In my essay Casualties I described the situation of my sister-in-law and her first husband committing suicide.
The first guy I knew to commit suicide over a woman was my brother-in-law. I don’t like to go into too much detail about it as critics may think it’s my casus belli for getting involved in the manosphere, but suffice to say it was after a 20 year marriage and 2 children. My sister-in-law promptly married the millionaire she was seeing less than a year after he was in the ground. This is a real point of contention her family and I have with her, but it was his terminal beta-ness / ONEitis conditioning that greatly contributed to his hanging himself. The psychologist in me knows there are plenty of imbalances that dispose a person to suicide, but I also know there are plenty of external prompts that make taking action more probable.
My brother-in-law hung himself as a response to having the unthinkable happen to him; his ONE, his soulmate, a woman he was very posessive of, was leaving him after 20 years of marriage (for a millionaire we discovered later). She was the ONLY woman he’d ever had sex with and had been (to the best of my knowledge) a faithful and dependable husband and father since they married at 18 and 19. He did the ‘right thing’ and married her when he’d gotten her pregnant at 17 and stuck by her, sacrificed any ambition he had and worked his ass off to send both his kids to college – an advantage he’d never achieve. He wasn’t a saint by any means, and I’m not going to argue my sister-in-law’s motivations, since those aren’t my point; my point is that he was an AFC who never came to terms with it and believed his life was only completed with his ONE. He literally couldn’t go on without her.
He couldn’t kill the beta (if he was even aware of it), so he killed himself.
This was back in 2003 and I’ll admit the trauma of this experience and the behavior and consequent mindset of my wife’s sister was a catalyst in waking me up to a much broader definition of feminine hypergamy. No longer was this curious term just about “the tendency of women to ‘marry up’ in status with men”, it was about an entire psycho-social dynamic written into women’s psychological firmware since birth. It was this experience that made me aware that hypergamy was an overriding psychological imperative based on a constant condition of doubt and uncertainty about how well she might optimize this hypergamy in measure with her capacity to attract men of equal or greater SMV than her own.
I’ll also admit this episode in my life was personally jarring for me when I considered that my own wife would necessarily be prone to the same predispositions. Her sister, a God-fearing evangelical ‘good girl’, had gone feral on the husband who’d done the right thing after knocking her up at 17 and married her and set about working his ass off for the next 20 years. She was already in the process of divorcing him when he decided a noose and a tree were a better option than living in a world where he had to see his still gorgeous ex-wife with the millionaire she’d met (and later married). So why not Mrs. Tomassi too, right?
I can list any number of reasons as to why I trust Mrs. Tomassi, all of which I’ve read from every blue pill married chump in my time in the manosphere, but I’m not so naive as to think that certain circumstances and conditions ‘could’ change and she could also go feral. This is what my brother-in-law never could grasp. His world literally revolved around his wife.
He was by no means a saint, and for all of his dedication to his family and wife, his main fault was his possessiveness. My brother-in-law controlled the frame of his marriage, but this frame control was rooted in an insecure possessiveness bordering on the obsessive. On some level of consciousness he knew, by happenstance, an unplanned pregnancy and an early marriage, that he’d married well above what his realized SMV would’ve normally merited.
Possessiveness
I’ve seen this type of possessiveness in other men as well, but the common thread among them is usually an underlying, subconscious sense that the guy doesn’t deserve the woman he’s locked down in one way or another. A lot of them would be counted amongst the same Betas who subscribe to the Leagues mentality, only much more pronounced – it’s as if through luck or circumstance, or maybe due to a natural Alpha dominance that they don’t really understand they manifest, they get into an LTR with a woman they would otherwise consider “out of their league.”
Just this possessiveness might seem bad enough, but when it’s combined with ONEitis (the soul-mate myth), a Scarcity Mentality, a subscribing to the myth of Relational Equity or especially a self-righteous dedication to his feminine conditioning and White Knighting, then you’ve got a volatile mix of psychoses and a recipe for suicide or murder-suicide. When possessiveness is a man’s ego-investment and his worst fears of losing the “best thing he’ll ever have”, the relationship he subconsciously believes he didn’t deserve, comes to actuality, he may cease to exist because that former reality ceases to exist. What’s worth living for when you’ve already experienced the best you never merited to begin with?
A lot of my readers got irate with me when I suggested that if their girlfriends or wives wanted to head out with the girls for a GNO they should, as indifferently as possible, let them go. Granted, I attached more than a few caveats as to how to go about it, but the operative behind this indifference is really a test of your own possessiveness.
