As Good As It Gets

On several occasions I’ve gone into the pro’s and cons of marriage. I tend to get a couple of standard reactions to my take on marriage; the first is usually the binary, all or nothing response that virtually all women, and a significant number of feminized men, will throw at me after having only a cursory skim through a few of my articles. It usually goes something like,

“WTF?!! You misogynist asshole! So ALLLLLLL marriages are one-sided affairs for men, doomed to failure once a woman gets fat after pregnancy, greedy or bored and her hypergamy kicks in? My folks, grandparents, aunt & uncle et. al. are still together after ___ years so that proves that love can conquer all and you’re fulla shit.”

This is the usual response I get from deep blue-pill men and women still relying on their, feminine conditioned, ready dismissals so as not to have to actually dig any deeper into what I’ve  written about the truths of contemporary marriage and have their precious (and fragile) idol of a loving marriage challenged, and possibly destroyed.

Frames of Reference

The other reaction I get is the one I covered in Fidelity, which usually goes something like,

“Dude, how can you be a red pill Man and be married? It’s contradictory to everything you write, fuck you charlatan, I’m going back to (insert URL of PUA, MRA, MGTOW, christo-manosphere, etc. etc. site) and read up on the latest approaches.”

Again, this is usually the result of a guy without the patience to really read what I’ve posted here for the past two years, and developed in my writing over the past ten. If it seems like it’s TL;DR material  it probably wont resonate with an attention deficient reader.

Obviously in both these instances the responses come from a lack of understanding the totality of my personal history, life, Game and female experiences – which of course is what I hope readers will get a better grasp of when the book is released. I’ve had sex with over 40 women in my past, during a time when there was no such thing as formalized Game. I apply elements of Game in my line of work – the liquor, nightclub and gaming industries to be specific – and use it to my professional advantage with the women I work around and who work for me. I use aspects of Game with my daughter (Amused Mastery) and set myself as an example of the type of Man she should associate herself with – of the boys she likes we both make a point of distinguishing the chumps from the more confident and dominant guys. I observe elements of Game while reconditioning greyhounds. I’ve even recently used an AMOGing technique to get a better interest rate and price on a new car I purchased this year – and I only did it to see if it would work.

The Measure of Game

There is an element in the manosphere that will tell you that the only real form of Game, the only legitimate, measure of Game is how many women you’ve successfully banged in your pursuit of perfecting Game for yourself.

I agree with this assessment.

The real measure of Game is only truly tested by how well it gets you laid. You can use your understanding of Game to improve your life, your career, your family interactions, etc. You can use your grasp of Game to destroy a feminist’s arguments and you can use it to literally save a man from suicide, but the real test is in how well it provably functions in getting you to intimacy with a woman.

Roosh recently had a series of articles and tweets regarding the present legitimacy of Game. Among his concerns is the claiming of Game authority by men who have never really used Game to get laid. A couple years ago Matt Forney had a similar post on the old In Mala Fide site titled something like “Never trust the advice of guys who aren’t getting laid”. In the years I’ve spent on the SoSuave forum I’ve seen this concern come and go; it’s interesting to see these sentiments get recycled, but the concern is the same. When late-term virgin men feel they have the Game savvy to authoritatively give other virgins (self-inflicted or not) Game advice it delegitimizes Game as a whole.

On the internet we are who we say we are. I’ve been getting laid (and for the better part the old-fashioned way) since I was 17. I’ve also been married for the last 17 years. Both my sexual and relationship past, as well as my marriage have benefitted me with a comprehensive understanding of Game principles. Furthermore my studies in behavioral psychology and over a decade of involvement in the manosphere have made me a pretty good connector of dots when it comes to behaviorism, sociology and psychology with regards to gender dynamics. I’m not trying to prove my pedigree here, what I’m driving at is that while Game has more to it than just getting laid, if you aren’t getting laid (or laid more with your wife) then your Game is untested and not as legitimate as someone who has put their own Game into successful practice.

The New Monogamy

I recently got a PM from a reader, Emperor Lu Bu, wanting some input from me on a blog post he’d written contrasting the modern ‘horrors’ of marriage and the white knight apologists’ rationales for endorsing marriage:

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on that piece, primarily because I seem to recall you saying that you were yourself married (employing some sort of complicated “marriage Game” to remain so).

