Foundations

The primary principles and building blocks of Positive Masculinity.

A Ship in a Harbor

A ship in a harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships were meant to do.

Once upon a time there were two old men talking about the places they lived and how each thought their homes were the best places to live. The first was born and raised in a remote town in rural Montana. He always spoke lovingly about his hometown and often boasted it was the most beautiful place in the world, though he’d never been more than a few miles beyond it’s borders. He was proud to be from a small town and had lived there his entire life because it was genuinely a wonderful place to live. He often said it was the best place in the world to settle down in.

The second man was from the same town, but he left at 18 to join the Navy. In the course of his enlistment he’d traveled to Singapore, Australia, the Philippines, Guam, and many other countries in the asian pacific. Additionally he’d spent time at several Naval bases in San Diego, Hawaii and San Francisco. Later he traveled to Panama, through the canal and was stationed in Florida and South Carolina. After his time in the Navy, he went to a university in New York and later became an investment banker traveling to Britain, the Netherlands, France, Germany and Spain. In his 50’s he was commissioned to be a US Ambassador to several countries in the middle east. In his travels he’d experienced the best and the worst of humanity. He’d been met with grace and hospitality as well as hate and hostility. Ultimately he’d decided to retire in New Zealand, because it was the most welcoming and beautiful country he’d traveled to in the course of his life – and proud, he too believed his home to be the best place in the world to settle down in.

Which of these two men’s advice should a young man consider when it comes time for him to call a place his home?

Fem-Centrism

My intent with yesterday’s (relax, they’re just tits) post was to illustrate how the reality in which we find things “normal” is rendered by fem-centristic influence. Across ethnicities, and encompassing all manner of social diversity, this influence is so insaturated into culture, laws, media, entertainment, from our collective social consciousness to our individual psyches that we simply take it for granted as the operative framework in which we live. I realize this is a tough pill to swallow, because the male imperative does in fact intersect with the female imperative depending on mutual goals. However, the point is that the operative framework, the reality we function in, is defined by the feminine.

I can remember first becoming aware of just the hints of this the first time I watched a popular sit-com on TV with a critical eye. There simply were no positively masculine actors or roles in ANY show, and rather every male was ridiculed for his masculinity. This then led into other aspects of society and media I was just starting to become aware of. Feminization was everywhere, but my inner guilt for even considering that possibility was hindering my unplugging from it.

I remember at first feeling guilty about feeling offended by just my noticing this. I felt ashamed of myself for thinking that maybe things weren’t as ‘normal’ as women would like me to think. What I didn’t understand was that this was part of my conditioning; to internalize a sense of shame for questioning that ‘normalcy’. A lot of men never get past this programming and never unplug. It’s just too embedded in “who they are”, and the resulting internal conflict will prompt them to deny the realities of their condition and sometimes actively fight others who challenge the normalcy they need in order to exist.

Once I’d gotten past the self-shame, I began to notice other patterns and interlocking social conventions that promoted this fem-centrism. From the macro dynamics of divorce laws and legal definitions of rape, to the gender bias in military conscription (drafting only men to die in war) and down to the smallest details of mundane water cooler talk in the work place, I began to realize just how overwhelming this influence is on our existences.

Observing the Framework

Recently I listend to an advice radio talk show where a woman called in in emotional distress with her husbands actions. Apparently she’d dated the man for a year or two before marriage and they talked about how neither wanted children from the outset. Prior to the marriage both agreed, no kids, that is until about a year into their marriage the wife had secretly gone off the pill and made deliberate efforts in her sexual activities with her husband in order to conceive. Trouble was she wasn’t getting pregnant. Only later did the man confess that he’d had a vasectomy so as not to risk having kids with any woman he paired up with.

The ensuing indignation wasn’t directed at the woman’s admitted duplicity and covert efforts to deceive her husband into thinking she’d had an accidental pregnancy, but rather all the fires of hell were concentrated on this man’s alleged deception of her. This serves as a prime example of how the feminine reality frames the directions of our lives. Publicly and privately, not even an afterthought was spared for the woman’s motivation and desperate measures to achieve her sexual imperative because the feminine imperative is normalized as the CORRECT goal of any conflict. A woman’s existential imperative, her happiness, her contentment, her protection, her provisioning, her empowerment, literally anything that benefits the feminine is not only encouraged socially, but in most cases mandated by law. Ironically, most doctors require a wife’s written consent to perform a vasectomy on a married man; not because of a legal mandate, but rather to avoid legal retaliations and damages from a wife. By hook or by crook, her imperative is the CORRECT one.

Some will argue that it hasn’t always been thus, and that in certain eras woman have been reduced to property like cattle. While that may have some merit I would argue that the perpetuation of this notion better serves the new feminine reality in promoting a need for recognition of victim status and thus a need for restitution. The truth is that even the most ardent supporters of reconciling a “patriarchal  past” are still operating in the feminine realty in the now. Other than sultans and emperors, very few men born prior to the dark ages have ever really ‘owned’ a woman.

Sexual Revolution

I got into a hypothetical debate with an online friend as to what it would mean to humanity (and masculinity in particular) if a new method of birth control was developed with the specific and unique ability to allow men to control conception to the same degree women were given with hormonal contraception in the mid-sixties. I thought it interesting that human effort could create reliable contraception for women in the 60’s, yet in 2011 we can map the human genome and yet not figure out how to afford men the same degree of birth control?

Put simply, the feminine imperative will not allow this.

Imagine the social and economic damage to the feminine infrastructure if Prometheus gave such fire to Men? Imagine that balance of control veering back into the masculine; for men to literally have the exclusive choice to fulfill a woman’s sexual strategy or not.

The conversation got heated. Men could never be trusted with such a power! Surely humanity would come to a grinding, apocalyptic end if the feminine sexual strategy was thwarted by reliable male contraception. Societies would be sundered, populations would nosedive, and the nuclear family would be replaced with a neo-tribalism dictated by men’s sexual strategies. Honestly, you’d think the discovery of atomic weapons was on par with such an invention.

The ridiculous, pathetic endemically juvenile and perverse masculinity that 50 years of feminization created could never be trusted to further humanity in pursuing their sex’s inborn imperatives.

