Open Relationships

During the last post’s comment thread I sort of went back in time to when I’d first heard the term ‘open relationship’. It was back in the mid 80s and I’d heard it being proposed to me by my first girlfriend when I was around 19 and she’d grown bored of my predictable Beta perfection. Needless to say this moment preceded my semi-pro rock star 20s and the natural Alpha-ness I matured into. So at the time I was thoroughly steeped in the dutiful Beta conditioning of believing that ‘going steady’ monogamy and only banging the ONE girl was the right thing to do.

I also believed that women’s motives were reliably based on what they said rather than what their behaviors implied (and their contradicting behaviors were the result of being confused by nebulous ‘society’s’ unfair expectations of women). So it was with a great deal of confusion that I was forced to wrap my head around exactly why my ‘girlfriend’ would want to retain me as an intimate orbiter while she pursued other guys to bang and become potential intimates with.

She suggested an “open relationship” – all the same non-sexual intimate expectations with no expectation of reciprocal sexual fidelity –  an idea she’d no doubt been familiarized with from her former hippie ‘free love‘ parents. And not unlike the simpering Beta in today’s cartoon, I too was uncomfortable with sharing my 18 year old girlfriend with any other guy. Looking back it was quite the conflict to my 19 year old, Beta conditioned mind. On one hand I was taught to respect the independence of a woman and didn’t want to be the guy to tell her what she could or couldn’t do, but I also bought into the Disneyesque sacrifice all for true love narrative.

I suppose now I owe her some gratitude since my rejecting this “I want to play the field” episode was instrumental in setting me on a course for my Alpha 20s and the “don’t give a fuck” attitude that unintentionally served me so well with women then.

Today there are cutesy synonyms like ‘poly’ to describe a woman who believes it’s in her multiple lovers’, as well as her own, mutual interests that they obligate themselves to what really amounts to her attention, emotional and sexual needs independent of each guy who fulfills that role for her. The problem arises in the degree of investment those men believe that an above board ‘poly’ woman will be able to appreciate. I had this situation presented in last weeks’ comments:

Why does an open relationship favor women and not men? It’s only cuckoldry if you don’t approve of it. If you agree to an open relationship for both of you, then it seems like an equal footing.

The cuckoldry Devil is in the details; and in this case that Devil is in the perceived ‘agreement’ and who’s doing the agreeing. Contemporary Open Cuckoldry and the social conventions of ‘free love’ era faux-idealisms in ‘open relationships’ work in tandem today to promote the sexual selection strategy of women’s Hypergamy.

Cuckoldry, in its most visceral, Hypergamous sense, favors women because there is no margin for error on a man’s part. Bear in mind that an ‘open’ relationship only serves a woman’s sexual imperative because she benefits from comfort, rapport, security and likely provisioning of the primary man with whom she’s come to this agreement with. In all honesty I’ve rarely met a guy in an open relationship who wasn’t a Beta at the mercy of his wife or LTR’s proliferative phase, Alpha Fucks, Hypergamous impulses.

Most of them understand their optionless condition and resign themselves to the women they’ve committed to, wanting to, and acting on fucking more suitably, conventionally, masculine men than themselves. Arguably, most stay at home fathers fall into a sort of contextual form of an open relationship for much of the same reasons even if their wives are only getting a vicarious Alpha ‘fix’ by working among higher status men who haven’t abdicated on their burden of performance by adopting the feminine support role.

What About Those Assholes?

Now I am aware of the often domineering men who insist on fucking women outside of their commitment to a monogamous lover. I also understand that the reverse can and does apply. I’m also aware that when a man’s SMV exceeds a woman’s it places her into a similar position to that of the Beta men I’ve just described.

Bear in mind that the issue I’m on about here isn’t one of fault, but rather how an effectively polygamous relationship serves the interests of either genders’ sexual strategy.

It’s vitally important to consider how both of these ‘open relationship’ formats are popularly perceived in a cultural context. For a woman, being ‘poly’ may hold some stigma to it. She may be considered a de facto slut in some sense – remember she’s maintaining the pretense that she’s committed to one or more men, rather than a booty call where there is no pretense of exclusivity – but the social (not to mention legal assurance) efforts being made to ‘normalize’ what amounts to her cuckoldry of that ‘primary’ partner is reinforced because it seemingly serves as some kind of new-age feminine-primary family unit. And after all, he too is ostensibly free to exercise his sexual strategy in this arrangement. A win-win, right?

In the case where the ‘primary’ partner is the woman and the high SMV man leaves her no choice but to adopt his sexual strategy as the dominant one in the relationship, that ‘open relationship’ is considered dysfunctional and socially frowned upon. He’s a cad or a philanderer at best, and an abusive self-absorbed inconsiderate monster at worst. Reverse the sexes in today’s cartoon and imagine what the feminine-primary social response might be.

Force Fitting Sexual Strategies

What we’re observing in a modern interpretation of ‘poly’ or ‘open relationships’ is a conflict between the normalization of unilateral control of sexual strategy within a monogamous relationship context. I know that sounds like a mouthful but consider…

The Cardinal Rule of sexual strategies:
For one gender’s sexual strategy to succeed the other gender must compromise or abandon their own.

No doubt many Blue and Purple Pill readers will (in the interests of “equality”) remind us that there was a time when it was socially expected of (high socio-economic status) men to “keep” a mistress (or use prostitutes) as well as a wife, or even have many wives. All socio-economic Apex Fallacies aside, this being an outlier rather than a norm, those arrangements still put that man into a position of maintaining support for both (all) women in order to satisfy his sexual appetites as well as the relative wellbeing of them.

