Do you love me?
Revisiting the topic of pump-n-dump, the key point I was making on my original post is that uncommitted sex doesn’t happen by accident. Both parties go in not wanting to make any explicit promises. If they wanted to, they could agree to stay together as a couple for 3 months, 3 years, or 3 decades. Likewise they can also decide they will be sexually exclusive for the term of the “relationship”. As Doug1 mentioned in his comment on the original post:
Often a guy won’t know if he’s gonna want at least a fling or something longer when he ends up pumping and dumping a girl who’s not a complete slut. Depends on how much fun and compatible she is post banging, whether she’ll allow a non exclusive kind of relationship for a good while or semi permanently and so on.
Questions of commitment and exclusivity aren’t out of bounds to either party when deciding if they want to have sex. To the extent they aren’t mentioned, each party must feel it is to their advantage not to raise the point.
However, many women wish to have this both ways. Instead of asking the man if he will agree to mutually promise commitment and exclusivity, they will often ask him if he loves her. But make no mistake, this isn’t about commitment, it is about his investment in her. It is a subtle slight of hand, because investment is typically what a man would offer a woman in exchange for her commitment to him. The conflation of the two is a very neat trick, and one which I suspect most women do without consciously considering it. Paige’s recent comment had me thinking about this:
Relating Pump-n-Dumping to Serial Monogamy assumes more self-awareness in the woman than she actually has. At the beginning the woman is convinced she will be in-love forever…if the romantic feelings decline she believes the relationship is no longer worthwhile for either partner. But she doesn’t just assume at the beginning that this will happen.
Not all women are like that, as Doomed Harlot demonstrated in her comment:
Yes, yes, 100 times, yes, any woman who has uncommitted sex assumes the risk that the man might end the “relationship” (to the extent there is one) before she would want to.
This seems blindingly obvious, to the point that I wonder who would say otherwise? It seemed perfectly clear to me when I first started having uncommitted sex at 18, and it was clear to all my female friends who were having sex at that time.
The fact is that men and women are free to make whatever informal agreement between themselves that they wish to. This doesn’t have the same meaning as marriage, but it is something different than uncommitted sex. On the Misery and vice thread, the topic of a virgin having sex with her fiancé was raised. Sweet As felt that this could make the woman a slut:
A man states that he wants to be married and he wants “marriage material.” He defines “marriage material” as a chaste woman (and/or virgin bride). He values this virginity until he wants to have sex with her, with the promise of marriage. If she gives in, and he breaks up with her, she is — to the next man with the same standard — a slut and therefore no longer marriage material. If she doesn’t give in, she doesn’t trust him.
But the woman in this example wasn’t looking for uncommitted sex. Calling her a slut is way over the top. So for my female readers I offer this handy rule: If you want investment from him without offering him commitment or exclusivity, make him say he loves you before you have sex. If you want commitment and exclusivity, well, ask for that…
Love me image created by Nevit Dilmen.
I think when girls in our permissive post feminist post birth control culture participate in fast and very potentially casual, non committed sex, generally with a guy a god lot SMV/hotter than she could attract for negotiated committed sex, she’s doing so in the belief that there’s at least a good chance her special snowflake charms can win him to commitment.
She’s doing an opening of store special discount sale, in other words, to attract sampling, and she hopes loyalty.
This is heavy female projection. Both sexes do it but the girls far more.
“She’s doing an opening of store special discount sale, in other words, to attract sampling, and she hopes loyalty.”
Very good analogy.
When I woman speaks of wanting “love” I think most imagine the Disney love with implied monogamy.
I’m a test-drive-during-the-engagement sort of guy. But then I am quite the sexual conservative really.
“make him say he loves you before you have sex.”
I did that, but it didn’t work out too well to be honest. In my case I’ve always been with secular men and always in the context of a relationship in which the man was definitely “crazy” about me. But I think love alone is not enough, especially when young.
The best is to wait until making sure both are in love and are emotionally mature enough to know the meaning of love, commitment and marriage, as well have fundamental compatibilities (and no red flags). Otherwise it’s hard to say there won’t be regrets.
Dalrock:
The mistake I think you’re making is taking what women say at face value. Sex means a commitment to most men; to women it means nothing at all. Recall that in our culture, women fancy themselves as the ‘owners of sex’; and that entitles them (so they think) to do it with whoever and whenever they please for whatever reason.
Remember also that 90% of all relationships, including marriages, are terminated by women. That alone shows how little value they place on sex as an intimate experience of bonding with men. It also illustrates that a woman’s pledges of love before sex are, to put it bluntly, outright lies.
The men who ‘pump and dump’ are really doing nothing more than following their own instincts, both their biological needs for sex (although masturbation is much safer alternative); and their survival instincts. They probably intuitaively know that a relationship with a typical female will end in disaster for them, so they take what they want and get out of it before it’s too late. Our feminocentric culture has created an atomosphere not unlike a civil war, where relationships are carried out on what’s virtually a ‘kill-or-be-killed’ basis. And I wish to remind men again who ‘pump and dump’ to look at the false rape/paternity statistics and think carefully about whether what they’re doing is really worth the risk.
As in all cases, including non-sexual ones,women demanded the power and fought dirty to get it,now they have it and have no idea what to do with it.
I think it’s fair to assert that a person speak to what they want.
The biggest issues that I find, though, are that people either A. don’t know what they want, or B. don’t realize what they are doing when they do whatever it is they think they “want.”
As the previous commenter said, some women offer a sampling to attempt to garnish commitment. I think many do this without doing it consciously. Part of it is, they expect that if he is asking for sex, he is interested in her, not just the sex.
In irony, I think that sex actually does mean commitment for many women, and that for men, it does not. This has long been the standing cultural more, and I’ve not really seen any changes in regards to it. So, I’m not sure where the evidence is that this idea has “flipped” — that women no longer utilize sex to garnish the commitment.
I think, too, that many people do simply lack clarity in themselves. They do not necessarily see themselves clearly, nor are they therefore likely to see others clearly. A client and I joked today about the nature of illusion.
After his last thai massage, he felt very stretched out and loose. At todays, he felt much more relaxed and stretched out than last week, and his body could handle both deeper stretches and deeper compressions. He asserted during one of the stretches that last week, he felt amazing and loose, but today he felt tight and balled up. But, he noted “that could be an illusion.” I asserted to him that last week he was one tight ball of tension, and this week he felt very loose and relaxed. But, my perception could also be illusion.
Of course, being the consummate optimist, and a person who has had a generally successful and happy life, I can say that I, in general, perceive people as good, decent human beings striving for a good and happy life. I believe that they strive to be moral/ethical and just, and that they are not seeking to use people.
This could simply be an illusion. As could my perception that people have no clue what they really want or what they are really doing. In my experience, people are often driven by then impulses, and those impulses often lead to confusing outcomes and suffering.
And D, thanks for defining for me the use of the term ‘slut’ in this sphere. I am, admittedly, both new and confused by much of the language use. It is learning about how people are perceiving things, and then applying certain labels to those perceptions.
I definitely agree that a couple can make whatever agreement they want — whether it is a quick fling, a premarital relationship, or the big “M” (i.e. “marriage”).
The standard premarital relationship is that the couple agrees to exclusivity for the duration of the relationship. But, unless you have promised to stay together for life, there is an implicit understanding that either party can terminate the relationship at any time.
Most relationships also involve some less well-defined understanding that the couple is exploring the possibility of marriage, or that the the relationship will only terminate under egregious circumstances, like cheating. Or that you are together because you love each other. This is where things get sticky. Since these kinds of expectations are difficult or impossible to define, it is likely that the parties’ expectations differ. That is why hurt feelings or a sense of betrayal often ensue during a break-up.
So the advice is — if you want investment from him without offering commitment or exclusivity, make him say he loves you before you have sex with him. I am puzzled, and maybe it’s because I’ve not read enough of this blog to understand the terms being used.
Is there a difference between investment and commitment? The only example given of male investment that does not necessarily involve commitment is “romance.” Romance can be great and fun, of course, but it is also an easily performed series of gestures. Do women really want to “exchange” sex for some flowers and some pretty words? For that matter having him say “I love you” seems a bit formulaic. Anyone can utter three simple words. Whether these words are sincere or whether the feeling behind them is lasting is another matter.
[D: There are three links in the post which define the terms as I am using them. Two in the paragraph before the quote from Paige, and one in the final paragraph. But you are very close here even without reading those.]
The irony is that I am sounding like a bit of a scold here, tsk-tsking young women for giving away the milk, etc. which is far from what I mean. What I’m really getting at is that buying into the frame that “women barter sex” is inherently debasing to women. If sex is transactional, then isn’t the woman always by definition a whore, whether she gets $50, a nice dinner, an “I love you” or a wedding ring?
Sluts* like me opt out of that frame. I decided as a teenager that I was not going to pander to some hypothetical future groom by limiting my sex life, nor was I going to pander to any current boys or men in my life by engaging in sexual activity in exchange for affection. To me, the dignified path was always about having sex if and when it felt desirable and right to me (within certain ethical contraints, those being best summed up as “do no harm” — practice safe sex, ensure the consent of your partner, and be kind). In other words, I had sex because I wanted to have sex, and no other reason. If someone had expressed a concern about my value in the marriage market, I would have said, “Screw that.” Besides, I think that if a woman takes care of herself physically, projects confidence, and behaves like a decent and kind person, she will do just fine on the “market” anyway, so why should she wrap herself up in knots about whether she’s a “slut” or not?
*I self-identify as a “slut” because I have always opposed the double-standard and the transactional view of sex, and have acted accordingly. On the one hand, I may not qualify under the standards set forth here. I never had sex with, or even kissed, anyone other than a premarital boyfriend of several years and my husband. With both men, I had sex with them immediately on a first date within a few weeks of first meeting them with absolutely no expectation of or desire for a further relationship. The fact that I wound up in long term relationships with both men does not change the nature of my initial encounters with them.
[D: You clearly lacked initiative in your sluttyness. Only two men, one a long term boyfriend and the other your husband? You could do better if you set your mind to it.]
I agree with the notion that sex can be entirely non-transactional, and that for me it is so.
For me, it is a sacrament in itself — a sacred act — without any specific religious overtones. My body is sacred, my spirit also sacred, and everything that I would consider “of myself” is also sacred.
Most people do not toss around sacred things in transactional ways. Nor do they necessarily concern themselves with how others may define them, or describe them, based on how they act on their notion of what is sacred and how one should act around/with sacred objects.
And for whatever it is worth, I also feel that another’s person is also sacred. This is demands that I both perceive and treat people in a specific way — as one would treat a church not their own, or any sacred object, or for that matter, themselves.
I wish that more people saw themselves as sacred. If they did, they would likely treat themselves so much better. I hope to teach my son that he is sacred.
Sweet As,
I’m not religious but you are essentially expressing the same point I am trying to make. Where I likely differ is that I think it is possible to have casual sex while maintaining self-respect and respect for the other person involved.
Doomed Harlot: If I understand you correctly you did not use sex to barter resources/investment from a man with the same or lesser SMV or to elicit the interest of a man with a higher SMV, therefor you don’t qualify as a WHORE or a SLUT.
https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2010/09/03/sex-cartel/
Trusting and not demanding anything extra from a man with the same SMV will never give you a bad reaction from men (or maybe not even women), unless they disagree on the “same SMV” bit.
“So for my female readers I offer this handy rule: If you want investment from him without offering commitment or exclusivity, make him say he loves you before you have sex. If you want commitment and exclusivity, well, ask for that… ”
I am not so sure. If the man has the same SMV (in his mind) her demands is saying that she thinks he has a lower value and that he has to sugar the deal (bartering sex as a commodity). If he agrees that he has a lower SMV, it’s the same. If the man has a higher SMV (in everybody’s or her mind) she instinctively knows she cannot make such demands or she will rationalize that he has accepted them, even if he hasn’t or is obviously lying (obvious meaning obvious to any man she would ask).
[D: A woman clarifying the nature of the relationship before deciding to have sex isn’t bartering. She is making sure she knows what the situation is. She is acting purposefully.]
My simple advice would be for women to seek out men with the same SMV as them and not demand anything from them, thus avoiding both the WHORE and SLUT qualification.
From the other thread, but pertains to here:
Seriously though, that kind of thing never worries me.
Me neither. The idea of my husband abandoning me seems laughable, really. I can’t even imagine it, although I sometimes try to and wax hyperbolic. It’s like imagining pigs flying.
I’ve never really questioned his fidelity, either before or after our marriage, as he’s incredibly loyal by nature. I think with betas (even “higher betas”), marriage is more intended for their protection from abandonment, than as protection for their wives. I’ve never known of a beta to leave his wife unprovoked, just as I’ve never known of an alpha who remained faithful. If anything, the real problem I’ve seen with beta-LTRs is that they’re inclined to hurt or even kill themselves if their women leave them. They’re very self-destructive that way.
But abandoning their women? That’s relatively rare, I think. Women don’t seem to notice which men are unfaithful, and just sort of lump all men together indiscriminately. If you don’t want to get dumped, avoid disloyal men and behave yourself. It’s really not that complicated, and I suspect it works quite well even outside of marriage. Marriage is to keep women from being dumped by alphas, and betas from being dumped by women.
These are gross generalizations, of course, but I think there is a lot of truth to it.
[D: Bullseye.]
“I love you” is not a magic charm by which you can weed out the cads from the good guys. If a cad thinks he can get some by saying it, he will, and think nothing of dumping the lady after.
“If you don’t want to get dumped, avoid disloyal men and behave yourself. It’s really not that complicated, and I suspect it works quite well even outside of marriage. Marriage is to keep women from being dumped by alphas, and betas from being dumped by women.”
Exactly.. My husband is incredibly loyal to me and I to him..
I couldn’t get a better man.
He satisfies me in every way 😉
I AM so lucky..
I guess this is why, Alte, that I have said that I have never ever even thought of sleeping with another man, after I had met my husband..
Our bond is a very deep one..
When beta cheats I think it is because he “fell in-love” with another woman, as opposed to an alpha just liking sexual variety.
A man in love will never cheat…
Do you know Paige.. I know with great certainty that my husband would never cheat..
I just know it! I would not cheat either.. But, he is a much better man than I am a better woman…
He is steadfast and strong..
I am weak…. Really.
I trust him implicitly..
More so than I trust myself..
[D: Well put. I think it is hard for many women to fathom the inherent loyalty of a beta. Roissy writes about when it can become farce, but just as often (probably much more often) it can be noble.]
Admittedly- I am a bit of a cynic about love. You can’t come from a family where the average is 3 marriages per person and come away with any beliefs about enduring love.
Ugh, “love.” “In love” “falling in love” and worst of all “falling out of love!” The least understood and most abused terms in the english language. Everyone thinks they know what they mean, but no one can define them, except as the senator defined “pornography” as “I know it when I see it.”
Women seem to be more prone to error than men, as women are more emotional, but the error hits guys, too. Love is not the butterflies you feel, not the squishy, gushy feelings. Love is not, in fact, a feeling, or at least, defining love as a feeling is like defining hate as a feeling, maybe correct as far as it goes, but limiting to an incredible degree.