Yet, this is precisely the power that was put into the hands of women in the 1960’s and remains today. The threat that male contraception represents to the feminine imperative is one of controlling the framework of which gender’s sexual strategy will be the normative. Prior to the advent of female-exclusive hormonal birth control and the sexual revolution that resulted from it, the gender playing field was level, if not tipped in favor of masculinity due to men’s provisioning being a motivating factor in women achieving their own gender imperative. Latex prophylactics were available in the 40’s, and this may have afforded men a slight advantage, but both parties knew and agreed to the terms of their sexual activity at the time of copulation.

Once feminine-exclusive birth control was convenient and available the locus of control switched to feminine primacy. Her imperative became the normalized imperative. His sexual imperative was only a means to achieving her own, and now the control was firmly placed in favor of feminine hypergamy. Whether in the developing world or in first world nations, the onus of directing the course of humanity fell upon women, and thus the feminine reality evolved into what it is today.

The Feminine Reality

I think one of the basic premises I acknowledge in my essays is one that even some of the more ‘enlightened’ Men of the ‘community’ don’t entirely grasp. This is the presumption of a feminine reality. Sometimes I refer to this as the female imperative, other times I might colloquially express it in terms of it being “The Matrix” for an ease of understanding, but I always presume my readers (even of my comments on other blogs or forums) have a basic understanding of this.

I think I may be a bit mistaken in this.

Everything a man experiences, every social conditioning he receives from the earliest age, every accepted social norm and every expectation of him to qualify as the definition of a mature adult Man in contemporary society is designed to serve the female imperative. Moralist wallow in it, absolutists and defeated white knights existentially depend upon it, and even the better part of relativists still (often unwittingly) feed and serve the feminine purpose. In fact, so all encompassing is this reality that we define our masculinity in the terms of how well we can accommodate that feminne influence.

Our media celebrates it, and brooks no dissent. There is very little dissent, since to peel back the veneer is to be at odds with a reality defined by the female purpose. You feel lonely because you can’t understand it’s influence, and the conditioning you’ve been subjected to defines the objective solution to curing that feeling. You base the decisions of your future, your education, your career, your religious beliefs, even where you’ll choose to live, to better accomodate the feminine influence either in the present or in preparation of accommodating it in the future.

You get married, out of fear for not being found acceptable of it, or from social shame for not yet having accepted your role in service to the imperative. Your children are offered in tribute to it, while in turn you unknowingly perpetuate it in them. You pay tribute in alimony, in divorce proceedings, in the expected sacrifices your career demands to maintain its influence in your own life and in society at large. You exist to facilitate a feminine reality.

We can excuse it with moralisms, we can attach notions of honor and stability to it, we can even convince ourselves that the feminine imperative is OUR own imperative, but regardless, men still serve it.

Sexual Strategies

For one gender to realize their sexual imperative the other must sacrifice their own. This is the root source of power the feminine imperative uses to establish its own reality as the normative one. From this flows the rules of engagement for dating / mating, operative social conventions used to maintain cognitive dominance, and laws and legalities that bind society to the benefit of the feminine. From this is derived men’s default status as the ‘disposable’ sex, while women are the protected sex. It’s this root that the imperative uses to excuse (not apologize for) the most blatant inconsistencies and atrocities of women.

Monogamy and fidelity are only useful when paired with an optimized hypergamy. Without that optimization, they’re inconvenient obligations to the the feminine reality.

In order to effect this reality men must be convinced of a degree of more control than the feminine imperative exerts. They must believe that it is they who are the masters of a reality defined by the feminine, while remaining dependent upon the systems that the feminine reality outlines for them. So they are told they are Kings, brutes, savages, patricians, intellectuals, anything that might convince them that the reality they exist in is privileged and expressly serves their purpose. Already the ‘protected sex’, this all encourages the default presumption of victimhood for the feminine.

The crowning irony of the feminine reality is that men should be accused of patriarchy while enabling the very framework of the feminine imperative. The feminine sexual strategy is victorious because even under the contrived auspices of male oppression, it’s still the female goal-state that is agreed upon as the correct effort. Satisfying the feminine imperative, achieving the ends of the feminine sexual strategy is still the normative condition. Men’s goals are aberrant, women’s are beatific.

Forgive me if I’ve waxed a bit too poetic here, but it’s important to see the Matrix for what it really is. The next occasion you lock horns with even the most well-meaning woman’s (or mangina’s) opinions about life, relationships, marriage, having babies, religion, etc. understand that her perceptions are based in this reality. She’s correct because her beliefs line up with what the framework of her reality reinforced in her as correct. Any other frame of reference is either utterly alien to her at best, wicked and evil at worst.

Morpheus: The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

Truth to Power

Denying the utility of Power, vilifying it’s usages, is in itself a a means of using Power.

Real change works from the inside out. If you don’t change your mind about yourself you wont change anything else. Women can change their hair color, their makeup, clothes, breast size, and any number of cosmetic alteration on a whim or as they can afford them, but the constant discontent, the constant inadequecies they complain of are rooted in their self-perceptions, not how others perceive them.

This is an outside-in mentality; hoping the external will change the internal, and it’s just this mentality that lesser men apply to themselves – the only difference being the application. The AFC (for lack of a better term) has the same problem as the vain woman (OK, really any woman) – a lack of true self-understanding of their own problem. It’s very difficult to do self-analysis and self-criticism, particularly when it comes to questioning our own beliefs and the reasons our personalities are what they are. It’s akin to telling someone they’re not living their lives ‘correctly’ or that they’re raising their children ‘wrong’; only it’s more difficult because we’re doing the telling about ourselves to ourselves. Self-estimation (not self-esteem) NEVER happens spontaneously, there always has to be some crisis to prompt it. Anxiety, trauma and crisis are necessary catalysts to stimulate self-consciousness. A breakup, a death, a betrayal; tragically, it’s at these points in our lives that we do our best introspection, we have our ‘moments of clarity’ and yes, discover what abysmal, simpering chumps we’ve allowed ourselves to be molded into.

Denial

The first step to really unplugging from our preconditioning (i.e the feminine Matrix) is recognizing that this conditioning has led to the beliefs we think are integral to our personalities. The psychological term for this is called ‘ego-investment’. When a person internalizes a mental schema so thoroughly, and has become conditioned to it for so long, it becomes an integral part of their personality. So to attack the belief is to, literally, attack the person. This is why we see such a violent reaction to people’s political, religious, inter-social/inter-sexual, inter-gender, etc. expressions of belief – they perceive it as a personal attack, even when presented with irrefutable, empirical evidence that challenges the veracity of those beliefs.

