Inter-gender Communication

Men in Love

Dalrock had an interesting post last week – She’s the Victim – and as is the nature of Dal’s conversation the post served as the tree trunk for various branches of very interesting off-shoot discussion. Starviolet, a regular commenter (some would say troll) dropped what was a seemingly innocuous question:

“Can men really not tell when a woman doesn’t love them?”

As would be expected, the male responses to this and her followup comments ranged from mild annoyance of her naiveté to disbelief of her sincerity with regards to her “want to know.” However, her original wonderment as to whether men did in fact know when a woman doesn’t love them, I think, carries more weight than most guys (even manosphere men) realize. So I thought I’d recount my comments and the discussion here.

Can men really not tell when a woman doesn’t love them?

No, they can’t.

Why? Because men want to believe that they can be happy, and sexually satisfied, and appreciated, and loved, and respected by a woman for who he is. It is men who are the real romantics, not women, but it is the grand design of hypergamy that men believe it is women who are the romantic ones.

Hypergamy, by its nature, defines love for women in opportunistic terms, leaving men as the only objective arbiters of what love is for themselves. So yes, men can’t tell when a woman doesn’t love them, because they want to believe women can love them in the ways they think they could.

From Women in Love:

Iron Rule of Tomassi #6
Women are utterly incapable of loving a man in the way that a man expects to be loved

Women are incapable of loving men in a way that a man idealizes is possible, in a way he thinks she should be capable of.

In the same respect that women cannot appreciate the sacrifices men are expected to make in order to facilitate their imperatives, women can’t actualize how a man would have himself loved by her. It is not the natural state of women, and the moment he attempts to explain his ideal love, that’s the point at which his idealization becomes her obligation. Our girlfriends, our wives, daughters and even our mothers are all incapable of this idealized love. As nice as it would be to relax, trust and be vulnerable, upfront, rational and open, the great abyss is still the lack of an ability for women to love Men as Men would like them to.

HeiligKo responds:

All right, I keep hoping your rule #6 is wrong, but it hasn’t proven to be. So is the big lie that men miss not that women can provide this, but that we don’t invest this energy into fellow men? That we don’t find men we can be vulnerable with, so that we are emotionally prepared for the trials that women will create in our homes. Is this why so many women tend to isolate their husbands or boyfriends from their male friends early on in marriage or dating?

Presuming Starviolet was genuinely confused (and I’m half-inclined to think she is) this is exactly the source of Starviolet’s confusion. Women’s solipsism prevents them from realizing that men would even have a differing concept of love than how a woman perceives love. Thus her question, “can men really not tell when a woman doesn’t love them?”

I don’t necessarily think it’s a ‘big lie’, it’s just a lack of mutuality on either gender’s concept of love. If it’s a ‘lie’ at all it’s one men prefer to tell themselves.

Bridging the Gap

Later in the discussion Jacquie (who is one of the two female writers to make my blogroll) brought up another interesting aspect of bridging the lack of mutuality between either gender’s concepts of love:

If it is beyond what a woman is capable of, therefore even if a woman recognizes this incapacity in herself, is there no way to compensate? What if a woman truly desires to try to move beyond this? Does she just consider it a hopeless matter and do nothing? Or is it something she should strive for continuously with the hope that she can at least move somewhat closer to this idealized love? Is it even too much for her to comprehend?

As I was telling HeligKo, it’s more a lack of mutuality on either gender’s concept of love. Starviolet’s question about whether a man can determine when a woman doesn’t love him goes much deeper than she’s aware of. I think a lot of what men go through in their blue pill beta days – the frustration, the anger, the denial, the deprivation, the sense that he’s been sold a fantasy that no woman has ever made good upon – all that is rooted in a fundamental belief that some woman, any woman, out there knows just how he needs to be loved and all he has to do is find her and embody what he’s been told she will expect of him when he does.

So he finds a woman, who says and shows him that she loves him, but not in the manner he’s had all this time in his head. Her love is based on qualifications and is far more conditional than what he’d been led to believe, or convinced himself, love should be between them. Her love seems duplicitous, ambiguous, and seemingly, too easily lost in comparison to what he’d been taught for so long is how a woman would love him when he found her.

So he spends his monogamous efforts in ‘building their relationship’ into one where she loves him according to his concept, but it never happens. It’s an endless tail-chase of maintaining her affections and complying with her concept of love while making occasional efforts to draw her into his concept of love. The constant placating to her to maintain her love conflicts with the neediness of how he’d like to be loved is a hypergamic recipe for disaster, so when she falls out of love with him he literally doesn’t know that she no longer loves him. His logical response then is to pick up the old conditions of love she had for him when they first got together, but none of that works now because they are based on obligation, not genuine desire. Love, like desire, cannot be negotiated.

It took me a long time, and was a very tough part of my own unplugging when I finally came to terms with what I thought about love and how it’s conveyed isn’t universal between the genders. It took some very painful slap-in-the-face doses of reality for this to click, but I think I have a healthier understanding of it now. It was one of the most contradictory truths I had to unlearn, but it fundamentally changed my perspective of the relations I have with my wife, daughter, mother and my understanding of past girlfriends.

If it is beyond what a woman is capable of, therefore even if a woman recognizes this incapacity in herself, is there no way to compensate? What if a woman truly desires to try to move beyond this? Does she just consider it a hopeless matter and do nothing?

I don’t think it’s necessarily impossible, but it would take a woman to be self-aware enough that men and women have different concepts of their ideal love to begin with, which is, improbable. The biggest hurdle isn’t so much in women recognizing this, but rather in men recognizing it themselves. So, hypothetically, yes you could, but the problem then becomes one of the genuineness of that desire. Love, like desire, is only legitimate when it’s uncoerced and unobligated. Men believe in love for the sake of love, women love opportunistically. It’s not that either subscribe to unconditional love, it’s that both gender’s conditions for love differ.

Women Studies

Last week Heartiste had some excellent play-by-play Game analysis of this video. The guy doing the approach in the video is Steve, who is a friend of Krausers, and before I go into today’s post I just wanted to take a moment to say that Steve’s confidence and Game savvy is impressive. Whether he’s consciously aware of how well he’s internalized Game or if it’s a practiced effort, just like Krauser he gets a lot of points in the Tomassi book for application.