When I say “I hate you” but do nothing at all to hurt you, and in fact I go out of my way to help you, am I really hating you? Are you suffering any ill effect of my so-called “hate?” If not, then how can I say I really hate you? It’s not affecting my actions in any way, if I express tenderness and affection to someone I hate, how can that be hate? It isn’t. Hate is only true when expressed, as when I run over a dog with my car intentionally I am expressing hatred toward that dog. If I run down my wife and belittle her, I am certainly expressing hate towards her (I’m not talking negs here, I mean true mean spirited things). Are you getting the picture? Hate is not a feeling only, it’s best understood as an action.
So it is also with love. I can say “I love you” until the cows come home, but that does not make any but the most vulnerable feel loved. Love requires action to truly be called love. Love requires an object to be loved by the one doing the loving. Love is expressed by what you do, not what you feel. It is not subjective, it is objective.
“I fell out of love with you” is total crap. “I chose to stop loving you” is much more accurate. Even more honest is “Because I stopped feeling the squishy mushy indefinable feeling I always associated with love, I chose to stop loving you.” But you see the problem isn’t the lack of feeling, but the lack of doing.
The real problem is that the heart is deceitful and will lead anyone astray. If you put all of your faith in your feelings, what will you do that morning when you wake up and you don’t feel that mushyness? Will you choose to not love your husband that day? What if your mushy feeling is only based on how he treats you, and his likewise? Once the cycle of not feeling “love” starts, you stop expressing love to each other, and that reinforces the lack of love felt, which feeds into the lack of love expressed, and so on.
Love is an action, and therefore an act of will, not an emotional reaction to any event. There’s an old saying, you marry someone because you love him, but one day you will choose to love someone because you married him. I hope you understand that’s the way love and marriage is designed to work, and indeed I just proved how it cannot possibly work any other way.
Alte–
Being unfaithful and abandoning your woman are two different things. Alpha males don’t generally leave their good wives just because those men have a fling or two. Men, particularly alpha men are naturally polygamous; having sex with another woman and even having strong feelings for her doesn’t make most men want to stop loving and sexing their wives.
Our feminist culture completely misinforms women about this. I think a lot of intense, absolutist female jealous is female projection about what the consequences would likely be if THEY cheated, so far as their sexual desire for their husbands goes.
Of course it’s much better for an alpha to have this understanding with his LTR/wife, rather than deceptively cheating on her.
I prefer this version Dan..
The Excellence of Love
1If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.
4Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, 5does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, 6does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; 7bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away. 9For we know in part and we prophesy in part; 10but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away. 11When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. 12For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known. 13But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.
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Paige says:
Pretty much. The later part is definitely true by and large — unless the wife has become a horror.
Partly I think the beta part is true because betas tend to know they can’t get away with cheating — part of their appeal is definitely the loyalty they offer to compensate for being less hot emotionally and sexually. This is more than a cold rational calculation. It’s internalize in beta personalities much of the time as being “who they are”.
There is however a phenomenon with greater betas as they get older especially if they are professionals or otherwise have a lot of career success, where they actually become lesser alphas and find pretty younger girls are actually really attracted to them, without lots of effort or reliable promises of commitment. That can lead to cheating most definitely. And often wife initiated divorce.
@Doug1
Partly I think the beta part is true because betas tend to know they can’t get away with cheating — part of their appeal is definitely the loyalty they offer to compensate for being less hot emotionally and sexually. This is more than a cold rational calculation. It’s internalize in beta personalities much of the time as being “who they are”.
You being natural alpha, I would argue that you are misreading natural betas (including greater betas). I had a roommate in college who was natural alpha. He fell in madly in love several times a week. This and his natural game turned into him managing a harem of women, some of them knowing more than others about the nature of the arrangement. I learned a great deal from him by watching his game, but even so I wasn’t interested in flings or having a harem. I think someone like Gorbachev might be able to shed some more light on this. He was natural greater beta, who learned to be alpha. He probably has good insight into the difference between the two frames of mind and personality types.
Kathy, in this secular age, I find Thomas Aquinas’ approach the best – arrive at the answer through pure reason, then validate the conclusion against scripture. If both are in line, I’m pretty sure I came up with the correct answer. Put another way, quoting scripture about love and marriage to the average agnostic/athiest will get you nowhere when talking about morality (though witnessing is another question). Put things in terms of logic, and sometimes they can be persuaded.
Of course, people being people willful ignorance of learning the truth and willful disobedience of what they know to be true (both also called sin) allow them to continue their self-destructive folly.
Doug- that is basically the impression I get.
SMV 6 man marrys SMV 6 woman. Man has career success….. man becomes SMV 8, woman has aged and her SMV has only dropped. Man has SMV 8 women offering whagt he never could have got when younger… Man convinced himself he is in-love with the woman and “out of love” with the wife. Jonathan Edwards comes to mind here.
I think the fear is for us women who tend to hang around the 5/6 mark in attractiveness. If a man already has an 8 or 9 then other 8’s and 9’s are not going to be as much of an attraction. If he marries your average plain-jane in his youth, and then he skyrockets in sexual value while she slowly declines..she has a lot more reason to worry. If he has never slept with an 8 and suddenly they are available…thats a huge temptation. As the attraction builds he will experience cognitive dissonance. On the one hand he is “a good family man” but on the other hand “damn… I want to screw her” so he convinces himself he is justified and goes for the other woman, usually coming up with some lame excuse such as his wife didn’t do xyz enough, when the fact is his wife is a 5 and his new girl is an 8.
So perhaps the moral of the story is only 7 and up women should marry?
“Partly I think the beta part is true because betas tend to know they can’t get away with cheating — part of their appeal is definitely the loyalty they offer to compensate for being less hot emotionally and sexually”
ROFL, with that bit of nonsense.
How many years have you been married, Doug..?
I still think that my husband is hot.. Psst he is not an Alpha though.. Certainly not by your standards.
Let me tell you something here.. I have been married for fifteen years.. Our bond has strengthened over that time, and the sex has just gotten better and better..
Weird isn’t it?
Unless you have been in such a deep and commited relationship, I think that you are unqualified to comment, here.
How lucky am I .. I get unconditional love, loyalty (and it is reciprocated) and hot sex.
Thank God I never married one of those feckless, Alpha’s.. Lol..
Who needs ’em?
..
Most women are stupid about men, really. I think that is perhaps because they are so alpha-focused that they rarely think about beta men at all, so when they end up with one they just project alpha-like expectations onto the men. The Apex Fallacy of mating, I suppose.
Are they really “less hot”? The hottest and most-desirable men IMO are the higher betas, not the alphas. If I look around the Manosphere, for example, I’d probably rate guys like Dalrock, Athol, Brendan, etc. much hotter than Roissy and the rest of the players. Even when I find an alpha sexually stimulating, I’m turned off by the thought of their promiscuity. Who wants the dubious compliment of being Notch #56 on their belt?
Alphas more of the instant-gratification variety of “hot”, which is something I suspect most women will eventually tire of. The constant drama is like living with a crazy-ass woman, and I increasingly find it a total turn-off. I suspect that modern women are perpetually-attracted to alphas for the same reason that they gorge themselves on ice cream: lack of self control and introspection. Alphas are like sexual junk food; they don’t satisfy for long and are bad for your health.
Paige, you gotta stop thinking that way.. Don’t listen to this BS from Doug..
You have been married 10 years and you are going to have your sixth child this year..
I never worry about my husband leaving me (nor does he worry about me leaving him) We really love and care for one another.. I know that is hard to believe, for some..
You listen to too much secular nonsense.. Players are certainly not to be taken seriously.. Nor are they oracles on such matters…
You worry too much and are insecure, and therefore susceptible to BS .. Start praying more and paying less attention to losers, eh?
“Alphas are like sexual junk food; they don’t satisfy for long and are bad for your health.”
Well said Alte. Lol..
Kathy- I think we have different ways of seeing things, but I don’t think this can be summed up as something lacking in my spiritual life.
I have worried about my husband leaving me since before I got married. I got married anyway because I wanted to have sex and I wanted to have children, so I took the risk. Since I have been married I have had many many many close friends lose their husbands to another woman. I can think of 5 cheaters right now, and 3 led to a divorce (the woman filed after being abandoned).
Realistically speaking there is nothing about me that is better than any of these women who this horrible thing happened to. I am not better looking. I am not nicer, sexier, smarter, sweeter, etc. I am no special snowflake. I am an average girl with average looks, average intelligence, and average domestic skills. If it could happen to them there is ZERO reason to assume it couldn’t happen to me.
I greatly admire your confidence, Kathy. But I can’t share it because it just doesn’t seem realistic coming from my perspective and objectively comparing myself to others who had this happen.
That said…I am not exactly crippled by anxiety. I don’t spend every waking moment in worry about it. I’ve only been talking about it recently because it is the topic at hand in this discussion, not because it consumes my every thought.
One thing I do know for sure is that my husband doesn’t want the children to experience a divorce, so that is a huge incentive for him.
“If you don’t want to get dumped, avoid disloyal men and behave yourself. It’s really not that complicated, and I suspect it works quite well even outside of marriage. Marriage is to keep women from being dumped by alphas, and betas from being dumped by women.”
Sounds good, but given the state of Marriage 2.o, it’s obviously untrue to say that marriage prevents any woman from dumping any man regardless of his position on the Alpha-Omega curve. Rather marriage today tends to INDUCE a woman to dump her husband.
“I’ve never known of a beta to leave his wife unprovoked, just as I’ve never known of an alpha who remained faithful.”
Lets not conflate abandonment with faithfulness. Most men who chose to marry do so not for their protection, but to protect their family. I know a number of married Alphas who cheat as easily as we draw breath. Not one of them would consider leaving their wife and children for a microsecond. Not one. The vast majority of them go to great lengths to ensure that their wives will not find out. They do this not just because of the potential cost should they be discovered, but also because they do not wish to cause their wife pain. Each would swear that they love their wife. They appear to believe it. We can debate the hypocrisy or the believability of those statements, but that debate is likely to prove moot.
Similarly, without regard to their Alpha-Omega score, most men don’t leave a marriage without what they perceive as substantial provocation. We may support the notion that a cheating Alpha has earned whatever wifely provocation comes his way, but from his perspective it is still provocation.
“Love is not, in fact, a feeling,…”
Love is also NOT an action. Love is not saying nice words to someone. Love is far more. It is deeper and spiritual. Actions, like words, are how we express love. Actions carry more weight because they stand behind the words. Love is part trust, part attraction, part communication, part need, part support, part respect and many other parts.
Love is necessary to any happy enduring relationship but not sufficient alone. People act in certain ways to one another because they love each other. Actions are one objective demonstration of the subjective feelings that well from the values that you share. Despite that, you can not objectively measure love by someone’s actions. The valuing of an action by someone is inherently subjective. There is also a subjective cost of an action to someone. I may perform some action toward someone that costs me little but is highly valued by them. The converse is true. Subjective valuation means that one can not say that A’s actions prove that he or she loves B, more than C loves D.
The fact that we tend to put generally common valuations on many situations does not falsify this premise. In fact it may reveal itself when we see a couple where the actions of one seem totally out of sync with expected behavior and yet are accepted even openly valued by the other member of the couple.
I think a lot of posts are treating women and men as identical psychologically, and I think that goes a long way to explain the current broken state of marriage and relationships.
To preface, when I refer to women and men, I must clarify that I mean “most women, most men”. I don’t want anyone to think I’m making personal accusatory statements.
But here’s the bombshell that changed my life: Women do not love the same way as men. (BOOM!)
It just SOUNDS controversial. If I say “women parent differently” or “women make friends differently” it sounds mundanely obvious, doesn’t it? But the myth of female love being the same as male love persists, despite the fact that women have been running from marriage in ratios of 2:1.
Women have a list of characteristics that make up her ideal of a mate. These are often set in the preteen years. Should the man meet the characteristics, she ‘loves’ him. What she actually loves, is the ROLE this person plays her life. She ‘loves her man’, no matter who’s face happens to be in that man-slot at the time. It’s impersonal, and based on her ideals of who she feels she ‘deserves’. Evolutionarily, it also makes sure that the injured or inferior males get dumped for more suitable ones. It produces stronger children.
Men have much less concept of what kind of women they deserve… in fact love often takes a man unawares, unseen and even unwelcome. It’s like a seizure. It comes to define who he is as a person, and it is not based on the role that woman plays in his life. If if did, men would be ending marriages constantly due to lack of sex. Men love YOU, not what you bring to the relationship.
This is why women end the vast majority of marriages and relationships. “I love you” from a woman, translated to man-speak is: “You’re doing a great job, and meet/exceed expectations.” Stop meeting her expectations, and she’s on her way out the door toward the next applicant.
Women are surprisingly candid about this: “He quit his job as a jeweler and became a bartender, so OF COURSE I broke up with him!” (He no longer meets the basic criteria.) “I need security (money). How am I supposed to raise a family on a bartenders salary? I deserve better than to be a bartenders wife!”
Say this to a group of women, and not one will blink an eye.
Now reverse the gender: “She quit her job as a IT engineer, and is starting a housekeeping business, so OF COURSE I broke up with her. How are we supposed to raise a family on a housekeepers salary. I need security, and I deserve better than to be a housekeeper’s husband!”
If a man said this to a group of men, he would be met with stunned silence, followed by: “How could you be so shallow as to end a relationship over a job title change? How dare you assume her money is your money? Earn your own! You must be shallow, and you must never have loved her in the first place.”
Who the man is as a person is surprisingly irrelevant to women. I’ve seen women bounce from hardcore atheists, to devout christians, and simply adjust their behavior accordingly. Many men report they don’t even recognize their ex-wives a few months after a breakup. They’ve simply reinvented themselves for the next opportunity.
This was known all the way back to biblical times, we just forgot about it during the middle ages when the deification of women peaked in the age of chivalry.
Take a look in the bible. I commands that a man LOVE his wife. No such command exists for women. Women are told to OBEY their husbands. Why? Presumably because God doesn’t command people to do things that outside of their ability.
All this talk about love puzzles me. Frankly, women don’t love men, by male definitions. Frankly, most of them don’t even like men. They are either useful, or useless in their eyes.
This reminds me of my favorite blessing upon a newly married couple: “May you always be her best option.”
Uncle Fred, if we’re getting into the subject of valuing, we can agree that all actions of love should be judged by three things, the intent, the impact on the receiver, and the situation in which it is applied. Thus love is in part subjective and in part objective and in part situational. Theoretically if we had perfect knowledge of all three aspects of each act of love, we could judge as appropriate each and every circumstance.
But let’s not quibble over legalisms. The basic point I was making is that most people only assume the subjective is the whole of what love is, when any real thought into the matter will reveal that is not the case. Over-reliance on any one aspect of love will tend to lead to an error in the understanding of it, and the error of the modern age is to put all of its eggs in the subjective basket, leading to the infidelity, divorce, and general destruction of the family and all the good associated with the family we have seen.
