Game

The Surrogate Boyfriend

From a soon-to-be-unplugged 30Darren from the SoSuave forum:

I made a big mistake and got involved with a coworker. We dated for a little about a year ago but it never went far. Never slept with her. We became close friends though. We would hang out, Go to movie, Get dinner go for drinks and just hang out. We always talked even late with text and everything. I liked her a lot and she seemed comfortable with me.

I guess i felt i always had a chance with her because when we hung out she always flirted with me and having sex with each other seemed to be the topic we most talked about. She even mentioned shooting a porno with me. I don’t know if it was just mind games or if she was serious. Right now i don’t know what i was thinking, i should of let actions speak louder than words. But i really felt for her so i grasped on anything that made me feel like she was interested in me. This went on for about 8 months.

We had up and downs. I’m not completely stupid, there were times where i was trying to leave her alone and let each other move on but then she would get this increased interest in me and id fall back in line. I would leave her alone when she would have her little flings but eventually she would gravitate towards me again.

This week was a crazy week though. We went out had she took something i said completely the wrong way. We decided to give each other space (which i did) but then she was all over again when i gave her no attention. She started telling everyone i was her best-friend and then when we went out for drinks with co-workers she started calling me her Man. I didn’t play into and give that too much attention because i felt it wasn’t real. Two days later she is completely ready to end it with me. Said she was blocking my number from her phone and to not expect to hear from her again. she said it was “time for her to spend energy talking to a guy she actually likes more than just friends and that she’s not attracted to me and cant force herself to be, good-bye”. Ill admit. That really hurt. So abrupt and harsh. And remember i work with her.. What am i to do and how do i act. Is it a power game or is this is.

Women have Girlfriends and Boyfriends. If you’re not fucking her, you’re her Girlfriend.

One of the more heinous crimes inflicted upon the men of Generation AFC is the curse of the Emotional Tampon. Hapless Betas being cast into the role of perpetually having to be “supportive” and emotionally available for a woman he’s enamored with all in an effort to prove himself the ideal boyfriend is an 80’s Brat Pack movie plot cliché now. Oh, if only she could see past the hot jock jerks and find the true love that’s been here all along,…swoon,…

Typically when I read classics like this it’s on the high school forum at SoSuave, and for good reason; usually all it takes is one or two passes at this experience for young men to come to an understanding that they’re being manipulated. As we progress through adolescence and into early adulthood (if all goes as it should) there are a series of valuable learning experiences that teach us (albeit harshly) a mature adult set of social skills. This is generally where I begin when I assess particular intergender situations – are the participants using an adolescent social skill set? Has some factor retarded this maturation (such as premature monogamy, or a stubborn clinging to Disneyesque ideals) into an adult social skill set?

What makes Darren’s situation interesting is the pseudo-relationship he’s entertained with this girl for 8 months. For all the shit slinging about Three Strikes or the sex never being worth the wait for a Wait for It girl, it amazes me how readily and willing a majority of Beta men will be to entertain a sexless, quasi-monogamy. I’d like to blame the girl for her playing along, but I can’t – she’s only doing what women do when they pursue their pluralistic mating strategy. Don’t blame the Doberman for eating the juicy steak. It’s Darren’s failure to consolidate, and consolidate early, on ratcheting up his sexual interest in the girl that’s the primary issue.

In addition, Darren still doesn’t want to acknowledge that he never had a relationship with her, instead wondering if her ‘abrupt'(?) rejection is some kind of power game, and hoping against hope that he can salvage a monogamy that only existed in his head. What his part really amounts to is a Buffer against the very real rejection he could potentially experience by putting himself out into the real world by spinning plates. The longer her perpetuates his pseudo-relationship, the longer he forestalls having to face potential rejection.

The Surrogate

Darren was playing surrogate boyfriend, voluntarily accepting and internalizing all of the responsibilities and accountabilities of being a woman’s exclusive, monogamous partner with no expectation of reciprocating intimacy or sexuality. It is the ideal situation for a woman in the same manner a Booty Call is for a man – all sex with no expectations of monogamy, commitment or emotional investment.

You essentially become a surrogate boyfriend for her – fulfilling all the emotional availability and security needs the Jerk isn’t providing with no expectation of reciprocating intimacy on her part.

How Cruel?

From the standpoint of a guy who’s aware he’s become a surrogate boyfriend, and those who can objectively see that he is, it seem incredibly manipulative and deliberate for a woman to put a guy whom she knows has a definite interest level for her into that role. I would argue that, more often than not, a woman doing so has done so repeatedly in the past so often that it becomes normalized for her.

Is she aware of it?

On some level of consciousness perhaps, but it’s comfortable for her to do so because she’s unable to have both her emotional / security needs paired with her physical needs in the same guy. So her coping mechanism is to entertain a Nice Guy (sometimes multiple Nice Guys) from whom she gets emotional support and a security response from, while wallowing in the physical rush and the resulting drama caused by the Jerk. I go into this splitting of needs in Schedules of Mating:

There are methods and social contrivances women have used for centuries to ensure that the best male’s genes are selected and secured with the best male provisioning she’s capable of attracting. Ideally the best Man should exemplify both, but rarely do the two exist in the same male (particularly these days) so in the interest of achieving her biological imperative, and prompted by an innate need for security, the feminine as a whole had to develop social conventions and methodologies (which change as her environment and personal conditions do) to effect this.

Maintaining a series of surrogate boyfriends is one of the most directly observable manifestations of women sexual pluralism.

Women get off on perfecting a gestalt boyfriend from both the Nice Guy and the Jerk, but relatively few are aware of it, and among those who are, even fewer will expressly admit to it. They’ll quite happily allow a surrogate to continue in his qualifying himself to her in his efforts to “be a good listener” and “be there for her” until such a time as he grows frustrated and he becomes a liability in his own right, or a liability to her Jerk sex / drama interest. The hot guy who uses her up and leaves her on the bed wanting more will always take precedence over the emotional surrogate because they’re so easily attracted and entertained.

The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill

A lot gets made of the Dark Triad or the Dark Side of Game where a skillful player can sadistically use his newly learned red-pill super powers for evil instead of for the greater good of mankind. Game-aware women – the ones who have been forcibly exhausted of all pretense of maintaing the illusion that Game is a lie – feel as though it’s owed to them, in their concession of Game’s reality, that Men should use Game to women’s benefit. Even to the last effort women still cling to the tools of a feminized acculturation;

“Yeah, OK, you got us, Game is really what women want, hypergamy is the law of womankind, but now it’s your responsibility that you use it for the better benefit of society by molding a new breed of improved Betas to accommodate fem-centric monogamy. You owe us our security for having admitted to the grand illusion that’s kept you in thrall for so long.”

