Rational Male – Q&A

SoSuave and Rational Male reader compleks had a few questions about what he read in The Rational Male book. Since I’ve been doing these weekend questions lately I thought these might make for some interesting discussions. Hopefully they wont distract you from family time this holiday weekend, but maybe they make for some interesting dinner table talk.

Just a side note here, I’m deliberately leaving my own answers less detailed than I normally would so as to inspire your owndiscussions:

If The Rational Male was recommended to me as a book about game, I probably wouldn’t have read it. But my friend who put me onto it basically described it as a life altering piece that would forever change the way I viewed the world of inter-gender relations.

Big sell!

So I read it.

Being freshly unplugged I’m still just awakening from that groggy comatose/confused state. However I feel as though I have a slight head start on at least some of the material. Just by sheer chance, rather than any real research into the subject.

I’ve only ever been in one LTR (2years), and it was with the girl I first hooked up with (she let me sleep with her, better hang onto this one!). Anyway, I ended that (5-6years ago) and have been single ever since, with no desire of entering another relationship.

I started ‘spinning plates’ about a year ago, just through a natural realization that any moral/ethical objection was actually completely unfounded. Not just my own (programmed) objections, but objections from the feminine perspective, which I guess are one in the same. I thought I must have been ‘wired’ differently because I had no desire of settling back into a LTR. I actually argued my case on multiple occasions to avoid it happening.

This book was eye opening and definitely shed some light on issues I never would have even thought to question.

If you care to keep reading I’m just going to spew some thoughts/questions having just finished the book. Keep in mind this is from a very rudimentary understanding of the text.

1) Does ONEitis best Hypergamy?
We all know a girl (either personally or anecdotally) who is in a committed relationship with some deadbeat. Everyone knows she can do better, but you can’t possibly convince her to leave him. What factors are at play here? Does SHE suffer from ONEitis to the point that her hypergamous tendencies have been shut off?

Or could it be a case of low self esteem and lack of self worth, so much so that she believes he is the best she can do? Or could he actually just be an Alpha male (albeit a bad example of one)? I’m sure there’s a grey area or middle ground here with many factors potentially at play depending on the specific scenarios. But it’s a pretty common scenario and I’d like to hear what you guys think.

I get this one now and then – “What about this one great looking girl I know who’s stuck on this complete douchebag, deadbeat, scumbag, suckup, :insert invective here:?” While I’m not sold on the idea that women ever get ONEitis for a guy, I am thoroughly convinced that women being 1-2 SMV points below a particular man they’re involved with develop a strong attachment for him.

For women, oftentimes that attachment gets paired with the soul-mate myth. I’d separate that “spiritualism” from the ONEitis a man gets for a woman, but it’s still rooted in the same dynamic – the subconscious realization that this person is the ‘best they can do’ in the SMP.

The reason I’d make the separation between how men experience ONEitis and women is due to the concepts either have when it comes to love. Women’s concept of love is rooted in opportunism as a result of their innate drive towards hypergamous optimization. All this ‘deadbeat’ needs do is be perceptually 1-2 levels above her own perceived SMV and the Alpha prerequisite for Hypergamy is met.

Most guys looking from the outside of that perception in realize the guy’s a fuck up (even Alpha Buddah, Corey Worthington is an example), and we can’t understand why that subjectively hot woman can’t use reason and rationality to see that he is, but then, this is due to our own self-perceptions and our mistaken belief that women’s reason can be appealed to.

2) Genuine Inter-Gender friendships?
Okay, so i don’t have the book with me. But I remember reading a sub-section on inter-gender relationships. It didn’t sit well with me when I read it, but it’s probably something I will have to re-read. I have a lot of female friends. Friendships that go back 15 years. Some of these are very close friends in a completely non-sexual way.

I’m closer with some of these girls than I am with many of my male friends.
Initially these friendships may have blossomed based on the fact that I was a shy kid and didn’t have any ‘intimate’ relationships with women till I was 19. But they are now concreted as some of my most valued friendships.

What is your take on Rollos opinion of inter-gender friendships (as outlined in the rational male)?

My take in the book, and still is, is that men and women cannot be friends in the same way and to the same degree of intimacy that same sex friendships develop.

