The Abdication Imperative

Rationalmale regular and all-around red pill evangelist MikeC had an interesting Matrix experience recently. This comment was drawn from yesterday’s Respect post:

“This is another socialized manifestation of hypergamy: the man must always perform for her, ***always qualify to her.***“

Yup….I actually got engaged over the weekend, and when we got back in town we visited her parents. Me and her on one couch, her parents on the other, and I have a friendly relationship with them (her Mom loves me).

Anyways, we were talking some plans and stuff, and her Dad chimed in about getting used to just saying “Yes, dear”….”Yes, honey”, etc. First thing that popped into my head was the femcentric thinking involved. I didn’t think it was the time or place to call that out for the crap that it is…but I didn’t need to as both myself and my fiancee chimed in at the same time that our relationship isn’t one where she calls the shots and I just go along with it.

It truly is mind-boggling. It almost seems like at some point, a mass brainwashing took place that instilled in men that to “RESPECT” women you simply had to go along with whatever they wanted to say or do in that moment.

[Congrats Mike, and I mean that sincerely since I know you have your roots planted firmly in positive masculinity and Game-awareness. RT]

I was listening to a local talk radio show on my commute home last Friday and a caller tells the hosts that he’s getting married for the first time over the Memorial Day weekend. After all the ubiquitous congratulation, he petitions for advice from the show’s hosts as well as any listeners who call or text or IM into the show.

I can’t say as I was surprised, but predictably, every guy who dropped some words of wisdom couched it in exactly this “just say ‘Yes Dear’ to anything she asks, she’s always right” mass groupthink. “Happy wife equals happy life” was literally what at least 5 of these guys called in or texted to say. Everything after this was autonomously, automatically implying that a husband’s primary duty in a marriage was to ‘keep her happy’. “Make sure you get to all the things on her Honey – Do list and you’ll be alright” was another caller’s advice intoned in a voice that sounded as if he were telling a new arrival at Auschwitz of how best to survive in the camp.

Last week I wrote about how the Unplugged become progressively more sensitive to the group-speak of the Matrix, and MikeC’s experience is a a textbook example of this. However, it’s one thing to identify the code in the Matrix, but it’s quite another to see the latent purposes behind the memes, the clichés and the idioms that the PluggedIn take for common sense.

Hypergamy and Cognitive Function

As MikeC astutely highlighted from Respect, Men’s preoccupation with performance is a direct psychologically, sociologically evolved response to qualifying for women’s hypergamy. Perhaps the most important reason women’s primary drive revolves around security-seeking is due to hypergamy, by definition, being an inherently insecure proposition. In fact so insecure is feminine hypergamy in principle that it was necessary for women to evolve psychological fail-safe schemas on the subconscious level (i.e. involuntary shit tests).

In general, when a psychological dynamic is pressed into the limbic, involuntary, subconscious level of our psyche’s, it’s primarily due to that dynamic requiring too much mental attention for our conscious minds to process effectively and maintain a cognitive awareness of other dynamics, stimulus, etc. in our environment that require our more immediate attention. Mother Nature has evolved humans with a wonderful ability to muti-task our awarenesses, but there are limits to how much information a person can process efficiently before that psyche becomes overwhelmed. Taken to the extreme this processing overload has potentially life threatening and species survival implications. Thus these processes that would overwhelm our conscious cognitive abilities are relegated to our peripheral awareness and/or pressed down to a subconscious / preconscious level.

This then is the mental realm of feminine hypergamy. When Roissy writes about women’s hindbrains or imagination/rationalization hamsters, this is the conceptual, psychological region from whence they issue. It’s easier to think of hypergamy – and its manifestations such as shit tests – in terms of breathing. We can control our breathing when we think of it, but when our mental attention is required elsewhere our autonomous nervous system takes over and we breath on autopilot until such time as we become aware of that breathing. Whether we are under stress or running a marathon, that autonomous system kicks in to allow us to focus on more important stimuli. So too is it with hypergamy – women are aware of it, and may adress it consciously, but more often hypergamy is pushed into women’s peripheral consciousness to allow them to focus on other stimuli.