It’s an indictment of Game-aware women, and sympathizing men, that they should feel a need to delineate some aspects of Game into good camps (pro woman, pro feminized monogamy) and bad camps (manipulative, polygynous, male-centered). Even in the admission of the truth that Game has enlightened Men of, the feminine imperative still seeks to categorize the application of Game to its own end. That Men might have some means of access to their own sexual strategy is too terrible a Threat; Game must be colored good or bad as it concerns the imperatives of women and a fem-centric societal norm.

As the default, socially correct and virtuous concern, women have an easier time of this. As Game becomes increasingly more difficult to deny or misdirect for the feminine, the natural next step in accepting it becomes qualifying its acceptable uses. While hypergamy is an ugly truth, the characterization of it becomes “just how women are” –an unfortunate legacy of their evolution. However for Men, the characterizations of the harsher aspects of Game in its rawest form  (contingencies for hypergamy) are dubbed “the dark arts”.

Myth of the Dark Arts

According to common definition, the Dark Triad is a group of three personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, all of which are interpersonally aversive. Depending upon context, that may be a convenient assessment of a sociopathic personality, but it is hardly an accurate assessment of Game as a whole. In its desperation to come to terms with a more widespread acceptance of Game, the feminine imperative had to make some effort to disuade the common man (see Beta) from embracing the means to his release from the feminine Matrix. Associating Game with Dark Triad personality traits makes this qualification process much easier, since the feminine imperative owns the definition authority of what is social and what is anti-social.

The problem then becomes one of defining what acceptable use of Game is social and anti-social. Predictably Game-accepting women will want to cast Game into terms that suit them individually and accommodating for their own personal conditions as well as the priorities of their particular phase of life. However, because of such diverse conditions, consequently there is a lot of disagreement amongst Game-accepting women about what contextually constitutes appropriate use, thus a pick-and-pull form of rationalization about aspects of Game gets thrown about in their internal debates.

For feminized men this is a very confusing debate. It’s difficult enough for them to accept that women love Jerks (despite being told the contrary for half their lives by women), but for the Game-accepting women they still think are ‘quality’ it’s a bitter pill to swallow when these women debate the aspects of acceptable, lovable Jerk-like qualities and the evil, user, manipulative, ‘dark art’ Jerk that only contextually misaligns with their present conditions and priorities. For both the plugged-in and the freshly unplugged this is an incongruency that they have a tough time reconciling against the ideals of moralism that a fem-centric society has unwittingly convinced them of.

While a broader understanding of hypergamy and Game make for useful tools for enlightened single men, the Game-accepting Beta plug-in will still see it strictly as a means to satisfying the female imperative – long-term provisional monogamy. Any deviation from this narrative, any guy using Game for personal gain, personal pleasure or to enact his own sexual strategy is guilty of crimes against (feminized) society. Since the societal Greater Good has been defined by the feminine imperative, anything counter to it is definitively evil, counterproductive, anti-social and manipulative sociopathy.

The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill

The truth will set you free, but it doesn’t make truth hurt any less, nor does it make truth any prettier, and it certainly doesn’t absolve you of the responsibilities that truth requires. One of the biggest obstacles guys face in unplugging is accepting the hard truths that Game forces upon them. Among these is bearing the burden of realizing what you’ve been conditioned to believe for so long were comfortable ideals and loving expectations are really liabilities. Call them lies if you want, but there’s a certain hopeless nihilism that accompanies categorizing what really amounts to a system that you are now cut away from. It is not that you’re hopeless, it’s that you lack the insight at this point to see that you can create hope in a new system – one in which you have more direct control over.

There are no “Dark Arts”, this is simply one last desperate effort of the feminine imperative to drag you back into the Matrix. There is only Game and the degree to which you accept it and are comfortable in using it in the context that YOU define. If that context is under the auspices of a mutually beneficial, mutually loving, mutually respecting LTR monogamy of YOUR choosing, know that it’s the fundaments of Game that are at the root of its success or failure. If that context is in terms of spinning multiple plates, liberating the affections of women from other men, and enjoying a love life based on your personal satisfactions, also understand that it lives and dies based on your understanding the fundaments of Game.

Just as Alpha is not inherently nobel or deplorable, Game is neither inherently good nor evil – the Devil is in the details and whomever’s defined context in which you use it. In the introduction section of the 48 Laws of Power, author Robert Greene explains the same about power. Power is neither good nor evil, it simply is, and your capacity to use power, your comfort in using it, doesn’t invalidate the principles of power. Likewise, your discomfort or inability to accept those principles does not excuse you from the consequence of having that power used upon you.

The unwritten, 49th Law of Power, is denying the utility of power itself, or demonizing its use both moralistically and socially. With the wide dispersion of Game theory this has been the reactionary tact of the feminine imperative; appeal to the deeply conditioned moral, ethical, honorable, virtuous ideals engrammatically planted in men by a fem-centric society, while redefining the acceptable use of the same Game the imperative demonizes for its own purposes.

HB10

One of the most entertaining and enjoyable aspects of being active in the manosphere is reading the experiences of other men and then formulating some codified references of what guys relate. The Urban Dictionary is chock full of these colorful euphemisms. For instance, does anyone know what a “cranston” is?

Cranston
The cranston is the gap where the vaginal mound can be seen dipping into the space between the tops of the inside of a woman’s thighs and the bottoms of the inside of her buttocks.

Originally a military term.
I’d say she was about a two finger cranston to be honest.

I love a nice cranston.

The  most contentious term of reference almost always revolves around what physical body type men prefer as the feminine ideal. On damn near any major community forum you’ll find a thread attempting to definitively determine what hot piece of ass can be unanimously agreed upon to be the apex of male sexual desire – the mythical HB10. Even the Chateau used to have a dedicated page to just this purpose. As an aside, I’m still a bit confused as to what the HB actually stands for in this inference, ‘hot bitch’? ‘hot babe’? ‘hot butt’? I know Mystery coined this reference, but the “perfect 10” notion predated his by decades.

