamy, issues of morality and maybe an uncomfortable realization that your LTR has been subject to those motivators.
The purpose and approach men have with regard to mate guarding usually comes down to two positions.
The first being a moral high-ground idea that women do in fact have a moral or rational agency and thus have an obligation to keep their own Hypergamy in check. This may be from a religious perspective, but more often it’s based upon men’s idealistic equalist hopes that a woman can rationally be expected to parse her own investment in what men think should be Relational Equity.
Or in other words, women should know better, and be expected to cooperate with a male imperative by self-regulating their Hypergamous impulses as a matter of personal and social responsibility.
On a limbic level Hypergamy doesn’t care about Relational Equity and openly appealing to a woman’s reason, rationality or sense of responsibility a man believes she should be beholden to is counterproductive in influencing her genuine desires. However, this is usually a self-guided hope that women will recognize and regulate those behaviors at the risk of being socially ostracized in an already feminine-primary social environment.
Again, this can be couched in a religious expectation, but in a secular-equalist sense it amounts to putting the burden of mate guarding on women by presuming their ‘equal rationality’ will result in women mate guarding themselves by policing their own Hypergamy in men’s best interests. Anything less either makes them convictionless or the nebulous “low quality woman” who wont play by the old-order rules and expectations.
The second approach is a proactive mate guarding based on the presumption that mate guarding is a ‘defense’ against mate poaching by other, presumably (but not necessarily) more Alpha men than the one doing the guarding.
Within that context it’s understandable why men would want to protect their personal investment in a woman. What woman wouldn’t be aroused by the prospect of being fought over by two men she perceives as Alpha rivals? It’s a strong affirmation of her desirability and SMV.
Where it turns into a Beta Tell is when a man’s lifestyle revolves around ‘keeping’ her in a possessive sense for fear of losing her because she’s his only viable option for sending his genetic material into the future. That kind of mate guarding is the kind inspired by a scarcity mentality, but it’s also due to long evolved, subconscious sensitivities to her behavioral inconsistencies at or around her time of ovulation.
This is what Dr. Hasselton was getting into in her studies – ovulatory shift in mate preferences created an evolved sensitivity of them in men which in turn produced contingency behaviors (mate guarding) to ensure he wasn’t wasting his parental investment efforts with a child that wasn’t his own.
An evolved mate guarding sensitivity and contingent strategy was basically insurance against men’s cuckoldry risks.
I would argue that a contingent mate guarding strategy evolved not as a direct response to Alpha (or even Beta) competition stresses, but rather due to women’s innate Hypergamy, their sexual pluralism and the potential for parental investment deception when women were left with their Hypergamy unchecked.
If a woman’s predominant perception of you is Alpha, if her mental point of origin is one in which she recognizes her own SMV as being subordinate to your own, she wont be asking your “permission” to go to Vegas with her girlfriends for a weekend because her desire for her Alpha will be stronger than her peers influence on her during her ovulation week.
In theory, no woman who sees you as her perceived Alpha and Hypergamous best interest will want to ‘cheat’ on you – so the idea wont even occur to her. I realize this sounds simplistic until you consider the readiness with which most men will similarly isolate themselves socially, putting off friends and family in preference to spending his time with what he believes is a high-value woman.
Demonstrate, Never Explicate
From The 48 Laws of Power
Law 9
Win through your Actions, Never through Argument
Any momentary triumph you think gained through argument is really a Pyrrhic victory: The resentment and ill will you stir up is stronger and lasts longer than any momentary change of opinion. It is much more powerful to get others to agree with you through your actions, without saying a word. Demonstrate, do not explicate.
There is no greater demonstration of higher value for a man than walking away from a woman. Even a woman’s strongest perception of higher value cannot compete with the self-certainty of value a man has when he disconnects himself from a woman who’s already accepted him for her intimacy.
While Dread (even passive dread) is a strong signal of a man’s higher value, removing your own intimate acceptance from a woman and confirming the value her Hypergamous nature questioned about you is the last word in DHV.
For the first half of their lives, even the most mediocre of women become accustomed to men qualifying for their attention, intimacy and sexual access. Women quickly learn the utility of their first, best, agency with men – the power of sexual control.
So when that agency is proven useless with a man, that control is eliminated and she begins to question her capacity for that control. By removing himself from dependency on that agency he confirms that his SMV is more valuable than her own.
A lot of men report that their unprompted disinterest in sex with a woman, a wife, a girlfriend, often provokes a woman’s imagination with regard to her control and/or inspires a greater sexual determination to please him in order to reestablish this control when they next engage in sex.
There’s precious little that’s more effective at reestablishing Frame for a man than the demonstration of higher value walking away from a woman’s accepted intimacy represents. Some of the best sex you’ll have in your life will come after a reunited breakup.
Now, the reason I’ve detailed this is because the foundations of a man maintaining Frame within a relationship are rooted in limiting or removing this sexual agency and demonstrating higher value as part of that process.
