One of the blogs on my blogroll is Haley’s Halo. Haley is a Christian woman in search of a suitable Christian man to marry. From reading her blog, I gather that suitable means a virgin who knows how to put the moves on women, and is looking to marry but not beta.
A totally unrelated picture.
Wait. I know what you are thinking. That should be really easy, right? Why hasn’t she found a hundred guys like this? But it turns out that not only do alpha men not want to marry and women outnumber men in most churches, but single alpha men are extremely uncommon in churches. As ThinkingMan puts it in the comments to one of Haley’s posts:
With the unspoken paradigm that ‘girliness is next to Godliness’ presented to men in far too many churches, B’s odds of landing a church alpha are low if she attends one of those churches.
Now that he mentions this, it does match what I have seen in my few visits to church over the last few years. Before my father-in-law found his current church, he took us to the church he was test driving when we visited them a few years back. I have to say I would have enjoyed the services much more if the pastor hadn’t cried quite so much while delivering the sermon, especially since the topics he was covering really weren’t emotional at all. It also brings to mind the wedding my wife and I attended about 10 years ago between two devout evangelicals. I had seen crying at weddings before that, but never by the groom, and typically not continued sobbing to the extent that it prevented saying the actual wedding vows. I don’t have to tell you what my wife said after seeing that bizarre display.
So maybe there is something to this. I have to say I would be much more likely to attend a church if I could find one which wasn’t thoroughly feminized. Which brings us back to Haley’s challenge. How to find an Alpha when as a woman seeking a Christian husband she is at a disadvantage to begin with?
My thought was maybe she could find one of the less nauseating beta guys and alpha him up a bit:
What about “rolling your own” alpha? Seems that women love the idea of taking an alpha on as a fixer upper, trying to mix in some beta qualities. Wouldn’t it work better to find one of the less nauseating beta guys at church and date him while trying to up his alpha qualities? One thing about betas, they listen to their girlfriends.
If he doesn’t progress as expected you could always throw him back and start over. After all, if he stayed in nauseating beta mode there would be no threat to the girl’s chastity.
This idea was shot down immediately and unanimously. While I still think the basic premise is sound, I can understand why it would have limited practical appeal. The primary reason given in the responses to my suggestion was that once the beta was alphad up a bit, he would instantly transform into a pickup artist trolling for other women. I don’t think that is the real issue. For starters, you don’t want to make him that alpha. Also, I think they are grossly underestimating the true nature of betas. Betas generally have oneitis quite bad. This is the nature of the condition, and can either be noble or a farce depending on how this is expressed. So a slightly alpha’d up beta would be much less likely to leave or cheat than a beta’d down alpha. The only other option would be to go with a totally unmodified beta.
However, as I said I think they are right that this isn’t really feasible. I think the primary reason is that the whole “women love a project” myth is exactly that. In reality it is just a rationalization of the preference for alpha bad boys many women follow.
Note: I hope Haley doesn’t mind my poking a bit of fun at the significant challenge she of course is well aware she faces. I admire her tenacity and feel that it is only right that she not settle when looking for the love of her life.
I kinda get the feeling Haley had given up trying to find a man before she started blogging.
I’ve had the problem of “Alphaing up” a beta female with unintended results. When you take someone who regularly let’s people walk all over them and teach them to stand up for themselves it seems like they tend to take it too far in compensation for how they’ve allowed people to treat them in the past. I’m sure the same problem would be likely with “Alphaed up” males as well.
I must be doing something right (…or wrong?) if men on the internet are opining on my looks and romantic non-situation.
The problem is not that an “alphaized” beta would move on or cheat but that there’s a huge difference between dating an exciting high-status man and trying to “domesticate” him or dating a boring low-status wimp and trying to train him to be more exciting.
The reverse of this “rolling your own alpha” would be a man dating an ugly girl with the intention of gradually making her beautiful with plastic surgery. Would any guy do that?
Morghan said: ““Alphaing up” a beta female with unintended results. When you take someone who regularly let’s people walk all over them”
Alpha and beta does not apply to women in this sense. What you’re doing is projection – you project the values of one sex onto the other. There are no “alpha women”. A woman with high self-esteem is not an “alpha” but a pain in the ass.
A better example would be to find a beautiful woman who has been forced to make herself extremely plain, then allow and encourage her to wear makeup, dress attractively, wear her hair in a flattering way, etc.
The other analogy I was thinking of was what if there were a lightbulb which caused a man to see his wife as a perfect 10. Would he refuse to buy one and replace the bulb in the lamp in the bedroom?