I really enjoy these threads because it brings such diverse experience and perspective to the table. In particular I love the individual posts where guys will attempt to define what an HB 1 through 10 is to them by posting pictures of examples of each strata of woman. I must credit these threads for disabusing me of the one-size-fits-all mentality I’d been conditioned to believe men had with regards to what they found arousing in a woman. This was one of the last residual mental schemas of feminization I needed to purge from my  head in my own unplugging – despite women’s protestations that all men have “impossibly high, media fueled, bikini model physical standards for women” I’ve come to understand that this is simply a canard that despondent fat / post-Wall women comfort themselves with.

While in a general sense it is true that men largely have a predisposition for physical traits that imply youth, fitness and fertility, within those parameter is a myriad of physical variety and permutations of body type, age and ethnicity. Even guys with a ‘thing’ for MILFs are still looking for physical features that fit into this parameter.

Attraction vs. Arousal

Attraction and arousal are really two different things for men. We may be attracted to a woman’s personality, her femininity, her playfulness, her spirit, etc., but we are aroused by her body and sexual availability. There are many women I’m attracted to, but I have a very distinct physical standard for women I find arousing. I think this was one of the difficulties I had in assuming all men had a similar archetype for physical perfection in their cues for arousal. I came to realize I have exceptionally stringent physical standards for the women I find arousing, but that didn’t my standards were every guy’s standards as feminization would have me shamed to believe.

Myself not withstanding though, there is so much room for variety in men’s arousal cues I think it’s a shame that fem-centrism has convinced women that men are universally corrupted to seek only a very narrowly defined set of physical prompts for sexual desire. For instance, I happen to think that women with big assess are too fat for my particular arousal, but I cannot ignore the fact that a significant proportion of men like nothing better than a nice ‘ghetto booty’. I don’t understand it in the same way I don’t understand foot fetishes, but I can’t deny the fact that there are men who get off on feet.

So take heart ladies, unless you are grossly malformed, or morbidly obese you’ll probably find a subset of men who ‘have a thing’ for fucking exactly your body type. You may think men’s evaluating you so clinically is offensive, but we are far more forgiving in our arousal cues that women will ever be in their own physical standards.

HB’s & SE’s

Since so much has been made of HB scales and ratings I don’t think it’s too unfair to present my own observation here.

On the Tomassi scale, there is no such thing as a an HB10 that you haven’t slept with. The last point to half point is ALWAYS earned on performance. I’m sure you wouldn’t buy a Maseratti if it had a VW engine under the hood. Subjectively I believe there are HB10s it’s just that the last point is earned on performance not attractiveness. An otherwise HB10 who turns out to be a ‘lick it around the edges’ girl instantly falls back to an HB7 or so,..That said, I feel the scale also has to be adjusted for geographic region. An HB 8 in Butte, Montana is an HB 5 in Los Angeles. You have to adjust the scale for regional concentration. Hot women tend not to congregate in remote places, they go where they know their looks will serve them best. This then increases the benchmark for that place since the field of competition is deeper. Based on personal experience, an HB 9.5 in South Beach, Miami etc. is well beyond anything NYC, Houston or Chicago could offer up on a consistent basis. The rating curve is more pronounced. Conversley a Miami HB 7, becomes an HB 9.5 in Boise, Idaho. However, after having lived in Hollywood, Las Vegas and Orlando, and traveling somewhat extensively, I think my standards are exceptionally high in this respect.

Lastly, I don’t think that the HB scale is entirely helpful for men’s assessment purposes since it only accounts for physical appeal. There needs to be a second rating attached to the HB (physical) standard, one that accounts for self-esteem SE.

If you rate looks (HB) on a 1-10 and self-esteem (SE) on a 1-10 scale, realistically you’ll want different ratios at different times. If you’re sport-fucking and have no desire for a LTR this ratio might be around HB9 to SE3, no lower than this though since a 3 (the way I’d rate it anyway) would indicate the threshhold for self-destructive personality disorders. If you’re looking for a companion for the long haul of monogamy, then you’ll adjust your ratio accordingly. An HB8+ to an SE 5-7 might be ideal. It’s when you perceive imbalances in the ratio that is cause for concern. For instance an HB7 with an SE of 8 (too self-important for her looks). Or extremes like HB2 to an SE of 9 (most rad-feminists, easily avoidable) and an HB9+ to an SE of 1 or 2 (the suicidal death spiral girl).

It’s all in the balance my sons.

Dread Games

I’m not exactly sure why, but somehow last week became the unofficial ‘dread’ week. I’ve had so many other irons in the fire both work-wise and blog-wise this month that I find it particularly annoying that my attentions should be distracted by this topic again, but I will admit that the comments about the evils of Men manipulatively employing a sense of dread in their LTRs has given me pause to analyze the dynamic in more detail. So, OK, I’ll bite, what’s all this dread about anyway?

The original huff about dread came in the wake of Roissy’s seminal post about instilling a sense of dread in a woman in order to help maintain a consistent frame control in a relationship. Naturally, women’s unconditioned response to this overt assertion of control was to demonize the whole idea of dread. When you think about it dread, as proposed,  is really a sense of conceptualizing the potential outcome of a losing the intimacy of a partner and the resulting fallout (emotional, financial, familial, personal, etc.) from that loss. Such an overt declaration for promoting a sense of dread conjures melodramatic images of fiendish men blackmailing their women into emotional enslavement to their insecure whims.

I think what’s lost amongst all this sensationalism about dread – a very weak term for the concept – is the applicability dread has in a much broader scope (and particularly for women) than the overly dramatic characterization of it when men openly discuss using it themselves.

Faces of Dread

I have a good friend, Jim, who’s just this side of 37. I love the guy, but Jim’s not much to look at. At around 30 he essentially gave up on himself. He got married far too young on the business end of a do-the-right-thing ‘accidental’ pregnancy, and from a personal standpoint that was the end of his window of opportunity to explore any other options he may’ve had. His wife let herself go just after the 2nd pregnancy, turned into a beach ball, and he followed suit. In actuality it wouldn’t take much for him to get back on top of his game, but he has no desire to.

Now, after detailing Jim’s situation you might think he’d be the last candidate to participate in anything resembling a manipulation of dread in a relationship, and you’d be right, but he, and guys like him are often the unwitting participants in their wives’ own dread-games. Although Jim isn’t going to spontaneously attract women with either his looks or due to his complete obliviousness to Game, he is an exceptional provider for his family. He regularly busts his ass as a programmer for a legal agency and is the sole breadwinner of the family – singlehandedly funding his wife’s nursing school. In addition he’s a very attentive father, husband and is somewhat of a handyman around the house. In spite of all this his wife tends to be a bit of a shrew, browbeating him on a regular schedule which has been passed onto the personalities of his teenage daughters who engage in the same heavy handedness their mother does.

