Tag Archives: War Brides

June 20, 2012

Women & Regret

By Rollo Tomassi

Paradox on the SoSuave forum had an interesting question after reading War Brides:

I’ve seen it mentioned here in passing but I would like to know how women handle regret.

How do they handle decisions that may affect their destiny?

Moments like:

Seeing someone on a train, bus, coffee shop, grocery store but not saying hello when the moment comes.

Meeting someone great at a party but not exchanging numbers.

Not calling back a guy

I have seen low IL changed to high IL but do women generally waver in their interest level all of the time?

The funny thing about regret is, it’s better to regret something you have done, than regret something you haven’t done.

Any observational answer I could offer here is going to have to be adjusted to account for women’s inherent solipsism – everything is about her, and everything confirms her assessments as the default. As such, you have to bear in mind that regret, for women, usually begins from a point of how a missed opportunity could’ve better benefitted themselves. The root of this is grounded in women’s constant, in-born psychological quest for security. Hypergamy, by necessity, makes for solipsistic women in order to best preserve the survival integrity of the species. That’s not to say women can’t sublimate that impulse as necessity dictates, but just as men must sublimate their sexual imperative, women begin at a point of tempering the insecurity that results from hypergamy.

Guilt and Regret

Using hypergamy as a woman’s point of origin, this affects how women process regret. At this point I should note that guilt and regret are not cut from the same vine. You can feel guilty about something you did or didn’t do, as well as feel regret for something you did or didn’t do, but the two are not synonymous. I want to avoid that confusion here from the outset, because guilt is associated with a lingering negativity, while regret comes from different motivations. If you did something you feel guilty about, you probably regret it, but you can regret something you have no feelings of guilt about.

After you finish reading this post check out the ‘Missed Connections’ section on your areas Craig’s List. Read the differences in tone, vernacular and purpose of both men and women lamenting a missed chance at something they hoped might develop. There’s no guilt involved in this wishful thinking, only a regret for not having taken an action.

Women’s Regret

Women’s experience of regret depends upon the degree or intensity of the encounter in relation to their own conditions. I know that sounds like psycho-babble, but let me explain. If, and to what degree, a woman experiences regret in the situations Paradox is describing, these are directly proportional to her self-worth versus the (perceived) value of the encounter.

At the risk of coming off as shallow again, the fat chick who thinks she blew a shot at a Brad Pitt will regret it more than the HB 9 who happened to lose an “average” guy’s phone number. I’m going to catch fire for this I’m sure, but it’s really an autonomous response for human beings to make subconscious comparisons and employ a natural ego preservation. While it’s latent psychological function is to help us learn from experience, generally regret is painful, so our natural response is to defend against it. We tend to regret not capitalizing on situations where the perceived reward value is high. The psychological buffer of course comes in rationalizing the actual value potential of that missed opportunity or minimizing the negative impact of the taken opportunity.

So the debate is really how do women in particular process this reward valuation with regard to men? Again, I’ll say it breaks down to subliminally recognizing their self-worth, modified by social affirmations and then comparing it with the value of the encounter. Even semi-attractive women (HB 6-7) have a subconscious understanding that most intersexual encounters they have are mediated by their frequency – how rare was that opportunity? Meaning if a girl is constantly reinforced with male attention (guys asking her out all the time, social media influences, etc.) the rarity of any one encounter is compared against the frequency with which guys are hitting on her. This is female Plate Theory in action. If you happen to be one among many of the throngs of her suitors she’s less likely to regret not following up with you in relation to the extraordinary (see Alpha) guy she perceives has a higher value than she’s normally used to being rewarded with.

34 comments   |  tags: , , | posted in Hypergamy, Psychology, Romance

March 23, 2012

Moral to the Manosphere

By Rollo Tomassi

Putting angel’s or devil’s wings on observations hinders real understanding.

I say that not because I don’t think morality is important in the human experience, but because our interpretations of morality and justice are substantially influenced by the animalistic sides of our natures, and often more than we’re willing to admit to ourselves. Disassociating one’s self from an emotional reaction is difficult enough, but adding layers of moralism to an issue only convolutes a better grasp of breaking it down into its constituent parts. That said, I also understand that emotion and, by degree, a sense of moralism is also characteristic of the human experience, so there needs to be an accounting of this into interpretations of issues that are as complex as the ones debated in the manosphere.

Although I’m aware that observing a process will change it, it’s my practice  not to draw moralistic conclusions in any analysis I make because it adds bias where none is necessary. The problem is that what I (and others in the manosphere) propose is so raw it offends ego-invested sensibilities in people. Offense is really not my intent, but often enough it’s the expected result of dissecting cherished beliefs that seem to contribute to the well being of an individual.

Let that sink in for a moment; the reason that what I propose seems nihilistic, cynical and conspiratorial is because it’s analytical without the varnish of morality. For example, when I wrote War Brides, it was in response to men’s common complaint of how deftly and relatively unemotionally women could transition into a new relationship after they’d been dumped by a GF or wife. I wanted to explore the reasons how and why this functioned, but from a moralistic perspective it is pretty fucked up that, due to hypergamy, women have an innate capacity to feel little compunction about divesting themselves emotionally from one man and move on to another much more fluidly than men. If I approach the topic in a fashion that starts with, “isn’t it very unjust and / or fucked up that women can move on more easily than men?” not only is my premise biased, but I’d be analyzing the moral implications of the dynamic and not the dynamic itself.

I always run the risk of coming off as an asshole because in analyzing things it’s my practice to strip away that moral veneer. It challenges ego-investments, and when that happens people interpret it as a personal attack because those ego-investments are uniquely attached to our personalities, and often our own well being. Although there’s many a critic on ‘team woman’ shooting venom from the hip as to my emphasis on the feminine here, don’t think that iconoclasm is limited to the fem-centric side of the field – I catch as much or more vitriol from the manosphere when I post something like Looks Count or Women’s Physical Standards and the importance women actually do place on a man’s physique.

If you choose to derive your personal value from some esoteric sense of what sex ‘should’ mean, more power to you, but I find it’s a much healthier position to accept a balance between our carnal natures and our higher aspirations. It’s not one or the other. It’s OK to want to fuck just for the sake of fucking – it doesn’t have to be some source of existential meaning. If you think it means something more, then that’s your own subjective perspective – even in marriage there’s ‘maintenance sex’ and there’s memorable, significant sex – but it’s a mistake to think that the totality of the physical act must be of some cosmic significance.

It is as equally unhealthy to convince oneself that self-repressions are virtues as it is to think that unfettered indulgences are freedoms. There is a balance.

37 comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Communication

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