Paige–
His SMV is unlikely to skyrocket. Going from a 7 to an 8 is more likely the kind of thing that can and does happen with career success, status and confidence.
In such a case I think a now lesser alpha husband is quite likely to cheat but is NOT likely to leave his wife especially if he was kids with her. I think it’s often the wife that leaves her husband when she discovers he’s cheated — which I think is usually a foolish move on her part. Doesn’t tend to lead to a wife filed for divorce nearly as much in most other countries. At lot of what happens here is social pressure from her girlfriends married and divorced, taking the form of commiseration and how they could never live with it themselves and so on.
@OAK
I think that your analysis does not take into consider philo love- Love that is platonic and based on a friendship of equals and not complicated by the hypergamous instinct.
A woman is quite capable of loving a man just as she would love any of her girlfriends. Its when sex/children/lifestyles become part of the package that the love is complicated by expectations.
Many women have felt a very deep love even for their ex-husbands but they initiated the divorce because they could not adapt to the lifestyle that marriage to that man required. My Dads ex-wife is one such woman. She could not handle his gambling addiction but she maintained a platonic love for him.
Hee, hee… third paragraph from the bottom: “IT commands… ” not “I commands”.
Just want to make certain no one thinks I’m making commands on Dalrock’s blog! 😉
“All this talk about love puzzles me. Frankly, women don’t love men, by male definitions. Frankly, most of them don’t even like men. They are either useful, or useless in their eyes.”
More crap..
Frankly I am getting sick and tired of jaded men telling me women don’t love men, but just want to use them up!
@Paige:
You are correct, I didn’t take into account platonic love, nor do I feel qualified to expound on love in it’s many forms.
It’s easy to interpret this as anti-woman rhetoric, however I don’t see it that way. I am in a long term (but never married) relationship. I know exactly what I’m good for in her life, and I know that should I falter I’m history.
To my mind, it can’t be a bad thing that women don’t love men, any more than it can be a bad thing that Lions eat Gazelles.
However, A LOT of uneducated men running around making serious life/financial decisions that are predicated on the assumption that the love they feel is entirely mutual. It ain’t. It never was. It never will be.
Once you know the ‘rules of engagement’ (rimshot) I find relationships are much easier, and I temper my love for my partner by always remembering my place in her world. She tells me she loves me everyday, but I know damn well if we had to move out of our house into an apartment, because of something I did… well, I doubt I could see her vapor trail she’d be gone so fast.
I’m sure she’d tell everyone she has platonic love for me, but had to think about her future.
I’m also sure you can tell how hollow that sounds as a mitigating factor for a freshly dumped man.
When I discovered this, I went through all five stages of grief:
-Denial: “This can’t be right… I mean, it explains every relationship you’ve ever had, but how can this be true? It must be false.”
-Anger: “How dare these women take me for this ride for all these years! I don’t even want a relationship if it’s not on equal terms!”
-Bargaining: “Maybe it’s me… if I gave her more backrubs, and flowers, she’ll love me then… that’s it!”
-Depression: “What’s the point. I might as well be single forever. I shall die unloved.”
-Acceptance: “Of course women are different from men! Isn’t that obvious. Celebrate the differences. I will make sound financial and relationship choices based on my own best interest, JUST LIKE WOMEN DO! My love for her is not predicated on her returning that love, it is my male birthright. I shall be the best man I can be, never entering into the sexist institution of marriage. I can enter into relationships with Open Eyes and Reasoned Expectations.
Alte–
We’re saying practically the same thing. One of the attractive qualities of betas is their willingness to be faithful as well as loyal. (A substantial portion of alphas will be loyal but faithful is more of a stretch.) While just about all women want this, it trumps other qualities more for some women than others.
If so many girls didn’t give themselves permission to slut around a good lot in their late teens and 20s (and in some cases early 30s) in our feminist, secular and birth control society, betas would be more attractive to more girls earlier, and alphas would have to be less players than they can be now, both due to fewer girls making themselves available w/out commitment, and the social pressures that this changed environment would engender. More the former though.
I disagree with your interpretation Kathy. If I thought my girlfriend just wanted to ‘use me up’ I wouldn’t be in a long term relationship.
However, I’m perfectly aware that it is what I bring to the relationship, not me personally, that she loves. I’m perfectly aware that should a good looking engineer making a 6 figure salary with dreams of world vacations starts wooing her, I’m probably yesterday’s news. And I accept this as the cost of admission.
It’s evolution in action… ensuring the strongest species… it’s not a personal slight against either one of us.
Look, it was women that taught me this. I had a room full of women ask me why I hadn’t married at 42. I said, before thinking, “None of them could keep the act up long enough.”
Reverse the gender of that room, and the questions would have flown out: “What act? What do you mean?”
But the room full of women for silent for just a moment, then asked. “How long were you engaged?” I said “5 years.” And they said: “That’s a long time to keep it up.”
Rather than castigating women for something they can’t do, I think we need to celebrate the differences with open eyes. If all males were educated in relationships in the high school years, we’d have far fewer divorces, and far few marriages.
I say ‘all men’ because most women are well educated in the art of manipulating men by the age 14, and they hone the skill throughout their lives.
See, I really just can’t relate to that. I joke around with you about it, but I can honestly say that I have never sincerely worried about my husband leaving or cheating on me. He’s just not like that, even though he’s attractive and wouldn’t find it too difficult to do. He just doesn’t want to, for whatever reason. He’s actually highly sexually-continent, other than his chasing after me.
My father’s that loyal, as well, as are all of my living male relatives on both sides. Perhaps it also helps that we all have a “thing” for STEM-types. They seem more naturally loyal. Perhaps they are more rational and less impulsive?
Perhaps that is the case for other women, as some don’t seem to mind sharing their men. I do mind. I’d rather be beaten, raped, thrown down the stairs, pulled down into penury, and sleeping on the streets with a faithful husband than to remain living in the same house with a traitorous one. There truly is nothing worse than that to me. If I do not have his fidelity, then I do not want him.
Perhaps they do feel what little love (affection and concern, as for a favorite pet) they can toward their wife, but their love is relatively worthless if it does not incline them to fidelity. Without fidelity, love is just a greeting card motif.
If I were such a man, I would wonder about the kind of woman who would be willing to accept such a cheap substitute of the Real Thing. I would consider myself to be in the same situation as Groucho Marx; I wouldn’t want any woman who would have me. After all, if she were really that wonderful, wouldn’t she be able to land a similarly-attractive man who was faithful? She’s obviously settling, isn’t she? So what is wrong with her?
Actually, I suspect it’s adaptive. Women who do not compromise on fidelity tend to have children who benefit from their husbands’ focused attention. Such women (like myself) tend to be selected for, I suspect, because our children are more successful. The other women are mostly riding the carousel and ending up in harems (the wife of a cheating alpha is also part of a harem) or as single mothers. They and their children are, from and evolutionary point of view, losers.
As you can probably tell, it trumps everything for me. Perhaps it’s my more masculine mind, as I suppose I feel about a cheating husband the way men feel about cheating wives, but I really can’t understand how women can accept any infidelity.
My husband has ADHD so he is definitely impulsive. He lives on impulse. He married me on impulse. Our children were an impulse. Neither one of us are very good planners, though we have gotten better with age.
If my husband cheated I would stay because I have kids with him. But I would hate him and have to fight constantly showing it with all my strength.
@ Alte: Women accept infidelity when they have no better options. In the not so distant past, mistresses were common, because divorce was rare, and women had little opportunity for self advancement. Mistresses were simply a fact of life, and even interpreted as a positive. “Well, she takes care of the job I don’t want to do, and I get the house, the status, the kids and most of the financial benefits.”
Damaged women also accept infidelity. Abused women, or women who love like men do, are often the objects of pity to other women, who lament the damaged woman’s inability to see that her husband/partner is a loser, and hasn’t done anything for her lately anyway.
These damaged women often end up in shelters, surrounded by counselors who explain to her that not dumping a man because you ‘love’ him is illogical, against her biology and foolish.
Some of them can be helped back to Full Womanhood and a more utilitarian view of men. Others remain in abusive relationships to the bewilderment of other women.
This is why I don’t yearn to have my love returned in kind. Women that love men are considered damaged or crazy by other women. I’d rather have a psychologically intact partner that dumps me if I don’t meet her expectations.
Alpha males don’t generally leave their good wives just because those men have a fling or two. Men, particularly alpha men are naturally polygamous; having sex with another woman and even having strong feelings for her doesn’t make most men want to stop loving and sexing their wives.
Women whose husbands cheat lose in many ways. Her trust in his feelings and loyalty is gone. Women around her will look down on her for not being able to “keep her man.” And she herself will feel like a leftover – good enough for dinner once, now not enough to tempt unless there’s nothing else. Her husband may have some tender feelings for her still, but if he’s willing to put her through a complete reassessment of her innate and social value…well, to quote REO Speedwagon:
That ain’t love, I believe you’ve got the wrong emotion
That ain’t love, at least it doesn’t feel like love to me
In such a case I think a now lesser alpha husband is quite likely to cheat but is NOT likely to leave his wife especially if he was kids with her. I think it’s often the wife that leaves her husband when she discovers he’s cheated — which I think is usually a foolish move on her part. Doesn’t tend to lead to a wife filed for divorce nearly as much in most other countries. At lot of what happens here is social pressure from her girlfriends married and divorced, taking the form of commiseration and how they could never live with it themselves and so on.
I wouldn’t necessarily say one episode of adultery is worth jettisoning a marriage for, but these women from other countries aren’t staying for love either. They’re staying because their other options are limited. Again – that ain’t love. It’s financial and social dependence. It may be better for the kids, but…
There’s also the issues of disease and out of wedlock conception. I surely would not want my husband to father other children with another woman. Then all of his resources – emotional, psychological, financial, spiritual – will be channeled in multiple directions, and my kid would undoubtedly suffer, let alone hers.
I’m with Alte here. Adultery is a betrayal I would find excruciatingly hard to forgive and move on from. For women like me, avoiding the alphas is a much better strategy.
Hmm… that’s a viewpoint I could never share. I’d rather be the one-and-only to a poor man than one-of-many to a rich one. The way my husband looks at me… priceless. Other women never experience that, which leads me to pity them.
And for what? What valuable quality does such a man possess that a man like my husband does not have? The only difference between the two is fidelity, as far as I can see. I really do not understand what is supposed to make such men so valuable. It bewilders me, and always has. Perhaps we’ll soon see “survival of the fittest” after the economic crash, with those women surviving who understand which men are truly the fittest.
As for love… men show their love through sacrifice, and women through obedience. Just as with parents and children, or Christ and His Church. Same general dynamic. St. Paul defines it as men loving and women submitting.
I would argue that men provided no more valuable qualities then than today. It was simply the lot of women before the age of equality and relatively easy divorce. They had no choice but to accept it.
Hmmm… Obedient women?? Do they ride unicorns or something? 😉 I think you just added credence to my point.
Another point, Alte: Divorces DECREASE during bad economic times.
What’s the point of suing a broke guy for all his stuff?
This is why colleged educated men have divorces initiated by their wives closer to 92% of the time. (That’s 92% of college educated divorcees had the divorce initiated by the wife.)
In other words, your wife is much more likely to leave you if:
1. You have lots of money, enough for her to live comfortably after the divorce.
OR
2. She found a better suitor who makes more than you.
In a recession, there is less financial incentive to divide the spoils of the estate, and less more suitable men with whom to jump ship.
Ack, posted with a typo in my name! Please delete one of them.
An interesting article today at CNN basically confirming my long-held view that female adultery is harder for a relationship to get past than male adultery: http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/07/female-infidelity-its-different-from-the-guys/?hpt=C2
Of course, I don’t hold that there is a moral difference, just a practical one in terms of which tends to be more “relationship fatal”.
In this sense, it ties in, I think, to what OAK has been writing. Namely, the guy who commits adultery usually still loves and wants to be with his wife, yet he has committed an act of terrible betrayal. It is a personal failing and a betrayal, but it isn’t a rejection of the wife, in almost all cases (there are exceptions, like Mark Sanford, who appears to have truly fallen in love with his mistress, which made his affair more like the typical female affair than the typical male one).
Most female affairs are not, however, typically personal failings/weakness and betrayal related, but substitutional/swapping related. When a woman has an affair, the affair partner becomes her “man”, even if she happens to be married to another man — she has one “man space” in her, and there’s only room for one (at a time), and so the lover takes over the man space and the husband, well, he’s still loved but often she’ll say “like a brother”. At that point, hubby is done, because he’s no longer in her “man space”, and therefore the upgrade has already happened *inside* the woman, regardless of whether her outward status suggests that she remains married to someone else.
This is why overcoming female adultery is so much harder than is the case for male adultery. In many/most male adultery cases, the man will feel sorry, will want to work on the relationship, and will try to make amends while the couple is figuring out whether they can stay together — a main factor, of course, is whether the woman can get past the betrayal, which is admittedly very difficult. However, in a female adultery situation, by contrast, it’s not only the case that the male partner has to get past the betrayal (i.e. the flip of what happens in a case of male adultery), but it is most typically the case that the woman feels little to no remorse, will not apologize, feels entitled to have done what she did, and feels that her husband should accept the blame — and often she’s simply *done* with the relationship and just wants to end it as soon as possible.
My therapist spoke very frankly about this to me during my own divorce. Women who cheat generally feel no remorse, express no remorse, and will not really try to make amends. You’re no longer in their “man space”, and so you’re more like a brother to them. That isn’t the case when a man cheats on his wife. And the real reason is that men love women very differently from how women love men — the latter is much more conditional than the former.
Yes, that is true.
I was responding to Oak, but it applies to Brendan’s post, as well.
If he cheats on you, he might still love you, but he clearly does not love you enough to refrain from cheating on you. He might love you a lot, perhaps more than he loves the other woman. But is that what I want? To be loved more than some slut? Does that make me his #1 slut? What an honor.
And what does that say about how much he loves his children, that he would risk his marriage and his relationship with their mother? It seems to me that such a man loves himself most.
That said, women who feel as strongly as I do about fidelity tend to avoid such unfaithful men like the plague, to begin with. The very thought of a cheating husband fills me with rage and disgust, which is probably obvious.
Brendans’s comment is true. Taking it a bit further, it even explains why so many women accuse men of infidelity with a ferociousness that defies reason. She unconsciously knows what it would mean if she cheated and so projects that onto her man. The majority of accused men are faithful.
I think women are too untrusting of men and men are too trusting of women when it comes to infidelity. (This mainly applies to Betas, which is most men)
Indeed, Alte.
My point is not that male adultery doesn’t really sting badly — it does. It’s a betrayal, it’s a display of unloving behavior and so on.
However, female adultery has all of that PLUS a general lack of remorse on the part of the betrayer.
In other words, both share the sting you describe, but female adultery is typically harder to get past because the person who isn’t betrayed often can’t be bothered. In both cases the betrayal needs to be gotten past. However, it’s much more likely in one case than the other that the betrayer will be contrite and remorseful than in the other.