Yet for all the passive-aggressive derision, Jim’s wife is easily one of the most possessive women I’ve ever known. He literally lives in a constant state of surveillance as to his whereabouts. She calls to verify he is where he says he is, and continually suspects him of running off to a strip club (which to my knowledge he’s never set foot inside one) or engaging in anyway with another woman. It’s gotten to the point that it’s comical to think that she’d have any worry that he’d be snatched away by a better woman, but there it is, the dreaded competition anxiety prompting unease in an, albeit LSE, woman with no realistic possibility of it ever occurring.

“I can’t compete with that,..”

Some of the most neurotically possessive women I’ve ever known have been the girlfriends and wives of amateur circuit bodybuilders – my brother’s former GFs actually being among them. Most of these girls, even the fitness competitors, had to either be very self-assured or they resorted to controlling tactics and possessiveness due to the constant reminder of how desired their Men were by other women. Even when that was explicitly not the case, the perception of their desirability was enough to bring this out in them. They had the love and desire of very elite Men, but this still wasn’t enough to pacify that innate sense of dread.

Dalrock has blogged ad infinitum about the feminized notion of how a man’s viewing “using” porn is conflated with adultery. To say nothing about the constant push to pathologize the male condition, this is an easy out for women following the Eat, Pray, Love script wanting to exit a marriage with cash and prizes. However, the fundamental point in that conflation is a woman’s, often overstated, inability to compete with the “porn star ideal of physical perfection and sexual acrobatics that no normal woman could ever be comfortable with.” Considering the sheer variety of men’s sexual appetites this is ludicrous on the surface of it, but it is illustrative of the predominance dread plays in women’s psyches. It doesn’t matter what the particulars of his sexual appetites are, she feels inadequate in that competition and fears a loss of intimacy.

Dread Games

I catch a lot of hostility from the femosphere for even suggesting a Man directly foster competition anxiety in his LTR, but the underlying reason for this venom is a preexisting condition of dread in women that can barely be tolerated when it’s under the surface, much less when it’s exposed. Dread, in this context, is an innate fear of loss of security that intensifies as a woman progresses further beyond the Wall and with her diminishing capacity to reestablish that provisioning security with a new partner. In fact it’s exactly this dread that is the root source of the gynocentric laws that award women cash & prizes in a divorce settlement. So powerful is this fear that legal assurances needed to be instituted to account for a woman’s lessened ability to secure long-term provisioning after a failed marriage, after the Wall, after pregnancies, etc.

Dread, for lack of a better term, is a female condition.

Although I’ve suggested casually returning flirtations with other women as a means to amplifying desire and illustrating social proof, this is hardly the only, or best, means of fostering competition anxiety. Overt flirtations are a blunt means of  stoking this anxiety, but often all it takes is a nuanced shift in a predictable routine to trigger that imagination. The idea isn’t to instill terror from fear of loss, but rather to demonstrate higher value; particularly when a woman’s attention is straying into comfortable, routine familiarity and she begins seeking indignation from other sources.

Sometimes all that’s necessary to provoke that imagination is to get to the gym, dress better, get a raise, travel for work, change your routine, adopt a Game mentality, hang out with a new (or old) friend, be cocky & funny with her – risk to offend her sensibilities. Most women believe that their pussies are sufficient to hold their men in thrall for a lifetime, but as a woman’s SMV declines and a Man’s appreciates their confidence in this form of leverage falls off, thus forcing them to adopt new schemas for controlling the fear of loss. When you head off to Las Vegas for that trade show and your wife fucks the ever-lovin’ shit out of you the night before you go, you’re experiencing one of those new schemas. It doesn’t take much, most times the lightest touch will do. Good dread game doesn’t even have to be initiated by you. Often enough, women will do it themselves.

In light of this ambient fear of loss women seek to avoid, one might be tempted to use a more sympathetic approach in order to allay a woman’s fears. This is hardly worth mentioning here since this is generally the tact that most men intuitively use in their LTRs anyway – a constant reassurance of love and devotion. Guy’s like my friend Jim will follow a perpetual strategy of appeasement in spite of themselves.

Lets be clear, the vast majority of women are secure enough not to allow this condition to get the better of them, and it’s in the extreme cases I’ve used above that real neuroticism flourishes. Contrary to popular belief I’m not an advocate of the Dark Triad methodologies of Game. Not because I think they’re ineffective, but rather because, with the right art of Game they’re not even needed. Only in extreme cases are the dark arts to be employed, and if a situation necessitates their use it’s important for a guy to understand that a line has been crossed with a woman who necessitated their use.

So yes, you should be seeking to reassure an LTR of your love and devotion, but know that due to women’s intrinsic fear of security loss, you will never achieve an ideal state of contentment of it, and certainly not by relying solely on comfort and familiarity. She want’s you to rock the boat, it’s what makes her feel alive.

The Gift of Anxiety

 

Well since Aunt Sue’s decided to click on the ‘echo chamber’ setting on her blog’s comment filters I thought I’d take the opportunity to retype my deleted response to her (once again) on my unmoderated blog. Aunt Sue has a big problem with competition anxiety, and since she secretly loves me, she can’t make it too obvious that she reads my blog posts regularly for inspiration. Hell, it’s almost a Friday tradition now! It’s OK dear, I’ll entertain you for the weekend. Roissy, Roosh and Dalrock send you their unrequited regards too,…

Dear Sue, you know instead of paraphrasing my perspective on this you could simply quote the bit in my post that set you off (again):

Women don’t want a Man to cheat, but they love a Man who could cheat. Naturally you don’t want to appear to be seeking the flirtation – that would be OVERT – but rather playing along with it. I have encouraged or played along with casual flirtations with my wife present that leave her with the impression that other women find me desirable. When you’ve been together long enough and a strong emotional bond has formed, you will be surprised at how many shit tests and hypergamous evaluations you can avoid just by her perception of you being a commodity that other women are attracted to. Mrs. Tomassi has told me on at least a dozen occasions that she finds it flattering that other women would find me attractive. Always remember that your attractiveness to other women is an associative reflection on your spouse’s attractiveness to hold your sexual interest in the long term.