The problem is this:
The man who is alpha has a higher value already, and betaizing him a bit doesn’t reduce his a priori value: You still have a prize.
Alphaizing a beta is the opposite. You may produce a higher value male, but he was originally of lower value, and therefore no matter how high value he becomes, he’s not a prize to the one who generated him.
A woman doesn’t just the effect: She wants the effect to be reflective of the fact. Women don’t consciously realize that the effect IS the fact, most of the time. They need to know that they only grant access to their pussy to men of high quality; a man who Alphas Up wasn’t of High Quality to begin with, especially if she did it.
Her natural tendency to shit-test and betaize a man and test him will also counter this.
While it sounds like a good idea in theory, … what you need to do, …
is have women Alpha-ize men for each other. One picks a guy, has a relationship, Alpha-izes him, then hands him off to another woman.
That way, when the man arrives on the scene for Woman 2, he’s already of higher value.
(cheek: I know this goes on anyway some of the time).
Rather than it “should be extremely easy” to find “a hundred guys like this,” it’s actually quite hard because it borders on the oxymoronic. It comes close to saying one wants a guy who’s experienced but not a guy who’s experienced. The true, proven alpha likely got that way because… well… he’s literally proved himself alpha. Wishing along these lines smacks of a feminine desire to have one’s cake and (…well, you can finish the rest).
I suggest Ms. Haley decide what she truly wants–the bad boy alpha or the good boy beta. Her straddling the wooden fence here is only going to result in splinters lodged right where it hurts.
And note: marrying the alpha (with hopes to reform him into becoming more beta) or marrying the beta (with hopes of nudging him into becoming more alpha) is not going to make you, or he (i.e., Mr. “project”) happy.
I think you are right. I also think this demolishes any pretense that women “love a project”.
Rather than it “should be extremely easy” to find “a hundred guys like this,” it’s actually quite hard because it borders on the oxymoronic.
Sorry, I was being a smartass. Hence the “totally unrelated” picture of a unicorn. As you say though, this is a pretty unlikely mix. Just finding a virgin who knows how to put the moves on women would be a neat trick in itself. Or finding an alpha who wants to marry. Or finding a single manly Christian who wants to marry. She has a tall order to fill if she will find all of these contradictory qualities in the same man. Plus I’m guessing he needs to have a job, meet some minimum height, appearance and age requirements.
I like your fence metaphor! Very colorful.
And welcome to the blog!
The projects they love are alphas they’re trying to control or tame. That’s what they mean by a project.
Haley’s is the dilemma all women face: they want the best to commit to them but all the other women around wants the same. They don’t understand this or if they do they still don’t “settle”, they begin to compete with other women instead. It’s in their instincts and while it seems to be easily overridable one thing you shouldn’t forget is that it’s their instincts that make their ‘ginas tingle.
So your suggestion means for her that she should date a guy who she does not find desirable at all, and try to make him be desirable, which probably translates to: she should have sex with a guy she doesn’t want to have sex with. Not going to happen.
“I was being a smartass.”
Most of us knew you were joking 🙂 It was evident. And funny.
I am (or was) about as close to what Haley was looking for as you could find. I only had one woman (vaginally) before I met my wife. And I am pretty alpha, according to women who ought to know. But, the “downside”: I expected my wife to be a virgin; I am a very serious Catholic, so I wanted my wife to use acceptable birth control methods; and I expected her to be a traditional, obedient wife. I pretty much got this.
Moral: Haley might find a virgin Alpha, but she will get a lot of other stuff as well. I may be a one-woman man, but I expect a lot from that one woman.
Sometimes (but only sometimes), I feel actual pity for many of these women.
They deeply crave something that is really beyond the reach of most of them. I can only imagine the times of heartache, the jealousy in watching one of their slightly prettier girlfriends getting the kind of attention that they crave for themselves.
I even acknowledge that many of these women have been programmed by popular culture to crave these things – kind of like a kid who has been raised on too much sugar. They crave sweets.
BUT:
These women seem to want to wallow in it even more. They tease and taunt THEMSELVES with chick-lit, chick-flicks, celebrity worship, etc. They fixate on the process of competing for alpha attention. So my pity has limits.
Sadly, once women have been corrupted by exposure to alpha-chasing, they can’t be brought back. Once they crave that kind of guy, they are lost to good men forever.