Alte, you got your hamster spun up on this one. You know that both men and women encounter temptations. While I understand the normal femaleness of your feelings, I think you are projecting a bit much.
I have observed that whenever there is a hint of “what if” thinking, hamster wheels can accelerate to warp speed in an instant.
That said, women who feel as strongly as I do about fidelity tend to avoid such unfaithful men like the plague, to begin with.
One more point. This is a good strategy for women, because male cheating is mostly about character and opportunity. If you can find a man who has good opportunity yet strong character, that’s probably going to be optimal for most women, yet the number of such men is small, obviously. Men of good character but less opportunity are better bets from the fidelity perspective, but are probably less attractive overall.
For me, though, this isn’t really a strategy. In my view, almost all women will either leave or cheat given the right circumstances — that is, the man “fails” in some way, along the lines Oak is describing above. Doesn’t mean she’s a “bad woman” — it’s just how women are wired, whether they are Christian or not. Women of stronger character will choose to leave rather than cheat, but one or the other most women are going to make those kinds of choices if their man is found lacking compared to other men within her scope of opportunity. Religious convictions only impact this midly, in my experience, as these are very deep wires that are being tripped here.
For men, the strategy is not to be the guy who fails. Of course this creates a tremendous level of pressure on men who are married. It means, in effect, that marriage is a constant obstacle course, and that if you get bogged down on onew too many obstacles, as a man, she’s going to be at least thinking about leaving or cheating, because you are beginning to “fail” in comparison to her next best option. It’s this aspect of male/female relationships that is undoubtedly the most grueling for men, I think.
I meant to write for “men”, not for “me”, although, as a man, it also applies to me.
I don’t have a very good concept of romantic love because I am not a romantic. I always see marriage as a triumph of virtues and morals…never as a triumph of 2 peoples love.
People see my lack of romantic sensibilities as low self-esteem but it isn’t. I judge myself very objectively. I compare myself to other women and then decide where I fall in each of my qualities. It does not make sense to me to see a woman as special when by all objective standards she is not.
So while I very strongly want my husband to stay faithful, the only reason I can imagine that he would is because of his morals. The idea that he simply wouldn’t want to out of romantic devotion to me is beyond my realm of understanding.
@Brendan RE ” If you can find a man who has good opportunity yet strong character, that’s probably going to be optimal for most women, yet the number of such men is small, obviously.”
All men with $100 an access to a prostitute have the opportunity to cheat, if they are so inclined. Men of good character do not put themselves in a position to be tempted, not matter what their position on the status chart.
Of course, men who cheat on their spouses injure themselves more than anyone else, but that’s another subject for another day
Oak, I am sorry you think that way about women’s love. My husband has never had a high-paying job. In fact he’s never been paid more than $15k/year in his life. If we had to live in complete poverty, I would do it gladly with him and only have eyes for him. I would take a bullet in the chest for my husband. No richer man can buy my love; never happened, never will.
I love him for who he is, not for some material goods or for his ability to provide. I don’t believe that I’m somehow crazy or damaged goods for thinking this way. I just value certain things far above others. My husband is a genuinely good, moral and spiritual man. If he was more mercenary he could surely get a better-paying job due to how intelligent and capable he is. But money is not the most important thing. I think women who place money above all else are the damaged and crazy ones.
CSPB – “I think women are too untrusting of men and men are too trusting of women when it comes to infidelity.”
This certainly describes the way I once was.
I used to be of the same mind-set that some of the younger women (who “joined in” more recently) seem to hold – that it’s men who are the ones who do all the cheating, and women, especially Christian women (who openly express revulsion at the idea of infidelity) can be trusted.
I almost learned the hard way…
CSPB – “Brendans’s comment is true.”
And speaking of those young women newcomers, they could learn a lot from him. I’d suggest they go browse his old blog site(s) – I’d suggest starting here and here
All men with $100 an access to a prostitute have the opportunity to cheat, if they are so inclined. Men of good character do not put themselves in a position to be tempted, not matter what their position on the status chart.
Yeah, I rather obviously wasn’t referring to prostitution, but more to the garden-variety unpaid adultery thing, which very much does depend on opportunity. Prostitution use, if chronic, points towards sex addiction much more than the typical unpaid affair does, but that’s a bit of a tangent.
It’s true enough that a man of character will try to avoid positions of temptation, which is why character is what I keyed in on. I do think, however, that a man with character and *fewer* areas of realistic temptation is a bit safer in terms of committing the typical unpaid adultery, but, as you say, he may be a bigger risk to develop a hooker addiction .
@Brendan
In my view, almost all women will either leave or cheat given the right circumstances — that is, the man “fails” in some way, along the lines Oak is describing above. Doesn’t mean she’s a “bad woman” — it’s just how women are wired, whether they are Christian or not. Women of stronger character will choose to leave rather than cheat, but one or the other most women are going to make those kinds of choices if their man is found lacking compared to other men within her scope of opportunity. Religious convictions only impact this midly, in my experience, as these are very deep wires that are being tripped here.
I think women have more control over this than you credit them with. I think the key difference is the script she plays in her mind when the difficulty is occurring. If the script is “I can find a better man”, the switch will almost certainly flip and she is done. As others have pointed out, this can happen with startling speed and finality. If her script is something more like “I’m married to him through thick and thin, and we will make it past this”, she is much more likely to not experience that flip of the switch.
If her script is something more like “I’m married to him through thick and thin, and we will make it past this”, she is much more likely to not experience that flip of the switch.
Fair enough, but there aren’t terribly many women with that script, in my opinion. They’re not unicorns, but they’re also not that common, even among the religiously observant.
[D: Fair enough, but it still points to a choice on their part.]
It depends on a combination of factors. The womans beliefs and her threshold for misery.
If she has strong beliefs about commitment but goes way past her threshold for unhappiness she will leave/cheat but feel guilty about it. She could have a pretty big threshold for unhappiness and no beliefs in commitment but this is rare. Low-commitment people tend to have corresponding low thresholds for unhappiness.
It doesn’t matter what my husband does to me I will feel bad if I left him. He could beat me, cheat on me, etc… BUT he could push me enough past my threshold of unhappiness that the misery of staying is worse than the misery of leaving and feeling guilty after.
Brendan, I agree with you on the scenarios you outlined. Women tend to really lose all feelings for a man before they even cheat, and once she has cheated she has gone past the point of no return. On the other hand men can cheat while still perfectly content with their primary relationship. Both are destructive, but the female version is usually not recoverable. The lack of remorse is due to her having already lost all positive feelings for her partner, and therefore she does not regret leaving him. She might feel genuine remorse for the method in which she left, but she won’t have any inclination to stay and work on the relationship.
Kathy says:
“I’m sick and tired of jaded men telling me that women don’t love men.”
I’ll pose these questions again to you and all the other women who post here, although most of you dodge it every time:
Exactly WHAT has your gender done within the last two or three decades to demostrate that they love (or even like) men?
Good grief, Eric. Are you holding us accountable for the actions of other women? We can only control ourselves. I’m sure most of us women here would be glad to run all the sluts out of town at a moment’s notice. Their presence is only bad for us, as well.
I think you let women off too easily here, Brendan. Doggedly faithful women get just as little notice in our society as homemakers and betas, but that does not mean that most women are incapable of such fidelity. I see them all the time around here, and have a few in my family. I suspect I am also one, but I haven’t yet really been put to the test (thankfully).
I suspect the main difference is that people who value their marriage in and of itself do not cheat or leave, or are at least very unlikely to. Women who stay in their marriage because they’re “in love” (infatuated, horny, ambitious), will be inclined to cheat or leave when the lovey-feelings weaken. Women do not stay with their husbands because they never fall out of love with him (this always happens at some point, and for some time, Brendan), they stay because they value their marriage and want to honor their commitment. Game and hotness can only take you so far, after that you rely on fidelity.
That’s true, but with men it seems that most of the cheaters are just polygamy-junkies. They feel sorry for a bit (like an alcoholic who’s fallen off the wagon), and then go right back to the behavior again. It’s best to just avoid such men altogether, as they bring women little but grief. Grief and HPV.
A (former) friend of mine dated, and then married, such a man. Every time he’d cheat, he’d confess and cry and do a dramatic scene, and then a few weeks later, he was right back at it. She’d call me crying, and say that he’d sworn it would “never happen again”.
She’s now married to a very good man, who loves her deeply and is completely faithful. Does she appreciate him? No, she still pines away from the alpha she finally gave up on for her children’s sake. What a fool. Somebody should sell her some ocean-front property in Idaho. And her new husband is stuck with an infertile wife whose womb is plagued by the disease her ex gave her. The poor schmuck got one baby out of her and then she had a hysterectomy.
Don’t get me started. Such women truly sicken me, and I consider their idiocy to be one of the causes of our civilization’s rapid decline. Idiots and sluts. God helps us.
And now I’m going to go chill out.
Oak:
I think that your assessment of women’s attitudes is basically correct, especially the point that the opinions of ‘jaded men’ (another shaming tactic) do not emerge in a vacuum. Like most shaming tactics—and these threads have been full of them—it’s simply a matter of females projecting on to us what they themselves do to us far more often than we do to them. Like you, (that is, if I were still involved with American women), I wouldn’t expect love or anything else of value in return from them. In fact, most men who involve themselves with them lose far more than they ever gain from such relationships.
Eric @ It depends on how much skin she has in the game. A woman can deeply love a man as a person, but she won’t necessarily be able to be happily married to that man.
The reason is because womens internal sense of well-being is very heavily influenced by her external experience. Women are just more sensitive.
Men compartmentalize better, which makes loving through adversity easier. He can watch a sports game on television and tune out his nagging wife in the background. A woman who is experiencing a negative interaction with her spouse will not be able to ignore it. She will get anxious and not be able to focus on anything but that experience.
Women are security-obsessed. When there sense of security is threatened by a mans behavior they become an emotional basket case. A mans ego is easily bruised, but not his sense of security.
Brendan: Another problem is that men generally have the idea that marriages/LTRs should be spaces of rest and intimacy. They let their guard down, because the think that that’s the deal. Women might agree intellectually but more seldom emotionally. To that you have to add that married fathers have very little time for else than work, kids and chores. They do not have the energy to game their wife, or does not think that should have to, and even less time and energy to keep whatever level of game they might have had by practicing on other women, especially since you can only know that you have game if you are bedding women, which you are not supposed to do. Women on the other hand *only* have to stay physically attractive. Therefor it is easier for women to know and keep up their SMV.
Successful societies are set up to help men countering these tendencies. Ours is not and will therefor decline.
Hope,
“Women lose all feelings for men before they cheat”
No, they usually had none to begin with. The reason they cheat is the same reason they run to abortion mills every other time they get pregnant: society makes them the ‘owners of sex’ and they have to prove it by depreciating the man any chance they get. They cheat to prove to the man that he ‘doesn’t own her body’ and get abortions for the same reason.
“She might feel genuine remorse for the way the relationship ended”
Yes, and not the slightest empathy for the man involved, or the children. She will only feel remorse if somehow her precious, hyperinflated ego somehow didn’t come out intact; or she didn’t fleece her partner for everything she imagined herself entitled to.
“A man can cheat and still be perfectly content with the primary relationship”
Nonsense. When men have relationships with women, the tend to do so exclusively with one woman because he (wrongly) believes she loves and is committed to him as well. The kind of men you’re describing are the serial philanderers; and women marry such men in the full knowledge of their disreputable characters because they feel superior to such men. The loyal husbands are the ones who are on the receiving end of divorce cases.
@Eric, I fully acknowledge that women have been cruel to men AND to each other. Some of the worst psychological torture inflicted on me has been by other females. I have no illusions that men should blindly trust any woman, nor that anyone should trust anyone else without a great deal of caution.
But not everyone is all bad. I don’t like to see anyone suffer or be in pain, even those that have hurt me. I try to support, cherish and do all that I can for the man I have given my heart to. I give him backrubs and neckrubs daily, cook, clean and do just about everything I can to show him my love for him.
My husband would tell you that he has been wronged by both genders. He has had guy friends screw him out of his money, time and energy. He has had a best friend frame him for something he never did. He has had girls taunt him, mistreat him, make a fool out of him, and gossip about him behind his back. And of course like most STEM guys he has never really had much luck with girls. Yet he’s not super bitter. He just tries to only associate with people who aren’t selfish, manipulative and see other people as less than people.
He has a genuinely good heart, and for whatever reason, that’s a rare quality in both geners. And having it often just paints a big target on your forehead that says “kick me.” Just because men tend to think that women are “better” does not mean they really are. There are bad apples in both genders.
@Paige:
Your feelings are not uncommon for female that has grown up without a father that was present to you. It would seem you did not experience the “disinterested love of a father” or the affirming love as outlined by Dr. Conrad Baars, in his book Born Only Once. You lack the feeling that you are lovable just for who you are. This is the greatest gift of a father to a daughter. A husband cannot fill this void because he is supposed to want you for physical reasons, which rightly introduces a conditional component.
@Eric:
BINGO
(Don’t click unless you want safe silliness)
@Lavazza:
These men don’t even know the existence of Game or that they need to maintain a modicum of dominance for everyone’s happiness and peace. It actually takes 1/10 the energy of avoidance, appeasement and accommodation.
@CSPB
These men don’t even know the existence of Game or that they need to maintain a modicum of dominance for everyone’s happiness and peace. It actually takes 1/10 the energy of avoidance, appeasement and accommodation.
This is my sense as well, backed up by no less than Roissy himself.
I am Swedish and Sweden has traditionally been a high trust society (that’s seems to be changing now). I guess that is why feminism has been so sucessful in Sweden. Few will question people who have strong feelings or opinions about something. But feminism has overstayed its wellcome and there is a big backlash growing. I guess its the same with Game. Swedish men (at least in the chattering classes), due to their trust in others, have listened to what women say instead of what they do. That will also be changing.
Yeah I guess that’s where I would disagree to some degree. Game is like work for a lot of guys, certainly. It’s generally good advice, but there are caps as to the ability of some men to really roll it out, at least without a good deal of effort. The effort is worth it, but I don’t think it comes with a modicum of effort for a lot of guys.
Lavazza –
Sweden, though, is much closer to equality than the Anglo countries are, as far as I can tell. What I mean by that is not that women have it better off there (although it seems like they probably do), but that men are not as put upon as in the Anglo countries. My understanding is that the family law system is no way near as lopsided as it is in the Anglo countries, for example. I say that not because I think that system is preferable, but because I think that probably makes the system more tolerable to more men.
I suspect that is because their women don’t believe in wifely submission. A lot of women don’t, and they make troublesome wives. If she’s always trying to dominate you, then of course you’re going to exhaust yourself with Gaming her. If she’s generally submissive, then it’s probably not a big deal, and you’ll naturally become more dominant over time. All men are starry-eyed fools at the beginning, but if she doesn’t take advantage of that and encourages you to lead, then it isn’t a big deal.
It’s like a dance. If you have a partner who always wants to lead, then you’ll struggle to do so. If she’s pliable and waiting to be led, you’ll slide right into your leadership role.
