The Curse of Potential

One of the most frustrating things I’ve had to deal with in this life is knowing men with incredible potential who, for whatever reason, never realize it (or as fully) because they deliberately limit themselves due to a Beta mindset . Whether it’s potential for success due to a particular talent, the potential of their socio-economic state and affluence, or simply dumb luck that put them into a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, their blue-pill ignorance or pride, or rule-bound duty to the feminine imperative thanks to their Beta frame of mind, hold them back from really benefitting from it.

God forbid you’d have to cooperate with a guy like this in a business or creative endeavor where your own livelihood might be attached to his inability to move past his Beta frame or his feminine conditioning. One of the benefits of becoming red pill aware is a heightened sensitivity to how the feminized world we live in is organized; and part of that sensitivity is becoming a better judge of Beta character and avoiding it, or at least insofar as minimizing another man’s liabilities as a Beta to how his malaise could affect you.

I used to work with a very rich man who owned a few of the brands I became involved with in my career. While he was wealthy and had a certain knack for developing some very creative and profitable products, the guy was a deplorable chump with regards to his personal and romantic life. He was very much a White Knight Beta bordering on martyrdom when it came to his wives and the women in his life, who were all too happy to capitalize on this very obvious flaw. At one point he was attempting to launch a new product for which he needed some financial backing, but simply couldn’t get it from investors because they weren’t convinced their part of his venture wouldn’t end up as part of his next divorce settlement since he was planning his 3rd marriage.

His self-righteous ‘love conquers all’ White Knight idealism chaffed at the suggestion he would need a pre-nuptial affidavit for anyone to even chance being involved with him professionally, but his proven Beta mindset was a liability to his realizing his full potential. His story is an exceptional illustration of this Beta limitation dynamic, but there are far more common examples with everyday men I know, and you probably do too. That limitation may not even be recognizable until such a time that it becomes an impediment to some future opportunity that opens up to you.

From Letting Go of Invisible Friends:

I can’t begin to list the number of otherwise intelligent and ambitious men I’ve known who’ve drastically altered the course of their lives to follow their ONE. Men who’ve changed their majors in college, who’ve selected or switched universities, men who’ve applied for jobs in states they would never have considered, accepted jobs that are sub-standard to their ambitions or qualifications, men who’ve renounced former religions and men who’ve moved across the planet all in an effort to better accommodate an idealized woman with whom they’ve played pseudo-boyfriend with over the course of an LDR; only to find that she wasn’t the person they thought she was and were depressive over the gravity that their decisions played in their lives.

And again from Dream Killers:

It never ceases to amaze me when I talk with these young men in their teens and 20s and they try to impress me with their fierce independence in every other realm of their lives, yet they are the same guys who are so ready to limit that independence and ambition in exchange for dependable female intimacy. They’re far too eager to slap on the handcuffs of monogamy, rather than develop themselves into men of ambition and passion that women naturally want to be associated with.[…]

All of this is limited by a man’s attitude towards the opposite sex. Women are dream killers. Not because they have an agenda to be so, but because men will all too willingly sacrifice their ambitions for a steady supply of pussy and the responsibilities that women attach to this.

Social feminization and the Feminine Imperative both play an active role in curtailing a man’s potential, but more often than not it’s with a willing male participant. It’s important for red pill Men to remember that the Feminine Imperative is more concerned about women’s perpetuated long-term security than it will ever be about Men actualizing their true potential – even when it means his sacrificing that potential to sustain her security, and by doing so makes him progressively less able to sustain it.

Women who read my Appreciation essay and try to wrap their heads around my assertion that women will never appreciate the sacrifices men will readily make to ensure a feminine-primary reality never take this equation into account. They think I’m attacking the sincerity of their commitment by pointing out a less than flattering truth — hypergamy wants the security of knowing (or at least believing) that a woman is paired with the best man her SMV merits, but the fundamental problem is that her hypergamy conflicts with his capacity to develop himself to his best potential.

Turnkey Hypergamy

Hypergamy wants a pre-made Man. If you look at my now infamous comparative SMP curve, one thing you’ll notice is the peak SMV span between the sexes:

Good looking, professionally accomplished, socially matured, has Game, confidence, status, decisive and Just Gets It when it comes to women. Look at any of the commonalities of terms you see in any ‘would like to meet’ portion of a woman’s online dating profile and you’ll begin to understand that hypergamy wants optimization and it wants it now. Because a woman’s capacity to attract her hypergamous ideal decays with every passing year, her urgency demands immediacy with a Man embodying as close to that ideal as possible in the now.

Hypergamy takes a big risk in betting on a man’s future potential to become (or get close to being) her hypergamous ideal, so the preference leans toward seeking out the man who is more made than the next.

The problem with this scenario as you might guess is that women’s SMV depreciates as men’s appreciates — or at least should appreciate. As I outlined above, the same hypergamy that constantly tests and doubts the fitness of a man in seeking its security also limits his potential to consistently satisfy it.

Developing Potential

Just Four Guys (fast becoming my most lurked blog) had an interesting article on Quantifying Sexual Market Value:

Rollo Tomassi at Rational Male has a differing graph of SMV based on his personal estimation. While his evaluation of female SMV with age matches both these graphs quite closely, the same cannot be said of male SMV. However, the difference is that he is measuring potential SMV, rather than actual SMV, and he believes that older men who maintain a proper lifestyle can maximise their SMV to far higher levels than younger men can.

By age 36 the average man has reached his own relative SMV apex. It’s at this phase that his sexual / social / professional appeal has reached maturity. Assuming he’s maximized as much of his potential as possible, it’s at this stage that women’s hypergamous directives will find him the most acceptable for her long-term investment. He’s young enough to retain his physique in better part, but old enough to have attained social and professional maturity.

Thus, what we’re seeing here is the SMV that is actualized by the average male, whereas Rollo’s SMV is what a man could theoretically achieve with good inner game.

One misinterpretation I diligently tried to avoid in estimating men’s relative SMV is in using sex (or the capacity to attract potential sex partners) as an exclusive metric for evaluating men’s overall SMV. Notch count in and of itself is not the benchmark for SMV, rather it is a Man’s actualization of his real potential (of which notch count is an aspect) that determines his SMV. Hypergamy wants you to fulfill your best potential (the better to filter you), but it doesn’t want to assume the risk of protracted personal investment that your fulfilled potential will eventually place your SMV so far above her own that you leave her and her investment is lost.

This then is the conflict between male potential and feminine hypergamy. I detailed this in The Threat:

Nothing is more threatening yet simultaneously attractive to a woman than a man who is aware of his own value to women.

On the blue pill reddit forum I recently read a criticism of my SMP graph, dismissing it by stating that an early to mid-thirties guy was far more likely to look like your average schlub, with an average low wage job than some mature, successful guy, who’s kept himself in shape and maintains some GQ lifestyle. I have to say I’m inclined to agree; most men, average men are men who haven’t realized the potential they could. Whether this lack is due to motivation, the limitations of a feminine socialization, or an inability to come to terms with their blue-pill reality, they never actualize the potential that would make them higher SMV men. The blue pill redditors can’t see that it’s Men’s potential that sets them apart on the SMV scale.

I’ll finish this with a quote from New Yorker in last week’s comment thread:

I think that the primary lesson of Game is that one needs to have a life and purpose that makes a man happy and determined to wake up every morning. Once a man takes control of his life, then a woman becomes an interchangeable part of it like anything else. The road to that state only lies through relentless self-improvement and the shedding of prior limitations. Otherwise, the same brutal cycle repeats itself.