I’m not going to speculate as to whether Steve tapped into some natural reserve of Alpha mojo, or if he’s got his Game down to the point that it’s been internalized into his personality, or that his choice of woman in this instance was more advantageous to his personality type. Nor will I speculate that it may have been his Look and physique that led to a 5 minute kiss-close. I don’t have to because all of this was predictably scrawled across Roissy’s post comments. I say ‘predictably’ because when we observe a process we do so in terms of how it fits our own internal narratives.

As would be expected, the accusations of fraud and the disqualifications of how hot Steve’s target was started the hit parade, but amongst the “it was a set up” and “how much did it cost her to go along with it?” were some very interesting (though equally predictable) responses from The Chateau’s host of regular female commenters. The responses ran the gamut between “that’s so disrespectful”, “He’s so desperate. He comes across as a stalker and a lunatic” and “wow, did I just watch video documentation of sexual harassment?” to “that would never work on me! I have self-respect” to “yeah he’s kind of cute and has good Game.”

Geisha Kate summed it up best:

Its a simple matter of perception. An onlooker cannot feel what the people in the video felt. To them it was an awesome experience. The onlooker can’t tap into that and so it appears silly, etc. (no offense). Girls can look at this video and say, “that wouldn’t work on me,” but it likely would, and guys can look at the video and say it was because of his looks, which may be part of it, but its not the whole picture.

Kate’s was far and away the most objective of the female input; the rest of which were mostly an effort in plausible deniability of women’s universal attraction/arousal cues (NAWALT and “we’re attracted to different things”) to their, now expected, self-important anecdotal experiences absolving women of the obviously effective results Game had on one of their sisters.

Women Studies

The rest of what followed was essentially a debate between women (and less Game savvy men) coming to terms with Steve’s close and the red pill community’s dissection of the social and psychological dynamics observed in the video. The feminine side qualifies, disqualifies and personalizes the reasons why Game works, while the red pill side builds workable theories upon concrete analysis. All of this comes as the result of observing a process.

Steve’s approach video has everything the community and women alike could ask for. In it’s shot-on-video, raw genuineness it appeals to feminine indignation, the likes of which even Cheaters or Tyra Banks pale next to. Yet at the same time it is titillating enough to women’s arousal process that they’re drawn into casting themselves in the role of Steve’s Columbian target (not unlike the Twilight Dynamic). For blue-pills and white knights, it’s easily dismissed as some girl who “has no respect for herself” and they’ll continue their quest for the Holy Grail (a Quality Woman®) with a twinge of self-doubt that all women are in fact ‘like this’ and Steve’s approach might actually have merit. And that of course leaves the red-pill community with a lot of red meat to consume in verifying proposed dynamics and how well this girl’s response aligned with what’s already been established in our own version of ‘women studies’.

The manosphere is prescient if it’s anything, and as if on cue Vox fired off a very relevant post in light of the video debate at the Chateau – The logical fallacy of female attraction. As per usual, Aunt Giggles is still soft-selling the ‘betas-are-the-sexiest-of-men’ trope that only women in their 50’s can afford to invest themselves in. I say this is relevant to the debate over Steve’s video because the women (and manginas) commenting about it are uniformly conflicted amongst themselves in defining what characteristics, qualities, physique, attitude, behaviors, etc. empirically constitute attraction/arousal cues for women.

As I detailed in the Feminine Mystique, from a social perspective, the feminine imperative can’t afford men understanding the methods behind the madness with regards to optimizing hypergamy. A persistent sense of feminine ambiguity and female unknowability must constantly be reinforced for men by women. Thus women (and less enlightened men) perpetuate the myth that “women just don’t know what they want”, but is that the truth of it? Are women really unaware of their own attraction triggers? Or is it that they are so preoccupied with optimizing hypergamy (in a short window of SMV peak) that they’re simply never bothered by an inquisitive thought about what factors contribute to their being turned on enough to fuck one guy, but conversely being attracted to another for a long term commitment? Are women ever really prompted to observe their own process?

Observing a process will change it.

From the end of Vox’s Logical Fallacy post:

“Showing no emotion and saying absolutely nothing is an excellent way to avoid interrupting the process.”

Vox mentions that more sociopathic men, being entirely self-concerned and outcome indifferent, are primarily the types of men women feel the most arousal for and attraction to. In other words, the sociopath, in his self-importance, can’t be bothered to observe the process of attraction in women.

That said, I can’t help but find a similar parallel in women’s cognitive ignorance of their own attraction cues. Women’s innate solipsism (further reinforced by fem-centrism), like the self-importance of the sociopathic man, predisposes her to be oblivious to her own pluralistic sexual strategy (Alpha vs. Beta attraction). A woman’s solipsistic nature suggests she can’t be bothered to observe her own process.

In fact I would argue that evolution and hypergamy has selected-for women who are more predisposed to being oblivious to their own attraction cues, thus allowing them more cognitive brain-space to be devoted to filtering for the best mating option and the best long term provisioning option among prospective males.

By its very nature, women’s strategic sexual pluralism – Alpha Cads and Beta Dads – creates an unresolvable internal psychological conflict. Women cannot consciously reconcile the sexual impulsivity that drives them to (want to) fuck the hottest genetic Alpha with the drive for the security that a Beta provider represent with respect to parental investment. This dichotomy is even hard-coded into women’s hormonal cycle, impelling women to the sexual prowess of Alpha dominance in the follicular phase, and to Beta comfort in the luteal phase of menstruation. The solution? A healthy female psyche pushes this irreconcilable conflict to the peripheries of her conscious awareness.

The rationalization hamster we know today was psychologically evolved to mitigate the mental anguish that results from women’s pluralistic sexual strategy.

One of the contentions women participating in the manosphere have with red pill Men is that those men are observing women’s process and bringing it to conscious light in a globalized, meta perspective. Thus the scramble back to NAWALT, or women mature into new ways of knowing what they want, or “silly man, don’t try to figure out women, you’ll never figure us out.”