It is probably less work for the man if he has good marriage game. I do all the chores that my husband initially did, and the few occasions he does them now, I tell him he’s doing me a favor and thank him. We never fight or argue, and he gets his way 99% of the time. He says “do this,” and I’m all “okay.” Maybe it’s also a version of my own marriage game to cater to him and follow his lead.
As Alte says some women are more domineering than others. My mother-in-law has that kind of a personality, and we get along great because I don’t backtalk to her. When she and my husband get together, they are all snark and sarcasm with each other (but in an affectionate way). He actually enjoys it because he doesn’t get to use his biting, combative sarcasm on me much. Once I asked him if he’d like me to be more that way. He said hell no.
“As you can probably tell, it trumps everything for me. Perhaps it’s my more masculine mind, as I suppose I feel about a cheating husband the way men feel about cheating wives, but I really can’t understand how women can accept any infidelity”
I feel the same way.
My first husband’s cheating was the straw that broke the camels back for me..
First, I actually think there is a squeaky wheel issue. The most noxious females and males, the most jaded man/woman-haters, are the most vocal. I do not think that the majority of women or men hate the opposite sex.
Most people do actually like people. They do stupid things — hurtful things — and usually unconsciously. Seriously, one of my friends will not recognize her own part in anything, ever. She’s the consummate victim — and it is annoying as crap. Seriously. I’ll at least admit my part in things (or contemplate to discern what my part in something may be; this is how my husband always “traps” and eschews in our arguments. He will be in the wrong, but instead of talking about it to work it out — which is my method — he likes to lash out, complain, and go “fine! but what is *your* part in this!” and it’s like, dude, i was just bringing up that I’d like to deal with this issue that has arisen. He knows it gets me to change frame, and he can remove any blame on his part, even though we both know it’s both of us, because it’s a *relationship*.)
Bigger picture than the last few decades: patriarchy had good stuff and bad stuff for men and for women; feminism has good stuff and bad stuff for men and women.
It was the “bad stuff” of patriarchy that lead to the rise of feminism. Feminism solved some problems, hasn’t touched other problems, and of course, in it’s arising, caused some unforeseen issues. After feminism, another movement will arise, which will embrace the good of patriarchy, the good of feminism, and solve some of the problems created by both. It, too, will inadvertently create new problems, which will be solved by the next movement.
Because these are broad social movements which often have an unconscious affect on people (until they become aware of it), inferring that the bad arises of feminism are the mark of all women is just as equally unfair for all men to be characterized by the dark side of patriarchy. Likewise, from men or women, the statement is both errant and jaded. This is not shaming language — it is simply the statement of the error of categorizing people so broadly as a sex.
My primary curiosities in this “sphere” are related to the balance of individuals in relationship. The birth of our son brought a lot of strain into our relationship, due to dynamics that were less problematic before our son came along. Then, we moved to another country and started a business (by taking over an existing business — so that was very stressful). By the time we get two years down the track, I was incredibly frustrated. Instead of focusing on his issues head-on and acting, DH reverted deep into his personality-type under stress, and I was living the nightmare “supermom” situation, not getting the sex life I wanted (meaning, far more sex than I was getting), and DH’s neediness was out-of-control.
This is why we are interested in the David Dieda materials — which I think the “manosphere” would do well to read and understand. It’s fascinating material. The difficulty of it, for me, is the question of what I need to do.
I have found that men have very little to offer in this regard other than “look nice” and “don’t be a slut.” I already look nice; there’s no way I can be considered a slut. I’m still getting rejected. So, we are working together on our relationship to get it balanced out.
That all being said, I’m not religious either. I do “believe in” a spirit realm, which can most closely be linked to the concept of “Buddhahood” or perhaps what the upanishads (hindu/vedic texts) consider the Self. But, that’s another thing anyway.
@Sweet As:
What was the bad stuff of patriarchy?
What is the good stuff of feminism?
CSPB
The successes of feminism expose the problems of the patriarchy, so for expedience, I’ll outline the benefits of feminism: access to education, health care (birth control — even married couples may decide that one or two children is enough for them), political process, work in traditionally “male” fields such as the sciences, laws that protect women from abuse in marriages as well as out of marriages, rights to own property, and more equality in divorce.
Of course, each of these arisings creates a “slew” of social problems, but reverting to the prior paradigm is not the answer, honestly, because the prior paradigm wasn’t perfect (no matter how many manospherians romanticize it). And, we note, the current paradigm isn’t perfect, and the future paradigm will solve some ills and create others (new ones).
” ‘jaded men’ (another shaming tactic)”
Er, no Eric, no shaming language, just the truth as I see it.
Jaded = Cynically or pretentiously callous.
And, that’s what I’m seeing here..
….“Women lose all feelings for men before they cheat”
No, they usually had none to begin with. The reason they cheat is the same reason they run to abortion mills every other time they get pregnant: society makes them the ‘owners of sex’ and they have to prove it by depreciating the man any chance they get. They cheat to prove to the man that he ‘doesn’t own her body’ and get abortions for the same reason. ”
Jaded? Much!
I too could also construe your women had no feelings to begin with, as shaming language, but I am so bored with the whole notion of shaming language.. Everytime a woman makes a comment that a man does not like, they cry foul and trot out the shaming language card.. Yawn.
@Sweet As:
Those things were possible since the 1920s. Implying that the problems of patriarchy comprised of the absence of things that were not missing is a contrived argument. And additionally you are implying that all those fruits of feminism were good, which many people do not agree with. A simple measure that I use is the percentage of children growing up in 2 parent homes. No claimed goods can counter the great damage done to children under the current situation.
When exactly couldn’t women own property? Men and women have always had equal access and restriction to birth control. There have always been laws against abuse and rape. You seem to confuse equality and protection with supra-equality and victim presumption.
CSPB:
As always, individuals can look at the same information and see the situation differently.
Nevertheless, feminism existed long before the 1800s, and it worked against the problems of the patriarchy. Unfortunately, as every movement does, it created it’s own problems. Those problems are rather exhaustively discussed in the manosphere, so there’s no real need to list them per se.
I’m really not interested in hammering on about who is meanest to whom and for how many years and so on. I’m not really interested in finding out who is to blame. And I’m really not interested in romanticism of the past.
What I am interested in is — what can we do to solve these problems on the larger, social scale?
As an aside or in addition, I’m even more interested in how to solve the problems inherent in my own relationship, which has come from a place where I was wearing all pants and DH wasn’t wearing any pants.
Please note that this did not come about because I am a horrible, dominating woman. I am very strong willed and pragmatic, and certainly demonstrate some of the issues that have arisen out of feminism (particularly certain cultural identity/assumption issues). It is actually something my husband likes about me. He was also seeking someone who was strong willed and pragmatic, largely because of the passivity of his personality type. This, mingled with the emasculation from his family life — which comes both from the dark side of feminism AND his family’s own peculiarities — lead to the situation where I was in a position that I did not want and never wanted to be (the “supermom” position).
So, I spoke up. We have always sough polarity and balance in our relationship — though unconsciously. Now, we are doing so consciously. And I’m largely looking to information as to how.
I have also been reading various women’s blogs, and most of it doesn’t seem to apply — though the same can be true of men’s blogs as well. Most of them tell me to cook, clean, keep myself in shape, take care of our child, work (part time at least, or volunteering or at the church), dress up for him, and so on. All of these things I already do.
Ultimately, he has to do whatever it is he has to do. I’m just trying to figure out what I can do to facilitate that process.
I have recently posted about the worst website ever for men.
http://theprivateman.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/the-worst-mens-website-ever/
Shameless self promotion over.
[D: I saw that yesterday on your site. Those guys are amazing.]
I ascribe most of the economic, demographical, social, political and scientific development of the ca. 70 (oil) to ca. 200 (coal) years to cheap and abundant energy resources. That includes feminist influence. There has been no feminist influence in countries or groups that has not had access to cheap and abundant energy resources. Oil extraction is at a plateau since 2006 and the downward trend of cheap oil will diminish feminist influence.
aah see, cpsb, in the bad old days women had to earn or inherit property before they could own it – feminism has unburdened females from such harsh and oppressive measures…
tspoon: LOL!
@Sweet As, interesting that the things feminism credits itself for solving were magically solved by:
Birth control (science took care of that one).
Freeing women to work in science, etc (I think that things like dishwashers, cheap goods from the industrial process, prepackeged cheap food, automatic clothes washers, etc, etc freed women from hosework far more than any feminist ideal.
Participation in the political process – the jury is somewhat out on how well that’s working, just ask Ann Coulter.
Laws that protect women in and out of marriages – feminists hate to admit this, but physical abuse was actually illegial before the feminist movement, somehow.
Rights to own property – ditto
Divorce rights – you can see how great that turned out for men, women, and especially children. Making it easy to get a divorce has caused more female poverty than any partiarch every could.
All in all the benefits of feminism are either greatly exaggerated, fabricated, or offset by tremendous drawbacks. Some day it will be regarded as a temporary taking leave of humanity’s senses, the only questions is by that time will all women have to wear a burqa or not.
Oak–
I’d love to know from where you got that statistic. It doesn’t seem implausible to me. If it checks out I’d like to use it myself.
@ Eric: I tend to agree with your posts, but I see a lot of anger in them as well. I’ve seen it as my personal mission to accept what I see in woman without anger. (That’s the 5 stages of grief I put above. You still sound solidly in ‘Anger’. )
What makes me most angry, is the fact that men in my life purposely withheld their own observations. I had to figure the whole out myself, and I didn’t figure out until 37. Men don’t speak up for each other, we more enjoy tearing each other down. Just once, I’d like an older gentleman to turn to a younger gentleman who’s engaged, and just speak the sober truth for 20 minutes. I bet 80% of marriages could be prevented that way.
Men of course, have their own issues, which don’t need to be brought up here: It’s on the news every night.
Here’s the positive spin on the negative issues we’ve been discussing:
“Women don’t love men”: More accurately, women’s love is DIFFERENT from men. I expect love from my relationship, as long as I maintain my appropriate role. A good woman stays with a man that who fulfills his role. Women love the ROLE men play in their life, not the man himself.
“Women are only interested in what they can get from the relationship. You are either useful or useless”: Women are smart and practical when it comes to relationships.
I figure, if evolution caused this state, it can’t be bad. It just is. However, you can’t deal with how things are, if you don’t know how things are. So I try to educate young men.
Because young men are utter fools in matters of love, and women are practical manipulators of men’s foolishness.
doug1: I believe I got that statistic from ‘The Myth of Male Power’. It only applies to West Coast Americans. It’s not a new book, so I assume it’s an old statistic.
Sorry for all the posts folks, but one more comment:
For men that wish to take the path of acceptance and attempt a relationship in spite of the obvious pitalls, one final piece of advice.
-Never, under any circumstances, divulge your knowledge of female behavior in relationships to the woman in your life. She will recoil like a vampire to a crucifix.
What little ego woman have, (yes, it’s the man with biggest ego) is wrapped up in her ability to attract and maintain a ‘good man’. You never want her to think the fish has spit out the hook, or she’ll pack up her gear and move to another lake. She must feel your powers of reason, where she is concerned, are compromised.
Women will fence with men, testing you, teasing you, trying to make you show interest, and lack of judgement where she is concerned. If you don’t respond, you will be deemed ‘boring’ or no longer interested.
This is not a problem for me, because I genuinely love my partner, in spite of the fact that I hold no illusions about her feelings towards me. (She just wanted better housing.)
So I’m loving, often attentive, yet just aloof enough that she feels the need to make an effort. Never ask for sex. It demeans you, and it’s the primary locus of control in men. You only arouse contempt by whining. If you want regular sex, marriage and long term relationships are not going to work for you. (According to a German Study I read on CNN: 80% of women married 20 years or longer have no interest in sex. And the majority of marriages have sex ‘less than weekly’.)
In fact, you might want to figure those statistics in your discussion about male infidelity. It seems fairly obvious why it’s a problem.
Share your bed, your money, even your heart, but always deny them your soul, or you are in for a world of misery.
Oak@
Do you think she would leave you if you lost your job or got a serious illness?
And what do you say about women who eventually reverse roles with their husbands and become the breadwinners who support their husbands financially?
@ Paige.
Depends on what you mean… lost my job for a few months? No. We have savings. She wouldn’t leave, she’d just treat me like crap.
Lost my job for a couple years, making us sell the house? In a heartbeat. Bubbye.
If I became seriously ill, I think she’d stick around for awhile. It’s socially stigmatizing to leave someone when they are sick. However if had some serious chronic illness, I’m sure she’d tell people we ‘grew apart’. (LOL.)
Ah, yes… Stay at home daddies! My friend was one of those. He’s homeless last I heard. Staying at his parents and trying to find money for a divorce attorney. She called the police and said she felt ‘unsafe’ so he’s not allowed to come home. She basically just engineered a fight, called the cops, and he’s history. He’s not violent. I would not associate myself with a man who is violent, especially to his partner.
I tried to tell him, but he just got mad at me. I believe the words I used were: “If you don’t get a job soon, she’s going to rip your heart out and stomp on it.”
He didn’t believe me. 2 years later, at 43, he’s living with mommy and daddy wondering what just happened to his life. This would be his second marriage. Some people are really slow learners.
@Oak
“Just once, I’d like an older gentleman to turn to a younger gentleman who’s engaged, and just speak the sober truth for 20 minutes. I bet 80% of marriages could be prevented that way.”
NOPE!
Personal experience on this one. Before I learned that it was impossible I tried to save 3 guys that I knew very very well from marrying utterly dysfunctional women. One was an alcoholic, the second was a domineering bitch control freak, and the third one was a manic depressive. All of them were already treating their prospective groom with disregard, contempt, and like chattel prior to the marriage. ALL the warning signs were plain to see. The conversations were not “just 20 minutes”. They lasted for a number of hours over dinner and drinks. Outside of kidnapping them for weeks of deprogramming, intervention was hopeless.
You see, by the time the marriage is close the prospective participants are insane. They really believe that they are in the minority of those that will have a happy successful marriage. All of these marriage have turned out as ugly as possible. One ended in a divorce so ugly and destructive that, even without children, the man was wiped out financially and emotionally for a decade. The other two are basically slaves to an insane person, cut off from all outside support.
In the aftermath, I was able to ask each of them why they ignored my consul and went ahead in to a marriage so obviously doomed to end in disaster. The answers while expressed somewhat differently all came down to the same thing. They believed that I was “exaggerating to make a point”. I was in fact being quite mild. They also believed the very clear signs of trouble which they agreed would cause them to warn a someone to rethink the situation, “did not apply in their case”. “She was different”. Denial so complete as to render all thought processes void.
I am convinced that a man can learn these things only when not in a relationship of before a relationship reaches a certain point. Once he decides that “she is the one” it is hopeless. He will not hear you, or at least he is incapable of rational thought where the relationship or the woman is concerned. Like I said – he is insane.
Brendan—
The great practical difference properly leads to a moral difference. There should be a double standard here. Feminism starting with first wave feminism has worked mightily to stamp out the traditional one that definitely existed in Western and all other civilizations.
