Managing Expectations

One question I was asked during the Christian McQueen interview was what my perspective on a “healthy” kind of love would look like. Anyone familiar with my writing understands that, to the best of my objectivity, I try to be as descriptive as I can when it comes to the dynamics I analyze. The Rational Male will always be an endeavor in descriptiveness, not prescribing what I think anyone ought to be doing. I’ve run down my reasons for this in the past, but the solutions to your problems begin with your understanding the nature of those problems. I’ll give you tools, observations and suggestions, but my hope is you’ll use them in your life according to your need.

As I said in the interview, my interest isn’t in making Rollo Tomassi clones, and anyone telling you they have a customized plan to lead you to the relationship of your dreams is selling you something (likely a $1200/month ‘counseling’ retainer). That said, I’m going to break protocol here for a moment and see if I can provide you with some general observation about what I believe are the foundations of a heathy love relationship.

From a Red Pill perspective I’d say the first and most important thing for a man to grasp is coming to terms with realistic expectations with women based in Red Pill awareness.

In a Blue Pill paradigm men are conditioned to believe that Blue Pill goals are both attainable and worthwhile in the effort needed to achieve them. Deferring to feminine primacy, deffering to feminine correctness and essentially enabling and facilitating the ends of women’s sexual strategy are all the hallmarks of that conditioned thinking.

In Mental Point of Origin I explain how a man’s origin of thought is conditioned to default to a feminine purpose; he puts his first thought to the benefit of the feminine rather than himself and it takes either a very traumatic personal episode or a Red Pill awakening for a man to realize how thorough his conditioning has been.

I’m reviewing this Blue Pill mindset because the expectations a man has of a woman while he’s trapped in that mindset is radically different when he moves into (and accepts) a Red Pill awareness. That may seem a bit remedial for Red Pill men now, but it’s important to be reminded of how much your expectations of women have shifted since you came into that new awareness.

There was a time when you were Blue Pill and not taking a woman seriously at her word – as opposed to understanding the primary importance of her actions – was probably offensive to you. Any White Knight you encounter in life is still basing his expectations of women in that same egalitarian equalist premise that women are rational agents with an equal interest in men’s goals and purpose. The mistake being that they put faith in the idea that men and women have intellectually risen above the influences of their evolved psychology and can be relied upon to behave reasonably and in each other’s best interests.

Ironically a Beta /White Knight’s methodology for qualifying for women’s intimate attentions are still rooted in performing to the standards of what he believes is a pre-understood social contract between men and women. However, his expectations of women and how they’ll reciprocate his feminine-identifying efforts is where he’s gravely in error.

It’s my belief that Red Pill men need to come to realistic expectations of women based on their Red Pill awareness in order to come to a loving relationship with women. Accepting that reality also means accepting the differing concepts men and women have with regard to love. That’s a very tall order for men still coming to terms with the fact that their Blue Pill conditioning made them hopeful they could sustain a love based on Blue Pill expectations of women. Their idealistic concept of love has an end-goal of that concept being mutually reciprocated by a woman; this is the Blue Pill hope for love.

Love in the Age of Equalism

Egalitarian equalism between the sexes is nominally based on an acceptance of agreed terms, but love, like desire, is not the result of a process of negotiation.

What’s more ironic is that the more pronounced the efforts in gender parity are in society the more pronounced the men and women in that society cling to traditional sex differences:

To the contrary, most cross-cultural studies find nations with the highest sociopolitical gender equality (e.g., Scandinavian nations) exhibit the largest psychological sex differences in the world. You read that correctly. Higher gender egalitarian nations tend to have larger sex differences in mate preferences for Good Looks, in Big Five personality traits and the Dark Triad traits of Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and psychopathy; in romantic attachment and love styles; in sociopolitical attitudes and personal values; in clinical depression rates and crying behavior; in tested cognitive and mental abilities; and in physical attributes such as height and blood pressure[97]. If sociopolitical gender egalitarianism is supposed to reduce sex differences to the point where they “disappear,” it’s doing a terrible job. In fact, it’s most often doing the exact opposite. Without the constraints of patriarchal sex role socialization, it appears men and women are freer to follow their evolved desires in ways that lead to even greater psychological difference

It’s important to recognize truths like this because our acculturation in an equalist doctrine of gender parity is often never considered with regard to how the sexes interpret a loving relationship. How a society perceives love on a meta level is greatly influenced by the degree to which that society considers and acknowledges sex differences. I’ve stated in the past that androgyny is not a goal-state for any species – it leads to stagnation and an inability to adapt. Androgyny becomes homogeny; an evolutionary dead end, and the statistics seem to back this up. When a society idealizes a state of homogeny between the sexes that society presumes love is also homogenous.

Play with her, and play with her

I’ve mentioned in the past that revealing Red Pill truths to women you want to become intimate with is ultimately a self-defeating effort. The same can be said for women you may be involved with at the moment and are attempting to convince of your new Red Pill identity. Once you let a woman in on the Game it changes the game. Observing a process will change that process. This is known as the observer-expectancy effect, or the Hawthorne effect which is a “form of reactivity in which subjects modify an aspect of their behavior, in response to their knowing that they are being studied.”