Recently Professor Mentu had a twitter debate with a manosphere-aware female wondering if there were in fact ‘red pill women’. Naturally in her self-congratulatory solipsism she wanted credit as a woman figuring out the Men who’d figured out women. I got a good laugh out of this, as I do with bloggers like Aunt Giggles and a few select other manosphere women because in truth, all women are red pill women – it’s dragging the truth of the red pill out of them that’s the trick. On some level of consciousness, and as evidenced by behaviors and the construction of larger social conventions, women are aware of their own hypergamy. The Threat, again, is men looking under the hood for women and then overtly attempting to get women to confirm the realities of the observations they’ve drawn conclusions from. The problem is that the feminine imperative will NEVER allow a consensus of women to confirm men’s piecing together of hypergamy. Men observe the process and thereby change it.

Just Get It

I don’t usually cite Athol Kay on Rational Male, but I have to give him props for his recent How Walkaway Wives Run a Dirty MAP. There’s a lot going on in this post, and as per usual Athol approaches all of his observations from a married perspective constrained by a limited single-life experience, but a few fundamental points of Game really shine here. To be sure, relationship Game (or married Game) varies widely in application compared to the Game used in single-man-sex-life, but the foundational principles are essentially the same – as are the pitfalls – only the risks are higher and the rewards negligible by comparison.

I’ve stated this before, but, having experienced the ups and downs of single-man-sex-life as well as married-man-sex-life, I can honestly say that I’ve never found Game more necessary than when it’s within the context of marriage. I’ve also written volumes about the all-risk proposition of marriage for men, and women’s utter inability to appreciate the all-risk sacrifices men assume in committing to marriage. So it should be obvious that under such conditions if a man chooses to entertain a lifestyle of marriage the only acceptable condition is that it be within his frame and his terms. And this, gentlemen, requires not only a commitment to Game itself, but an understanding of, and an internalization of a much tighter Game than would be necessary in single-man-sex-life.

Higher risks mean less margin for error

In your single-man-sex-life Game, you have the leisure to Spin Plates, drop the ones which don’t produce dividends, and non-exclusively enjoy the ones who do. Though it may pain you to lose a particular girl as the result of fumbled Game, or to miss the opportunity of experiencing a woman due to a failed approach or consolidation, it pales in comparison to the risks inherent in lacking the long-term Game necessary to contend with women’s hypergamy in the context of marriage. Dumping a girl (or getting dumped) when single may be an emotional ordeal for some guys, but the decay of a marriage and the financial, familial and emotional consequences for lacking Game in marriage is a punishment that will make a single man’s break up tears seem like a blessing. Tight relationship Game means much more than just getting your wife to fuck you more regularly after the honeymoon.

A lot of men will respond that marriage is just not worth all that contextualization of Game, and they’d be right. It’s all risk with negligible reward / appreciation and the liabilities are too steep. Furthermore, there’s a contingent of men who’ll say that it’s impossible to perpetuate the solid Game necessary to assuage female hypergamy indefinitely, and they’d be right too, if Game was a constant act for them that they felt they had to keep up forever. Some guys get mad at just the suggestion that they’d need to Game their potential wives. “She should just love me for who I am!” They expect to be able to drop the Game, relax and be who they are, only to have their wives progressively convert them into an imagined ideal which really isn’t the guy who tingles their vaginas. Then they find out that their wives loved them for who they were.

Crossover

One of the points that jumped out at me from Athol’s post:

When the lines of communication are broken between you and your wife, you aren’t going to get a message that the lines of communication are broken. That’s what the lines of communication being broken means. When she checks out of the marriage, she doesn’t tell you because she checked out of the marriage. That’s what being checked out of the marriage means.

I usually have to control my laughter whenever I overhear an AFC in the crab barrel parrot back the Matrix-speak about how “good relationships are all about communication with your GF/wife.” When this is coming from a single guy I can at least partially excuse him for lack of any practicable experience, but when it comes from a married Plug-In it’s just evidence of the totality of his conditioning. Most guys who tell you this are repeating what their girl-friends always told them was the most important key to a good relationship, but as with everything femme there’s always a latent purpose underneath the veneer of aphoristic truth they sell themselves.

A few months back I was at a liquor event with my usual ‘pour girls’ and during our conversations one tells me about her ‘guy problems’ with a “clingy boyfriend” obviously on the down end of an SMV imbalance.

“It’s so frustrating Rollo, why can’t guy’s just get it?”

With a practiced, but cute, little wrinkle of her nose, and the huff of her $5K tits, my girl had just indirectly revealed one of the most vexing complexities of intergender communication – women want men to “just get it.”

Just Get It

From Female Dating Advice:

The guy with the capacity to call a woman’s bluff with a confidence that implies she is to be worthy of him rather than the other way around is the Man to be competed for. Essentially the ‘chick speak’, ‘chick advice’ phenomenon is a shit test writ large on a social scale. And even your own mother and sisters are in on it, expecting you to ‘get it’; to get the message and see the challenge for what it really is, without overtly telling you.

She want’s you to ‘get it’ on your own, without having to be told how. That initiative and the experience needed to have had developed it makes you a Man worth competing for. Women despise a man who needs to be told to be dominant. Overtly relating this to a guy entirely defeats his credibility as a genuinely dominant male. The guy she wants to fuck is dominant because that’s ‘the way he is’ instead of who she had to tell him to be.

Observing the process will change it. This is the root function of every shit test ever devised by a woman. If masculinity has to be explained to a man, he’s not the man for her.

In my Pour Girl’s example we see this ‘get it’ paradox from the single-man-sex-life perspective, and in Athol’s scenario we see it from the married-man (or LTR) -sex-life perspective. Many men will complain that they hate the presumption that they need to be a mind reader and ideally women ought to just communicate overtly and directly – just as a reason-based man would communicate. The problem is that in doing so it changes the dynamic for hypergamy. As I’ve stated so often, women say they want the truth, but they never want full disclosure. Hypergamy will not be pandered to, and will not be negotiated with.

This is why the “communication is everything” meme has been responsible for the demise of more relationships than anyone will ever admit. It’s not that you communicate, it’s what you’re communicating and how you communicate it. I’ve counseled more men than I care to recount who’ve sobbed from the depths of their souls, “IF SHE’D JUST TELL ME WHAT I HAVE TO DO TO MAKE HER LOVE ME I’D DO IT!” not realizing that their very verbalization of that and a belief in open, rational communication is the very thing that’s killing (or killed) their woman’s desire for him.