In the modern instance where western(ized) women are a protected class in a feminine-primary social order, the priority of sexual strategy changes hands. I cover this exchange in the Adaptation series of posts, but to paraphrase, Free Love, open relationships or now, ‘poly’, has really become an increasingly acceptable methodology for women to optimize both the Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks aspects of Hypergamy while still enjoying a semblance of the security that old order monogamy provides for women’s emotional needs.

Now lets review The Cardinal Rule of Relationships:

In any relationship, the person with the most power is the one who needs the other the least.

In an economic state where women are less financially dependent on (or autonomous from) men, the Alpha Fucks aspect of Hypergamy will take priority. That’s not to say the Beta comfort and rapport appeal becomes worthless as an emotional investment, but it’s less likely for a woman to need to prioritize that aspect while pursuing the Alpha Fucks aspect. Beta comfort and security have a value, but that value requires less urgency than pursing Alpha sexual experience (functional breeding opportunities).

Consider the poor Beta symp in the cartoon. That caricature is of a Beta conditioned man struggling with the Old Set of Books, with the old order ruleset expectations from a woman who will never recognize them because she’s never needed to. It’s his investment in her, his necessitousness, his optionlessness and his inability to see it’s the source of his frustration and his anxiety. He needs her, expects more from her, than she needs him.

The lie inherent in the humor of the cartoon is that women possess the capacity to compartmentalize their emotional investments. The Medium is the Message; women can only compartmentalize their feelings for men they don’t see as Hypergamously optimal men (i.e. Alpha, higher than their own SMV men). For men who embody that optimization, women simply cannot afford to feel anything more than submission (a submission to a dominant man they innately desire) to him and are thus unable to consider anything like compartmentalizing their emotions for him.

And from Schedules of Mating:

For a female of any species to facilitate a methodology for breeding with the best genetic partner she’s able to attract AND to ensure her own and her offspring’s survival with the best provisioning partner; this is an evolutionary jackpot.

‘Open’ relationships, and the social narrative reinforcement of the concept, are one such adaptation to facilitate this methodology.

All of this may seem a bit pervasive coming from the guy who advises men to spin plates and date non-exclusively for as long as it takes (if ever) to attain the depth of experience to become a relatively good judge of women’s innate nature, and then if he so chooses, decide how best to pair and parent with her.

The difference in this approach is characteristic of the differences in men and women’s sexual strategies. In Plate Theory, while there is an above board implication of non-exclusivity, there is never an implication that a woman is (or should be) more than a non-exclusive dating opportunity. There should never be any pretense of there being an established, invested relationship as we see in the ‘poly’ concept of women.

In fact this is the primary distinction in non-exclusivity; who’s Frame is the predominant one? In a woman’s ‘poly’ Frame there is a retainership implied in what she believes should be an accepted non-exclusivity.

Ask yourself this, why would a man persist in an ‘open’ relationship? What unique advantages does he get in this arrangement that he couldn’t by simply staying single, practicing Game and spinning plates? Then ask yourself what unique benefits does a woman receive from the same ‘polyamorous’ arrangement?

When you’re contemplating this, try to divorce yourself from the emotional investments and focus on cold hard evolved Hypergamy and how it would function for either sex in that arrangement. Keep in mind that as far as feminized society is concerned, and for all of the triumphalism of independent women, the onus of committed relationship responsibility still defines the worth of a man.

Beta “Manhood”

From MoodyPrism had an interesting observation about the social acceptance of cuckoldry:

I’ve seen men make the mistake of mentioning that they would never raise another man’s child on FaceBook. Shit storms ensued. The usual shaming tactics were trotted out such as manning up. Interestingly enough I’ve heard a woman (on one of those absolutely dreadful day time talk shows such as the View) say that a woman in a relationship with a man with his own kids was a fool for wasting her time on his kids instead of hers. The framework for open cuckoldry is already there, we just need to see the push that makes it completely socially acceptable.

Open Cuckoldry is already in its developmental stage in a social respect. When you consider the Sandbergian plan for Open Hypergamy, the logical implication of this is what’s described here – prioritizing the sexual selection and Hypergamous optimization of women on a societal level while maximally restricting (via social shaming and disapproval) the sexual strategies that would ever serve male interests,…so long as that male is anything less than an optimal Alpha.

Open Cuckoldry has many euphemisms now, but in the Red Pill aware perspective it’s just a matter of time until the social plan of prioritized Hypergamy and outright cuckoldry becomes a social norm.

TuffLuv also presented me with a related question in the last comment thread:

A little too black and white on this stuff Rollo. Sure cuckoldry, as you call it is becoming the norm.. the euphemism being “mixed family”. But I see the majority of instances not being a chick who had the child of some alpha bad boy, or even alpha good boy.. I just see fickle chicks who dumped the baby daddy cuz she either found something better or went looking for something better. The poor dad is just an every day average guy who got his heart broken by the bitch.

So, ponder if you will, if there is a difference between a man raising another man’s child(ren) where the bio father is less alpha (possibly by far) than the new suitor, and a beta man raising the child of one of the woman’s former studs.. I think in the real world you find the former far more than the latter, except in cases where the married or committed woman actually went out and cheated and got pregnant with another man’s child. Maybe that happens a lot but that is not *open* cuckoldry.. That’s classic cuckoldry, and perhaps the only thing that should be called cuckoldry.

I think there should be another designation for the former case. It’s still a bit shameful, but not nearly as much as the latter, eh?

Definitely something to consider, but this situation also implies a change in conditions or context with regard to the woman doing the cuckolding. The fundamentals don’t change – that woman may have bred with a less than optimal man, but the Hypergamous sexual selection impulse still drives her to seek out the Alpha fucks aspect of Hypergamy. She’s Making Up for Missing Out and still she has the provisioning and support she needs in order to pursue the opposite side of the Hypergamous equation she missed out on courtesy of the Beta father.