I had an interesting conversation this week with my good friend Ray and a couple of my designers, Sadie and Sam (names changed to protect the innocent). Just a little background first; Sadie is the Japanese woman I mention in Mental Point of Origin. She’s been divorced once and her relationship history is one punctuated by her involvement with Beta men.
She’s is the definition of the opportunistic concept of female love, but her frustration comes from never having been able to consolidate on an optimized Hypergamy – she simply doesn’t have attractiveness or feminine pleasantry to generate the Alpha interest that would satisfy her. Thus, she attracts Beta orbiters looking for some low hanging fruit, and force-fits them into a contextual Alpha frame. In other words, she opportunistically entertains the Betas with provisioning potential and hopes they’ll man up into dominant Alphas. Thus far she’s been disappointed.
Sam is a gay man in his early 30s who makes a good living afforded by not having children and possessing a high calibre technical skill set. He’s got the outgoing, “look at me, I’m special because I’m gay” exuberance I expect from gay men, but he’s not flamboyant and can still be professional when he has to be. He’s been “dating” a new guy for a while now and has moved this guy into his home recently. He took part in our conversation because the issues of sharing resources, money and picking up half the rent (in his case mortgage) in a relationship came up.
Ray has been one of my best friends for over 15 years now and he’s the guy I mention in Good Girls Do. He’s worked for me directly or indirectly for most of that time and he’s notorious for starting conversations like this when we have downtime. He’s a firestarter, it’s what I like about him, and among the three he’s the only one who knows my online reputation. Ray is Red Pill aware so he knows how to prompt a controversial conversation with me when we’re in mixed company.
Ray: “RT, hypothetical question…”
RT: “Do I have to?”
Ray: “Let’s say you move your girlfriend in with you…”
RT: “Let’s say I don’t and I would never do that. End of hypothetical.”
Ray: “No, I know, but, say you did, and let’s say your rent is $1,000 a month. Would you tell your girlfriend ‘Hey the rent is $1,000 a month how about you pay $300 and I’ll pay $700 or would you say 50/50?”
RT: “No. I’d pay it all myself. I’d also be sure that only my name was on the lease.”
Sadie:”What? Why, that’s silly?”
Ray: “You wouldn’t expect any contribution?”
RT: “No. I wouldn’t turn it down if she took it upon herself to contribute, but I wouldn’t expect it from a girl I (foolishly) brought into my living arrangement.”
Sadie: “You wouldn’t expect her to pay half?”
RT: “No. If I can’t provide my own $1,000 rent or food, or to keep the lights on, I have no business bringing a woman into that arrangement. If I have more than enough for myself I don’t need her paying. Besides, if she’s that into living with me, she’ll want to contribute in other ways and I wont have to ask.”
Sam: “You don’t think it should be an equal split? Maybe that’s a man and a woman thing…”
RT: “Yes and no. I’m sure between you and your boyfriend there’s a more dominant personality right?”
Sam: “Yeah, me.”
RT: “And you probably make more money too. So there’s really no ‘equality’ when it comes down to it.”
Sadie: “I expect my boyfriend to pay half the rent.”
RT: “Of course you do, because women think in terms of equality when it works to their advantage. What if your ‘boyfriend’ could pay for all the rent, utilities and most of everything else? Would you still try to pay half?”
Sadie: “Yes of course.”
RT: “What if he only paid just half and you knew it was a better deal for him?
Sadie: (tentative) “Yes,…”
RT: “I doubt that, but what you’re saying is that you’d limit improving your way of life to maintain a belief in equality.”
Sadie: “All the guy’s I’ve lived with have been mooches.”
RT: “Which explains why you’re not living with them any more. It goes both ways, women don’t respect men they need to support. All this stuff about equality in relationships is nonsense.If your boyfriend could easily make rent while you struggled to come up with it you’d resent him for it. There is no equal division.”
Sam: “I guess I see what you’re saying, but the expectation is still the same even for me and [boyfriend].