As I’ve written a thousand times, a cardinal truth of the universe is that genuine desire cannot be negotiated. The moment you tell your wife, your girlfriend, that you will exchange a behavior or attitude or belief or any other compromise for her desire you fundamentally change her organic desire into obligation. What she wants, what her hypergamy wants confirmation of, can never be explicated, it can only be demonstrated. If her desire is for you to be more dominant, her telling you to be so negates the genuineness and the validity of your becoming so. Again, observing a process will change it – on a limbic level of consciousness her innate hypergamy is aware of that truth.

She wants a man who knows he needs to be dominant with her, that is the confirmation of hypergamy.

Blueprint for an Alpha Widow

Hithard’s recent flushing of his nest drew the unsurprising female indignation response from Rational Reader ‘S’. Hers is the predictable reflex with which women feel the need to associate with themselves when confronted with (even hypothetically) another woman’s behaviors reflecting badly upon the feminine as a whole. In Indignation I touched upon the need for women to create the rise that comes from indignation for themselves, or live it vicariously through the proxies of their friends or media that caters to this need.

However there is still a need for a disconnect from that indignation impulse in order to preserve the feminine ego. It may be satisfying to experience drama via a third party, but not many women can afford to be called out for it.

So when a woman inserts herself into the psychological proxy role of another woman experiencing that indignation first person, the immediate response is one of ego preservation. My drawing attention to this isn’t to burn down S’s feelings about casting herelf into another woman’s role, but rather to observe the more rational process women will use when they’ve got a disconnected God’s-eye view of all the aspects of a relationship between the two parties causing that indignation.

“I would never stick around / go back to a man who dumped me! Here’s what she should do,…”

For all of what makes women primarily emotional creatures, it’s interesting to see how rational a response they can muster to a vicarious source of indignation. And in predictable feminine fashion S makes that third party indignation about herself (here’s what she / I would do). From Point, Counterpoint:

Women on the other hand almost exclusively rely upon personal experience and anecdotal evidence to form a premise; only using extrinsic information to support their personal interpretations when the source agrees with that premise. The innate solipsism of women promotes a self-centric primary position as the beginning of forming a premise and then progresses to extrinsic sources for ancillary support.

What S fails to account for, and what Hithard elaborates on in his final comment is that, with the first person emotional investment, women will routinely return to a former lover if his Alpha impact was sufficient enough. Even when a woman cannot physically return to that Alpha defined relationship, she will return emotionally.

What Hit hard describes is the blueprint for creating an Alpha Widow:

@ S
“Well that’s good for those women but I’m serious. Why would anyone want to hang around someone who does not want them?”

That’s a valid enough question for me to give an answer on before I go. I do feel it is a topic that can benefit us all.

For women it all depends on how strong the emotional connection is to a man and if you are filling her needs.
Let’s focus on the emotional connection though as it has the strongest pull factor, and hopefully I can give you some form of idea through a post. Which is difficult when challenging a held belief

Now for arguments sake let’s say you and I (hey try to visualize I am your perfect match) S go through the usual process and begin a relationship.

Things start off strongly. There is both a physical and emotional attraction, but more than that… When we are together there is an element of excitement that sets your heart fluttering. The feeling that I overwhelm your senses, where you feel safe to begin investing in me, both emotionally and physically. With each passing day you feel a stronger and stronger connection that warms your core. Where mind body and soul feel as though they are full of the pure essence of being. You are happy to be led in this passionate embrace. Your needs are satisfied, your spirit fulfilled. YOU ARE HAPPY!!

“Wait, what you’re breaking up with me?”

“What do you mean you want to break it off, no I don’t understand?”

“How is this for the better?”

And this is where the residual emotional attachment comes into play.
Developing an emotional attachment with a woman is a bit like hooking someone on drugs when it’s done right. It is very hard to maintain past a certain timeframe though in a relationship. And there can be numerous other mishaps, with this post only touching the surface.

Now first thought is usually ‘a$$hole’ and anger.
But that passes as the innate need for contact develops. The feeling of just being close to that person even if only briefly, gives them that fix that they crave.

Now I can drip feed your emotional needs to position you to where I want you to be. If I have anchored the emotions right, then you will feel as if no one can love you like I do. Or no one touches you or makes love to you with the passion that I do. Each stage through the escalation I have to ensure I am leading, directing and in touch with where I want to be. The end result I am looking for is your emotions screaming out to be fed in my absence. The reason you run back and fuck me is because it feels as if my intimacy is feeding your soul. The reason you try to please me is to grasp at the high I can deliver

You’re probably thinking:

“I’m not that stupid”

But most people can think back to moments in their life where the heart ruled the head. Hypotheticals are always a mother foucker. The most I can say is this is a high percentage occurrence.
Guys do this as well and God knows there are forum boards full of guys wanting to run back and get stomped on again. Guys tend to get hooked from their feelings being taken high, low, high, low etc over time. Women more from an intense high to a low over a shorter time frame.

Just reading something about a situation can be very hard to identify with because it reads like a no brainer. But if a lot of people wrote down the dumb things they do in love they would simply cringe and think;

‘Was I really that stupid?’

So bear that in mind when challenged with what may feel is an inconceivable notion. Emotions can blind you.

And you are right – why would a sensible person stay. The saving grace for a fool in love is time. Time to wake from his/her stupor.And generally people eventually wake up

I suppose I treat relationships a bit like bubble gum from time to time. I mean it’s great when it has flavour but over time it gets bland and tasteless and I have enough of it and throw it away. The last thing I want to do is go find it and pop it back in my mouth again for another go.

The above was just an over the top example to try and answer the question. Not something you should try and do, some kind of relationship advice, or something I go out of my way to do. Generally you only need a bare minimum of emotional attachment and play it from there. Each step can be expanded on massively and you will have to forgive my syntax, rambling and bad grammar.

Big thankyou to Rollo who has been a great mentor over the years. Someone who has my greatest respect.