The trick to this is how you follow up after flirting. She has to be made to feel as though she’s still the one you choose to be with even though you have obvious, provable options. Women are always unconsciously evaluating the men they are with. Her self-worth is associated with his value. This is exactly why women in the stablest of relationships will still shit test. There are precious few ways for a Man in a long standing LTR to establish social proof and demonstrate higher value better than reciprocating a flirt with other women. Nothing stimulates a tired LTR like suspicion and jealousy. Her Imagination is the most important tool in your Game tool box. The hamster doesn’t stop spinning after marriage, but it’s incumbent upon you to make sure it keeps up the pace.

The problem you have with my take on this is that you see it in an absolutist, all-or-nothing in-your-face disrespectful frame. As if every aspect of an LTR would be overshadowed by a malevolent ‘dread’ of loss bordering on emotional blackmail. You might be surprised to know I don’t actually agree with the idea of using the impending doom of ‘dread‘ per se.

If you could get past your taste for the melodramatic you’d realize that returning casual flirtations is actually a compliment to the woman a Man is with. It satisfies that internal, hypergamous doubt as to whether the guy a woman committed herself to years ago is still the Man other men want to be and other women want to fuck.

You see the problem with your perspective Sue is that you view intergender relations from a ‘security first’ priority. This is mostly due to your fem-centric conditioning, but also because you’re in a phase of life now where security means more to you than it did when you were in your 20’s or 30’s. It’s difficult to see the value of adding measured degrees of insecurity into an LTR when your long-term security becomes your paramount concern. After the Wall, women dread the idea of having to start over in a sexual market place in which they are grossly outmatched, so even the slightest deviation from the ‘security forever’ script becomes a major ego threat.

An LTR based on dread, a threat, or an implied ultimatum isn’t one based on genuine desire, and you know enough about my philosophy to understand how important real desire is to me. I think of it more as an ambient understanding that a Man is still desired by other women and this manifests in flirtatious behavior. Obviously if a guy is overtly seeking out opportunities to flaunt his flirtations with his LTR, that’d be indicative of him having other issues to resolve for himself. Guy’s thoroughly underestimate women’s sensitivity to nuance and subcommunication; it doesn’t take much to trigger her imaginings, but most guys think they need to beat her over the head with what he wants her to get; and that of course defeats his purpose – he’s too obvious.

Relationship Game – A Primer

I had a request from a comment thread to breakdown the function of Game within the confines of a marriage or LTR so at the risk of coming off as Athol on Married Man Sex I thought I’d elaborate a bit on maintaining a Game mindset into an LTR today.

Going Alpha

Before I dig in here I think it’s important to bear in mind that the principles of Game do not change in an LTR, only the context does. Every behavior set, every frame control tenet, every aspect of amused mastery and even PUAs skills like Cocky & Funny are all vitally necessary, if not more necessary in an LTR. One of the greatest failings married men begin their nuptials with is starting from a position of Betaness. I’ve encountered, and counseled, far too many men with the same story; they entered into their LTR or marriage from a default position of being the “supportive” submissive partner only to discover Game later in their relationship and then fight the very uphill battle of convincing their spouse that they’ve ‘genuinely’ experienced a radical shift in their outlook and personalities.

If all she’s ever known is the Beta you, convincing her you’ve gone Alpha is a tough road to hoe. An Alpha shift in an LTR is threatening to a woman who’s built a lifestyle around the predictability of the Beta guy she committed to. It stirs up the competition anxiety she’s been numbed to for a long time, and while that’s beneficial in prompting her genuine desire for you, it also upsets her sense of security. It’s for this reason that Beta men are reluctant to experiment with being more dominant; they carry over from their singlehood the same mistaken belief that women require comfort, familiarity and security in order to become intimate or “feel sexy”. They still fail to grasp, even in marriage, that sex by definition requires anxiety to be grounded in genuine desire. Sexual tension requires urgency.

So from the outset it’s important to acknowledge that going Alpha from a Beta default is going to require a measured, practiced effort. The ideal position is to begin an LTR from an incorrigible, irrationally self-confident, Alpha frame and encourage the belief in your partner that it was she who ‘mellowed’ you. It’s ingratiating and ego-flattering for a woman to believe that she has the capacity to charm the savage beast with her feminine wiles.

The Outline

If you are presently in an LTR, considering one or believe that you might be spinning a particular plate that may have that potential, I urge you to read through the Chateau’s 16 Commandments of Poon. This is one of Roissy’s seminal posts and should be required reading for every 18 year old young man upon graduating high school. This may seem like an odd place to begin relationship Game, but these tenets are not only the basis for good Game, but the foundations of a good, masculine primary LTR.

I’ll have been married for 16 years in July and in that time I can honestly say I’ve practiced every one of these tenets to varying degrees. However, I’ll focus on a few of the more contentious articles and explain the premises behind them:

II. Make her jealous
Flirt with other women in front of her.
Women don’t want a Man to cheat, but they love a Man who could cheat. Naturally you don’t want to appear to be seeking the flirtation – that would be OVERT – but rather playing along with it. I have encouraged or played along with casual flirtations with my wife present that leave her with the impression that other women find me desirable. When you’ve been together long enough and a strong emotional bond has formed, you will be surprised at how many shit tests and hypergamous evaluations you can avoid just by her perception of you being a commodity that other women are attracted to. Mrs. Tomassi has told me on at least a dozen occasions that she finds it flattering that other women would find me attractive. Always remember that your attractiveness to other women is an associative reflection on your spouse’s attractiveness to hold your sexual interest in the long term.

The trick to this is how you follow up after flirting. She has to be made to feel as though she’s still the one you choose to be with even though you have obvious, provable options. Women are always unconsciously evaluating the men they are with. Her self-worth is associated with his value. This is exactly why women in the stablest of relationships will still shit test. There are precious few ways for a Man in a long standing LTR to establish social proof and demonstrate higher value better than flirting, or reciprocating a flirt with other women. Nothing stimulates a tired LTR like suspicion and jealousy. Her Imagination is the most important tool in your DJ tool box. The hamster doesn’t stop spinning after marriage, but it’s incumbent upon you to make sure it keeps up the pace.