One common frustration that Game-aware Men express is how dificult it is to open an AFCs eyes as to why he’s not hooking up, why he’s not getting dates (or 2nd dates if he is), why he’s constantly getting LJBF rejections, etc., and all the flaws in what is really ego-investment internalizations. As I’m fond of saying, it’s dirty work unplugging chumps from the Matrix, and this is made all the more difficult when a person is in a catagorical state of denial.

People resort to denial when recognizing that the truth would destroy something they hold dear. In the case of a cheating partner, denial lets you avoid acknowledging evidence of your own humiliation. Short of catching a spouse in bed with your best friend, evidence of infidelity is usually ambiguous. It’s motivated skepticism. You’re more skeptical of things you don’t want to believe and demand a higher level of proof. Denial is unconscious, or it wouldn’t work: if you know you’re closing your eyes to the truth, some part of you knows what the truth is and denial can’t perform its protective function.

One thing we all struggle to protect is a positive self-image. The more important the aspect of your self-image that’s challenged by the truth, the more likely you are to go into denial. If you have a strong sense of self-worth and competence, your self-image can take hits but remain largely intact; if you’re beset by self-doubt (a hallmark of self-righteous AFC thinking), however, any acknowledgment of failure can be devastating and any admission of error painful to the point of being unthinkable. Self-justification and denial arise from the dissonance between believing you’re competent, and making a mistake, which clashes with that image. Solution: deny the mistake. Attribute it to an outside element (women won’t play by “the rules”) rather than resort to introspection (maybe I’m wrong about “the rules”?).

Therefore we see AFCs tenaciously cling to a moralistic sense of purpose in their methods which is only reinforced by popular culture in our media, our music, eHarmony, our religion, etc.

 Articles of Power

The term Power has a lot of  misapplied connotations to it. When we think of Powerful people, we think of influence, wealth, prestige, status and the ability to have others do our bidding – all of these are not Power. And as much as we’d like to convince ourselves that women are attracted to this Power, this is false. Because what I’ve described as aspects of Power here are really manifestations of Power. Here’s a cosmic secret revealed for you:

Real Power is the degree to which a person has control over their own circumstances. Real Power is the degree to which we control the directions of our lives.

When we allow our thinking, our personality disorders and our mental schemas, combined with their accompanying behaviors, to determine the course of our decisions, we relenquish real Power. The man who succumbs, by force or by will, to the responsibilities, liabilities and accountabilities that are required of him by society, marriage, committment, family, fatherhood, career choice, etc. leaves him very little influence over the course of his own life.

The painter Paul Gaugin is one of history’s most powerful men. At middle age Paul was a “successful” banker, with a wife and children and by all appearances, a man of great merit and considerable wealth. Then one day Paul decided he’d had enough and wanted to paint. He left his wife, children and his money, and decided he would become a painter. He cast off his former life to live the life he chose, he had the power to assume control of it. Eventually he died in Tahiti, but not after having one of the most interesting of lives and becoming a world renowned painter. You may think, what a horrible man he was to abandon his responsibilities to selfishly pursue his own desires, but the fact remains that he had the Power within himself to do so that most men would shudder to even consider. So entrapped are we in our self-expectation and self-imposed limitations that we fail to see that we have always had the keys to our own prisons – we’re just scared shitless to use them.

This Power is the root of that all important ‘confidence’ we toss out every time we tell a 19 y.o. chump what women really want so he can get laid. It’s this ability to make our own decisions, right or wrong, and to confidently own them that separate us from “other guys.” It’s this self-guided Power that evokes a seemingly irrational confidence to Spin Plates, to assert ourselves and to be unafraid to make ourselves the PRIZE, and it’s just this Power that women want to be associated with.

Lack of this Power is exactly what makes master PUAs revert to some of the most pathetic AFCs once they become involved in an LTR. They sell women on this idealization and the perception that they possess this Power only to discover the AFC insecurities these behaviors were meant to cover up once they’ve bought the act. This isn’t to devalue PUA skills as effective behavior sets, rather it’s meant to illustrate the behaviors that should be manifest as a result of effecting a real personal change. It should be that adopting a positive-masculine mental schema prompts these PUA skills as a result. Instead we have the cart before the horse in a mad rush to get that all important pussy we’ve been deprived of for so long, by masking our deficit in real Power and understanding with rote memorized PUA techniques hoping that by practicing them they’ll turn into “natural game” and we’ll mature enough to initiate a lasting personal change.

Case Study – Creative Intelligence

Below I have posted descriptions of 4 men from a case study I was involved with as part of a graduate study for personality psychology. Before you ask, no, this wasn’t an original study, however it was a measures experiment we performed to see how the results matched with our own university.These descriptions are excerpts from that case study comparing female mate selection. They were presented individually to 101 university women between the ages of 18 and 36. All were single/unmarried and none were aware of the intent of the experiment. I’ll present more details of the experiment after you have chance to respond so as not to spoil your genuine responses. Here are the descriptions:

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M is an art student. M has always had a passion for painting and plans to pursue a career in art. He creates paintings of people and complex landscapes. His paintings are so lifelike that they are often mistaken for photographs. The consensus amongst his art professors is that he is, by far, the most talented student they have seen. One professor, an expert on lifelike paintings, says he believes M is one of the most talented artists ever to produce these paintings. To make extra money to support his schooling, M has sold a few of his best paintings. They have sold for between 100 and 200 dollars. One professor lamented that M’s paintings are worth far more, but like so many other artists, he will probably never make very much money selling them.

L is an art student. He paints abstract paintings. L came into art by chance. He took an art class as an elective because it fit well in his schedule. For his midterm project, he produced an abstract painting after an hour of “fooling around” with the paint and canvas. The majority of the painting actually consisted of paint he accidentally spilled onto the canvas. A very wealthy man who was looking for art for his home discovered L’s painting in the student art studio. He paid L $5,000 dollars for the painting. Some of the man’s other wealthy friends liked L’s painting and commissioned a total of $100,000 in paintings from him. L and his art professors were shocked at the success of L’s paintings, because, in the words of one professor, “he has no real talent, just some good luck.” L continues to capitalize on his success by selling his abstract art.

