Never Take a Woman Fishing

(h/t to Zelscorpion for the image and ref for today’s post)

Hi Rollo,
On rereading Truth to Power a very inspirational post, I wanted to hear your thoughts on men with families such as my self choosing to travel on vacation alone.

In your videos above you touched on masculine qualities men being in the driver seat around decision making. I have a wife you as with many women is cultured to try assume headship of the household with decision making even vacations etc.

She doesn’t want to travel abroad as we have a 7 month old son where as I feel there is no reason why she should worry about doing so. Anyway the crux of the issue is I am only 28 years old and having sacrificed my independence early (at 25) have a desire to travel and I don’t care about rocking the boat to make that happen.

I would love to hear some advice about the benefits of and good ways of grabbing hold again of control of our own circumstances and decisions!

Never take a woman fishing.

That’s a little idiom I learned way before I was Red Pill aware from the guy who was the best man at my wedding, and my long time fishing buddy. I wouldn’t call him a philosopher, but he was a keen observer of women’s behavior and became salt-of-the-earth wise by default:

“When you take a woman fishing you’re trying to include them in something they really don’t want to be doing, but you like it a lot. So you think ‘I like fishing and I want to include her in something we can do together’, but when you do she complains about EVERYTHING. ‘It’s dirty, I’m cold, I’m hot, I didn’t bring a water bottle, where’s the sunscreen?, there’s too many bugs, why are there so many bugs?, why do we have to hike so far to fish? can’t we just find a spot by the dam? where’s the bathroom?, etc. etc.”

“So what do you do? You force yourself to make her comfortable the whole damn time. You don’t hike, you don’t scout for the sweet spots on the river or, God forbid, you try to get her in a kayak. You end up going out after breakfast and the light’s all wrong. You try to keep them clean and close to the ‘potty’, you bait their hook ’cause it’s filthy, you untangle their reel snarls,…what you don’t do is fish. Your whole trip becomes about making her ‘like’ fishing with you and not about actually fishing and doing all the things we do when we fish together or on our own. I mean, you want ’em to like it, but you’ll never teach them to like it because you’re too busy making everything right for ’em.”

“Unless they were brought up right and they dig fishing ’cause their Dad taught ’em to like it, never try to bring a woman fishing. They gotta come to liking it on their own, they gotta want to do it on their own. I mean, look at Dodge (our dog) he don’t care if it’s cold or 4am, he’s happy to be on the trail going wherever the fuck we’re headed.”

Back in May Zelscorpion tweeted a few of the pictures from this series and made an interesting point:

https://twitter.com/Zelcorpion/status/599493741573971969

I had to admit, he’s got a point and it reminded me of the sage words of my Best Man. I think one of the tragedies of men’s Blue Pill conditioning is the presumption that they must find a way, sometimes forcibly, to become more compatible with a woman. I wrote about the paradox of compatibility a while back:

It’s very entertaining for me to hear guys reason as to why they got into yoga, or my all time favorite, salsa dancing as some means of meeting girls. I mean really, if that’s the goal you choose to devote the precious few hours of your leisure time to then I suppose a guy ought to take up scrap-booking or zumba.

If you’re picking up a hobby in order to meet women all you’re doing is attempting to Identify with what you expect your idealized woman to appreciate. If you get into something for this reason it’s not a hobby, it’s a Buffer.

Successful men don’t chase success – success chases them. Women are going to expect you to have your own uncontrived, interests, passions and hobbies established before meeting them.

When I first began counseling men in my SoSuave days many times I’d read guys telling me, “Well if she’s not into the same things I am she’s just not the ‘right’ girl for me”, as if common interests were some criteria that would trump his sexual interests in a girl. Blue Pill idealism convinces men that the “right girl” will necessarily love doing the same things as himself, but the all too common Red Pill truth is that men will have their peak experiences in life alone or in the company of other men who share the passions and interests their wives simply have no interest in.

Peak Experience

I don’t subscribe to Maslow’s theories in whole, but I do think his Peak Experience idea has merit. There will be times and achievements in your life that will stand out as significantly memorable. It’s easy to point to the experiences that should be the most significant; a marriage, the birth of a child, a religious experience, a first kiss, a school graduation, etc., you get the idea – experiences that should be the standard fare in a romanticized, idealistic sense.

We tend to overblow these experiences because we think they should be something to etch in our consciousness; and if we don’t, well, then there must be something wrong with us for not appreciating their popular significance. Tragically it’s our negative experiences that have the most lasting effect on us; evolution has made pain something memorable so as to help us avoid potentially life-ending future experiences. But the events that should evoke lasting good memories, the ones we are taught should be significant, are often the ones we ruin with unrealistic expectations, or we build up only to have them not quite live up to the fantasy we make of them.

The Peak Experiences I’m talking about here aren’t planned, or are just loosely planned by necessity. Some of the most memorable events you’ll ever experience wont be ones that you had a forethought about. These are often the experiences we hope to recreate long after they occur, but prove impossible to really recapture. Much of what makes up our personal preferences in life come from these spontaneous Peak Experiences. Remember the first girl you got with? Remember that time when things aligned just perfectly for you to hit that hole in one?

One of the reasons I have such a passion for snowmobiles was due to a day I blew off work so I could go out for the entire day on a beautiful Lake Tahoe morning. I went on my own which is something I rarely did. It was a Wednesday so there was nobody on the trails. The snow was only a day old and I took my sled to the top of a place called High Meadows, but even this pristine place wasn’t high enough. I took off in the back country and got to the top of a peak that was as high as I dared to go alone. Once I got there I had a view of the lake that I imagine few people had experienced. Then I fell back on the seat of my sled and stared at a sky that was so blue I never thought of it in the same way again. I laid there for a long time just staring and thinking about life and living and God and the universe.