The Abdication Imperative

Hypergamy is rooted in doubt. Hypergamy is an inherently insecure system that constantly tests, assesses, retests and reassesses for optimal reproductive options, long-term provisioning, parental investment, and offspring and personal protection viability in a potential mate. Even under the most secure of prospects hypergamy still doubts. The evolutionary function of this incessant doubt would be a selected-for survival instinct, but the process of hypergamy’s assessment requires too much mental effort to be entirely relegated to women’s subconscious. Social imperatives had to be instituted not only to better facilitate the hypergamous process, but also to reassure the feminine that men were already socially pre-programmed to align with that process.

In an era when women’s sexual selection has been given exclusive control to the feminine, in an age when hypergamy has been loosed upon the world en force, social conventions had to be established to better silence the doubt that hypergamy makes women even more acutely aware of. And nowhere is this doubt more pronounced than in the confines of a monogamous commitment intended to last a lifetime. Thus we have the preconception “Happy Wife equals Happy Life” pre-programmed into both gender’s collective social consciousness. It’s as if to say “It’s OK Hypergamy, everything’s gonna be alright because we all believe that women should be the default authority in any relationship.”

When you disassemble any operative feminine social convention, on its most base, instinctive level the convention’s latent purpose is to facilitate and pacify hypergamy.

As I covered in Hypergamy doesn’t care,.. it isn’t enough to profess love, promise support, exemplify dedication, etc., no, in a social context hypergamy demands a total pre-abdication of authority. Hypergamy wants social assurances before it makes a decision it has to live with. And even under the condition of total contrition hypergamy will not be pacified, but feminization, since the sexual revolution, has defined society in hypergamic terms, and that imperative will insist that the general populace internalize that “Happy Wife equals Happy Life.”

Chumps I’ve Known

It’s amazing the sheer amount of guys I know or have known who I’d classify as being AFCs. I’d like to say that pretty much every guy I’ve known has been an AFC with a handful of notable exceptions. Some grew out of it with experience, others were partially Game-aware or simply naturals who backslid and devolved into AFCs, and still others have been “lifers”; men who still don’t get it into their old age.

I was having a discussion about the legion of AFCs that most women have to sift through with my assistant where I work. She’s an attractive (HB7.5-8) young woman of 26 who’s been dealing with an AFC long distance and non-exclusively for well over a year now. Her frustration comes from the multitudes of Betas she meets in her dating life – in fact after working with me for over 2 years she instantly identifies guys as AFCs. She’s familiar with the mindset now; the lack of decisiveness, the neediness, the wish-washy yet possessiveness, and all the other Qualities of the AFC. All of this got me to thinking about the AFCs I know or have known and their individual circumstances.

Dave L
Dave L. is perhaps the most pitiable of AFCs I’ve known. His story, as he tells it, began with his very overbearing and domineering mother. He came from a very strict Baptist family and so dealt with a very guilt-conscious mother for the better part of his life. Interestingly he transitioned from an authoritarian mother to an authoritarian wife. He’d only ever slept with one woman, Sue, whom he met in the military in his 20s. She was a sexually abused (by her uncle) single mother of 2 delinquent sons who saw in Dave L. what she never did in the other men in her life – a guy she COULD control. They’ve been married over 25 years now and had a daughter. In this time he has been little more than a slave to her. Their history is one of a constant brow-beating by her as he perpetually tries to find ways pacify her in the exact way he tried to pacify his mother’s insecurities. Every decision he’s ever made has been to appease her and has never been “good enough”.

When I met Dave L. his daughter had learned from her mother how to control him just as strictly. It was as if she had been passed his leash so she too could learn how to discipline him, and to keep him in check. When we first met I used to butt heads with both his daughter and his wife (and unwittingly so) because I would openly challenge their authority over him by questioning his autonomy as a man. They of course instantly jumped to his defense and maintained he was a “real man” and I would be too if only I would defer to women’s authority.