L and M are considered highly desirable by other women on campus and very attractive. Friends of L and M say that they are dependable, kind, and generous friends.

J is an entrepreneur who had great success in his first business venture. He started a small software business in a friend’s garage. His product was a new kind of software for improving factory designs to radically increase the profitability of manufacturing. Within his first year, J secured contracts with Ford, General Electric, and Boeing. In the next three years, J sold his software to most of the top manufacturing companies in the United States and several of the top companies in Asia. After 5 years in business, J’s company was valued at 120 million dollars and had 250 employees. The Wall Street Journal credited the success of J’s company to the “brilliance and novelty” of J’s product and to J’s “sheer genius as a businessman.” However, J’s company fell victim to misfortune the next year. After J rejected a take-over bid from Microsoft, Microsoft filed a lawsuit claiming that J’s software infringed on some of their patents. Although most experts agreed that the suit had no merit, the cost of defending himself against the lawsuit created huge cash flow problems for J, which drove the company into bankruptcy. Although J has very little money left, he has recently begun a new business venture to sell another of the software products he has invented.

R recently inherited 20 million dollars from the couple who had adopted him when he was a year old. They died in a car crash, having made their fortune in commercial real estate. Before they died, R worked as a sales person at a computer company. Although R worked at the company for several years, he had not advanced past his starting salary or rank within the company. He went to a community college, but after graduation he didn’t feel sure what to do with his life. A friend who was working at the computer company suggested that R join him and work there. In R’s words, “I guess I’m just not very good at this job. At least now I won’t have to worry about money any more.” R and his adoptive parents were very close, and he was deeply saddened by their deaths.

J and R are both attractive and in their mid-twenties. They were recently nominated as two of the most eligible bachelors in Los Angeles.
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Bear in mind, these guys a theoretical archetypes, how they relate to women is irrelevant. How the subject women percieved them is what’s being assessed. Of these 4 men, which do you suppose was rated the highest in desirability with which to have a short-term sexual affair with by these women? And which man was rated the highest in desirability to enter into a long-term relationship with?

This study was done to determine comparative priorities in women with regards to male ‘creative intelligence’ vs.‘provisioning ability’ in female mate selection. I would’ve titled this thread as such, but I wanted to get some unbiased and impulse responses from readers here to see what the perceptions of these archetypes were from men and the reactions guys expected from women to these archetypes.

You’ll notice that care was taken in these archetype descriptions to balance out the physical attractiveness of each man (i.e. both artists were considered equally attractive by peers and both businessmen were ‘eligible’ bachelors). What was at issue wasn’t their extrinsic characteristics – comparative physiques or obvious Alpha presence – but what women chose in regards to these men’s intrinsic characteristics. The theory being that Creative Intelligence is of a higher mating value in the short term while a better Provisioning ability is more desirable in the long term. Bear in mind that hypergamy influences the decision making process for both of these sexual strategies. Also added was the caveat that legitimacy of provisioning ability, and the potential for future provisioning in it’s absence (i.e. the down on their luck men), played a factor in this mate selection.

Creative Intelligence

So what exactly is “Creative Intelligence”? Although there is no firm consensus on how to define it, we often know it when we see it. We also know a bit about it from a century of creativity research. Within humans, creative intelligence is closely associated with the highly heritable general intelligence, and creative intelligence seems to rely on the generation, selective elaboration, and skillful implementation of ideas and strategies. In other words, creativity represents a strong capacity for successful improvisation, thus it became a desirable, selected-for species survival trait.

The problem is that creativity sounds desirable, as does intelligence, so “creative intelligence” can become a vague term that seems useful for solving any behavioral problem, whether technological, ecological, social, sexual, or cultural. Many plausible adaptive functions explain the origins of human creative intelligence. These include: tool-making and tool-using, hunting, foraging, and food preparation methods, social strategizing within and between groups and sexual courtship dynamics (i.e. hunter-gatherer proto-Game).

Sorry for the psych lesson, but we had to be specific.

Trade Offs

As I elaborated in Schedules of Mating, most women face trade-offs in mating. In selecting a long-term mate, it makes hypergamic sense for women to put greater weight on traits that advertise ability and willingness to invest in protection, provisioning, and care of the woman and her offspring. This will favor the evolution of ‘good dad’ indicators – reliable cues of paternal investment ability and willingness to participate in those responsibilities. In our past, women of very high mate value (HB 8 and above) had the luxury of attracting a long-term mate who has both good dad potential and good genes. Fast forward through the ages and women have progressively had to settle for a committed partner who is not ideal either paternally or genetically. Then add to this the increasing complexity of men adapting to mimic these cues in order to facilitate their own breeding strategy. Consequently women are, by order of degree, incentivized to secure better genes or better paternal care from short-term or extra-pair partners, while simultaneously seeking long term provider males. Either would help at any time.

In this study, the idea was that, issues of relative attraction and arousal being satisfied, women will prefer a male possessing a higher capacity for Creative Intelligence in short-term sexual encounters to ensure the best possible future options for her offspring, while choosing a mate with better Provisioning ability for long term parental investment.

Art and business were chosen as two contrasting domains of work. Each requires distinct styles of creative intelligence, but both demand combinations of practical and theoretical skills, individual effort and social interaction. Hence, merit-based success in either domain may function as a mental fitness indicator. In each domain (art or business), one vignette described a man who showed high creative intelligence in his work, but who was poor due to bad luck and adverse circumstances. The other vignette in each set described a man who was average on creative intelligence, but who was wealthy due to good luck and beneficial circumstances. All vignettes made clear that each man’s creativity level was largely endogenous, reflecting natural (and presumably heritable) talent, but that his wealth level was largely accidental, gained through no merit or fault of his own.

Results

Each woman completed two forced-choice questions: (1) “Based on these descriptions, who do you think you might find more desirable for a short-term sexual affair?”; (2) “Based on these descriptions, who do you think you might find more desirable for a long-term committed relationship?” (L or M in the artist vignettes, and R or J in the entrepreneur vignettes). Next, participants rated the desirability of each man as a short-term mate and as a long-term mate on two 9-point scales (where ‘1’ = not at all desirable, ‘5’ = average; ‘9’ = extremely desirable). The rating questions were as follows: “Overall, how desirable would you find L [M, R, or J] as a long-term partner?” “Overall, how desirable would you find L [M, R, or J] as a short-term partner?