RT: “There is no equality in a relationship, but there can be complementarity where either person’s benefits can offset the needs of the other.”
Ray: “So you and Mrs. T aren’t 50/50?”
RT: “Ray, I make about 4 times the money that she does, how is there ever going to be anything like equality with that kind of balance?”
Ray: “But what about chores and shit?”
RT: “I take care of the outside of the house, she takes care of the inside. I do the smelly dirty jobs, she keeps the fresh cleaning ones, it’s not rocket science.”
Sam: “Sounds like you just want to stay in the power position.”
RT: “Yes, but it’s only a power play if you’re exploiting your partner. Women like to say they want an equal partner, but they don’t, do they Sadie? They want someone to respect and look up to. So when that comes down to numbers, to money, what’s really holding you together? Love? Mutual interests? (at Sam) Right now you can’t help but be the more dominant one in your relationship. So do you stop being so just to balance things? Do you expect [boyfriend] to pick up the slack more?
The Cardinal Rule of Relationships
In any relationship, the person with the most power is the one who needs the other the least.
This principle isn’t so much about ‘power’ as it is about control. This might sound like semantics, but it makes a difference. It’s very easy to slip into binary arguments and think that what I mean by the cardinal rule of relationships is that one participant must absolutely rule over the other – a domineering dominant to a doormat submissive. Control in a healthy relationship passes back and forth as desire and need dictate for each partner. In an unhealthy relationship you have an unbalanced manipulation of this control by a partner. Although control is never in complete balance, it becomes manipulation when one partner, in essence blackmails, the other with what would otherwise be a reinforcer for the manipulated under a healthy circumstance. This happens for a plethora different reasons, but the condition comes about by two ways – the submissive participant becomes conditioned to allow the manipulation to occur and/or the dominate initiates the manipulation. In either case the rule still holds true – the one who needs the other the least has the most control. Nowhere is this more evident than in interpersonal relationships.
When I was writing this post many years ago I hadn’t fully considered how this rule interacts with, and contradicts, many of the tenets of egalitarian equalism. The idealistic state of that equalism is one in which two co-equal, yet independent people come together in a perfect union of balance. In theory that balance should account for resources, emotional investment, family considerations, as well as intellectual and social status aspects of either partner.
These considerations alone should be enough to illustrate equalitarianism as the manipulative farce it is, however, all we really need to do is take into account the Cardinal Rule of Relationships. It’s very easy to be accused of being controlling when you embrace the truth of this rule – and particularly so when the reigning social undercurrent is one in which everyone ought to be co-equal rational actors.
I expected to have that leveled at me in this conversation, but it’s important to bear in mind the real nature of power. By my own definition, power is the degree of control we exercise over the direction of our own lives. As I mentioned, I don’t mind being the more powerful partner in terms of resources in my marriage because I accept that stupid notions of maintaining anything like “equality” is simply infeasible. I know more than a few men who’ve sold their lives’ potential away in the belief that they should lessen themselves in order to support a more balanced, equalist ideal. Ultimately their relationships, marriages and families suffer because they never own that potential – just the idea of owning it is a source of guilt and shame.
For all of the bleating about more equitability being needed between men and women. the fundamental truth is that it’s neither a realistic nor workable state. I’ve used money for my illustration here, but this applies to many other facets of an intersexual relationship. From an equalist perspective this sounds a lot like a want for creating a condition of dependency, but in truth it is an unachievable state of egalitarianism that creates a never-satisfied state of dependency.
Her World or Yours?
If you go back and look at the video from Bachelor Nation you can see the dichotomy that presumptions of “equality” sows in western(izing) women today. Within the first 6 minutes of the video we see the internal contradictions inherent in women. There is a want for an idealized equal pairing, but yet a desire for a man to be a Man. The documentary finds the root of this dichotomy in modern resource imbalances between the sexes, and makes the predictable appeal to men not living up to their burden of performance. The male shame comes in contrasting women’s taking on what should be men’s performance burdens – the male obligation to which ironically flies in the face of anything like true egalitarian equalism.