Ron
For a time Ron was one of my best friends and not a guy you’d really want to arouse to anger. He had my back in a lot of bad situation and I was his confidant and counselor for many years. But for as in control and assertive as he could be, Ron was an AFC. He had the Bad Boy posture that women loved, but he defeated himself with his soulmate-ONEitis mythology. He married Kris at 19. They met in the Navy, and he got her pregnant fairly early which prompted the marriage. Kris was beautiful and one of 3 women Ron had ever been with. He “did the right thing” and married her, and they stayed married, having 2 more children throughout their 20′s. Gradually, Kris left Ron to himself and the kids more and more as she felt she’d missed out on her 20′s and spent more time with her single girlfriends in the evenings. She began to resent Ron, who by now had let his physique go while she stayed in good shape. Ron didn’t see the signs, because he’d been progressively pushed into a position of having to qualify to his wife and internalized the thinking that it was “the right thing for a man to do.”

Ultimately at 29, Kris cheated on him. I was on the other end of the phone with him after he’d been searching all night through the town in which they lived for her car – with their children in the back of their mini-van. As melodramatic as all this sounds, he’d tracked her down to a motel and had been waiting in the parking lot since 4am for her to come out so he could kill her. I managed to talk him out of that, and he tried to “make it work” after the incident for another 4 years, but this was really last stop before toll. At present, she’s planning on marrying another lover she had and their family/children is in shambles.

While Ron wasn’t the cause of this, his AFC responses, progressive beta-ness, rationales and inaction only contributed to his present condition.

Dave B
Dave B is a textbook example of insanity – repeating the same mistake over and over. His first wife was his ONE, so was the second, so was the GF between wife 2 and 3 and so was the third. With wife #1 he had two daughters. After their divorce she gained custody of them and was awarded spousal and child support. Wife #2, another daughter, but only after they’d divorced once, made up, had the ubiquitous make-up sex and she got pregnant “by accident”, then they divorced for good. She too was awarded spousal support and child support for a daughter he never sees. After #2 Dave “met the ONE” again and moved her and her son and daughter from 2 different fathers into his home. After the teenage son was picked up for burglary of some neighborhood homes he got into a verbal argument with the GF. Dave B made the mistake of merely snatching the keys to the car, the car he’d given her, away from her hands. That was enough to have him restrained from entering the home he was paying for, driving the car he was paying for, and Dave B went to live with mom & dad for a spell until that was sorted out. Now Dave B is on wife #3; another single mother of 2 daughters. In the meantime wife #1 self- destructed and he was order by the court to assume custody of his first 2 daughters (which is what he wanted anyway) after they’d been abused by their stepfather and wife #1 turned up to be a meth addict. Turns out all that money he’d been paying for years went to feed her habit and the habit of the abusive step-father.

Shawn
Shawn is a guy I know who basically ONEitised on EVERY girl who EVER dated him. He’d been married for about 2.5 years to a fairly religious girl who told him she “wanted to be a pastor’s wife” only to have her eventually cheat on him with a guy who was the Bad Boy and ended up in Las Vegas. Shawn went on to get a master’s in education, and moved to a string of the “coulda been” girlfriends, who’d date him for about 2-3 weeks, figure out his Disneyesque views of love, LTRs and men & women in general. He was a very good songwriter until he found himself in one of these “coulda been” ONEitis spells. Then every song was about the girl he thought was his “gift from above” and he proceeded to smoother her in his clingy-ness and idealize her on a pedestal.

He went through about 3 or 4 of these while I knew him until he met his 2nd wife. Mary was a single mother of one son and technically his step-cousin (his step-fatehr’s, brother’s daughter). She’d “accidentally” gotten pregnant by a black guy on the college basketball team and according to her very strict (and notably racist) father had disgraced the family, but they being religious, she had the baby and began her life as a single mom. Shawn adopted the Cap’n-save-a-ho persona and started this whirl wind ONEitis crusade to “do the right thing” and not only marry her, but legally adopt her son. Mary of course was happy to have the help, but saw Shawn for what he is; desperate and a romantically idealistic AFC. Mary was actually a pretty good friend of Mrs. Tomassi for a time and she’d confide in her that she wished he had the ambition and drive that I had. The short version was that she wanted a Man she could respect – similar to her authoritative father – and while Shawn was welcome help, she just wasn’t hot for him. Now Shawn is legally bound to her and the child he never fathered and has little respect for him. After 8 years of marriage they still haven’t had the child(ren) that Shawn wants.