Men and women cannot be friends in the way or to the degree that most people perceive same sex friendship to be. Now the natural response to this is “I have lots of female friends” or “what are you trying to say, I can’t have female friends, they all haffta be enemies?” Which of course is the standard binary (black or white, all or nothing) retort and the trained AFC thinks anyone suggesting that men and women’s relations as friends could be anything less than equitable and fulfilling is just a neanderthal chauvinist thinking. However, they are incorrect – not because you wouldn’t want to actually be a woman’s friend. There are fundamental differences in the ways men and women view friendship within the framework of their own sex and the ways this transfers to the concept of intergender-friendship.

Quite simply there are limitations on the degree to which a friendship can develop between men and women. The easy illustration of this is that at some point your female “friend” will become intimately involved with another male; at which point the quality of what you perceived as a legitimate friendship will decay. It must decay for her intimate relationship to mature. For instance, I’ve been married for 18 years now; were I to entertain a deep friendship with another female (particularly an attractive female) other than my wife, my interest in this woman automatically becomes suspect of infidelity – and of course the same holds true for women with man-friends. This dynamic simply doesn’t exist for same sex friendships because the sexual aspect is inconsequential.

I should add here that the presumption of an equatable degree, character or quality of intergender friendship (platonic) being the same as a same-sex friendship is a product of the same “we’re-all-the-same-with-different-plumbing” naive equalism that deliberately ignores complementary differences between the sexes.

This presumption is actually a vetting mechanism for women’s control of sexual selection and Hypergamy. The social convention that promotes the idea of equitable concepts of friendship only serves women’s imperative of being able to hold the attentions of multiple male orbiters until such a time that she can optimize both sides of her sexual strategy (Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks). The longer you’re rapt by the idea of an equal intergender friendship, the longer she has to consolidate on whatever side of hypergamy she’s prioritizing at the phase of life she’s in. In other words, the longer you’re in the bullpen, the longer you’ll be a Plan B prospect.

3) Religion vs Evolution vs Habit?
This is a bit abstract. But in terms of a decayed loveless marriage, what would you say are the factors holding these marriages together? Neither party is happy, but they are also unwilling to do anything about it.

One clings to a religious frame as reason to not leave/divorce, as the children are all old enough now that “staying together for the childrens sake” no longer applies.

The other seems completely indifferent and stuck in the routine. Both are mid 50’s and have been married for 30 years and probably just scarred shitless of being alone. But what would you make of this from an ‘unplugged’ point of view. (might be a stretch from the realm of this book, but just curious).

What you’re describing is akin to the phenomenon of Grey Divorce. In the time line from my Preventative Medicine series, I briefly outline what’s known as the 20 year itch – the period of life, usually after 50 around the time a long-married couple becomes ’empty nesters’ and the binding responsibilities of raising children is at, or almost at an end.

It’s around this phase that a reassessment of one’s partner takes place and the prospects of living out the rest of a life with that person gets serious consideration. This is a phase that’s very telling of the overall prospects of marriage as an institution on whole and how either sex really considers their idealistic, loving union from very mater-of-fact practicality, when there is no longer a mutually cooperative goal (childrearing) as the centerpiece of that relationship.

Religion and/or a conviction that children are better raised by an involved two parent (male and female) family who are both mutually invested in the success of their kids is generally a bond that both parties mutually agree to as the cornerstone of their marriage.

Once that goal has been met (or termed out) then that relationship must be reestablished and based on a genuine interest and desire for the other person. For a man this may involve his realizing an understanding of tenets of the Game that he’s, until then, unwittingly been a party to. For women this may be a longing for renewed interest from extra-marital (but not necessarily infidelity) attentions and desire from other men.

It’s kind of telling how men’s idealistic concept of love endures beyond his late-life Epiphany stage. In spite of having experienced the consequences and all-downside risks men face in their prior marriages, it’s still overwhelmingly men who want to remarry and take another shot at that idealism.

It is women, in either their veiled pragmatism or their aging, unrealizable opportunistic concept of love who are more or less indifferent to the prospects of remarriage.

“Most currently divorced or widowed men are open to the idea of remarriage, but women in the same circumstances are less likely to be,” says the report, which draws on figures from a survey it conducted in May and June. Almost two thirds of men either want to remarry or would at least consider it, while fewer than a half of women would.

These stats alone are more than enough to verify my assertions of how either sex hold different concepts of love.

Men still dream of an idealistic love, and women have find precious little use for men beyond the practical when presented with the prospect of having to optimize Hypergamy at an age they are no longer capable of intersexual competition.