On my way down the hill I thought how cool it would be to bring Mrs. Tomassi up there so she could appreciate it too. I mean, why wouldn’t I want to share such an incredible Peak Experience with the woman I love; the woman I want to share my life with? To this day Mrs. T has only been on my sled about 3 times. She’s very self-cautious and doesn’t like the smell and sound of the engine. That might seem trivial, but no matter how much I can try to relate that experience or try to recapture it no one but myself will ever have that unique event.

Experience & Frame

When I look at the guy with his dog in these camping shots I can now appreciate them much more because I know he’s experienced that same uniqueness. When you plan an event with a woman, when you make efforts to bring her into an appreciation of something you enjoy the experience of you must remember that you are, in essence, negotiating for her genuine desire to do so.

Now, before I’m run up the flagpole for suggesting otherwise, yes I know that many men and women do in fact find pleasure in commonly held interests. I see women on the river fishing in waders and at Trout Unlimited events all the time. My point isn’t the interest itself, but rather the desire to participate in it. A lot of guys hold the belief that including their wife, girlfriend or even a girl they’re spinning as a plate in something they think she should enjoy will have the effect of bringing them closer. The inherent problem with this is the presumption that including her in it will lead to some new shared experience that will bond them both in a genuine way.

The problem with preplanned ‘date nights’ is the same problem men experience with trying to pull a woman into his Frame by insisting she take up one of his hobbies or passions; it’s contrived and feels disingenuous to her. The point of the experience becomes about her being involved in it and not the actual doing of whatever it is you do together. The vibe becomes one of him making and controlling that experience so it becomes something pleasurable for her to participate in rather than really finding some inherent reward from it due to genuine interest.

Thus you get guys who (figuratively) take their women fishing and the event becomes more about introducing her to it than actually catching fish. Guys get so caught up in controlling unpleasant variables for her that the real experience of fishing is something entirely different. They want that woman to feel the same joy he does in doing something intrinsically rewarding to him, but the truth of it is she must come to it on her own.

Always Maintain Your Individualism

And this leads us back, once again, to establishing and maintaining a positive, dominant and individualistic Frame with a woman. She must want to enter your reality for it to be a genuine desire on her part – you cannot lead her into it, she must enter it of her own volition. Spontaneity is the key. Whether it’s an ‘insta-date’ from a PUA perspective, or an unexpected twist of plans in your marriage, that woman must want to participate in that event, in that moment of her own accord.

A good test of genuine interest with a woman is less about how open she is to trying “your things” and more about how insistent she is instigating her own participation in them. The trap most Betas fall into is converting “his things” into “our things” and he compromises those previously rewarding experiences into a sideshow he hopes will bond he and his woman together.

In Male Space I made this point:

When the influence of feminine-primacy is introduced into social settings made up mainly by men and male-interests, the dynamics and purpose of that group changes. The purpose becomes less about the endeavor itself and more about adherence to the feminine-inclusionary aspect of that endeavor. It starts to become less about being the best or most passionate at what they do, and more about being acceptable to the influence of the Feminine Imperative while attempting maintaining the former level of interest in the endeavor.

A similar dynamic plays out when men try to open the Male Space of whatever it is they find individually enjoyable to the women they hope will share in his enthusiasm. One thing I learned very early on in my marriage was the absolutely vital importance of maintaining my individual identity apart from my wife.

The biggest mistake I made when I was involved in LTRs prior to meeting my wife was allowing myself to get caught up in the equalist idea that since both men and women were functional equals we should necessarily base our compatibility estimates on how alike we were in interests. Consequently I progressively began convincing myself that I found their interests fascinating, but in doing so I slipped into their Frame. I was too scared of losing a woman and was too necessitous to experiment with doing what I should have – insisting on maintaining my individual interests and maintaining my own reality for a woman to enter.

I was fortunate in that Mrs. T expected me to control the Frame from the start of our relationship. I’ll admit, at the time it was something very unfamiliar to me to have a woman expect me to prioritize my interests above her own, but the purpose of this was establishing a Frame she wanted to enter into. Today I adamantly insist on having a life that is apart from her, but she can enter into if she has a real interest in it. This blog is just one extension of that dynamic.

If you are to maintain a dominant Frame with a woman you must necessarily set your interests apart from her own. You must still insist on your individualized identity and the experiences that set you apart from her in order to maintain a reality in which she continually wishes to genuinely be a part of.

Ted had a great comment from last week’s thread that speaks to this:

I don’t expect my wife to be like a man with male interests. I expect her to be a human with human interests. Something deeper than pop culture anyway.

I know a little bit about a whole lot of stuff. I’m willing to chat about any number of subjects other than tech and politics. It just has to he something better than what’s on TV and the weather. I keep hearing women can do anything a man can, so let’s see some intellectual debate!

More often than not truths must be brought to women by men. It’s uniquely refreshing when women have the critical insight to look for truths, but it’s refreshing because it’s rare – and it’s refreshing when they seek them from a man who’s Frame she’s chosen to be a part of. One of the best aspects of the principle of Amused Mastery is that, if you actually have the mastery that comes from individualized experience, it makes maintaining a positive, dominant and enjoyable Frame much easier with the same woman.