 

Recounting the stories of AFCs we’ve known is educational in that it illustrates the commonalities of conditions these guys (sometimes ourselves included) face and the mindset that accompanies them. It’s very easy to go all self-help-motivational on people and tell them what they ought to do and ought to believe about themselves, but stories like this make the conditions real for us. I’d encourage commenters to relate the stories of some of the AFCs they’ve known in the comment thread.

I wont argue the merits of bolstering your self-esteem and taking action to make a positive improvement in yourself toward becoming a capital ‘M’ Man. There are hundreds of blog threads in the community that address this, but recounting the wreckage of lives that AFCism (for lack of a better term) puts the reasons why a guy needs to “improve” in sharp perspective. It’s like seeing the emaciated starving children in 3rd world countries on Unicef commercials as a prompt to do something.

I didn’t start this post as a warning sign for AFCs, nor did I start it point out what not to do. It’s an illustration of the sheer scope of the problem and the very real impact it has not just on men’s lives, but their families, the women they paired off with, their children, their friends, etc. That might seem negative, but it’s reality. I could’ve just as well posted about PUAs I’ve known (which would’ve been a lot shorter), or glossed my own marriage in an effort to point AFCs in the right direction, but powder-puff enthusiasm tends to only come off as conceit. And in the end, the AFC still thinks his best course to a fulfilled LTR/marriage is doing exactly what he is already doing – only more so. The more you suffer the more it shows you really care, right?

The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill

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

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

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

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

Myth of the Dark Arts

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

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

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

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

The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill

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

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

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

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

Dread Games

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

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

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

Faces of Dread

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

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

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

“I can’t compete with that,..”

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

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

Dread Games

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fidelity

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

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

My question is: Why?

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

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

A Brief History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afterlife

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

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

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

Infidelity

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advantages

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Flow

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

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

The Process

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

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

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

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

Embracing the Flow

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

Be Her Drug Dealer

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

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

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

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

Looks Count

“Your bulletproof Game and charming personality wont make you look any better when your shirt comes off.”

Looks.

Assets.

Game.

Have two. Three is best, but if you only have one, Game is the most essential.

I realize that I’m heading into dangerous territory with this, but I maintain that looks are an integral part of attraction – sorry, that’s a fact of life – but I’ve never stated that looks cancel Game. In fact I advocate that learning Game is just as necessary as maintaining a good physique.

The problem is with people who can only think in absolutes. It’s always an either-or proposition; Game trumps physique or physique trumps game is horse shit. They’re both important and play off each other. There are plenty of average looking guys who pull tail thanks to Game in spite of their looks, and there are also good-looking guys who pull tail without ever hearing what Game is. But wouldn’t you rather be the guy with both? The guy who can pull women without compensating for personal deficits?

Consider that greater than 66% of people in western society are overweight (33% are morbidly obese). So it stands to reason that 2/3rd of the guys seeking out the community in order to change their lives, outlook and sexual prospects are going to be struggling with obesity from the outset. Now also consider the preferred belief among guys that looks, at least, matter less than personality, Game, etc. in female attraction. This is NOT a coincidence. For these guys it takes more effort to change their bodies than to change their minds.