Just learnt of the passing of Jophil, a great loss to the community and one that has saved many a broken man. I regret not letting him know the positive influence he had on my life.

Later all and best wishes

I’ll come to you like an affliction, but I’ll leave you like an addiction, you’ll never forget me, you wanna know why?,…

16 Years On

On July 20th my wife and I celebrate our 16th wedding anniversary. It’s no secret to my readers that I have a very good marriage and I’m constantly asked what my ‘secret’ is for keeping things positive, or the Oprah classic, “what do you do to ‘Keep It Fresh™‘?’. The manosphere is littered with stories of guys and their divorces contrasted against the stories of single guy’s decaying LTRs or dealing with recovering from them. I try not to make a habit of personalizing things that gloss myself, but when I do just understand it’s more from a sense of being a wild card. Guys with successful marriages (a dubious term at best) don’t really have the motivation to come to forums like the manosphere and share their insights. Why bother if that area of one’s life is more or less taken care of? So in light of this, I’ll share a few things I’ve learned in the last 16 years that make for a good marriage from my perspective.

Let me begin by giving you all some background; Mrs. Tomassi is my first marriage and Bebé Tomassi is my one and only daughter. As I’ve said before, by society’s current standards I’m a freak. I’m a freak in that I met my wife and we dated for 8 months (non-exclusively for 4) before I proposed to her. I was 28 when we married. After 2 years being married we decided to have one child – by design. My wife expected me to be a Man and I in turn expected her to be a Woman. I did not knock her up and then marry her. She was not a single mother, nor did she have excess baggage from previous relationships.

This is important to know, because when I relate stuff like this I often get the “well, you did everything right” response, when in fact every bit of what I enjoy with my wife today is due to me doing much more wrong. I had to unlearn what 26 or so years of feminized and emasculated teachings had taught me up to that point. Admittedly unaware, I had come across a unique situation – a woman who actually wanted a Man to be a Man, and in all honesty I was completely unprepared for it. I was an AFC (really a recovering AFC by that point due to a psychotic  relationship prior to all this) and there was no community back then to inform me otherwise. I had read some of Dr. Warren Farrell’s books, but that was the extent of my own self-understanding with regard to my own gender conditioning.

Being the Driver

Now I had come across a woman who on our first date insisted that I drive HER car. My truck was a piece of shit of course , but after years of this gender equalism brainwashing, a woman, upfront, wanted me to take control. Since then I’ve always been the driver (with the exception of her driving us home after I had my wisdom teeth pulled). This was symbolic of how the next 16 years would play out.

Mrs. Tomassi is no push-over and she most certainly gives me shit tests even to this day. In fact I’ve described marriage as one life long shit test and I still hold to that, but from the begining she expected me to be positively masculine – to be the decider, to be the initiator, to have the ideas and to confidently execute them. Even in my worst failures, the fact that I attempted honestly was more important than the outcome. This may not have been the case in the short term, but in the long term is where you can see the appreciation in the behavior. We compliment each other in our understanding of our gender roles.

When we met my wife was dating two very rich men (we were non-exclusive, remember?), I had 2 nickels and a beat up pickup truck to my name. Mrs. Tomassi is a medical professional and the men she’d dated prior were E.R. doctors and specialists; guys making well over $300K annually. They had boats, cars, large homes, status, dispoasable wealth, and yet despite all of that I’m the one she pursued and locked in with (her Mom thought she was insane to marry me at the time). They had it made, but for all that wealth they were still clueless when it came to being Men – they were uncomfortable in their own masculinity. A lot of guys mistakenly believe that having a large bank account is the key to getting women, and while that might help in the short term, in the long term it’s to your own detriment (she’ll end up with half after the divorce) if you don’t ultimately kill the inner AFC and fearlessly embrace the postiveness of your own masculinity.

The Ingredients

There are so many aspects I can detail about what makes for a good marriage, but all of these really boil down to two things, genuine desire and mutual respect. Too many couples become complacent and comfortable in their marriages and this leads to a decline in both of these areas. A certain degree of subtle anxiety and constructive discontent is necessary for a good marriage. That comes off as negative to the plug-ins of the Matrix, but it’s really what makes each partner want to be better for themselves and each other. Taken too far it becomes abusive, but none at all and the marriage becomes stagnant which is equally dangerous. In the right proportion, this anxiety makes for a marriage that retains it’s mutual desire (which is really analogous to Interest Level) and mutual respect.

So how does this anxiety manifest itself? An easy example is staying in shape together. I can honestly say my wife is still hot (if not more so since the boob job). I want to bang my wife as often as humanly possible; how many men married for 10 years can make that statement? My wife is a piece of ass and I see guys eye her all the time. Likewise I’m a bodybuilder and keep myself in peak condition. I get women in their 20’s flirting with me often enough, and this confirms for her and myself that we are both desirable people – this is one example of this anxiety, and we both recognize it and respect each other for it.

There are other ways this anxiety can be applied, for instance C&F (cocky & funny) goes a long way in marriage. Mrs. Tomassi loves just enough C&F attitude from me to reaffirm her perception of my confidence. As I said earlier, marriage is a life long set of shit tests and carefully used C&F is a tool that can be used to diffuse a lot of these before they even happen. Confidence is still the thing that makes a woman want a man, even in marriage. Generally a shit test IS a test of confidence. Prior to marriage, it’s latent purpose is to help a woman determine whether a guy can provide for her long term security. After marriage, a shit test is used to reassure a woman that she married the right guy.

I’ve come to find that Game is even more necessary in marriage than when you’re single – there’s far more at stake when the commitment is intended to be for a lifetime.

I have a lot of rules I pop off with about LTRs & marriage. I emphasize that a man not even become monogamous until he’s 30 and that he shouldn’t consider marriage until his mid 30s. Again, I state this not because I did so myself, but from my side of the fence I can see the huge advantages to doing so now. Marriage should be a last resort, something to be forestalled until a Man, by virtue of years of experience, has the ability to recognize with measurable accuracy, a woman who deserves what he provides her. The PRIZE mentality is essential. A man must be a Prince first, before he can be a King when he marries.