In my perspective this is the main reason couples’ therapy, marriage counseling and Purple Pill couples’ coaching is ineffective. Those negotiations that are supposed to lead to a better relationship and a “healthy” love are founded on Blue Pill goals and Blue Pill expectations of an equalist understanding that men and women are fundamental equals with an equal interest in rational problem solving.

Why am I inserting this here? Because your Red Pill expectations of women must remain stoically within yourself.

Once your expectations of women are out in the open the process has changed. Women love Men who Just Get It, but explaining how you Get It disqualifies you from being the Man who does. Demonstrate, never explicate.

In a way I pity the women who identify themselves as Red Pill women. Not because I think their efforts are misplaced, but because they become privy to Red Pill truths and now have a different awareness of that observer-expectancy effect. The process is changed with regard to how they deal with men, maybe their husbands, and now they can no longer play the Game without some peripheral awareness that they are playing a game. The machinations of it are revealed so the context becomes one of identifying aspects of those truths and being self-conscious of men’s and their own behaviors being influenced by them.

In coming to terms with Red Pill expectations of women a man must embrace some ugly realities. Those realities that used to be denied or sugar coated with the pretty lies of the Blue Pill can rub you raw. Among others, Hypergamy, women’s sexual and love opportunism and the potential of damning a man to a life of indentured servitude are tough expectations to have to weigh against the idealistic want of a healthy loving relationship with a woman.

There will be a contingent of men who’ll insist women be held accountable for the worst of these behaviors. While I don’t necessarily disagree with that sentiment, there will always be a want for personal accountability and justice for women’s actions from men, however, this belief is still rooted in the idea that women are coequal and rational actors. That personal accountability desire is based in an equalist mindset. That’s not to say women shouldn’t be held accountable for the results of their impulses, or given license to them – Hypergamy is not itself an excuse for the worst of its consequences. Moreover, it is to say that a Red Pill aware man needs to base his expectations of women on the Red Pill foreknowledge of what her instincts and impulses will lead her to.

Conventional Love Model

I posted the following comment in response to Girl With a Dragonfly Tattoo’s recent plea for women to embrace empathy and / or sympathy:

Sympathy / Empathy flow downward from men to women and then to children. Men who understand and accept this never expect empathy from women to begin with. For that man, either a woman meets his criteria for his investment or he drops her for a better prospect.

Only in a feminized equalist society do men expect in-kind reciprocation from women. As a man, your “needs” are only important to you. Men’s disappointment comes from expecting a balanced return on his emotional investment and relational equity; this is the result of his egalitarian equalist conditioning. It sucks and it’s offensive to men because they’ve believed for most of their lives that there should be an equitable exchange of emotional and personal investments – his woman should have his needs and his best interests in mind in a like fashion that he has for her; this is not and has never been the case.

In fact it’s a recipe for failure, since it puts men into a position of neediness, and thus forces him to negotiate for his woman’s desire.

I’ve made an attempt in today’s post to address this last part. A great deal of men’s frustrations with women finds its root in an equalist expectation of a like-for-like exchange of intimacy. In A New Hope I explained how a man might cast off his former hope for a Blue Pill solution to the problems inherently created by an egalitarian mindset. I think it’s vitally important for men to keep that in mind – the source of those problems offers the false hope of a solution to those problems.

As a man it is important to understand that love will always, necessarily, be an unequal exchange of sacrifice for a woman. You simply don’t share the same concept of love with a woman. There are complementary benefits, but never assume your investment with a woman will be an equitable tradeoff. Men weren’t designed for that, this is why notions of relational equity is a real tough ego-investment for a man to abandon when he comes to Red Pill awareness.

In closing, what I find interesting in all of this was recalling how my Vulnerability post was received. That was an important post because it described the expectation of submissiveness and surrender that the Feminine Imperative and egalitarian equalism inculcate in men. Even the definition of the word was recreated to fit the doctrine – weakness is strength – and more than a few critics still clinging to that Blue Pill boilerplate wanted to re-redefine it in some way to be palatable to both the manosphere and that old Blue Pill hope. That’s the essence of the Purple Pill.

What they fail to realize is the inherent vulnerability men face in loving a woman at all. All risk, with no realistic expectation of reciprocation of his emotional investment and even greater risk of rejection for expressing that expectation – now that’s vulnerability. Egalitarian equalism always stresses the importance of men and women meeting each other’s needs to achieve a balanced loving relationship. This is a fundamentally flawed premise in the context of feminine social primacy. In a Blue Pill paradigm a man’s needs are always subordinate to a woman’s. That is vulnerability – a man putting faith in the presumption that a woman’s sustained long-term interests will ultimately serve his own.

Men will always be the risk takers in all aspects of life.