Yes. Even if they don’t start out that way, but more as a female version of males wanting sexual variety after things have gotten rather routine sexually with her husband, they very much tend to go this way if she falls in lust/love with her affair partner. That’s what Michelle Langley found in her deep interviewing almost 200 women who had had extramarital affairs for her book “Women’s Infidelity”. The basic reason is that most women are wired to be monogamous or serially monogamous emotionally. Having sex with another man tends to totally dissolve her sexual/emotional bondedness with her husband, which has probably already weakened from early stages as happens in most marriages after 4 years or less, to the point where many women will find having full sex with their husband distasteful or even repulsive. This rarely happens with men when they have affairs.
Exactly right.
The main thing that makes male infidelity so dangerous to marriage is feminist American women entitlement and fair’s fair culture, reflected by the wife’s girlfriends’ reaction to it when she talks about it with them.
To expound a bit further, (you really shouldn’t encourage me Paige 😉 ) Stay at home fathers by definition do not fulfill the role of male provider in a woman’s life. She can pretend all she wants, but a stay at home dad, is a diminshed male in her eyes.
Men either support a wife a children, (useful) or they do not, (useless). This even extends to older males. A male who hasn’t married, or isn’t supporting a family is considered suspect, possibly damaged or dangerous.
As I have never married, and work in a office full of women, I get these questions all the time. I get a ‘pass’ because I was a working single father until my daughter went to college. (Which, by the way, is entirely because I did not marry. Had I married, I never would have gotten custody of my daughter.)
@uncleFred:
You win!! I just realized I’ve tried it too. You see, I’m not bashing on women. I really, really feel that it’s men that are causing the problem.
If you get down on one knee with gifts of gold and diamonds, and BEG to be screwed, you’ll probably get your wish.
Oak–
You have a very strange to me quasi feminist and quasi cynically anti-feminist point of view.
My beautiful much much younger live together LTR adores me. She’s also quite submissive and somewhat masochistic towards me. I love it and her. She’s also an accomplished professional. I think the feminist lauding of “strong women” (in their interactions with their man) is utter crap. No thank you.
For me- attraction suffers with things like joblessness and illness but commitment does not. No matter what happens (and we have faced it all) I always have a strong love for him as a person. I always want him to be happy and am generally willing to make personal sacrifices to help him be happy. He may never work again because of a back injury and he hasn’t worked in 2 years. I will be the breadwinner after I finish school. I do think I will have to work harder to feel the same “tingles” I did when he was fulfilling a more traditionally masculine role, but I can’t imagine that I would suddenly stop loving him. I have fantasies of being old on a porch swing watching our grandchildren play. What prouder legacy than a 50 year marriage?
Oak–
You are describing a woman’s settle type love for a beta provider.
Women can and definitely do fall into infatuated love most often with alphas but they can as well for greater betas or betas.
The main difference between female and male love is that in our feminist culture women feel entitled and maybe in some ways even obligated (if they’re strongly feminist influenced) to leave a man they no longer feel “in love with” (sexually infatuated with) but only have caring feelings for, whereas many men feel they should work harder on their love as infatuation fades, since they’ve made a commitment. In the case of betas men also tend to fear a long sexless and lonely period before they can attract another attractive sexual partner.
Women have a strong sense of “falling” in and out of love, whereas men are taught by our entertainment culture to feel any falling out of love on their part is a moral failing. “All men are dogs” and simply must restrain and rechannel themselves is the American media message. Whereas if/when a woman gradually falls out of infatuated love with her husband, and starts being receptive to other guys who are interested in her, at least a good part of the social message is that that’s probably his fault, not hers.
@Oak:
“If you get down on one knee with gifts of gold and diamonds, and BEG to be screwed, you’ll probably get your wish.”
Well said and sadly absolute truth.
Your comment comment about not blaming women leads me to clarify something.
My characterization of the three women in question was accurate in each case. It was not meant in anyway as a general representation of women. I generally believe in allowing people to make their own decisions without intervention. These three cases were so extreme that I felt an obligation to try to prevent the ruination of people lives.
As to the source of the problems:
Clearly the men are responsible for failing to face the reality of who they were marrying. However, in two the three marriages, I am convinced that both women knew exactly what they were doing and intentionally and knowingly misrepresented themselves and their intent. So if we want to assign blame there is enough for all parties.
Alte–
This is pure ideology Alte, based I think on your projecting what your feels towards your husband would be after awhile if you got involved in an extra marital affair.
Brendan–
This did not used to be the case. I think this is heavily culturally mediated. Religion has a weaker effect than it used to because it’s entirely optional and swims in a secular sea. This is less true e.g. among Mormons where they’re thick on the ground, such as Salt Lake City. I’d guess the divorce rate among this is very low, though I’ve never looked that up. But I’m sure it’s much higher even among them than it was100 years ago, because of the wider secular sea and laws.
Oak–
I don’t understand this. Never married fathers are generally even less likely to get custody than divorced ones, I’ve always read.
Brendan–
That’s a cultural phenomenon. That’s what feminism and secularism has brought. Most American women were like that 100 years ago.
I do agree that there is a lot of pressure on women to leave their husbands if their girlfriends do not perceive the husband as being worthy. Last night a woman was asking about my life and I told her how long I had been married and she said “oh my soodness…” She then leaned in and whispered in my ear “Does he treat you ok?”
I was like WTF???? I had just met this lady and yet she was immediately concerned I might be being beaten into submission because I hadn’t traded up yet. She is in the same class as me because she wants to learn skills for her work in civil rights. Lord only knows what she means by “civil rights”. Does she run a Married Womans Rescue or something?
Anyway.. when girlfriends see their girlfriends unhappy they desperately want to fix the situation for them..so for better or worse they put a lot of pressure to get them out of the relationship with the hope that maybe they can do better next time. They don’t think of the husband because they think he must be a bad guy if he isn’t making her happy.
That’s a cultural phenomenon. That’s what feminism and secularism has brought. Most American women were like that 100 years ago.
Yes — cultural values and opportunities. In the ancien regime, women were not encouraged to think about things in that way, and even if they did so, the culture did not provide many unfrowned upon ways for a woman to pull it off. Not so today, on both counts.
They don’t think of the husband because they think he must be a bad guy if he isn’t making her happy.
Yes, indeed, and this is one reason why men ought to be more circumspect about their wives’ friends. The friends are almost never an ally for a married man, really. They’re almost like an extended group of non-in-law in-laws who may not have direct contact with the guy, but who exercise an even stronger influence over his relationship than a real in-law would. And it’s not over just whether to leave a man — it’s also about how to run the relationship with the man. It’s not only divorce that tends to run through groups of women friends like a virus, it’s also other behaviors as well (such as infidelities).
Paige–
Yeah and there’s often a very low bar for him to be considered unworthy. If he’s really successful and works long hours, then he’s likely neglectful and doesn’t help enough around the house in the feminist informed view of American wives girlfriends. And so on.
If he’s ever raised his voice at her (never mind how often she has), he’s likely emotionally abusive in to the American feminist informed girlfriends of the wife.
It’s a pervasively misandrous culture.
Kathy:
You may be sick of shaming tactics, I’m sick of double-standards and moral equivalency on this issue of infidelity. Since nobody answered the question I posed, I’ll go ahead and do it:
We were discussing the ethics of pump-and dump, and as Oak pointed out, women love differently (assuming they love at all). Here’s how ‘pump and dump’ works between the two genders:
1. A man tells a woman what she wants to hear; seduces her, uses her for sex, then dumps her. She realizes she’s been used, and her feelings are hurt. She recovers. That’s the end.
2. A woman tells a man what he wants to hear and has sex with him. But instead of dumping him, she keeps telling him what he wants to hear, and having sex with him— leading him to believe that’s she’s really in ‘love’ and committed to him. This could go on for months or years. They may even get married; have children together; go through hardships together. Then, one day, she meets some idiot in a gutter somewhere, and dumps the man. He realizes he’s been used too, but he’s not just suffering from ‘hurt feelings’. His world has collapsed. The fact that substance abuse, mental illness and suicide usually follow when this happens to a man shows how much more invested emotionally we men are. The fact that women end relationships 9x more often than men, show how little emotionally invested you women are.
And, after getting used, the woman has plenty of social reassurance that all men are pigs. When it happens to a man, he gets the same reassurance that all men are pigs; ‘stuff happens, people change’; he ‘didn’t see the warning signs/do enough/ wasn’t good enough’; why not ‘get a dog and stop whining’; ‘after all, he didn’t own her or anything’; blah, blah, blah, blah.
So much for the shaming tactics that we men ‘trot out whenever we’re disagreed with’. Most shaming tactics that you women employ are merely projections of your own collective characters, anyway. You use them, like everything else you do, to hurt men—and yes, Kathy, you women do it intentionally and without remorse.
Oak;
Thanks. I generally agree with your posts too, but whether I’m angry or not—I don’t think passive acceptance of injustice and abuse is a virtue. Frankly, I’m sick of watching good men being turned into basket-cases because they’ve done nothing more wrong than trusting somebody, loving somebody, or following the social norms. And I’m also sick of watching bums, louts, and losers being rewarded with regular sex and fatherhood, just for being truly inferior males. And I’m especially sick of constantly hearing that it’s all men’s fault and that we aren’t good enough, won’t commit &c.
As I see it, what young men need to be taught is not (what our culture teaches) that none of us are good enough for women. They should be taught that few of us can ever be BAD enough; and shouldn’t aspire to be the kinds of men women want, since the kinds of men they want are blots on society. Instead, men should be encouraged to understand, like you said, what real women are like—and encouraged to explore cultures that offer them such alternatives.
@ Eric
“When it happens to a man, he gets the same reassurance that all men are pigs; ‘stuff happens, people change’; he ‘didn’t see the warning signs/do enough/ wasn’t good enough’; why not ‘get a dog and stop whining’; ‘after all, he didn’t own her or anything’; blah, blah, blah, blah”
A lot of that comes from the myth of female monogamy, the idea that a woman will naturally be faithful to the man in her life. So when a woman leaves her husband, believers in the monogamy myth will reflexively cast all blame and responsibility on the man, thinking that it must have been abuse or failure on his part that led his “monogamous” wife to leave. When often it’s just because she had a hypergamous itch to scratch, and the opportunity to do so.
Eric- For Gods sake man…
Why don’t you go spend sometime with women in a sexually disinterested setting where you can see there capacity for love and sacrifice? Like at a volunteer charity of some kind.
I think you must have swam in the wrong pond for way too long.
1910s-1920s had more than 1 in 6 marriages end in divorce.
It’s pretty much safe to say that anything anyone says is just wild lies.
“I think you must have swam in the wrong pond for way too long.”
Indeed Paige. He’s an angry man alright..
His generalizations about women are wrong..
His only interest is in paying out on women. Women are no worse or better then men.. That’s really the truth of it.
I have been married for fifteen years to my second husband.(and incidentally Eric it was my first husband who BROKE my heart and commited adultery-I was the faithfull one) Instead of blaming all men for the hurt and pain that I suffered with my first husband, I was eventually able to put it behind me and realize that not all men were like that..
I am really sorry that you have such a jaded outlook, Eric.. However it is not one I share..
I have been swimming in a much nicer pond than you, it would seem.
No one in my family here in Australia, has been divorced.(with the exception of myself-that marriage was subsequently annuled) Nor in my husband’s family (he has five brothers who are married. also one sister)
Our friend’s marriages are also intact..
The reason that many women have become badly behaved and selfish, is because they have been allowed to. There are no checks anymore. Divorce has become much easier. Women have been encouraged to pursue careers and eschew marriage and motherhood..
Many have been brought up with no moral or religious standards.. This also applies to men.
There are some very immoral and degenerate PEOPLE in this world.. Male and female..
I agree with Alte here, when she says
“. People tend to end up married to people like themselves, who travel in similar social circles. The data says that promiscuous men tend to marry promiscuous women, chaste men marry chaste women, and the average men marry average women. Whenever I’ve seen a promiscuous man marry a chaste woman (only know two such marriages, but I’ll pretend to be an expert for the sake of the argument), he uses her as a baby-incubator, and then gets himself a mistress on the side who he can actually relate to.
http://traditionalcatholicism.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/sex-cartel/#comment-9730
Like attracts like, Eric…
Oak: ” Never ask for sex. It demeans you, and it’s the primary locus of control in men. You only arouse contempt by whining. If you want regular sex, marriage and long term relationships are not going to work for you. (According to a German Study I read on CNN: 80% of women married 20 years or longer have no interest in sex. And the majority of marriages have sex ‘less than weekly’.) ”
Hmm, I do think that you have a point there, Oak.. In my interactions with other women, I find that their focus seems to be on their kids and often hubby is left high and dry and sexually frustrated..
The simple fact is, the less they have sex, the less women want it..
The more they have sex the more they want it..
It is a pity that some women neglect that very important aspect of their marriage, because more marriages would be intact if they didn’t.
My husband never asks me for sex. Actions speak louder than words.. 😉
I have asked him, though… Lol…. Over the phone.. and via text. Also
popped my head in the door of his office and made suggestions.. all part of the fun.
The reason that we are very close, is because we have frequent sex…
This may sound unbelievable to some, but it’s true..
Sex, soothes and relaxes. Relieves tension.. Makes you feel good and sleep better.. I am always in a better mood afterwards. The more we have sex the less that we argue.
Because we have an autistic son, we have been unable to go out together much and pursue other interests..
So, sex became the most important thing for us, it was the only really mutually pleasurable thing that we could do together at home (one day we’d like to be able to go fishing and camping again. lol.) and is an integral part of our marriage.
And as a result the sex just got better and better.. It’s why we have a deep and special bond.. It is also why I can honestly say that in fifteen years of marriage, I have never once.. NOT ONCE ever had thoughts of sleeping with another man.
A marriage with no sex.. Is not a good marriage..
Kathy–
Wrong. They’re much worse in this American feminist culture. Because they’re enabled to be.
Kathy–
Triple good for you Kathy.
Unfortunately I think yours is an unusual story.
Why does this rotten feminist culture of ours have no messages for married women especially with children that they should follow your example.
There used to be the message that married women should give their husbands sex even if they themselves weren’t feeling it in the beginning. With it hopefully becoming they do more once he begins. There have been oodles of messages to men that they should work to sexually gratify their wives. That I think is good, though the tone is somewhat off. I.e. it often takes on a sort of servicing her tone which is not actually very seductive to most women and certainly isn’t alphaish. It should be more along the lines of wanting to drive her crazy. But anyway those messages are out there.
There are about no messages of a wife’s duty to sexually please and satisfy her husband.
As you say with women the more sex they have the more they tend to want. Absolutely true of women in my experience.
Kathy,
I think that Eric is going to end up turning into a George Sodini.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Collier_Township_shooting
Code Orange and Code White.
http://exposingfeminism.wordpress.com/shaming-tactics/
Lavazza:
The women who post here could almost invent some new color-codes of their own!