“Looks aren’t as important for women“

The first thing most men who were previously out of shape will tell you is the marked increase in attention they receive from women after they got in shape. This is perhaps the simplest experiment that puts the lie to this assertion.*

There is a popular misconception men adopt in thinking that “looks aren’t as important for women” and that they’re more forgiving of a few extra pounds if a guy is witty, humorous and/or embodies some combination of the laundry list of nonsensical adjectives they place on their online dating profiles. This is the male version of the body image acceptance social convention women have been promoting themselves for the past 50 years. Don’t worry about getting in shape; money, humor and confidence will make any woman swoon for you. If this were the case the Louie Andersons and Danny Devitos of the world would be swimming in top-shelf poon. I have no doubt that very rich, but out of shape men have a relatively easy time attracting women, but they can’t make a woman genuinely desire to fuck him on a physical level. It’s just the very commercial version of negotiating desire.

While this may seem like a male-specific social convention, guess again; it’s actually a very calculated feminine convention. In terms of feminine breeding strategies and women’s schedules of mating, it is far more advantageous for a woman to engage in short-term breeding strategies with Alpha men during the peak of her sexual viability when she knows there is a social structure ready to accommodate her long-term breeding strategy (i.e. provisioning) with future men. In other words, encourage men to think that “looks aren’t as important to women” so they’ll be more acceptable future providers while breeding in the short-term with men embodying their very specific physical ideal. This is precisely the reason why the “kidult / man-up” phenomenon is so vexing for women today – it threatens this long-term strategy.

Priorities

In accordance with women’s sexual strategies, women place an importance upon looks according to their phase of life. The priorities and importance of characteristics that women will consider prerequisites for intimacy shift as her life’s conditions dictate.

14 – 24 years old: Looks are EVERYTHING. Yes, some romanticism might help complete the fantasy, and Game is definitely a factor, but the priority for arousal is primarily Darwinian. Women will gladly overlook character flaws or a lack of assets in favor of fucking the physical Alpha while she approaches her own sexual apex. For a brilliant study of this take the time to read Dr. Martie Hasselton’s study, Why Muscularity is Sexy.

25-30 years old: Looks are still of primary importance, but other factors are beginning to compete in significance as she becomes increasingly more aware of hitting the impending Wall. While she’s still hot enough to command attention, her hypergamic priorities lean more towards the life time provisioning potential and parental investment potential a Man represents. As she gets closer to 30, she knows she has to play her cards well if she is to cash out of the game while she’s still able to compete with other women. Ambition, character, assets, humor, personality, etc. begin to be more important in the light of a potential lifetime commitment.

30-35 years old: Most single women in this demographic are in varying degrees of denial (aided by social conventions), but on some level of consciousness they realize that they’re past their expiration date and securing a commitment is a progressively more difficult battle with every passing year. Looks lose precedent in favor of assets and status. Game and personality become more prominent, but the primary focus is catching up to the choices she made (or should’ve made) when she was about 28. Locking down a proven commodity – a Man with a reasonable amount of success and status – is the goal now; not a Man with “potential” for that same success. While the physical is still important, she’s more than willing to compromise the physical standards she held at 24 if the Man brings a lot to the table.

35-45 years old: She’s well past her expiration date, hit the Wall and is, graciously or not, accepting the fact that she’s used goods. Any notion of a list of requisites or priorities are a fond memory now. She may play the Cougar card in an ego protection effort. This may seem like she’s back to her primary Looks focus in playing the Cougar, but again, on some level of consciousness she understands that younger Men are doing her the favor by fucking her and in no way expects more than a physical fling. The hope is still, by some miracle, to lock down an aging AFC divorcee in a bad spot, with at least some amount of appreciable assets. Status is nice, looks would be icing on the cake if he’s still got them, but provisioning takes priority above even Game or social intelligence.

Making the Change

Changing yourself takes an effort. The greatest obstacle in change is the first one; recognizing and accepting that you need to change. This is where AFCs and beta males chomp at the bit because they’ve been told for the better part of a lifetime to “just be themselves” and everything will go according to fate’s plan. Then for whatever reason they unplug from the Matrix enough to realize that they’ve been sold a bill of goods and that personal change is necessary for them. They need to change their lifestyle, change their attitudes, change their outlook, change their minds about themselves and yes, change their physiques too.