Stay-at-home dads, house husbands, and anything relatable will always have a stigma attached to them in spite of any weak attempts to make them socially acceptable. That stigma is founded in a limbic-level understanding of men’s burden of performance; to be a Man is not just to produce sustainable resources, but to provide a surplus of those resources.
I recently read a poll sponsored by Forbes magazine that listed men’s top goals in life and for the first time in that poll’s history “a good physique” outranked all personal and financial ambitions for top executives. The predictable shame then followed that men aren’t “Manning Up” any more, and they’ve become vain, self-absorbed narcissists for a new focus on what image they present.
The obvious Red Pill conclusion is of course a realignment with the prevailing social perceptions (courtesy of the Feminine Imperative I might add) that women are out-earning men financially and educationally; thus the Alpha Fucks side of Hypergamy takes precedent. If America’s top execs are heeding the message of Open Hypergamy, why bother establishing yourself financially, academically, ambition-wise or otherwise?
The problem with this equation is evident in the Bachelor Nation video. I can understand the sentiments of MGTOW; if the opinions expressed by the quality of woman represented in the video are any indicator of a female zeitgeist it makes the idea of abandoning the Game altogether that much more appealing.
That said, and I’m going to dare to get prescriptive here, I believe that establishing yourself as an independent Man should be your top priority. I have no doubt that that sentiment will get convoluted with feminism’s Strong Independent Woman® meme, but lets clarify something first – the ideal that men ought to be strong and independent has always been the precursor to his quality as a man. Independence, self-sufficiency and determined ambitions have always been the hallmarks of a man comfortable with his burden of performance. Only in women is independence a novelty.
Yet now, in men, this independence is not just a novelty, but it’s been distorted into being an obsessive-compulsive sign of a man’s imagined insecurities. The very strength and independence men have always been expected to embody is the domain of women, while any hope for it from men is a sign of a fragile ego.
Frame is everything. Always be aware of the subconscious balance of who’s frame in which you are operating. Always control the Frame, but resist giving the impression that you are.
I firmly believe Alpha is a mindset. That mindset can get the poorest son-of-a-bitch laid with the right application, tact and circumstance. That’s a tough pill to swallow when you work your ass off in the belief that your affluence and status should be the metric Alpha is judged by and women respond to. That’s also not to say affluence and status won’t get you laid by their own merit, it’s just the context in which that happens that makes the difference. There are many men who’ve found their retroactive cuckolding after having based their personal successes on the presumption that those successes should be the basis of his quality to women.
The concept of frame covers a lot of aspects of our daily lives, some of which we’re painfully aware of, others we are not, but nonetheless we are passively influenced by frame. What concerns us in terms of inter-gender relations however is the way in which frame sets the environment, the ambience, and the ‘reality’ in which we relate with both the woman we sarge at a bar and the relationship with the woman we’ve lived with for 20 years. One important fact to consider, before I launch into too much detail, is to understand that frame is NOT power. The act of controlling the frame may be an exercise in power for some, but let me be clear from the start that the concept of frame is who’s ‘reality’ in which you choose to operate in relation to a woman. Both gender’s internalized concept of frame is influenced by our individual acculturation, socialization, psychological conditioning, upbringing, education, etc., but be clear on this, you are either operating in your own frame or you’re operating in hers. Also understand that the balance of frame often shifts. Frame is fluid and will find its own level when a deficit or a surplus of will is applied to change it. The forces that influence that lack or boost of will is irrelevant – just know that the conditions of an operative framework will shift because of them.
We can go back and debate the Crisis of Motive once again – who do you really do it for? – but in terms of Frame, even if you subscribe to a MGTOW perspective, it’s important for a Man to have a world into which a woman might enter. Not for her sake, but for a Man’s edification.
Establish your world; you shall make your mission, not your woman your priority. Women should only ever be a complement to a man’s life, never the focus of it.