Establishing Boundaries
London Towers on the SoSuave forum started a fairly contentious debate on how a man ought to establish boundaries within a relationship last week:
In my last LTR I never set boundaries, let her hang with her ex, guys, never got jealous, just didn’t give a fuck…because my life was going well and I had no insecurity she wouldn’t do anything because I was the shit. She even wanted her ex to hang with us, just so she could show me off. This actually seemed to work for me as I had some natural alpha state for the first 1 year due to life success and she could feel this, thus other guys were just orbiters. I would even joke to her about who she found attractive in the bar, that’s how self confident I was. This would actually make her want me more.
Then cracks in my game came out, I was going through a rough patch with life and suddenly the game shifted. She would start to compare me to other guys including her ex in a negative way. I suddenly became insecure because I didn’t feel Alpha anymore due to life not going well and suddenly started enforcing boundaries which she would constantly test because she knew I lost my game unlike when I was Alpha and didn’t give a shit. Enforcing boundaries was actually coming from an insecure place and I don’t think your words mean shit if you ain’t got your game tight.
Now, I’m not too sure how I would handle my next LTR. I’m in the process of becoming alpha again, but now truly alpha as in my inner game this time. But would I now still have the not give a sh1t attitude if my girl still hung out with her ex/guys?
Part of me thinks if my game is tight, I give her great sex, pluck at her emotional spectrum, she rides on the magic carpet of my exciting life (which comes from knowing my life mission) she will be hooked on me in a multiple of ways and if she knew I would drop her cold and can easily replace her if she doesn’t provide me with the affection/sex that I need.. she will enforce her own boundaries.
This is the only true boundary I can provide. A girls attention will drop if she starts even emotionally to involve someone else. At that point you just freeze immediately. So the only boundary you can ever enforce is through your attention and her subtle awareness you have options and will walk away with ease at the very beginning of her not providing for your needs. That loss is something she could not deal with.
I’d encourage readers to take the time to read through that discussion and the various approaches to establishing boundaries within a relationship (or even non-exclusive plates you may be spinning). After picking through the differing perspectives I made the connection between establishing boundaries and men’s natural predilection for mate guarding behaviors.
Most of the expressed perspectives tend to side with either of the two mate guarding approaches I mentioned at the beginning of today’s post; one, in which women are rationally expected to police their own Hypergamous impulses, and the other, where an active (and equally reasoned) explicating of boundaries are overtly declared as an ultimatum in an effort to protect a man against the parental investment risks of being cuckolded by a woman he knows can’t be expected not to otherwise succumb to her Hypergamous impulses.
If you notice how London Towers’ story unfolds here he essentially proceeded by demonstrating his higher value, secure in the confidence of it, only to have that DHV eroded due to his life’s circumstance.
This is when the boundary of Alpha indifference he’d organically set (albeit unknowingly), based upon his value, was challenged in his drop of status 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 illustrated for you here.
Next, commenter Soolaimon picks up the opposite end of the extreme:
These boundary guys have it ass backwards.
They are judging women by their words instead of judging them by their actions.
Judge women by their actions and not their words.
Agreeing to a boundary is only her words that these guys think will keep her from cheating.
Women who cut out other men from their lives on their own is a woman who understands what an exclusive relationship is.
Those are her actions you judge her on.
Not useless words she can go back on at any moment.
[…]
Smart classy intelligent women already know what exclusivity means they don’t need to have it defined when they are defining it for you by removing other men on their own.
Women do that for Alphas and not betas who need to set a boundary out of fear.
Women that are really into you will agree to what you want with no problem.
When they lose interest they will still cheat on you making your boundary useless.
If your woman knows what exclusivity means and has the same values as you why are you so terrified to put a ring on her finger and marry her?
There’s a lot to consider when you establish boundaries with a woman. Essentially those boundaries men wish to establish and have respected by a woman really just amount to a codified form of mate guarding.
When you think about it, this is what (at least in an old social order) the marriage contract was meant to insure from a male-beneficial perspective – an assurance of fidelity, but also a contractual insurance against Hypergamy.
Considering the contemporary risks involved, in the current social environment there are any number of reasons men are wary of marrying a woman, but what marriage has become is really a challenge to what a man believes about mate guarding and his confidence in controlling a woman’s Hypergamous nature based upon his degree of desirability to her.
Though I don’t disagree in principle, Soolaimon’s exaggeration is founded on the idea that there’s always going to be a bigger fish; another AMOG to seize your woman’s interest should your combination of Game, material and emotional provisioning, or ambition for such be lacking.
Like most absolutists, he does little to contextualize the preconceptions a woman may have with a particular man they’re already involved with. A woman may fantasize about sex with a more Alpha male during her ovulatory phase, but that doesn’t mean she has the opportunity to realize it – even for “smart classy independent women”.
That said, and after London Towers’ example, it’s impossible not to come to a conclusion that implied, demonstrated boundaries – ones that have actionable consequences of intimate and invested loss (i.e. Dread) – are preferable to explicated, but ultimately appealed-reason declarations of boundaries that are negotiated insurance policies to limit her Hypergamy.
While I do believe boundaries are a necessary part of a relationship, it’s far better for women to discover them for what they are, and the consequences of them, by demonstration rather than overt explanation.
The hand burned by the stove teaches better than any warning.
The only person who’s behavior you can control is your own, but that behavior can have a significant impact on the behaviors of others.