It seems to be an underlying theme among all of them that men simply aren’t looking for good women; although they still won’t explain why women initiate breakups with men 900% more often, or why it is that the ‘pump-and-dump’ advocates here seem to have so little trouble finding sex partners while nobody else seems to be able to find a loyal wife. They keep assuring us that our culture is rife with potential wife-and-mother material; although they can’t explain why nearly half of all pregnancies end in an abortion mill or why only a quarter of American children live with both their biological parents. (I should also mention that half of the children who are living with both parents have a foreign-born mother).
They lecture us about men’s ‘jaded attitudes’ while saying nothing about women’s attitudes towards men. Pick up any women’s magazine and tell me how many articles you read that portray men as anything other than sex-crazed maniacs and women as anything other than earthly goddesses, entitled to slavish devotion with no corresponding efforts on their own part.
As for turning into George Sodini, no, I don’t think it will happen. But it’s too bad the media doesn’t pay as much attention to the suicide rates among men or the abortion statistics. But I suppose since those are only men and children who die in those cases, they don’t really count.
It is the same women doing the bad stuff over and over and over. A woman who has had one abortion is very likely to have a second and a third and a fourth. She has shown herself to have a tendency towards irresponsible behavior.
Responsible women don’t have abortions, don’t have a long line of failed relationships, etc. The women doing the same things wrong over and over and skewing the statistics to make it seem like all women are like that. NAWALT.
You don’t come across the responsible women as easily because they aren’t out being social. They don’t go to the bar after work. They go home to knit, balance their checkbook and watch Antiques Road Show. They are very slow to commit because they are generally cautious anyway and don’t want to break any hearts or get theirs broken.
You might not be very attracted to the responsible women because they tend to be a little nerdy, not obsessed with their appearance…far less likely to strut around in heals with their nails done. They are neat and clean but not fashionista’s. They don’t giggle or flirt or act in the girly girl ways guys like. But they DO EXIST.
Paige: Oh, please. Just because I do not notice a woman does not mean that she is good. My guess is that the women I notice are as good or bad as the women I don’t notice. I seldom get positively surprised when I for some reason get to know a woman without my purposeful effort.
But nice try.
[D: I think she has a point. Responsible women do tend to disappear. In the US at least they tend to move out of the city and into the suburbs. If they aren’t working (instead raising kids) and not out trolling for men, how often would the average man run into them? This isn’t to say that all married w/ kids women are responsible, because guys with game have no shortage of stories to tell about those who aren’t.]
@Kathy,
Do you mind if I quote your comment on sex in marriage in an upcoming post?
“If they aren’t working (instead raising kids) and not out trolling for men, how often would the average man run into them? ”
As parents in their kid’s class? Not that that type of interaction is very deep, but the best people I know have made a strong impression on me quite early, even if they are not high profile.
[D: I’m not suggesting you wouldn’t recognize them when you see them, just that you would see them less. They would be underrepresented in your day to day interactions.]
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Go right ahead Dalrock. Fine by me, mate. 🙂
“There used to be the message that married women should give their husbands sex even if they themselves weren’t feeling it in the beginning”
Yes, Doug, you are right..
Fortunately I have a good mother.. (very devout Catholic) She always said to me that if a married couple are not having sex.. then there is something wrong in that marriage.. Even if the wife was not in the mood she had a duty to service her husband..
I will be honest, I never felt it to be a duty.. On the odd occasion when I have been very tired, I have never refused my husband.. Why? Because I love him and.. sorry this may be tmi.. I love feeling him inside me…A husband and wife cannot get any closer.. It is like I am under his spell.. Hard to explain..
There is much more to it than just the physical..
Truly Doug, some women DO not know what they are missing out on…! If only they would make the effort..
For some reason this song comes to mind..
I can’t help falling in love, I fall deeper and deper the further I go..
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Kathy
Hmm, I do think that you have a point there, Oak.. In my interactions with other women, I find that their focus seems to be on their kids and often hubby is left high and dry and sexually frustrated..
Those women have “married” their children. Placing children at the center of a family is a grave error. Presumably the marriage predated the children (maybe not by much), and it would be a good thing if the marriage continued after the children have left home. But a woman who places the children at the center of family, rather than the marriage, is displaying a kind of contempt for her husband. Not on purpose necessarily, but that doesn’t make the emotional hurt and/or estrangement to him any less real. This can often lead to him withdrawing from her in various ways.
Eventually, he’s going to leave. Maybe not physically. Maybe only emotionally. But since women need love more than men do, that will be enough. Or perhaps when the last child has left home, she will turn to him and he will say “Who are you?”.
Women by and large do not understand how important sex is to men, not really. Some do, and attempt to use it as a means to manipulate their man, an error that can eventually lead to extremely bad results…men as a rule despise manipulation.
Lavazza:
LOL, I’m surprised that you missed Paige’s ‘Code Gold’. You’re right, it was a nice try, but no dice. Men may value female beauty highly, but what a man considers beautiful is such a subjective matter that 100 men would give a 100 different definitions of it. The same is true of the canard that men ‘are only interested in sex’; certainly men are highly sexual motivated, but our sexual tastes are just as varied and subjective.
I disagree with both Paige and Dalrock too, that these ‘good women’ are all out there, living in so-called ‘modesty’. Believe me, the jerks, thugs, bums, and lowlife men who are out there too certainly have no trouble finding them.
Paige:
I would tend to believe that the reason that so-called ‘good women’ aren’t behaving in a feminine way is because they have no interest in attracting men (except of course men of their own choosing, and those ‘men’ invariably will be lowlife-men).
The reason men don’t encounter good women is because there are none to encounter. The few who do exist are rarely single for long since they are so heavily outnumbered by single men.
Eric- feminine behavior doesn’t come natural to some women…especially those who are more left-brained. The same variety of character traits and dispositions you see in men you also see in women.
While womens sexuality tends to have many similarities because that is actually dictated more by evolutionary sources…our personalities, interests, and temperaments are unique to each of us. Of course there is a bell curve where a lot of women in the center have many similarities, but in a population of 6 billion you can find plenty who are non-typical.
All women have flaws but some flaws will be more bothersome than others. A lack of femininity may be a flaw, but is it a worse flaw than the sensitivity/impulsivity characteristic of the average female? That is for each man to decide.
You are right that such women don’t go out of their way to attract men, but they aren’t making a conscious effort to repel them either. These are probably the women who make the best wives, because they don’t crave male attention.
[D: I’m not suggesting you wouldn’t recognize them when you see them, just that you would see them less. They would be underrepresented in your day to day interactions.]
I am a father of two school age children. I know the parents of their best friends well and I see the other parents enough to be able to see if someone is of outstanding character. These super women must be in a different social class, culture or geographic area.
How do you define “outstanding character”?
I probably don’t qualify, and yet I would never do the things that everyone is accusing most women of doing (lifestyle divorce, abortions, cuckolding, etc).
You wrote “You might not be very attracted to the responsible women because they tend to be a little nerdy, not obsessed with their appearance…far less likely to strut around in heals with their nails done. They are neat and clean but not fashionista’s. They don’t giggle or flirt or act in the girly girl ways guys like. But they DO EXIST.”
And I wrote “My guess is that the women I notice are as good or bad as the women I don’t notice.”
It’s just a guess. If I don’t know a person intimately I divide them into 1) has shown cracks at least once, 2) has shown good character at least once and 3) I don’t know. 3 is the biggest group, 1 and 2 are even. If I try to separate attractive women from mousy women I can’t see a clear trend differentiating mousy women from attractive women. YMMV.
Paige:
Since you quoted ‘a population of 6 billion’, I’m assuming that you’re including non-American/Anglo women in that figure. If so, what you say is true, because women outside our culture do not reflexively hate men the way American women do. But I was referring to Anglo/American women.
There seems to be an underlying premise behind your arguments, as well as the other women who post here: that only a few women are predatory, abusive, slutty, or ruthless; and—for some reason—we men encounter these few 100% of the time. Also, you all seem to be fixated on the idea that our low opinion of American women comes out of a vacuum; that none of us has seen repeated cases of female abuse that might justify our opinions.
This is probably the third time on a thread, for example, where someone has intimated that I formed past relationships with women I picked up in bars. Thinking back to my last relationships with American women I recall that I met 4 at work; 2 through mutual friends; 1 on the Internet; and 1 one on the subway. That’s hardly trolling through seedy locations. And, in all those cases, I never got left for a man was richer, taller, handsomer, or even of a better character. It was always for some abusive ex-boyfriend; some new lout that she met in some slimepit somewhere. The same is true with nearly every man I know (at least the decent men, the scumbags have no trouble landing women at all). The only exceptions are the men who married outside American culture.
What I am saying is that the least good women are also the most attractive. They have good Girl Game.
It isn’t so different from how the least good men are also the most attractive. The Alpha jerks have major swag and good emotional intelligence.
What do you say about the cases where women do stay faithful? Luck?
Yes, or to rural areas. I sometimes go for months without encountering a non-related male, other than the ones I see walking around the grocery store, or something. I spoke to one at a school function recently, and afterward it occurred to me that he was the first one since my husband’s work Christmas party.
Everything is quite sex-segregated around here, and most of us don’t work in mixed-sex environments. Even when families or neighbors get together, they split up by sex. I was actually chastised by the other women at the function because I spoke to him for over 30 minutes, which was apparently beyond the limits of decency.
@ Doug1: I can see how unmarried men could be at a disadvantage. If you don’t cohabitate with your child, etc.
However, in my case I lived with my daughter throughout the breakup.
Women have a very simple playbook that is used over and over again in divorce:
1. Quit your job about 6 months before the divorce. Now the husband is responsible for all attorney fees, including hers.
3. Draw out the proceedings and drain him dry until he cries uncle, and you get what you want.
She THOUGHT she had the advantage because I hadn’t married her, so she began gloating that she never put my name on the birth certificate, and that she was going to move out of State so I’d never see my daughter again. Big Mistake.
I waited until I had my daughter in my physical custody, hired the best attorney I could find, and had her served at work with court orders preventing her from absconding with my daughter, or affecting the current residential arrangement. (With her dad.) I included in those orders that if she challenged paternity, she would be asked to pay for at least half of any paternity test. (I knew it would never happen. She looks just like my side of the family!) My ex GF realized she was going to go broke fighting me on this, because I had a better job, and I was a good father.
So she capitulated. I got physical custody, she had 2 to 3 weekends a month. Her only demand was that I sign a paper promising I would never ask her for child support. Which said a lot about her character, doesn’t it?
Same circumstance, only married? She would have bled me dry with her attorney fees, and I would have ended up caving in to prevent utter financial ruin. I’d also would have had to move to another State to stay in touch with my daughter.
Marriage=Lose/Lose. A man who walks into Family Court has already lost. The outcome is predetermined: The one with the internal genitalia gets the house, the children, the vehicle, and at least half the estate, typically more. The one with the external genitalia gets visitation every other weekend, and all the bills.
And to make matters worse, the judge will only enforce the parts of the divorce decree that favor the woman. The judge will jail a man for not paying support, but never jail a woman for not allowing visitation. It’s the most sexist institution in the United States, and why any man would willingly subject himself to it’s authority is beyond me.
Just a side note: Did you know that unmarried men can never be forced to raise someone elses child? It’s simple; a 400 dollar paternity test, and you are off the hook for support… as long as you didn’t do something dumb like get married.
If you got married, and you don’t challenge paternity within 6 months in most States, you are legally the “putative father”. Meaning that only married men can be forced to raise and be financially responsible for, someone elses child! Marriage is second class citizenship for men.
If anyone is curious, my daughter is now a Senior on the Dean’s List at a prestigous private college, (paid by me and my family of course.) So I think I did OK.
@ Eric: My advice, which may be unwelcome, is that you remember that men have a vile side to them as well. I don’t approve of everything that women do, but I accept that it’s part of their human nature.
@ Eric again: That being said, I still agree with the vast majority of your posts. If you are like me, you have to hold onto that anger for awhile to prevent making more mistakes. But eventually, I hope it calms to an amused cynicism. 🙂
Paige: “What do you say about the cases where women do stay faithful? Luck?”
Yeah, the externalities matter a lot, maybe more than character. Few women will divorce when the kids are small and they need money and support from the father (whereas men, if they, leave do it when the kids are small), the same if the woman is unemployed, if the legal system is favouring the father etc.
Apparently having boys, or better, only having boys will lead to fewer divorces.
Marriage is second class citizenship for men.
The main problem is that under the law marriage enforces obligations against the higher-earning party. This is almost always the man, but not always. I know of a few situations where women have been higher earning and have divorced and have ended up paying c/s to their ex-husbands (and moan about that), but these situations are vastly outnumbered by the reverse, due to the more typical mating pattern. It’s true that women can’t be forced to pay for another woman’s child in almost all states (an exception is Massachusetts where alimony and support obligations become marital obligations if a man remarries). But generally in divorce whoever is making the most money at the time of the divorce ends up paying dearly.
@Brandan, I think you are discussing the theory on how Family Court SHOULD work, not the realities.
I have no problem with the obligations going to the higher earning party. However, it also seems fairly obvious that if most marriages involve two people working full time, then it makes the most sense that the highest paid parent would get custody… Right? I mean, that’s the person with the most resources to care for children… right? So obviously, the person with the greatest resources, male or female, should be the primary caregiver.
Yet, somehow, it’s the opposite. This is pure sexism. It’s an old male judge, looking at the couple and saying “Kids need their mom, and I don’t care about the rest.” They have pre-defined “best interest of the child” to mean “Custody goes to the woman provided she’s not drunk/high during the court hearing, and not in jail.”
Another aspect of Second Class Citizenship comes from the male’s depiction in the media, the devaluation of fatherhood in general, and the words of the average wife. I work in an office filled with women. One primary motivator for not getting married is listening to women discuss their moronic husbands, and how they can’t do anything right. I made the assumption that Marriage causes brain damage in men, because it doesn’t seem possible that all these women married idiots. 😉
The judges in my neck of the woods have no problem looking at an unemployed house-husband, and telling him to “Get a job”, rather than burden a mother with support payments. My friend, at his first divorce, asked about his right to see his children, and was told: “There is no such thing as Father’s Rights”. The judge was right. His ex-wife successfuly, and without any cause at all, kept his visitation down to a few times a year.
He lost custody, was assigned child support in spite of his unemployed status, and her employed status, and he’s now homeless after the dissolution of his SECOND marriage. (She said she “didn’t feel safe”, had him removed as the primary caregiver, kicked out of the home with no resources, and then divorced him and got full custody.)
Sure, that’s just an anecdote. But your best bet as a man is to avoid Family Court like it’s The Plague. And your best bet to do that? Just refuse to get down on one knee and beg to be subjigated.
In other words, even though he SHOULD have been the ‘winner’ in both marriages, it didn’t work out that way.
Paige:
“The least good women are also the most attractive”
This is projection. Just because women are attracted to male scum, you assume that men find bimbos and sluts attractive. What men find beautiful is much more rational than women seem to presume.
“It isn’t so different from how the least good men are the most attractive.”