After 16 years of marriage I can honestly say there are no appreciable advantages (outside of raising children) that a man cannot enjoy single that he can married. That’s not meant to be pessimistic, but rather a caution to emphasize how important it is to disabuse yourselves of this AFC, romanticized, marriage-as-goal mentality. It’s also not to say marriage is never worth it – just that marriage is complete advantage for women with negligible, if any, benefit for men. Marriage will either make a man’s life or destroy his life; enter into thinking about it like this and you’ll make a better decision. Is this person deserving of what I provide? Women will NEVER, even in the best of marriages, fully appreciate the sacrifices a man has to make in order to fulfill his commitment of marriage. Entering into a life-long binding commitment of fidelity that offers a man very little appreciable advantage, and knowing the totality of the risk he’s assuming in accepting that sacrifice will never be fully understood or appreciated by the woman he marries. This is why you have put your head into thinking whether she’s deserving of your provisioning, security, confidence, attention, etc. even when it goes against what you think is your kind and good-hearted nature. If you’ve come to a point where in spite of the acknowledged risks you still want to make that commitment, you must be as self-concerned about marriage as you would be in saving your own life.

Filibuster

ThirtyzDude from the SoSuave forum has just recently seen the light of pragmatism with regards to Spinning Plates. For me, one of the best things about the newly Unplugged is reading their fresh perspective of women’s behaviors in their, now, Game-aware context. Sometimes their fresh observations come as a jolt to their system. They realize, with some measure of shock, that the behaviors and rationales they’ve been conditioned to take for granted on for so long are actually strategies to insure the best hypergamic result for women.

Other times, their observations are truly revelatory,..

I’ve been noticing an interesting trend with many of these women: the ones that are willing to have sex within 3-6 dates typically don’t talk about it – when it happens it happens. When they talk about sex a lot, and try to convince me that they really like sex, it often doesn’t happen. They begin to make excuses, they say they want me but they don’t want to do anything they regret. My thoughts when this happens: wtf?

I partially covered this dynamic in the now infamous Wait For It? post:

If  she’s perceiving your value as as high as it should be, she wont hesitate longer than a few dates to become sexual – and she certainly wont tell you she’s making you wait. Hypergamy doesn’t afford a woman much waiting time with a Man she sees as superior stock.

One of the more frustrating situations I often encounter comes from guys who’ve been OVERTLY told that they’re being made to wait for sex until some circumstance or criteria is met for the woman. The standard filibuster (or loss-leader as the case may be) usually comes with the reasoning that she “needs to feel comfortable” before she has sex with a guy. Even more distressing is the guy who was getting laid, only to be told the same thing by an existing girlfriend. If you find yourself in either of these situation there are a couple of things to bear in mind.

Filibustering

If you find yourself at 2am with a woman you want to bang or, God forbid, a group of women who want to go out for pizza or tacos (usually to sober up) after dancing at the club, understand, you’re being filibustered. When a woman has minty fresh breath and is one drink in, you’ll be getting laid, however, you will not be having sex with a woman when she’s full of pizza, coming down from a buzz and her breath smells like garlic.

I can remember a time in my twenties when I had a policy of never taking a woman I wanted to bang out for dinner. This was partially due to me being broke most of the time, but also because I found that the girls who suggested such-and-such restaurant as a date venue were never up for sex that night. These were typically the girls who “wanted to know I wanted them for more than just sex.” If you ever hear a woman utter that sentence, know that it’s a prime example of a filibuster. It sounds like prudence – she wants to vet you for boyfriend status – but the truth is she’s putting you off while she waits to see what her other 3rd (or 4th or 5th) party options might develop into.

Women with a high interest level wont confuse you, but if she’s not thoroughly convinced of your status a woman will generally default to some form of filibuster. This goes back to the medium being the message for women, however, for men, one of the more confusing strategies of hypergamy is the female filibuster because it appears to promise a future reward if a guy is patient enough to wait for it.

Girls don’t talk about the sex that they’re going to have – they talk about the sex they’re not going to have.

ThirtyzDude makes an astute filibuster observation in his post; the more a woman talks about sex and tries to convince you of how much she likes sex, the less likely she is to actually want to have sex – with you. There’s a certain self-convincing that goes along with this for women who’ve already assessed for themselves that they will not be fucking you. The necessity to convince themselves, and you, that they are in fact sexual conflicts with the subliminal assessment that they don’t want to bang you.

Like ThirtzyDude I discovered that the women who were going to be sexual (DTF) didn’t feel the need to prove to themselves, and me by proxy, that they liked sex. This isn’t to say the DTF women didn’t talk dirty or act flirty, but their sexual interest was communicated by covert innuendo, never overt declarations. In other words the sale was assumed and we could progress on to verbal foreplay, not brinksmanship.

There’s a trite cliché that guys like to assume about women; a woman knows within five minutes of meeting you if she’ll bang you. I don’t necessarily agree with this notion, but I do think that a woman knows within five minutes of meeting you if she WONT bang you. You’ll often see this played out when women insert casual filibusters into conversation about having a boyfriend (boyfriend disclaimer) with guys who’ve too blatantly telegraphed their over-interest in becoming intimate with her. Attraction is not a choice, but too many guys think that it could be if they were convincing enough.

Generally, women who enjoy sex don’t go about advertising it, they just do it. I’ve stated before, a woman who wants to fuck you will find a way to fuck you. That may seem like a simple matter of logistics, but a woman who wants to bang you will find ways to fuck you that include self-rationalization, denial and lies of omission in order to bang you when her interest level is such that she’s motivated.

When a woman, and in particular one whom you’ve yet to bang, overtly explicates how much she enjoys sex, in essence she’s playing a slut by proxy. The strategy is to convince men she’s just as sexual as the women she doesn’t feel comfortable competing against. She can’t, or wont, match a “slut” by playing her game in real life, but she can allude to her alleged sexuality safely behind a filibuster. The real conflict arises when it comes time to have sex and her bluff is called.

Case Study – The Crazy

From a Rational Reader who shall remain anonymous:

I’m not sure what’s going on lately.

I’ve been in a weird way lately…about ready to jump off a bridge with the stress I’ve been feeling. I just don’t know who else to talk to.