They are like someone who has used alcohol too long; they have changed. It would have been nice to meet one of these girls before they fell too deeply for men that are not available to them. But their heart will always belong to some high-status guy, real or fictional.
Thanks Deansdale.
I think there is some hope for these girls. But they have to pray for two things. One is that Western men in general start getting more respect. This will raise all men’s status and make them more generally attractive. Time was, just being a man was alpha in itself and a woman would get her “tingles” and have a happy marriage to a fairly ordinary man.
The other thing such girls need to pray for is that ordinary men learn how to run serious game. My wife bonded to me partly because she was largely untouched when I got to her, and because I was not too feminised. So, I was a natural alpha with her. This is not really that hard. It is supposed by some experts on human courting to be a natural phase in human courtship – a short bonding period of very assertive male behaviour and very submissive female behaviour. My wife and I certainly went through such a phase. It can get pretty weird actually.
I think what is now happening is that women are bonding to unattainable men like celebrities (or vampires in books!), or men who are within reach physically but who are really out of their class (player alphas), and sometimes a succession of these. It messes up the normal pair bonding. At least that seems a reasonable theory.
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I think most of your objections to Roissy’s somewhat unidimensional use of alpha in describing male attractiveness, both in this post and especially the older “This is what a beta looks like one – which is now to old to comment on) are well taken. I’ve made similar objections myself.
You’re a little unfair to Roissy in rather ignoring his stipulation that it’s not the actual count of hot women that’s determinative, but the man’s ability to get that count. What he’s really measuring is how relatively easily it is for him to get hot women, to get hot women to stay with him, and to cheat and probably even get away with if she learns of it, rather than actually doing all those things.
Still the raw gina tingle, which Roissy’s alpha beta scale does seek to measure, is not the only consideration for non slutty girls looking for LTR’s. Since there are all kinds of intermediate scales of sluttiness most girls care at least a little bit about another dimension. Athol Kay and many others call these beta virtues, but I really don’t think that’s the best way to look at it. Some alphas have them and some betas on Roissy’s scale don’t much – though it is true that most betas pretend to have them as a way of trying to compete.
Instead I think we’re better off having a separate orthogonal scale. Call it the mate/dad scale. Here the higher scorers will be strong in loyalty, status, stability, money, loving supportive nature, money, and compatibility. They should also deeply love their own kids, for most women. Recall that Roissy says the most important things in order on the alpha scale tend to be: status (of the small group kind especially), game (playful dominance over women), looks, money. The order of the last two will vary with the girl, and with her age. Note that status and money appear on both scales but money combined with stability is considerably more important on the mate/dad scale. Loyalty is the big standout that’s leading in the second scale but absent in the cad or alpha scale.
Put simply girls care a lot about the second scale as well as the first for LTRs; good girls only want LTRs; and 60 years ago almost all girls middle class and up at least were good girls, with a lot more of poor girls being good girls then too compared to now.
Hence it’s slutificiation of girls brought about by feminist permission (and made technically more feasible by the pill, etc., although out of wedlock births are now sky high at 40%) that has lead to the long periods in their late teens and especially twenties when urban girls way emphasize their primate hindbrain desire for alpha cads.
Also keep in mind that the reality in the great majority of hunter gather societies today is, and presumably in the Pleistocene was, that marriages are arranged ones, with the girl having at most only limited veto powers. So this removal of social and cultural constraint on female sexuality post their early teens anyway really is a brand new thing, and not some return to more natural human times less constrained by “the patriarchy” as feminist lying myth making would have it.
Wouldn’t it be more plausible to make your own Christian? I.e., find a man who was reasonably manly, good-looking, successful, etc., marry him, and then persuade him to be, as we say, washed in the blood of the lamb? There would seem to be a much larger pool of men to begin with here, and sociological research galore to demonstrate the feasibility of this proposed transformation project.
“So your suggestion means for her that she should date a guy who she does not find desirable at all, and try to make him be desirable, which probably translates to: she should have sex with a guy she doesn’t want to have sex with.”
That’s the problem with all the women should ‘settle’ advice. Please note that in this instance I am talking actual settling (not having ridiculously high expectations to start with that makes anything else ‘settling’ – hi Lori Gottlieb before you got some common sense).
Whilst the idea of rolling your own alpha has been shot down a bit, I would actually be interested in a post about what (if anything) women who are in relationships where the man has become supplicating could do to help the relationship beyond walk away, after all a lot of these are marriages with children.
I would actually be interested in a post about what (if anything) women who are in relationships where the man has become supplicating could do to help the relationship beyond walk away, after all a lot of these are marriages with children.