I’m sure many guys reading this are experiencing the twangs of possessive insecurity even in my suggesting this course of action. The reflexive response most guys will have in a situation like this will be one of mate protection; the fear being that if they don’t express their disapproval they’ll run the risk of their woman thinking they don’t care enough about them to be jealous. This is a trope most guys sell themselves, because it’s more about suspicion than jealousy. As intuitive as this sounds it really masks the insecurity that their girl will meet another guy and hook up with him. On an instinctual level we’re well aware of women’s pluralistic sexual strategies, thus an evolutionarily honed suspicion was hardwired into our psyches to protect men from becoming the beta cuckold provisioning for another male’s offspring. However, as counterintuitive as this sounds, a GNO is an excellent opportunity to display confidence behaviors.
There is always going to be a naturalistic side to male possessiveness. For very good reason evolution selected-for men with a honed sense of suspicion – men want a certainty that their parental investment (or potential for it) will be worth the exchange of resources with a woman who will facilitate it. In other words evolution selected-for men with an internalized, hardwired understanding of women’s biological directive for optimized hypergamy. When a man’s sexual strategy and sexual optimization has to be sacrificed for women’s optimized hypergamous and pluralistic (Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks) sexual strategy in order to breed, monogamy becomes a one-sided risk for him.
Sunshine Mary had a recent post with more than a few loose premises about the nature of women. The first of which was this:
1. Women were not designed by either God / evolution to be traded around among men. There are few (or no?) societies in human history in which human females were heavily sexually promiscuous, and marriage has existed in some form in nearly every culture.
I’m not drawing attention to SSM to run her up the flagpole for this assumption, but it does illustrate a very visceral point about the possessiveness dynamic we’re exploring today. I responded to Mary with this:
In human male sperm there are 3 heteromorphic types: Killers, Defenders and Runners (fertilizers).
Killers destroy opposing sperm, Defenders encircle the ovum and provide a barrier against opposing sperm’s runners, and Runners specialize in ovum penetration and fertilization.
The only logical purpose for the evolution (or intelligent design if you prefer) of these type-specific sperm adaptations would be to optimize a competitive advantage in female fertilization of promiscuous human females possessing secretive ovulation.
Even the shape of a male penis is “designed” to maximize insertion depth to the uterus and simultaneously shovel out competing sperm from the vagina.
If women weren’t promiscuous, if women’s biological imperative wasn’t dictated by hypergamy, would these biological phenomenon have been a necessary evolution for human males? The predominant state of sexual competition, rooted in the dualistic, cuckolding, sexual strategies of human females, necessitated not only an evolved, male, psychological predilection for sexual fidelity suspicion, but an evolution of three types of purpose-specific sperm cells to maximize passing a man’s genetic legacy under conditions of uncertainty.
The Possessive Difference
Back in his earlier work Roissy had an interesting post about the behavioral manifestations displayed between Alpha men and Beta men. Really he likened the behaviors to more animalistic tendencies, but whether or not you acknowledge similar behaviors in people, the reasoning behind these actions make a lot of sense. Alpha men are slow to respond to sudden stimuli (such as loud noises or boisterous taunts) because they are so unused to any significant challenge – in other words, they’re not jumpy Betas used to opting for flight instead of fight. Their posture and body language convey confidence, but only because this Alpha posture is behaviorally associated with what Alphas do.
This is an important dynamic to understand when we consider possessiveness. A man with an Alpha disposition would be less possessive, and therefore display an indifference to possessing any particular woman due to his condition of (relative) sexual abundance. Possessiveness, or certainly an overly pronounced manifestation of possessiveness is the behavior of a Beta unused to sexual abundance and more likely accustomed sexual rejection.
It’s important to bear in mind that possessiveness is conveyed in a set of behaviors, attitudes and beliefs communicated in many ways. It’s not that possessiveness necessarily makes a man unattractive to a woman; on the contrary, it’s almost a universal female fantasy to be possessed by a so deserving and desirably dominant Alpha Man. It’s a visceral endorsement of the status of a woman’s superior desirability among her peers to be the object of such an Alpha Man’s possession; but likewise this is so common a (romance novel) feminine fantasy because of Alpha Men’s general indifference to possessiveness that makes it so tempting for women.
When self-deprecating, undeserving Beta men overtly display possessiveness, women read the behavior for what it is. Beta possessiveness is almost universally a death sentence (often literally) for an LTR. Nothing demonstrates lower value and confirms a lack of hypergamous suitability for a woman than a Beta preoccupied to the brink of obsession with controlling her behaviors. This isn’t to discount the very real reasons an Alpha or a Beta might have concern for a woman’s behaviors, it’s that his own possessiveness conveys a lack of confidence in himself.