Huh? Honestly, Paige, you’ve said a lot of things that made me do a double-take, but I can’t even believe that you mean THAT one seriously. Most of the loser men I know, who have women swarming all over them, look about as bad as they behave.
“The Alpha jerks have major swag and good emotional intelligence.”
Most of these ‘alpha’ jerks are less intelligent emotionally than an average baboon, and just about as sexually appealing. Normal females, in cultures not polluted by feminism, don’t think in this warped way. They seek out truly strong men who would be good protectors, providers, husbands, and fathers. Women in our culture are so obsessed with proving themselves superior to men that they compete for, and apparently find attractive, the LEAST suitable men as partners.
“What do you say about the cases where the women stay faithful? Luck?”
Yes. A man who finds a faithful American woman is about like a man who wins a million dollars at the casino. It happens, but so rarely that it’s remarkable when it occurs; but most men act like compulsive gamblers; ignoring the fact that most other men get thoroughly fleeced. The difference, though, is that visiting a casino is actually enjoyable, whereas dating American women is NOT.
Oak;
Thanks for the advice. I won’t be making any mistakes anytime soon, since I’ve been scrupulously avoiding any involvement in the US relationship scene for awhile now. In fact, MGTOW is looking better and better all the time!
Don’t listen to those guys Eric. Just find a hooker, man up, and marry her. We’ve got your back. Oh, and just act like yourself, except make sure you give her lots of gifts and act like she is better than you. That will make her love you.
Dalrock:
In addition to putting the Beta-photos on Match.com, put this post in the ‘relationship advice column’ there and watch how many men nod their heads in agreement!
The Scarlett Oharas have enormous success with men. The Melanie Hamiltons much less so. Guys marry good girls but are enamored by bad girls.
As for your saying that Alpha males are not attractive- I don’t know what planet you are living on. Every Alpha male I have crushed on was incredibly hot, had great swag, and knew how to get into my head like nobody else. They were female kryptonite.
you assume that men find bimbos and sluts attractive
Maybe it’s me, but those women are attractive.
“Hmm, I do think that you have a point there, Oak.. In my interactions with other women, I find that their focus seems to be on their kids and often hubby is left high and dry and sexually frustrated..
Those women have “married” their children. Placing children at the center of a family is a grave error. Presumably the marriage predated the children (maybe not by much), and it would be a good thing if the marriage continued after the children have left home. But a woman who places the children at the center of family, rather than the marriage, is displaying a kind of contempt for her husband. Not on purpose necessarily, but that doesn’t make the emotional hurt and/or estrangement to him any less real. This can often lead to him withdrawing from her in various ways.”
Check out how this woman laughs her way through marginalizing her husband.
http://badgerhut.wordpress.com/2011/03/26/marriage-is-part-of-parenting/
“You might not be very attracted to the responsible women because they tend to be a little nerdy, not obsessed with their appearance…far less likely to strut around in heals with their nails done. They are neat and clean but not fashionista’s. They don’t giggle or flirt or act in the girly girl ways guys like. But they DO EXIST.”
This is such bullshit. Every time a guy suggests that the overall female stock is wanting, someone pulls out “well if you didn’t just go after hot sluts, you might find some good ones!” Here’s the truth – men who are interested in good women have a fairly wide filter when it comes to looks/alpha markers. There really aren’t that many good women out there. You can argue that there aren’t a lot of good men either, and Spengler would agree with you, but it doesn’t make the male experience invalid.
I could give you 3 names right now of women who I think would make excellent wives who have hardly ever even been asked on a date. The reason? I assume it is because they are a little nerdy, not flirtatious, and have very reserved personalities. Guys just don’t seem to be that into them.
They would make better wives than most so it is unfortunate that they can’t catch a man.
Also: I didn’t say “Hot sluts”… I said “typical” women…flirtatious/girly/etc Many such women are not slutty, but they are prone to the same typical weaknesses of most women. Scarlette Ohara wasn’t slutty, but she was a “bad girl” compared to Melanie Hamilton.
People are attracted to characteristically feminine/masculine behavior but the more a person is stereotypical the more they will have the stereotypical flaws of their gender.
A woman who has character and personality more similar to a man…stoic, reserved, disciplined, analytical, etc…will make a great wife, but it will be harder for most men to keep a strong attraction to them.
Think of the TV show Big Bang Theory. You have the hot actress who lives next door and then you have the nerdy neuroscientist. The guys love the hot actress, even though she has all the annoying typical female traits…not very bright… shallow… undisciplined… and unpredictable. She makes a horrible girlfriend. The nerdy girl is none of those things but nobody wants to do her. She isn’t fat and if you take off her awful glasses she isn’t really that ugly (maybe a 4-5)…but nobody wants to screw her, not even the guys who are equally nerdy.
I have always been friends with nerdy girls because while I am far more typical, I am easily bored and enjoy the company of eccentric and intelligent people. I always felt kind of bad that I got more male attention because by all objective standards I am less deserving from the perspective of “who has better character/makes a better wife”.
@Paige
A woman who has character and personality more similar to a man…stoic, reserved, disciplined, analytical, etc…will make a great wife, but it will be harder for most men to keep a strong attraction to them.
I think you are underestimating just how visually oriented men are with regards to sexual attraction. Men don’t look at personalities in Playboy, etc.
Nerdy women with masculine personalities are often less attractive than their more feminine counterparts. They have more masculine faces, less feminine mannerisms, etc.
The ones who are as attractive as typically feminine women get snatched up quickly because they are every mans dream. The rest tend to hang around the 4-6 mark and that is only if you can see past their not-so-great fashion sense.
(I say 4-6 because most have symmetrical faces given that symmetrical faces are correlated with intelligence… 1-3’s have a correlating low intelligence which would make them not only unattractive but also crappy personalities)
My head is getting bloody from beating it up against the wall.
I am going to take this conversation over to my blog and see if I can get some women to participate.
I’d be interested to see your write up on this Paige. One thing I think is hovering around the edges is the different ways men and women experience attraction and love. For women I gather the two are pretty tightly intertwined. Women are attracted more to the personality than men are, and the personality also tends to be the object of love. For men the two are more distinct.
Dalrock/Badger:
It’s true that men are attracted sexually to beautiful women, but what’s often overlooked is that there is a HUGE variation in what men find beautiful. It’s developed in men from their childhood onwards and becomes an integral part of our personality structure. This notion that these feminized women put out, that only the cookie-cutter models in Playboy are beautiful to us, is totally wrong.
Paige;
I know what planet I’m living on; it’s populated by feminist/Amazons who are attracted to worthless men—precisely because of their worthlessness. These ‘Alpha guys’ you speak of get into female minds because their total incapacity to function as human beings inflate the feminine ego and her sense of superiority. The ‘Kryptonite’ is actually an emasculated man whose weakness feeds the so-called passion. It’s only a power-play, nothing else.
Think of the TV show Big Bang Theory.
No, please. TV is so far removed from the real world, it is less than worthless at modeling anything. I quit watching prime time TV years ago and have not missed it.
TV and movies are mildly hypnotic, due to the flashing images. Our brain waves when we are watching TV are closer to a sleep state, or to a hypnotized state, than to an awake state.
One reason so many people have such screwed up expectations in their own lives is because they unconsciously model themselves after characters in movies / TV. In my not so humble opinion, the more TV a person watches, the more they may mess themselves up.
Yes, we all have our little secret pleasures after a long day — reruns of “Seinfeld” maybe, or “Simpsons”, I guess. But it’s got to be limited, and it’s got to be viewed in an awake, critical mode.
Please don’t use TV characters as models for life. It don’ t work.
TV, movies, and novels are handy for pointing out prototypes and making examples.
Using these sources to develop a complete understanding of the world would be a bad idea, but using them to illustrate a point is not.
“Think of the TV show Big Bang Theory. You have the hot actress who lives next door and then you have the nerdy neuroscientist. The guys love the hot actress, even though she has all the annoying typical female traits…not very bright… shallow… undisciplined… and unpredictable. She makes a horrible girlfriend. The nerdy girl is none of those things but nobody wants to do her. She isn’t fat and if you take off her awful glasses she isn’t really that ugly (maybe a 4-5)…but nobody wants to screw her, not even the guys who are equally nerdy.”
There have been thousands of movies and TV shows about average girls who don’t get noticed by average guys, who only want cheerleaders and supermodels. Funny how we never see the stories of average guys who get ignored by average girls lusting after the quarterback.
@Retrenched
There have been thousands of movies and TV shows about average girls who don’t get noticed by average guys, who only want cheerleaders and supermodels. Funny how we never see the stories of average guys who get ignored by average girls lusting after the quarterback.
Good point. The other observation I would make is which sex complains about being forced to marry someone they don’t love?
Why is the marriage deck stacked against women?
Men, stop tricking women into loveless marriages!
By and large, men aren’t the ones struggling to fall in love with their SMP peers. Men complain about the legal deck being stacked against them in marriage and family court. Women complain about being forced to marry men they don’t love and/or being trapped in loveless marriages.
“I could give you 3 names right now of women who I think would make excellent wives who have hardly ever even been asked on a date. The reason? I assume…”
Stopped reading here. You don’t even know why they don’t get asked out, you’re just filling in whatever you come up with which just screams “CAUTION: HAMSTER IN MOTION” (in fairness a lot of people do this without giving us the “I assume” courtesy warning.)
Let’s continue though…because you make a sensible point:
“I assume it is because they are a little nerdy, not flirtatious, and have very reserved personalities. Guys just don’t seem to be that into them.”
I have to be honest, you make them sound mousy and without initiative – if they are non-flirtatious and very reserved they aren’t going to get much male attention, it’s not complicated. Part of being married is being attractive to your spouse, and if someone can’t generate that attraction before the courtship even starts then few men are going to bank on her as a marriage prospect.
That’s the same advice I’d give to a bootlicking beta, you gotta do something to be interesting and reasonably attractive to the opposite sex. They’re not entitled to get asked out on dates and become wives, nor are clock-punching providers entitled to marital bounty. And that’s the really sad part of today’s SMP – it’s a laissez faire market that does a very poor job preparing people for the competitive marketplace, and produces a LOT of failed outcomes (people not getting a good shake for their value).
Neither side can expect to bypass the attraction process and skip directly to the comfortable marriage state, a la Doc Brown’s dog Einstein skipping one minute into the future in the first test of the DeLoreon. You know all those articles about modern marriage, about how women don’t “need” men as providers and so look for companionship and tingles? Well it cuts both ways – (decently-statused) guys have higher standards today for marriage mates too.
Addendum…if they’re nerdy, they can probably be interesting without too much trouble. Tell them to smile more, that usually pays off bigtime with the kinds of guys who dig nerdity.
Or read this:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/03/caring-for-your-introvert/2696/
“Part of being married is being attractive to your spouse, and if someone can’t generate that attraction before the courtship even starts then few men are going to bank on her as a marriage prospect.”
Another addendum, by attractive I mean
It seems that whenever women hear words like “attraction” and “attractive,” they immediately think of skinny legs, big boobs, sprayed-up hair, and expensive fashion-conscious slutty clothing. (Susan Walsh just posted on this.) Meanwhile men think “does she look good, is she in decent shape, does she smile well and have long hair?”
I’ve thought long and hard about this issue of why women are obsessed with dressing up in ways men find unattractive, or in ways that attract the wrong kind of male attention.
I’m wondering if it’s all a big collective projection – because women only find a small subset of men really attractive and judge men by their social status, they think that THEY have to be high status and distinctive for men to be interested in THEM. Thus the women play for status and conspicuous cosmetology (i.e. expensive and/or shit that takes a long time to do) against their friends, when in reality it’s not necessary because a typical man finds most women attractive per se, and taken in the aggregate men as a whole find almost ALL women attractive.
This is post-worthy material, I think I just found a weekend task.
Shoot…
“Another addendum, by attractive I mean able to generate some dopamine-based interest in the man, to be better than his other options, not be a sex fiend stripper or something.”
I understand the value of attraction, though it does seem unfair that women who would make the best wives in every other area often struggle so much with the dopamine stuff.
I am closer to the typical woman than the nerdy woman…I can be sexy and flirtatious when I want to be and it isn’t because I am a hot tamale…but I also don’t think that based on the quality of my character alone I am as “deserving” of a man as they are. Sometimes I am moody, lazy, ungrateful, or snarky for no good reason at all. These women are NEVER like that. They are virtually perfect in all ways but in their ability to produce sexual allure.
It is unfortunate that nature seems to hide the best qualities under rough exteriors for both men and women.
I’m a nerdy woman, and I’ve never had trouble with attention from nerdy men, even when they had no clue what I looked like. They just love how I can “understand” them and enjoy their obsessions with them, like video games, technology and coding.
Badger is right. Most guys are not that picky. It’s more likely the case that nerdy women need to be gamed and also want the hot guys. Because there are tons of nerdy guys who would love to get with nerdy girls (at least the non-obese ones…merely chubby seems to be ok with nerdy guys).
Nerdy females are also not special nor superior as mates, and certainly not “perfect.” They get moody and crazy and so forth just like other women. They might have a bit more self-control and do such things more privately though. People are always astounded to find out I can even crack a joke. 😛
Hope/Badger:
I would guess that the women to whom Paige refers (never getting asked out) are doing little, if anything, to attract decent men. Hope’s point that men aren’t that picky and Badger’s that sexual attractive is important are both partly true. The difference is that what men find attractive is a highly subjective and personal thing. It’s different for women, who by and large couldn’t care less who they sleep with; and so they automatically assume that men act the same way.
“I understand the value of attraction, though it does seem unfair that women who would make the best wives in every other area often struggle so much with the dopamine stuff….I also don’t think that based on the quality of my character alone I am as “deserving” of a man as they are. Sometimes I am moody, lazy, ungrateful, or snarky for no good reason at all. These women are NEVER like that. They are virtually perfect in all ways but in their ability to produce sexual allure.”
Let’s look at it from another perspective – when you have alpha (dopamine), you don’t have to be totally perfect in the other areas, you buy yourself some breathing room in the name of balance. As many guys have discovered sometimes it pays to ratchet down a bit on the beta in favor of more alpha and you get way more results than if you’d put that energy into more beta traits.
Sad to say that as many betas have found out the hard way, “deserve” ain’t got nothing to do with it. People who do what needs to be done to make other people want them around are the ones that succeed, in work and in life. I tried to get away from deserve language a few years ago as it sometimes made me a martyr to my misery.
Don’t take me for an unalloyed critic, Paige – I understand exactly where you’re coming from. I have male friends who with just a bit of game would be jewels of the SMP, but they either get bad information or actively refuse to see the truth (I had to educated one of them recently on how to answer “do these pants make me look fat,” he had been indoctrinated into supplication.) It’s sad, they can’t bring themselves to dig out and see the daylight.
If the advice sounds harsh keep in mind that in the reformed-beta community, there’s a bit of “former smoker syndrome” – the tendency to get tough with people who carry a cross you’ve already ditched, telling them to suck it up because if you can do it they can. In reality, many of us wish someone had been so tough with us.
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