Remember that long thread about the “obsessed girl” I was dating who I thought was “crazy”? I’ve been seeing her again…and it’s been a weird, weird story I can’t even get my head around.

I was honestly convinced she was borderline/insane, based on her murky past and her “unstable behavior”. I was done with her…had completely blown her off and was ready to wipe her out of my life forever. Then some crazy shit happened and we found ourselves forced to sit down and talk with each other about what had been going on.

She tells me that every time SHE came over my house, SHE was telling herself, “I can’t do this any more, I can’t keep seeing him, etc”. She said she saw a really great guy in me but the things I was saying and doing were driving her nuts.

She started rifling off this list of things that I did that drove her crazy/drove her to drink herself stupid…things like:

* Suggesting other women were interested
* Teasing her/negging her
* Staying detached
* Treating her like I didn’t need her/wasn’t that into her (she says, “like a call-girl”)

I’m sitting there thinking…god dammit, this all sounds familiar…Has becoming a “disciple” of all this Game bullshit been sabotaging me with women for years now?? Am I the “crazy one”? Has all of this nonsense just been a defense mechanism I built to deal with my OWN lack of self-worth??

I decided to drop all of the BS…and just give it a chance with this girl, legitimately, for real. No more Don Juan games…just seeing each other for who we really are. I’ll tell you…I’m at full-scale war with myself…and I’ve lost complete perspective over which side of me is “right”.

There’s one side of me that is absolutely in love with this girl. I mean, she is smoking hot, she’s intelligent and insightful (though she has what I’d consider to be “flakey” ideas about stuff), she has good practical skills (runs her own business), she’s VERY physical…more than me even. She does ALL of the good “wifey” things that everyone talks about…she cleans, she cooks (deliciously!), she dresses to impress when we go out together. She even tells me she doesn’t want to “monopolize all of my time” and constantly encourages me to do stuff I want to do.

As I said before, her past is a bit “wild”, but she honestly seems like she’s become more mature and intelligent and is REALLY taking steps to leave all of it behind. Who am I to deny her a chance at redemption??

 

“wild past”

“unstable behavior”

“obsessed”

“crazy”

These are your terms.

Her list of prerequisites to stay with a “crazy” woman:

* Suggesting other women were interested
* Teasing her/negging her
* Staying detached
* Treating her like I didn’t need her/wasn’t that into her (she says, “like a call-girl”)

One would rationally think a ‘normal’ woman would find any of these intolerable, yet there you are. So either she is in fact crazy, finds reward in abuse and lacks sufficient self-worth to NEXT you, OR, you are approaching your LTR (such as it is) from a healthy, self-interested perspective that she actually does respect; in fact so much so that she’ll pursue you in spite of it.

I think what you’re experiencing now is not so much confusion with her as you are in owning your role as being the primary partner in your LTR. This is a VERY tough transition for a former AFC to accept. In truth, I would say that accepting and internalizing a dominant role in an LTR for a nominally beta guy is more difficult than realizing that applying Game actually works in attracting women as well as thriving with them in an LTR/Marriage.

It’s really a second unplugging for guys. The first shock of ‘unplugging’ comes in the actualizing that everything feminized society, everything any woman ever told him about the ‘appropriate’ way to engage with women is almost entirely the opposite of what produces the results he wants. Once he’s become so frustrated by his dating life that he experiments with un-conventional Game and discovers that Negs work, C&F works, Amused Mastery works, etc. there comes a point of disillusionment – and sometimes despair.

This comes from the realization that everything he’s held as a long-loved ego investment about women falls apart. Half his life was spent in the ignorance of believing women were equally as rational, equally shared the same mutual desires, equally as sincere in her words. The idea of duplicity based on her being female, or not understanding the gender differences in how women communicate, was shamefully due to his inability to become more like her. In his plugged in life, any failure, any misstep, was the result of his inability to identify with her more perfectly.

So it comes as no surprise when his eyes are opened to how much he’s invested of himself in these female-primary conventions. This is where most men turn back. It’s too much to bear in the revelation that what he’s believed for so long could be other than what women have told him so he enters a rationalized denial. And of course there is a well established social network ready welcome him back and reward him for his denial.

The Second Unplugging

The second unplugging comes when a Man is forced to come to this power dynamic realization again when entering into an LTR. Most guys who reinvent themselves and accept their masculine primacy role after having been subjected to an egalitarian gender equality doctrine for most of their lives feel strange in owning it in an LTR and/or marriage. It’s really put up or shut up time. Essentially you need to become the Man you sold yourself as when you were spinning plates. Guys who unplug and employ Game are initially mimicking the behaviors that used to be respected and attractive to women. Now they’re considered socially inappropriate or rude at best, borderline abusive at worst under feminine social auspices. Regardless, the results are undeniable.

In an LTR you have to actually be THAT guy, and for a formerly plugged-in AFC, the old mental schema of equality returns. Guilt sets in because he doesn’t feel deserving of the primacy he holds because he still hasn’t let go of that antiquated equalism he thought was valid for so long. He wants to play fair, but what he doesn’t realize is his concept of what is ‘fair’ is still rooted in his plugged-in mindset. It’s at this critical point that most LTRs destruct, because the guy reverts back to his old AFC mental habitus, or the girl settles into the comfort knowing she controls the frame and can dictate the terms of her intimacy as she sees fit.

This is one reason I emphasize a complete internalization of why Game works. I catch all kinds of criticism for being primarily theory based in my approach, but if, and when, you transition to an LTR monogamous commitment, by God you’d better understand why those theories are the bedrock of Game.

This is where you’re at. Your distress is coming from a want to return to a simpler way of dealing with your personal life that really never existed. Bear in mind that the “abusive” behavior your “crazy” girlfriend is complaining about is the same behavior that attracted her to you. If you’re feeling guilt for playing X-Box while she waits on you, then put down the console and do something productive, just understand that feeling of guilt comes from you thinking you need to “play fair” with her in order to keep her. That’s the path to her controlling the frame of the LTR.