Far too many guys are too fearful to even attempt this because they subscribe to a scarcity mentality (see Rule 16)

This then dovetails nicely into,…

VII. Always keep two in the kitty
Never allow yourself to be a “kept man”. A man with options is a man without need.

I understand this may be a very tall order for most men, particularly those with scarcity mentalities. However, I would interpret this less as spinning plates while in an LTR and instead replace it with keeping your options open. One reason to flirt in front of your LTR is to establish the suspicion that you have those options, and then allay those fears. Again this goes back to being a man who could cheat, but chooses not to. Men think that their dependability and steadfastness makes for a sexualized woman – it doesn’t.

Particular to relationship Game is this idea: Never allow yourself to be a “kept man.” Don’t make the mistake that I’m promoting infidelity by this, but rather think of it as maintaining an ambient, unspoken cognisance that, while she is a compliment to your life, she is not the focus of it.

I’ll be very clear, I’ve never cheated on Mrs. Tomassi, but I do know I could be balls deep in pussy if we ever did split. I know this because I experience the receptiveness of women to whom I do flirt with. I realize this sounds like conceit, but even if I were completely in error about that receptiveness I do know I’m in better shape, have more Game and possess higher status and value than 90% of the men in my peer group. So keeping two in the kitty for me is knowing that I CAN generate options if necessary. This may or may not be your particular reality, but it needs to be your mental state.

V. Adhere to the golden ratio
Give your woman 2/3 of everything she gives you.

This isn’t hard once you internalize it. Too many guys think Game is a waste of time because it means a constant memorization of scripts and gestures that they can never hope to master in every situation for every eventuality. And they’d be right – if all they did was try to commit everything to rote memorization. But as any good teacher will tell you, that’s not learning. Once the golden ratio becomes part of who you are it’s effortless and becomes your default response. Remember this is an outline. I don’t think aloud to myself “hmmm, well Mrs. Tomassi gave me 3 kisses this morning, I must remember to give her only 2 when I get home from work.” It’s an outline for a principle that you need to get the ‘feel’ for. The point isn’t trying to keep some scorecard of tit for tat exchanges. The effect you’re establishing is,..

it establishes your greater value by making her chase you, and it demonstrates that you have the self-restraint to avoid getting swept up in her personal dramas. Refraining from reciprocating everything she does for you in equal measure instills in her the proper attitude of belief in your higher status.

All the bleating sounds popularized by the post-Wall demographic of women about how there are precious few available men with the capacity to Man-Up and be the high status Men they’re entitled to find their root in this principle. For all the ramblings of the equalists they still betray their true desires in their own complaints – women DEMAND a man of higher status than themselves.

I add this at the end of this primer to address the criticism that will inevitably follow; “So, a wife should just be your doting slave then Rollo?” No, and neither should a man be his wife’s self-convinced slave. If you get anything from my blog it should be this – I am always focused on the Desire Dynamic. A slave might behave in ways that please you, but you cannot negotiate genuine desire, nor can you extort genuine desire. Freewill is an interesting topic, especially in terms of intergender relations, but understanding the dynamics that promote genuine, unobligated desire is paramount to a good relationship.

Fidelity

I was recently asked by Die Hard to add my personal input regarding fidelity on SoSuave. Rather than post an overwritten essay on the forum I thought the broader readership might be interested in the discussion:

So you guys are married… Rollo recently told me he has never cheated on his wife and I’m pretty sure Slick and Back haven’t either.

My question is: Why?

Before you guys were married, you had (or would have had) absolutely no problem with spinning plates and banging several chicks at the same time. So why do you have a problem with it now? What ADVANTAGE does it bring you to be monogamous with your wife?

I constantly get asked this, “how can you propose the ideas you do and still be married?” It’s actually because of my marriage that I feel qualified to do so. On this blog and in my SoSuave posts I generally make a point not to include too much personal details about my individual experience; first because it contributes to bias in analysis, and second because it always comes off as self-aggrandizing in some respects. However, to answer your question I have to give you some background about myself, so I apologize in advance if it sounds like I’m glossing myself here.

A Brief History

I was a stereotypical, but extroverted beta in my adolescence. I got played and/or rejected constantly until my senior year. I got laid for the first time at 17 with really the first girl who’d be my “girlfriend”. I literally rearranged my life to accommodate us having regular sex, to the point that I would travel from one end of L.A. to another by bus over a weekend. I wont bore you with the beta details, but suffice to say it didn’t end well.

It was after this that my 20 y.o. mind decided I liked getting laid more than I liked playing up to the Nice guy bullshit that got me raked over the coals with my “girlfriend”. I was already playing in bands at that stage and the Hollywood metal scene of the late 80’s and early 90’s was just begging me to come play and at 21 I was finally old enough to realize it.

I was a kid in a candy store. Rail thin, long blonde hair down to my ass, playing in two very popular bands and opening for national acts, doing session playing for Paramount TV shows occasionally; by 22 it was so easy to bang women I didn’t even consider trying to get with them. I had Game at the time, but it was the unpracticed default Game that comes from the confidence in knowing you have instant social proof and women will approach you. Which was funny because for most of it I was flat broke, but somehow managed to have women buy me drinks and all kinds of ‘gifts’ to offset that.

Of the 40+ women I’ve banged, about 38 of them were during the times I was between the age of 21 and 25. And there were all kinds of women; mostly the club sluts that guys in the community like to complain about, but also some nice Latinas, two MILFs (one was a manager for the band I was in), one brief single mother, two strippers, a nice church girl, even a Vietnamese girl who could fuck like a Tasmanian Devil. I had them as young as 17 and as old as 45 . Blondes, brunettes, redheads, big tits, small tits, one fatty, one coke addict, a girl with an MBA, and several from community college. I didn’t give the girls who’d rejected me in high school an afterthought. I was doing naturally what I later came to understand was spinning plates.

It got so easy I could walk into a club in another state, where no one even knew me and could still pull top shelf ass that most guys only whacked off to porn over. But all that came crashing down when I met the BPD psychotic girl I mention here. This was the real test of my true beta-ness, I wanted her to be my ‘dream girl’ but she was the daughter of Satan. Every high I was experiencing at that time turned into the lowest misery I could’ve imagined. It was a living hell, but one I wanted to be in. I had opportunities to get away, I had other women still throwing themselves at me for a time, but I wanted that BPD to be ‘the ONE’.

It was at that lowest point that I knew what it was like to be lower than a beta, I was an abject omega with her.

It wasn’t until mercifully after 4 years that I extracted myself from her web of neurosis, that I gradually transformed myself back into an adult Alpha mindset. I changed my mind about myself and got back on my feet by putting myself first.