Something like a Beta Husband Boot Camp?
It’s good but I was thinking something to be more day to day.
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Why is that a ‘problem’ with the ‘women should settle’ advice? Marry decent men, get ‘rode hard and put away wet’ by whatever alpha cads your body temporarily allows you to get, or refrain from polluting the gene pool. These are your options, whether you like it or believe it or not. You seem to expect ‘beta’ men to put forth effort to act more like swaggering fools (in my humble opinion) than they really wish to be: very well, but just where do you get off insisting that it’s solely a man’s job to do what he doesn’t thoroughly enjoy doing?
If you’re looking for an alpha Christian guy, I recommend going to an Acts 29 church.
http://www.acts29network.org/churches/
In my experience, the pastors of these churches are definitely alpha. With their influence, the guys in their churches also tend to be alpha.
Many men are not supreme Alphas, but do excellently with the needed alpha traits. Women should be looking for THOSE.
I could write a very long article on what my second wife has done to restore me to the alpha frame I was in before my first marriage, before I allowed marriage to a feminist and the feminized Church to turn me into a quasimodo; A man deformed by his deep desire to obey God raging against his alpha instincts because he was told were manifestations of his sinful nature, twisting him into a near-simpering beta with only flashes of alpha insight.
But she did it.
She still doesn’t know it happened and based upon something Rollo said I’m not sure she wants to. After all, if you have to ask her permission to lead her, who’s really leading. I’ve still got a ways to go, but I’m confident I’ll make it – and also help some other ex-church Christian men along the way.
Interesting suggestion Dalrock. And basically what has been in the back of mind for a few months now.
After being introduced to red pill thought and writing, my strategy is to find a man with some natural confidence and leadership skills and encourage that confidence and leadership to develop through submission, respect, and encouragement.
I dare say most red pill celebrities such as Roissy or Roosh would term a man like this a Beta; but I don’t care. Given that you can control attraction by managing the context, these so called Beta (or greater beta) men are still the most dominant men in my social circle (very conservative, homeschooled, christian youth).
Like someone alluded to already, it’s pure fantasy to hope for an alpha by Roissy’s definition who is still a virgin.
This post made my morning, Dalrock. I began reading you and Haley a few years back (2011?), then kind of quit the scene when I started hitting paydirt in 2013 or thereabouts. Now I’m back and reading up on Game as a married man so I can better fortify what I’ve got. xD My wife was a highly-sought woman for most of her life, judging by the pennies she has dropped, and she was definitely popular when I met her.
During our long-distance courtship, I had roughly three other men and a matchmaking matron trying to lure her away from me. She also has a clearly defined taste for alpha qualities. I have some of those in reserve, partly through natural vigilance/rebellion and partly through self-taught Game or something of the general sort (probably some form e-negging, if that makes sense) developed as a filter for the dating scene, but the legal framework of Marriage 2.0 tends to scare me back into full beta mode when things get rough.
I fully approve your suggestion of “roll your own alpha”, partly out of simple pragmatism, partly out of my own experience of what it means to be beta, and partly out of schadenfreude. I know a man who was relatively fit on the physical level and nevertheless got it up for a faithless whale, in addition to having taught myself to find attractive things in “plain” women to one extent or another, so I have very little sympathy for the “I need insta-tingles” line of argument. Heartfelt thanks and encouragement to Amy Wilson also, for her support for “roll your own” as a concept.
When I first started reading you, I felt very much like an uber-beta. Whether or not I *was* uber-beta, I don’t know for sure, but my experience inclines me to think that it is far healthier for all concerned if women in general were more like Amy. When you push a beta (or at least my kind) far enough down, you get results like the spell named “Beta” in Final Fantasy VII. Fire everywhere in the form of rage. That, I think, can far more easily yield the “nuclear alpha” scenario that I seem to remember being cited as a feared result than releasing some of the pressurized frustration early by “rolling your own”. Chances are that the beta in question will be grateful to the bae who taught it to him, rather than use it to cheat. But of course, this leads me to what I think the real motive is behind withholding alpha training from betas: the age-old lust for power. Teaching a beta how to woo like an alpha weakens a woman’s hand in the relationship. As much as feral women relish a challenge, they still want to win. Teaching beta to an alpha feels like a total, satisfying conquest of a worthy opponent. Teaching alpha to a beta doesn’t offer that same domineering thrill. And that’s one of the reasons why I think more women need to give “rolling your own” a fair hearing.