The Enemy is Us

The more I watch this video (h/t to Yohami) the more I’m reminded of this post – Could a Man Have Written This? This is a fantastic indictment of feminism, but it’s only effective because a woman is the one delivering it. In our contemporary fem-centric society only a woman could ever legitimately endorse such a message and be taken remotely serious. Imagine a Man, even the most respected, intellectual scholar, reciting this message verbatim. In today’s social context, the message is completely different if the narrator has a penis. Misogyny is a presumed precondition before any critical thought is applied to the actual content of the message.

In making this observation I was also made aware of a social meta-dynamic. On a micro level, women’s communicative process is more concentrated upon the context of information being processed, in preference to the content (which is men’s innate domain). On the macro, societal level we see this same dynamic framing the our public discourse – fem-centrism demands a feminized preference for the contextual (the feel of the debate) above the critical content or the factual.

Thus, in a greater social arena defined by the fem-centric, a man delivering the same message as Girl Writes What? already feels wrong before the information of that message is processed.

The Scope

Recently I’ve been posting on other blogs & forums that are not specific to the “community” per se and I came back depressed. This, and the articles I’ve read and written freelance recently, plus personally dealing with friends, coworkers, business associates, hell, even church pastors – everywhere, the Matrix is there. It permeates society on so many levels. Little habits to deeply internalized beliefs, it is SO all-consuming. I know, for my readers this is like saying the sky is blue, but it is literally fucking everywhere. Turn on the TV, watch a movie, listen to the radio, surf the internet, talk to a friend, look at a billboard on the drive home, it is all encompassing.

I realize how paranoid and conspiratorial that all comes off as, but sometimes paranoia simply means you have all the facts.

I sometimes feel like John the Babtist decrying the truth in the wilderness. Yes, I know modern western culture is a cesspool of feminized Beta-AFCness, but it’s got to be preached. I recently revived a thread on SoSuave about being a positive mentor to young men and I can only think that this is a fantastic idea, because it’s men, not women who’re to blame for the vast majority of where we find ourselves now. I know the MGTOW adherents wont appreciate this, but as much as we’d like to shake our fists at the nebulous feminist movement of 50 some years ago, but just as Girl Writes What? addresses in the video, it was men who really got the ball rolling for them. And it was calculated to be so. The mass feminization of western culture we know now is far more a result of men’s complicitness which evolved into adovocation as a means to women’s sexuality. Your Dad, my Dad, in some cases our Grandfathers, have all contibuted to this, either implicitly or complicitly.

Men like Women

All it takes is one critical thought that doesn’t tow the Matrix approved line on a forum like LoveShack to draw the ire of any woman. That’s to be expected, but what follows is a landslide of sycophantic males, like braying asses, all attempting to qualify themselves to be acceptable, not just to a single woman responding, not just to their generalized feminine sensibilities, but to themselves, in relative anonymity: Meaning they have nothing to really hide and this is their default go-to response.

Far more males (they’re not Men) will vehemently rise to defend the ‘victimized’ woman, without so much as a critical thought as to what’s been said. These men think like women; the content doesn’t matter, only the context. And if that criticism sounds even remotely disparaging of their AFC ego investments it’s met with such a throng of protest and so loud a chorus of a well taught and conditioned shaming response that even a woman with an opposing viewpoint becomes secondary to their need to prove amongst themselves who’s the more acceptable to the feminine norm.

Males have become assimilated by this feminization and are now more emphatic and effective feminists than the original founders of feminism could’ve ever hoped for.

Real Life

I’m also presently dealing with a guy I hired at work and have basically watched an otherwise confident, very good looking guy systematically go through finding a girl online, meeting up with her, moving in with her and buying a dog with her in the span of 3 months. I tried intervention, but of course I got the standard AFC rationales. Now he gets depressed because he’s in over his head, and is complaining about how he gets to the gym religiously and she gets mad because he even hints she get her fat ass to the gym. I recently met her, and at her weight, I simply cannot believe this girl should ever be in a position to dictate anything to my friend. Yet there he is, by his own doing, his own self-convincing and his own innability to see past what people like those on LoveShack are fostering. He’s talented, a good looking guy, bright, ambitious, he’s even a semi-pro club D.J. and now saddled to a woman who is in no way deserving or appreciative of a guy like him.

I’ve got another guy in another dept. who was a former Marine who served 3 tours in Iraq and is an amazingly organized and responsible guy. Alpha as fuck in all respects but one; he too is saddled with an overweight fianceé who barks at him via cell phone while he takes his smoke breaks. I hear them bickering occasionally and all the guy does is attempt to appease her – this former Marine, who war couldn’t bow, is crushed mentally and emotionally by a woman who should never have a position to question him. Why? because he subscribes to the societal fem-centric default mentality when entreating with women.

I have a designer on my team – a gorgeous 24 y.o. blonde – bright, talented, educated – who is like wise stuck with a Beta chump. She’s aware of my writing and I’ve made attempts to advise her on her own situation. Even in light of this, her constant complaint is that guys are indecisive pussies now, guy’s are whipped now, guys allow women to define them now – where are all the Men now?

Comfort Zones

This shit is EVERYWHERE. The pastor at the church I attend will be offering the annual Father’s Day diatribe this Sunday and I’m anticipating the standard fem-religious message that goes along with it. However, more importantly, I’m looking forward to taking a lot of mental notes on his attitudes directed towards gender interaction. I have a good idea of what they’ll be from observing his manner toward his wife (standard religious, male self-deprication, “boy I’m sure glad she took pity on a chump like me” attitude), but I think this might be a good jumping off point for some interaction with him on his blog.

While the feminine defined social landscape is depressing to be sure, I think it’s necessary to branch out into uncharted waters. It’s very easy to type away on my blog or other forums and get an echo-chamber effect. It takes more than that to hone the message. Sure, we get the AFC naysayers here or the unplugging truth seekers presenting an opposite view (even the rare rational female input), but I think in order to stay sharp we need to venture outside our comfort zones to bring the gospel to those still trapped in the Matrix. Where else are they going to get anything more than a juvenile impression of what our “community” is saying?

I have to admit that it frustrates me to no end to have my – what I believe, very well reasoned – ideas lumped into the PUA scam category or have them passed off as misogynous before I’ve completed a valid point. It’s become very easy to pass it off as such, thanks to the same men who’ve essentially done exactly the same thing we’re fighting against; making positive masculinity laughable.