Afterlife

In the time before I met Mrs. Tomassi, I’d been the cheater, and the cheated. I banged other guy’s women on GNOs, I’ve had sex with girls within 2 hours of meeting them. And I got cheated on and LDR cuckolded by the BPD girl. I’ve done all of that. A lot of guys drop the line that they’re monogamous because they’re sick of the game, but they never really experienced that game. They settle because they’d rather trade mundane ‘sure thing’ sex for risking more real rejection. From my personal perspective I laugh at this rationalization – especially when I hear a guy married for 3 or 4 years tell me how he’s tempted to cheat on his wife or wonder what banging this new girl would be like if only he hadn’t married so early. They can’t escape the nagging doubt that their lives could’ve been something different if only they’d held out longer.

I think it’s vitally important for guys to ‘get it out of their system’ and experience women in as visceral, emotional and practical a way as possible before even considering monogamy. A lot of my critics like to say, “well we can’t all be like Rollo and get everything right” but I profess what I do because I got more things wrong. I attribute the success of my marriage to having gone through what I did in my 20’s.

When I was considering proposing to Mrs. Tomassi the one overarching concern I had wasn’t about pre-qualifying her for some laundry list of wifely qualities I had in my head. My first thought was “is she someone I can remain faithful to?” That was my primary concern, is she someone I’ll just cheat on? I know me, I’ve seen me do it. I got lucky in that for 15+ years she’s been a great wife, mother and companion, but honestly I wanted a woman who would keep my sexual interest in perpetuity. She’s much more than this, but in all honesty I wanted a woman to stay as hot and sexually available as possible for the longest time possible. Call that shallow if you like, but I’ve never cheated on her in over 16 years because she has, and in my line of work the opportunities are always there.

Infidelity

What most people don’t understand about infidelity is that, for cheating to occur two primary elements must be present – cause and opportunity. Women tend to get caught up in the minutiae of cheating because it stokes their need for indignation; even vicariously through their girlfriends they’d rather wallow in the chemical rush that jealousy, suspicion and betrayal induce for them. Guys do too to an extent, but I think they focus more on the loss of the investment, especially the emotional investment. What both fail to see is the reasoning behind that act of infidelity.

Most men never cheat simply because they don’t have an opportunity to do so. Either they’re not in the correct environment or they just lack Game or aren’t attractive enough to really be a consideration for cheating with. These are the guys who’ll self-righteously declare how proud they are of their convictions in remaining faithful to their wives, when in fact they make their necessity a virtue due to circumstance. When you look at how most infidelity progresses it’s often prompted by the proximity of a willing partner. Opportunity is circumstantial.

Cause to cheat is much more complex. For men it’s often a feeling of not being appreciated, but more so than this is their wife’s lack of sexual interest or their own lack of interest in her because she devolved into something they never thought she would. As I stated before, if you don’t know what you’re missing, you’ll think you’re missing out. I know a disproportionate number of men who’ve cheated as the result of having cashed in on their potential in exchange for the ‘safety’ they thought marriage offered.

There are plenty of men with ample cause to cheat, but never do because they simply lack any real option to do so. That may not be enough for some men and they’ll extend that cause into creating their own options to do so; they hit up a prostitute, or put themselves into situations where they could cheat. Then there are guys like me who have plenty of opportunity to cheat as part of their work, but don’t because they don’t have any real cause to motivate them.

I’d love to speak from some Pollyanna, Promise Keeper’s moral high ground, but I really don’t have a reason to cheat.  That isn’t to say I haven’t been tempted, but in the back of my head I know I’ve nailed some comparative girl in my past. I don’t dwell on wondering what it would be like to bang one of my ‘pour girls’ or the hot receptionist at one of our distributors, because I fondly recall fucking a girl who looked like her 20 years ago. For me, one of the benefits of having lived plate theory (albeit inadvertently) is knowing I climbed that mountain a while ago.

Yes, I love my wife, we have a mutual respect, and were are a good fit, but I don’t feel crushing guilt for finding some other woman attractive. In fact Mrs. Tomassi tells me that when I stop looking at hot women, that’s the day she’ll start to worry. For the last 16 years she’s been someone I could be faithful to. My wife trusts me implicitly; in fact she’s been the inspiration of, or planted the germ of an idea in me about a lot of post topics most of my readers would find surprising. In 2010 I left for a product launch in Aruba. I was surrounded by stunning women, not one of which could be rated lower than an HB8.5. They had put me up in one of the best suites in the hotel. When I told Mrs. Tomassi I’d be gone for 4 days in Aruba she said, “if you’re gonna do any fishing there you’ll need to bring extra cash”. How many married men do you know whose wives would’ve gone ballistic over even the consideration of doing that? How many men’s wives would “forbid” him to go?

Advantages

You also asked if  there’s a particular advantage to monogamy that can’t be achieved in spinning plates, and besides having raised a whip-smart, beautiful, honor-roll-student, 13 y.o. daughter, not really. Does that sound odd or callous? It probably does because I don’t think a comparison of advantage to disadvantage in either lifestyle is really an issue. I think they’re two different ways of living and one is not necessarily better than the other – just different for different people at different phases in life. For the record I’m not anti-marriage, I’m anti-never-saw-it-coming-pollyana-how-could-she-do-this-to-me?-hypergamy’s-a-bitch marriage.

Do I know that marriage is a racket and puts a man legally and socially at an extreme disadvantage? Yes. Am I aware of the divorce fraud industry? Yes. Do I understand that for a woman to achieve her sexual imperatives I necessarily must sacrifice my own? I’ve written volumes about it. Do I know that women fundamentally lack the capacity to appreciate the sacrifices a man makes to ensure her sexual imperatives? You need to ask? So why get married?

Before he died, I can remember a conversation I had with my father where I was asking him about why he married my mom. I could never get a straight answer out of him, but he wasn’t being elusive. I was younger and unmarried then, now that I’m older I think I understand that he was telling me the truth when he said “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” He honestly thought he and my mother could make a life together when they got married in their mid 20s.

The reason I asked him was because I knew virtually nothing about their courtship and how such disparate personalities could come together and thus have me. He passed away back in September of 2010 and I rooted through his old photo albums with my mom. Here was this life my father lived in these photos that I had no inkling of. Shots of my parents years before my brother and I even came into existence. Lots of shots from their sailing days in the early 60s, friends whom I had never heard mention of, and an early life where no children were present. Just from perusing these shots I got a whole new perspective of my old man. He was in love with my mom, my mother who’d left the family in the mid 70s. They divorced when I was about 8 I think, and since then I’ve only ever known them as separate entities.