But change takes effort and people are lazy. They want the quick fix; the magic pill that makes them happy, successful and sexually irresistible. So they flock to guys selling the best program that promises all that for a minimum of effort. Learning Game demands practiced effort, but it requires FAR less physical effort than improving one’s body, and it’s especially daunting for guys unaccustomed to working out. It takes time, energy and dedication all commensurate with how out shape that guy is to begin with.

From Women’s Physical Standards:

There are countless “chubby chaser” websites dedicated to catering to this particular “fetish” for men, but not a single one exists for women, why?. By that I mean there is a percentage in society of otherwise average, fit men seeking out obese women, yet the standard for ideal masculinity seems to remain constant for females by the lack of “fetishes” for obese males. There is such a demand in society by men seeking fat women that businesses have been developed in order meet it, but there is no similar demand on the part of fit women (or one not sufficient enough to register) seeking overweight men. Why do you suppose this is? There has never been a “rubenesque” period for Men – where overweight men were consider the feminine ideal – in history. A muscular athletic build has ALWAYS been the masculine standard.

As I stated in Sexy, men define what is feminine and sexy for women, however the inverse is true in that women define what is masculine and sexy for men. The reason women find particular aspects of Men’s physiology sexually arousing is because the men in the past who embodied them were rewarded with sex often enough to make those traits hard-coded into women’s brains.

Yes, Game is vitally important, as is root level, dynamic personal change. I don’t think I need to explain just how important this is. However, looks COUNT, looks MATTER. What I find amazingly ironic is that looks are one of the few areas of change that a Man has DIRECT control over – his body. Barring physical disabilities, you have no excuse not to be in better shape. Why wouldn’t you want the full package? Stop being so Goddamned lazy and accept that you’ll need to exert some effort and sweat to make yourself more attractive. Game and a positive-masculine DJ mindset are vital elements for your attractiveness and well-being, but they WONT make you look any better with your shirt off.

*Side Note: I should also point out that for as much as women will assert that a man’s penis size is irrelevant to their sexual pleasure, often the first insult they’ll hurl at a man in order to shame him is “I’ll bet he’s got a small dick!” You connect the dots.

Free Lunch

“Rollo talks a lot about shaming tactics from women, and one I’m hearing now is that if the man doesn’t pay for the date, he is actually being feminine and passive, and is attracting more masculine, ball-busting like girls because he’s giving his role of pursuer up, and feminine women will be repelled by men who don’t pay for their drinks/dinner/dates etc.

To me, it just sounds like women being afraid of losing an advantage they’ve always had, free stuff.

How do you see it? First date is coffee, do you pay for that? Does she pay for her own? Do you look cheap if you buy that first cup? Do you look needy if you buy that first cup?”

Law 40: Despise the Free Lunch
What is offered for free is dangerous— it usually involves either a trick or a hidden obligation. What has worth is worth paying for. By paying your own way you stay clear of gratitude, guilt, and deceit. It is also often wise to pay the full price— there is no cutting corners with excellence. Be lavish with your money and keep it circulating, for generosity is a sign and a magnet for power.

Read this again, what has worth is worth paying for. The feminization of culture has simultaneously distorted the formality of a man paying for a date into a form of masculine control while still an being a required masculine obligation. It’s a Catch 22 – screwed if you do, screwed if you don’t, and there are two conflicting perspectives for this.

As I’ve expressed on a few occasions; as a man in this life, you will ALWAYS pay for sex in one form or another. That may be buying coffee, drinks, dinner, a concert ticket, a wedding ring or a mortgage payment, but always trust that there is going to be a cost associated with you and sex. Whether it’s with your nebulous ‘Quality Woman’ or the prostitute you picked up off the Trail for half an hour – you’re going to pay.

The second perspective is the ‘Chivalry’s not dead’ approach. Nothing has served the feminine imperative better over the years than to convince the male populace at large that it’s his codified moral obligation to prove his provisioning capacity to her in an effort to qualify for her intimacy. This point of view has had a long history of perpetual requisites for a man, but the holdover, and starting point today is paying for the drinks / date / etc based on a traditional, gender specific, obligation.