In this study M was overwhelmingly chosen as the short term partner. 89% of the participants chose the naturally talented, but out of luck artist for a short term sexual encounter. 7% chose L the rich artist, 3% chose J the poor/talented businessman and 1% opted for R the wealthy/untalented businessman.

J was also rated highest for long term relationship, but not as significantly as M in the short term. 67% of our subjects chose J, and surprisingly 17% chose L (rich artist). R was rated at 12% and M took 4% for the long term choice.

Intergender Friendship

Women have boyfriends and girlfriends. If you’re not fucking her, you’re her girlfriend.

Ever since “When Harry Met Sally” was released there’s been a constant droning about the validity of intergender friendships. To even suggest that men and women couldn’t be strictly platonic, mature friends is to invite reproach from a society that’s been steeped in notions of egalitarian equalism. If men and women are fundamentally “the same” there should be no impediment to developing and maintaining a friendship in like terms to a same sex friendship.

First off, 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 resoponse 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 15 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 understand how stupidly obvious this seems, but remember we’re qualifying the characteristics of intergender friendships in the face of a social undercurrent that wants to convince us that men and women are fundamentally equal. According to this precept, men should essentially possess the capacity to repress their sexual impulse to the point that it should have no bearing on his rational decision to engage in a platonic friendship. Likewise, a woman should be able to dissociate herself from her hypergamous nature to pursue a completely asexual friendship. And both genders should maturely pursue the friendship for their mutual enrichment, however, reality tells a different story.

Girl-Friends

All of this isn’t to say that you cannot have female acquaintances, or that you must necessarily be rude or ignore all women with contempt (that is binary thinking once again), but it is to say that the degree of friendship that you can experience with women (as a man) in comparison to same sex friendships will always be limited due to sexual differences. Most men will only ever engage in friendships with women that they initially find attractive which then, of course, is colored by their attraction to that woman. Now I’m sure the “not in my case” card will get played and attempt to make the anecdotal case for how much an exception to the rule you are, to which I’ll say, even if you legitimately are, it makes no difference. Because the very nature of an intergender friendship is ALWAYS going to be limited by sexual differences. Even if you can legitimately make the case that you aren’t now, or weren’t in the past, attracted to your opposite sex friend, your other intimate relationships will still modify and/or limit the depth of that friendship.

Even the best, most asexual, platonic, male-female friendships will be subject to mitigation based on sex. The easy example is; I’m sure you’d be jealous and suspect of your girlfriend were she to be spending any “quality time” with another ‘male-friend’. It’s simply time spent with another male who isn’t you and you’ll always question her desire to do so in favor of spending time with you.

Bear in mind that it’s also important to consider how women relate with their same-sex friends as a template for their intergender friendships. Remember each sex uses its same-sex model of friendship on which to base their understandings and expectations for an opposite sex friendship. Very few men have the patience to sort out how women interact with their women friends, so they opt for the easy answer that equalism gives them – we’re all the same, so your buddies are the same as women. Any guy that’s been in the circular hell of being a woman’s “phone-friend” knows this isn’t true. Girl-friends have a much different dynamic for friendship than do men, but likewise, and by way of her innate solipsism, she’s presuming her intersexual friendships will follow along a similar template to that of her girl-friends.

And why wouldn’t women expect their male friends to conform to their template for friendship? In a feminine-centric world it makes practical sense for men to realign themselves to women’s friendship frame. Men will all too readily tolerate behavior and attitudes from girl-friends that they’d come to physical blows were their male friends to do the same. Since the prerogative of maintaining that friendship is, by default, cast in a feminine-centric frame, women (generally) wouldn’t even think of altering their own interpretations of friendship to accommodate a male perspective.

Get it out of your head now that you’re even in a so called “friend zone” with any woman. There is no friend zone – there is only the limbo between you being fooled that a girl is actually a friend on an equitable level to your same sex friends, and you understanding that as soon as she becomes intimate with another guy your attentions will become a liability to any relationship she might want to have with the new sexual interest and she puts you off, or you do the same when you become so involved with another girl.

The Female Wingman

A lot of guys cling to this mistaken notion that they can parlay a female friendship into action with one of her hot friends. You may even have legitimate examples where that might’ve happened, but for each one, I’ll show you a girl who would’ve fucked you irrespective of whether or not you had a mutual female friend to vouch for you. That friendship may have been a convenient pivot into another hot girl, but it wasn’t the prior intergender – friendship that got you laid; it was that the girl who banged you found you attractive enough to fuck.

I’m not denying the utility of  ‘Social Circle Game’, nor am I ignoring that the conspicuous attention of hot women is good social proof – that’s not what the friend pivot is about. It’s about assuming a girl-friend will endorse you as a preselected, potential sexual partner.

You may think it’s great social proof to have some hot friend endorse you as a good lay for her other friends, but women talk. In fact it’s all they do most of the time. Your status as a friend gets transferred to her girlfriends. Why? First, if she was a prior target for you who turned into a LJBF, you already have that as an association of your friendship. Any of her girlfriends that would subsequently date you will know that she was your primary interest initially – not them. Secondly, assuming you even could have a completely innocuous, asexual, platonic beginning to your inter-gender friendship, there will be competition anxiety with the other girlfriends. This will result in a tendency for the original friend to filter your exposure to which of her girlfriends she finds the least threatening. You have to consider the balance between your value to her as another friend / orbiter against her endorsing you as a potential intimate for one of her girlfriends. Just because you have a girl-friend with a social circle of attractive female friends doesn’t mean you’ll get her endorsement for the one you’d prefer to get with.

To complete the circle here, all of this leads up to understanding that your female friend will NEVER be one of your guy friends. This silly notion is founded on the expectation that your female friend will hold the same interests and have the same reactions that your male friends will. Women are never going to be your wingman. One of the great downfalls of men today is too much female influence in their lives, to the point that it’s become stigma. Beware the guy with too many or exclusively female friends. This might make for the plot of stupid movies, but most women are wary of guys with so many female friends that they question their being able to relate with and be Men.


