Men in Love

Dalrock had an interesting post last week – She’s the Victim – and as is the nature of Dal’s conversation the post served as the tree trunk for various branches of very interesting off-shoot discussion. Starviolet, a regular commenter (some would say troll) dropped what was a seemingly innocuous question:

“Can men really not tell when a woman doesn’t love them?”

As would be expected, the male responses to this and her followup comments ranged from mild annoyance of her naiveté to disbelief of her sincerity with regards to her “want to know.” However, her original wonderment as to whether men did in fact know when a woman doesn’t love them, I think, carries more weight than most guys (even manosphere men) realize. So I thought I’d recount my comments and the discussion here.

Can men really not tell when a woman doesn’t love them?

No, they can’t.

Why? Because men want to believe that they can be happy, and sexually satisfied, and appreciated, and loved, and respected by a woman for who he is. It is men who are the real romantics, not women, but it is the grand design of hypergamy that men believe it is women who are the romantic ones.

Hypergamy, by its nature, defines love for women in opportunistic terms, leaving men as the only objective arbiters of what love is for themselves. So yes, men can’t tell when a woman doesn’t love them, because they want to believe women can love them in the ways they think they could.

From Women in Love:

Iron Rule of Tomassi #6
Women are utterly incapable of loving a man in the way that a man expects to be loved

Women are incapable of loving men in a way that a man idealizes is possible, in a way he thinks she should be capable of.

In the same respect that women cannot appreciate the sacrifices men are expected to make in order to facilitate their imperatives, women can’t actualize how a man would have himself loved by her. It is not the natural state of women, and the moment he attempts to explain his ideal love, that’s the point at which his idealization becomes her obligation. Our girlfriends, our wives, daughters and even our mothers are all incapable of this idealized love. As nice as it would be to relax, trust and be vulnerable, upfront, rational and open, the great abyss is still the lack of an ability for women to love Men as Men would like them to.

HeiligKo responds:

All right, I keep hoping your rule #6 is wrong, but it hasn’t proven to be. So is the big lie that men miss not that women can provide this, but that we don’t invest this energy into fellow men? That we don’t find men we can be vulnerable with, so that we are emotionally prepared for the trials that women will create in our homes. Is this why so many women tend to isolate their husbands or boyfriends from their male friends early on in marriage or dating?

Presuming Starviolet was genuinely confused (and I’m half-inclined to think she is) this is exactly the source of Starviolet’s confusion. Women’s solipsism prevents them from realizing that men would even have a differing concept of love than how a woman perceives love. Thus her question, “can men really not tell when a woman doesn’t love them?”

I don’t necessarily think it’s a ‘big lie’, it’s just a lack of mutuality on either gender’s concept of love. If it’s a ‘lie’ at all it’s one men prefer to tell themselves.

Bridging the Gap

Later in the discussion Jacquie (who is one of the two female writers to make my blogroll) brought up another interesting aspect of bridging the lack of mutuality between either gender’s concepts of love:

If it is beyond what a woman is capable of, therefore even if a woman recognizes this incapacity in herself, is there no way to compensate? What if a woman truly desires to try to move beyond this? Does she just consider it a hopeless matter and do nothing? Or is it something she should strive for continuously with the hope that she can at least move somewhat closer to this idealized love? Is it even too much for her to comprehend?

As I was telling HeligKo, it’s more a lack of mutuality on either gender’s concept of love. Starviolet’s question about whether a man can determine when a woman doesn’t love him goes much deeper than she’s aware of. I think a lot of what men go through in their blue pill beta days – the frustration, the anger, the denial, the deprivation, the sense that he’s been sold a fantasy that no woman has ever made good upon – all that is rooted in a fundamental belief that some woman, any woman, out there knows just how he needs to be loved and all he has to do is find her and embody what he’s been told she will expect of him when he does.

So he finds a woman, who says and shows him that she loves him, but not in the manner he’s had all this time in his head. Her love is based on qualifications and is far more conditional than what he’d been led to believe, or convinced himself, love should be between them. Her love seems duplicitous, ambiguous, and seemingly, too easily lost in comparison to what he’d been taught for so long is how a woman would love him when he found her.

So he spends his monogamous efforts in ‘building their relationship’ into one where she loves him according to his concept, but it never happens. It’s an endless tail-chase of maintaining her affections and complying with her concept of love while making occasional efforts to draw her into his concept of love. The constant placating to her to maintain her love conflicts with the neediness of how he’d like to be loved is a hypergamic recipe for disaster, so when she falls out of love with him he literally doesn’t know that she no longer loves him. His logical response then is to pick up the old conditions of love she had for him when they first got together, but none of that works now because they are based on obligation, not genuine desire. Love, like desire, cannot be negotiated.

It took me a long time, and was a very tough part of my own unplugging when I finally came to terms with what I thought about love and how it’s conveyed isn’t universal between the genders. It took some very painful slap-in-the-face doses of reality for this to click, but I think I have a healthier understanding of it now. It was one of the most contradictory truths I had to unlearn, but it fundamentally changed my perspective of the relations I have with my wife, daughter, mother and my understanding of past girlfriends.

If it is beyond what a woman is capable of, therefore even if a woman recognizes this incapacity in herself, is there no way to compensate? What if a woman truly desires to try to move beyond this? Does she just consider it a hopeless matter and do nothing?

I don’t think it’s necessarily impossible, but it would take a woman to be self-aware enough that men and women have different concepts of their ideal love to begin with, which is, improbable. The biggest hurdle isn’t so much in women recognizing this, but rather in men recognizing it themselves. So, hypothetically, yes you could, but the problem then becomes one of the genuineness of that desire. Love, like desire, is only legitimate when it’s uncoerced and unobligated. Men believe in love for the sake of love, women love opportunistically. It’s not that either subscribe to unconditional love, it’s that both gender’s conditions for love differ.