In light of that, if it makes you feel a sense of completed duty in paying for a woman’s drinks / meal, then by all means continue to do so, but not because a woman’s convinced you of a moral obligation. My approach is to recognize this ‘tradition’ for what it really is. You’re a Man. Men of power despise a free lunch; not from business associates and certainly not from a woman he intends to make his pleasure.

What has worth is worth paying for. By paying your own way you stay clear of gratitude, guilt, and deceit.

You also stay clear of obligation. There can never, and will never, be an egalitarian equality between the sexes: we are different. The good news is this is the way women want it in spite of their feminization conditionings. Covertly, women want a Man who initiates, approaches, drives, and yes, pays the tab. However, when overtly pressed about ‘paying her way’, she is forced into a position of denying this because her conditioning has taught her “she is her own person” and the expectations of her day say she should at least pay half, not be afraid to approach a man, initiate a date herself, etc. Make Sadie Hawkins proud.

These are masculine expectations, and much like the “virtues” of the professional woman, feminine masculinization conditions her to equate her value on masculine terms, while still being a woman. The fallacy being that a Man ‘should’ be attracted to the same masculine traits she finds attractive. And predictably, innate gender nature continues to contradict this.

So yes, pay for the drinks, date, etc., just know what you’re paying for. What has worth is worth paying for – is she worth the payment? You are the Prince, your attentions have value, does she appreciate them? Have a plan, make the decisions, direct the course of the date. If she’s unresponsive or only luke warm in her reciprocation – NEXT! Hypergamy makes ALL women opportunists by order of  degree; accept that, it’s simply how the world works. Golddiggers are women who overtly acknowledge this opportunism in word and behavior; they’re not too hard to recognize if you want to see them.

You’ll know more about her the morning after you bang her brains out than you ever will on a casual, comfy dinner date.

I want you to want me

,..but, Rollo I want it to be because of who I am, not what I can pay for.

This is an uncomfortable truth, and a lot of guys don’t like to hear it, but your capacity to pay is PART of who you are.

Your accomplishments, your career, your passions, your aspirations, your physique, are all PART of you. There are parts of you that are more attractive than others, but the sum is what makes you who you are. There was a thread on the SoSuave forum a week ago regarding career choices and how this relates to life and women etc. I realize this may be an unpopular opinion on this, but what you choose to do as a vocation is part of who you are. It may not be your source of personal identity, but for better or worse, your vocation and it’s associations become a part of your identity. It’s similar to how you look physically is part of you. It’s a comfortable fiction to think that women are less interested in a man’s physique, or should be attracted to a guy unbiased by what he does – but these are all part of a whole.

Egalitarian Equalism is self-defeating; it leaves a vaccuum of power or responsibilities to be filled by either sex in the wrong instances; for instance, expecting a man to possess the equitable feminine qualities he’s lacking yet still holding him accountable for them. In other words, if a wife feels her husband is incapable of providing for her and the kids with the decisive, confident security of leadership she will feel compelled to assume the role of the husband and he will be relegated to the role of being the passive, submissive wife. In the egalitarian model this is acceptable, socially reinforced and passed on as learned behavior to their children. And in this generation (and perhaps the one prior) it’s not a stretch to assume that contemporary male submissiveness was in fact taught to them by their own parents.This may seem like I’m being overly analytical, but look at this framework from the perspective of paying for a date / drinks / events etc. from the beginning stages of an LTR or even just spinning a plate. This egalitarian model has filtered into the male social identity to the point that a guy thinks it common place for a woman to initiate and approach him with a date proposition. He thinks it normal for a woman to want to pay the tab, open doors for him, etc. These are traditionally Men’s behaviors that AFCs believe women think are empowering and attractive in women.

Your Grandfather never pondered whether he or your then-to-be Grandmother would get the bill; it wasn’t even an afterthought. He payed the tab and Grandma was appreciative. And that’s what’s at issue – appreciation. Feminization has stacked the deck against a guy to the point where he questions a woman’s motives. Does she appreciate his generosity or does she feel entitled to it?