I must admit, I’m curious as to whether you found an Eastern wife, or whether you just rolled some particularly dangerous dice and took a Western one for yourself.

As I stated in Fidelity, I’m not anti-marriage, I’m anti- uninformed, pollyanna, shoulda’-saw-it-coming, ONEitis fueled, shame induced, bound for bankruptcy, scarred my children for life, hypergamy’s a bitch, marriage. I could very easily detail the aspects of my 18 year relationship with Mrs. Tomassi that would sound like my marriage is a one-of-a-kind white knight miracle, but it will only come off as some naive rationale similar to the social conventions Lu Bu lists in his post. However, I assure you Mrs. Tomassi is a pretty, thin, blonde American, any Game I do run has long passed the point of being a very uncomplicated subconscious part of who I am, and I’m well aware of how hypergamy, the feminine imperative and western matrimonial laws collude to make marriage a dangerous prospect. Caveat emptor.

In contrast with this, Dalrock had another post from the other side of the divorce spectrum this week in quoting an interview with Kate Bollick:

…for people who want to have kids and raise them with someone else, I wonder what the next alternative for love/sex/reproduction is. Because it seems like for women there’s currently two options: Option A, which is dating, marriage, kids (and divorce and remarriage, etc.), or Option B, which is every other nontraditional alternative, where it’s everyone for him/herself, trying to figure out what fits. Option A being pretty clear, and Option B being wide open.

As you can see the future looks pretty bleak for anyone rooting for team marriage. From the extreme manosphere perspective marriage is akin to Russian roulette with 5 rounds in a 6 shot revolver. From the Jezebel / Bollick side of the equation, the SMV navigation plan is no longer in need of any pretense or concealment; women are now comfortable in admitting the plan actually is to cash out of the SMP casino between 27-28 years of age and to take the beta provider schlub to the cleaners for future cash & prizes. Even for Athol Kay, his MMSL is an effort in after-the-fact marriage damage control.

As Good as it Gets

So where does that leave us? Back in 2003 Tom Leykis once had a great rant about how being an unmarried man, spinning plates in his mid-twenties to mid-thirties, was as good as it gets. I’m beginning to think this was more than a bit prophetic. I’ve written six individual post about the various aspects of Plate Theory, and although I presented the options for both a continued plate spinning plan and a path, at least, towards monogamy from plate theory, I’m starting to wonder if a continued, indefinite, commitment-ambiguity isn’t simply as good as it gets for men today.

For as much as Aunt Giggles would have anyone believe that both men and women want to be married – “want’s” got nothing to do with it. A desire to be married and live in an idealized and secure state of mutual love and respect with someone is really a no-brainer. The whole Minter affair (literally and figuratively) in July superimposes the idea that even the most anti-marriage guy still wants to be married, but it’s not the getting where the problem starts, it’s in the having.

I have no doubt that the idealization of marriage, enduring companionship, mutual love and respect are very strong desires for men, but as I stated in my love series, men love idealistically, whereas women’s love is rooted in opportunism. Women get very upset at this proposition because they tend to conflate an unrealistic desire for unconditional love with a love based on a man’s performance for her in order to earn  and keep it. It’s not that men expect some childish form of unconditional love, it’s that a man must continue to maintain that love through performing and meriting it – this is what I mean by women loving opportunistically.

Whether a man comes to terms with how women love them, they still want to get married because they believe in the dream. Despite all the risk, despite every red flag a woman waves, and even despite the bitter disaster of his previous marriages, men still want to be married – they desire the ideal union.

But what if as good as it gets is simply entertaining a succession of non-committed, non-exclusive relationships? In essence, a sustainable plate spinning until such time as a woman demands committed monogamy, and then she’s replaced with a new plate and the cycle continues. I’m sure this would seem manipulative and horribly selfish to women, and furthermore it might contradict what I’ve just written about men’s general want for marriage (or at least an idealized union), but contrast this perpetual plate spinning strategy with the perspective extremes of both the raw deal men and women I mentioned in Lu Bu and Dalrock’s posts.

Rather than a deliberate or unintentional “marriage strike” perhaps the direction we’re headed is a sustainable series of modular monogamy or perpetuated singleness? Maybe that’s as good as it gets?