Rejection & Revenge

“There’s not a lot of money in revenge” – Inigo Montoya

Either directly or indirectly, I talk a lot about rejection here. Usually this is due to rejection, and the fear of it, being the root cause of so very many mental schemas, behaviors, rationales, etc. for guys. My thread Buffers outlines many of these rationales or conventions used to deaden the effect of rejection, but it’s rejection and how one accepts it that makes for a healthy or unhealthy response to it.

Recently I’ve been considering the principle of rejection and I think the, now proverbial, Pook had it right – Rejection is Better than Regret. However, for all the wisdom in that simple truth, applying it, learning from rejections and accepting rejection is what primarily trips men up.

I use men exclusively in this context because, as a Man, based on gender alone, you will experience rejection far more than any woman ever will. If that sounds like a bold statement let me clarify that, you should experience rejection more than any woman. In sports, in career, in education, in personal relations, and with the opposite sex, you will statistically experience more rejection than a woman. That understanding isn’t intended to wave the male power banner, or make Men the champions of virtue. Neither is it to presume women don’t experience rejection themselves; it is a simple observance of fact that rejection is an integral aspect of being male. Get used to it.

So, rejection is preferable to regret, we get that. What we don’t get is how to accept and deal with that rejection. I’m not going to type away here and pretend that I have it figured out yet, however I can tell you how men, boys, AFCs, Symps, and even PUAs will refuse to accept and/or deal with that rejection. Go look at Buffers, Buffers are how men prevent rejection not how they deal with it once they’re experiencing it. But just as men (and women) employ rationales and conventions to prevent or blunt a potential rejection, so too have they developed coping strategies, rationales and techniques that afford them the least amount of discomfort when they have been rejected – or in the case of women, when they are delivering that rejection.

Remember, rejection isn’t limited to just inter-gender instances. In fact that’s almost a more interesting aspect; your reaction to being rejected for a potential job will be far more measured than if you were rejected for intimacy with a woman. One reason we go to such great lengths to buffer ourselves against rejection is the fear of having to experience it, but often the fear of it is more debilitating than the actual experience.

Revenge

I mention this in particular because it’s easily the most common, and potentially the most damaging reaction men have with rejection. This can be from enacting something petty and annoying to the actual murder of the rejecting woman. This is the “how can I get back at her” response, and while it may seem satisfying to ‘teach her a lesson’ trust that this lesson will never be taught by revenge, no matter how justified or deserving she is.

Indifference speaks volumes. The very consideration of revenge is a waste of your time, a waste of your effort, that would be better spent learning and bettering yourself from that rejection. I can personally relate a story of a young man who was just released from prison. He killed the boyfriend who his ‘soulmate’ replaced him with when he was 16 by stabbing him 32 times. That was his revenge. If he’d been 2 years older he would’ve been put to death or served a life sentence. You may not be that extreme in pursuing a course of revenge, but the consequences are similar. For so long as you consider revenge, no matter how petty, you’ll still be attached to the emotions of that rejection. Accept the rejection, move on, rejection is better than regret – literally in this case.

Men aren’t being prepared, aren’t being raised to be Men. We constantly belabor this to the point that we make it a matter of personal pride and duty to instruct our fellow men less fortunate to realize it. Dealing with rejection is the lynchpin to this. When I read posts from Men I’d otherwise consider enlightened (to the Matrix or what have you) contemplate how best to enact their ‘revenge’ upon a woman who refused his approach, or in retaliation to a woman’s infidelity, I wonder if they are as enlightened as I gave them credit. In facing rejection, you have no choice but to accept it. How you’ll do so is a matter of your character. It’s important to cultivate an almost third-person approach to accepting rejection. For a lot of people, particularly those unaccustomed or new to deep personal rejection this is a tough order. We get emotionally invested and that’s never conducive to making good decisions, particularly for men who’d do better to rely on rationality and pragmatism. We’re particularly susceptible when we’re adolescents and young adults.

It’s part of the human condition to desire what we think is justice. It’s our nature to make comparisons, and in the instance of inequality, to see them corrected. And although we rarely consider the ultimate consequences of our actions, this isn’t the reason we should temper a desire for revenge. The thing we ought to consider is the overall efforts and resources necessary in order to exact revenge and weigh them against the things we might achieve for our own betterment by redirecting them to our own purposes. Even the efforts required for a slight revenge are better spent with concerns of our own.

This might seem like a longwinded way of saying “Living well is the best revenge”, and to a degree I think that’s true, but beware the ‘Well-lived’ life spent in pursuit of revenge. Revenge should never be the motivation for success. Even the time and mental effort needed to consider some appropriate way of making her aware of how she made you feel are resources better spent on meeting new prospective women who will reciprocate your interest. The root of confidence is developing, recognizing and acknowledging as many personal options as possible. Any effort you’d expend on revenge is a wasted opportunity to better yourself. Indifference to detractors and personal success are a far better revenge than any one sided injury you could inflict on them in return.

Law 36: Disdain Things You Cannot Have: Ignoring Them is the Best Revenge
By acknowledging a petty problem you give it existence and credibility. The more attention you pay an enemy, the stronger you make him; and a small mistake is often made worse and more visible when you try to fix it. It is sometimes best to leave things alone. If there is something you want but cannot have, show contempt for it. The less interest you reveal, the more superior you seem.

3 Stories

One of my favorite ways of helping young men understand how unimportant their immediate concerns are over rejection is to put things into a larger perspective. When you’re in the moment and unable to see the forest for the trees, rejections seems so crushing. It’s when you look at things in terms of how they play out in the course of time you realize that instead of some horrible soul-destroying rejection you really dodged a bullet that would’ve radically altered the progression of the better person you become.

When I was 15 or 16 I was in total love (teenage lust) with this girl named Sarah. I did everything in the AFC handbook to get with this girl – played friend after a LJBF rejection, wrote to her, called her all the time, etc. I got “I’m not ready for a relationship now” line right before she got the hot monkey sex from one of my best friends. He was the Alpha Bad Boy and she couldn’t get enough of him even after he’d dumped her, and I of course played right along. Flash forward to when I was 22. I had gotten my shit together, I was in the gym religiously, I played in a very popular band in the area and I was walking through the outdoor halls of the college I attended when I hear some girl’s voice say “Rollo, hey!” I looked around and literally looked right past her at first wondering who was calling for me. Then she says, “Hey it’s me Sarah.” I look down, and sitting on this bench is this 300+lbs land monster with the barely recognizable face of this girl I’d obsessed over about 6 years earlier. I was floored. Apparently she’d gone through rehab for cocaine and ballooned after it because she replaced the drug with food. For the first time in my life I was speechless.