I think if most guys are honest with themselves, on some level they buy the idea that they and some idyllic woman can live out a plan or be happy together for a lifetime. I honestly couldn’t tell you why I proposed to Mrs. Tomassi. I wasn’t forced by pregnancy or emotionally coerced by some BPD’s neurosis. I can only echo my Dad’s words now, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” I still do, and I’m not naive to knowing what could happen, and that women are fully capable of betraying a man after 20 years of marriage. There is no security in marriage.

Men are the true romantics, not women. They talk a good game, but it’s men who are the real slaves to romanticism. It’s men who conceive every romantic gesture. Mrs. Tomassi wears the wedding ring my father picked out for my mom all those years ago. The back story is kind of lost on her, she just loves the ring and life goes on. We want to believe in the fairy tale. We want to believe we’ll be the exception against all odds and every horror story. My father was probably the most uninspired man you’d ever meet when it came to women. He was very analytical, he was very ordered in his life, but he was also a hopeless savior for the women in his life. I wouldn’t call him a White Knight; he was much too rational for chivalry, but he did what he did because even he, the staunch atheist, believed marriage could make you happy. At some point my old man looked at that ring in the jewelry store and thought “yeah, that’s a good one, I could see that on my wife.”

The Flow

When I was writing Breadcrumbs this week, I was attempting to focus on one aspect of an overall whole of applicable Game that I assumed most readers of this blog would already have some grasp of. I regret that I’m sometimes hasty in these assumptions; there are plenty of freshly unplugged Men who are looking for practical information on Game who’re completely unfamiliar with the techniques and associated principles that support them. It’s a shame to me to think that a guy’s first experience with Game should come from, to put it gently, a more juvenile mindset. It’s no wonder most men spit the red pill out after being told ham-handedly to “just neg the target bro.” It’s difficult enough for most men to come to terms with their fem-centric psychological conditioning, but doubts about the legitimacy of a still evolving Game, courtesy of adolescents, is often enough to drive a man back into his mental cocoon.

What I was alluding to in Breadcrumbs was an element in the overall flow of a date. I use the term “date” here in its loosest meaning; no one really “dates” anymore, but there is a progression in engaging a woman you have an interest in, whether you’re on date number three of an LTR or you’re working towards a same night lay.

The Process

As odd as this will sound there is a natural “flow” to a date that escalates to intimacy. Much of what the mPUAs teach is really emulation of behaviors that follow this flow. Damn near every PUA technique (tools in the toolbox) is a behavior most men in the seminars have never figured out on their own either by way of fear of rejection, or simply no opportunity. Kino, C&F (cocky & funny), peacocking, open-ended questions, conversational skills, isolation, escalation, etc. are all part of this flow. When a guy gets stuck at a particular stage in this flow the date breaks down, interest levels waiver. This may be him, it may be her, often a combination of both, but the flow stalls out and intimacy is not arrived at.

For a guy used to rejection (and at some point this is ALL guys) and sexual deprivation, the natural impulse is to blather out as much information as possible in the shortest amount of time for fear that he wont get another stab at the only girl in recent memory who accepted his approach. He disrupts the flow and ceases to intrigue the woman. As counterintuitive as this seems (and contrary to the popular belief that women want full disclosure and complete honesty) women want to read a Man chapter by chapter, each chapter being a new reward for her interest.

Nothing is more self-satisfying for a woman than for her to think she has pieced together who you are using her (imagined) feminine intuition.

But the AFC rattles off his life-story book summation from the back cover and feeds her the cliff notes all in the course of a 2 hour date, vomiting it out all over the restaurant table and mistakenly believes it’s just a necessary step to intimacy and familiarity. He loses the initiative, his sense of mystery, his challenge and his attention is too easily given – and is therefore worthless because she didn’t have to earn it. In his rush to get past the uncomfortable stages of clumsily developing rapport, he denies her the satisfaction of having to ‘figure him out’.

Embracing the Flow

The guy who successfully escalates is the Man who’s conscious of this flow and isn’t afraid to sometimes pause it, be deliberately ambiguous, or halt it altogether in order to leave her wanting more – then restarting it, should it hang. The Man who’s got options isn’t afraid of keeping his own mystery and challenge about him, and women covertly pick up on this nuance. The guy who does this communicates confidence subconsciously in that she picks up on the fact that his attention (and personal information) is a reward for her interest. This is the ‘breadcrumb’ ideal that maintains flow. Give her just enough tidbits, breadcrumbs, about yourself to pick up the next one and lead her where you (and she) want her to be.

Be Her Drug Dealer

I should note at this point that there is a certain bio-chemical aspect for women experiencing intrigue. However, by this definition, a person can develop a ‘tolerance’ to the endorphin cocktail if exposed to it often enough. When engaging a woman, probably the last thing on a Man’s mind is the hormonal responses being triggered for her while the ‘date’ progresses. The easiest illustration of this is the “action date” theory; do something exciting with your target in order for her to associate that feeling with you. On the front end, she’s jet skiing with you in South Beach, but on the backend her body is producing adrenaline and dopamine in excitement. The ideal state is very Pavlovian; you want the very mental image of you to produce the same effect in her body chemistry.

That’s all fine, but maintaining that rush doesn’t need to come exclusively from bungee jumping or sky diving. Those same chemical triggers can be stimulated with indignation, jealousy, lust, intrigue, suspicion, imagination, etc., basically all the food her internal hamster needs to spin the wheel. Far too many men underestimate a woman’s nuanced sensitivity to the prompts that trigger this biological response.

Using this information, it would seem that the right idea would be to do the intuitive thing and perpetuate the good feeling rush of the date by rattling off as much detail about yourself in the shortest amount of time to get to intimacy. It seems to make sense since every guy’s been told the way into a woman’s pants is to make her feel comfortable with him, to be her friend, be sensitive, listen to her, etc. So he can’t appreciate the necessary anxiety that comes from sexual tension in attraction. The attraction phase is uncomfortable, and the natural, predictable response is to avoid the discomfort. So while she may be high on endorphins at the time, his rationale is still deductive – how does he get from point A to point B to point C?

He desexualizes, he sells the farm, he makes himself an open book and essentially kills the impetus and breaks the flow.