My second story was about this one girl Bridgette who I also had a major AFC crush on in high school and I lacked even the confidence to really approach – I self-rejected. Again, flash forward to about 22 and I pull this exact same girl in a club (who actually still looked pretty good), only now I can’t keep her off of me. I ended up turning her into a fantastic booty call. This girl would literally knock on my window and climb in through it to fuck me in the morning before I left for class. However, it got to the point where I dumped her, because she insisted on never taking birth control while assuring me she was and I had a close call with her, and I was tapping 4 or 5 other girls at the time that I thought were better plates to spin (even though I didn’t know what plate theory was then). What I couldn’t get in high school ended up my left-overs just 5 years later.

Lastly, I had my first ‘real’ girlfriend look me up online once. This was the girl I first had sex with at 17 and I ended up moving to the college town she was enrolling into so I could keep fucking her. I basically altered the course of my life for 2 years to accommodate her life decisions, only to have her cheat on me and break up with me after I’d moved. She was my ‘first’ so naturally I assumed she was the ONE and the better I “supported” her the more she’d appreciate me (i.e. fuck me), so I took it pretty hard. I had still tapped her once or twice after all this, but she dropped off my world over 20 years ago. I get this email from her and I guess she’d looked me up. I checked out pictures of her on a vanity site she has (not FaceBook), and I can’t say time has been kind to her. At 37 she looks about 55, makes about $32K tutoring kids how to read (after that terrific degree I moved to ‘help’ her get), she’s “married” to another woman (an open marriage so to speak). It was kind of an eerie feeling just barely being able to make out the girl I’d known at 17, now at 37.

In all of these situation, but particularly this one (after 20 years), it’s hard not to feel more than a little self-satisfied and think karma’s a bitch, but I wonder how many women I’d been rejected by who are doing better now after the years. I’d also like to think that men tend to do better with age, but I know this isn’t always the case. Though I’m aware that living well is the best revenge, I think that living well in order to exact that revenge is misguided. Thing’s like this will happen regardless so long as you put the emphasis on your own betterment.

Plate Theory III: Transitioning

You cannot help anyone until you’ve first helped yourself.

The following was posted with permission from a consult I did.

Hi Rollo, my name is Akash and I am big fan of your posts. They are always lucid, logical, and insightful.

I discovered the community about 5 months ago after yet another failed relationship characterized by highly AFC behavior on my part. I ended it with a tremendous amount of guilt as I felt that because she was a “good person” I ought to have made it work even though I wasn’t in love with her. I am 27 years old.

Based on your posts I would really appreciate your advice on two issues:
(1) how to make the best use of my impending return to school in May for a second undergraduate degree and;
(2) how to overcome the cognitive dissonance I feel about pursuing women outside the confines of a committed relationship as I still suffer from social conditioning that tells me I will hurt women by pursuing primarily sexual relationships with them and so it is immoral to do so.

If you would like to post a reply on the forum, rather than by a PM, for the benefit of others that is fine with me. I wanted to direct these queries to you though as I believe I could benefit from your worldy wise opinion.

Sincerely look forward to hearing from you.

Best,
Akash

Akash,

I’ll give you a run down of what I can gather from your initial post, but understand that what you’ve given me here is pretty limited as far as information is concerned. I can only assume certain things from the very brief description of your life so take what I write with that in mind. In the future give me a better account of what your AFC behaviors were, how your relationships have ended, family background, where you live, why you’re pursuing a second degree, etc. I can be more accurate and avoid assumptions this way.

To begin with, you’ve only been involved in the “community” for the past 5 months so the first thing I’m going to tell you is that it takes time to mold your personality and unlearn mental schemas you’ve become conditioned to consider integral parts of your current personality. One of the biggest obstacles most men have with accepting the fundaments of a positive masculine mindset is the attitude that personality is static and uncontrollable by them. A lot of this “that’s just how I am” mentality comes from this basic conditioning and needs to be addressed from the outset since this almost universally is an ego-investment on the part of a guy who’s probably emotionally distressed, confused and/or frustrated.

Understand now that personality is ultimately what YOU determine it to be. This isn’t to say that external factors don’t influence personality; indeed these variables and outside influences are exactly the reason men such as yourself do seek out the community. However, it is you who determine what is comfortable for you and what will constitute the traits that makes your personality your own. You are most definitely not a blank slate, but you have the capacity to erase parts you don’t like or are unusable and rewrite new parts that you like and prove efficient.

(1) how to make the best use of my impending return to school in May for a second undergraduate degree

This all depends on what your own personal goals are. The best use you can make of this time is to devote yourself completely to achieving the purpose for which you decided to pursue a second degree in the first place. I can only assume you are working for this degree with a set outcome in mind, but is this what you truly want? I ask this because I know far too many men who’ve altered the course of their lives to better accommodate the women in their lives or to facilitate their insecurities and fear of rejection. It’s not an unfamiliar story to me to hear of how a guy opted for a certain university or a career path because he’d convinced himself that it would sustain a relationship that he was fearful of loosing or he felt was his “responsibility as a man” to be supportive of her ambitions at the sacrifice of his own. The conclusion of this scenario, more often than not, ends with a bitter man, mad at himself with the long term results of his choices after the woman he’d strived so long to accommodate leaves him for another man who held fast to his own identity and ambition – which is exactly what makes him attractive.

I’m not sure how or if this fits into your conditions, but let it serve as an illustration for reclaiming and remolding your own personality. Only you have the hindsight to assess why you made certain decisions in your life. I’m only asking you to be as brutally critical of your true motivations for making them. Maybe it’s time you review why you decided to pursue a second degree?

(2) how to overcome the cognitive dissonance I feel about pursuing women outside the confines of a committed relationship as I still suffer from social conditioning that tells me I will hurt women by pursuing primarily sexual relationships with them and so it is immoral to do so.

Akash, any reasonably attractive woman knows you’d like to have sex with her. It’s a primal, chemical instinct and to be bluntly honest, there’s nothing wrong with it. In certain Muslim sects men are allowed to take “temporary” wives for a set period of time in addition to their “permanent” wives so long as they support them financially. Some Mormons practice open polygamy in a similar fashion. Some men marry and divorce multiple times (and support them congruously). All of these practices are considered, to a greater or lesser degree, moral. The dissonance occurs when the rationalizations for a behavior conflict with the motivations for it and the associative psycho-social stigmas that get attached to it. Sorry for the $10 words here, but your feelings of guilt or hesitancy in a desire to explore multiple relationships is a calculated result of a very effective social conditioning with a latent purpose meant to curb a natural impulse.

Recognizing this is the first step to progressing beyond it and actually using it (responsibly) to your own advantage. As men, our biological impetus is to have unlimited access to unlimited sexuality with females bearing the best physical attributes. This is a rudimentary fact and on some level of consciousness both men and women understand this. No amount of proselytizing or social conditioning will erase what God and evolution hard-coded into our collective bio-psychological desires and behaviors. Admittedly, social conventions have historically made a good run at limiting this drive, but it can never (nor should it ever) purge this, because in essence it is a survival-ensuring attribute for us.

I wont argue against the utility in the latent purpose of absolute monogamy. No other method proves more valuable in parental investment and developing a strong masculine and feminine psyche in a person than that of a committed, opposite sex, two-parent family. I feel it’s necessary to add here that I am thoroughly unconvinced that gender identity is exclusively a set of learned behaviors as many in the mainstream would try to convince us of. There is simply too much biological evidence and the resulting psychological/behavioral response to gender differences to accept this, making it vitally important that a child (and later a healthy adult) be taught a healthy appreciation for both the masculine and feminine influences in their psyches.

The genders were meant to be complimentary, not adversarial. I certainly would never condone infidelity based on just this principle alone since it seems the most beneficial for healthy adults. It’s when this healthy monogamy becomes clouded by infantile, emotionality and insecure romanticisms with the resulting expectations that are derived by them that it becomes necessary for a man to cultivate an attitude of being the PRIZE. Adopting this mindset broadens his selection of opportunities for monogamy to his greatest advantage prior to committing to monogamy. In other words, if you are essentially sacrificing your capacity to pursue your biological imperative (unlimited access to unlimited sexuality), pragmatically, you’ll want to choose a partner of the highest quality from the broadest pool of potential you are capable of attracting.

The downside of this proposition is twofold. First, your ability to attract a sizable pool of quality ‘applicants’ is limited by factors you immediately have available. At 37, if all goes well, you’ll be more financially stable and mature than you are at 27. The 37 year old Akash will, in theory, be more attractive to a long term prospect than the 27 year old Akash. Secondly, women’s sexual value decreases as they age, meaning there is no guarantee that your beautiful, vivacious, 27 year old bride will remain so at 37. In fact the odds are she wont.

All of this makes betting your biological imperative on monogamy critically important and thus deserving of the widest possible selection.

Men literally live and die according to their options, so it stands to reason they ought to entertain a prolonged period in their lives where they are open to exploring the most options they have access to while concurrently developing and improving themselves prior to making a commitment of this magnitude.

And this is precisely where most men fail. They buy into and internalize psychological social contrivances (i.e. ONEitis) that are little more than effective means of inculcating a self-expectation of accountability and liability to make this commitment, irrespective of maturity level or personal success (not simply financial success). The saddest ones, the AFC ones are the pitiable men who carry these contrivances into marriage and even old age without ever understanding that they had more potential which they squandered due to an inability to see past these contrivances and learn to be selective based on experience.

A truly powerful Man jealously guards his most precious resources; his independence and his ability to maneuver. In other words his options and his ability to exercise them. True power isn’t controlling others, but the degree to which you control the course of your own life and your own choices. Commitment to anything ALWAYS limits this. When you step through one door, a hundred more close behind you. You’re free to do what you want, right? You can always quit a job, divorce a wife, change your school, etc., but how many men do you know who are what they are today as a result of their own real doing, unfettered by how their choices impact their GF, wife, kids, parents, etc.? By comparison, how many guys do you know who dutifully stick with a dead-end job that’s slowly killing them because it’s better than dealing with the consequences and backlash it would have on his family? Are they free to quit? Sure, but not without an impact on their families and relationships.

So where does this leave you? You have 2 paths as I see it. You can sarge and explore your options with multiple LTRs and, should you decide to become sexually involved, do so while maintaining non-exclusivity with them. Put off and unlearn the expectations you’ve been conditioned to accept through (feminine beneficent) social contrivances and truly explore your opportunities while bettering your own conditions in anticipation for becoming monogamous at some later point. Or, you can remain in your sense of moral doctrine (no shame in this) and still non-exclusively date and explore your options while you continue to better yourself with the caveat that you know you’ll be limiting your depth of experience. I wont denigrate a decision to opt for this, but far too few religious men have the perseverance to stay objective in their decision to ‘hold out’ and overlook major character flaws in women they’d like to be their spouse in a furious rush to marry them and get to “the sex part.” Better to fall short in conviction than make hurried decisions that will alter your life.

And perhaps this isn’t even what you’re driving at? I don’t know if it’s a religious conviction or an internalized social contrivance that passes for one that’s the cause of your hesitancy, but isn’t it interesting that both are so closely associated? I know devout atheists who still believe in the fallacy of the ONE or the soulmate myth. Most women (and far too many men) look at me as if I’d denied the existence of God when I elaborate on why I think their eHarmony, induced fantasy of a soulmate is hogwash and psychologically damaging on a social scale.

Regardless, whatever your reasons, women should only ever be a compliment to a man’s life, never the focus of it. When you start living for a woman you become that woman. Never again compromise your own identity to receive the ever-changing approval she grants you. You have to be the PRIZE at all times, not just while you’re single. In fact, it’s imperative that you remain so into an LTR. My suggestion to you is not to even entertain the idea of monogamy until you are established in your career for 2 years, after your college is complete. Play the field, do whatever, but do not commit even to a girlfriend. Rather make a commitment to yourself, promise yourself you wont allow yourself to let emotionality and conditioned expectations of monogamy dictate what your goals will be or how you’ll achieve them.

It’s called enlightened self-interest; you cannot help anyone until you’ve first helped yourself.