Tuesday, November 19, 2013
Why Relationships work, or don't work
Let's say Joe Ex-PUA listened to me and settled down with a young woman. You may now think, "Wait, how is this supposed to ever work when there will always be other younger women around? Won't he forever be tempted to jump ship?" Well, first, you'll also get older, and your focus in life will eventually shift from getting laid or, in the case of PUAs, fantasizing about getting laid, to something more constructive. Remember, you used to have hobbies in high school! Second, it's really not the case that girls are that easily interchangeable.
I certainly don't want to urge guys to settle down with some random girl, albeit precisely that seems to be what the average Joe is doing. In that case, you're pretty screwed from the get-go. Eventually she'll have a baby, possibly from another man, and she'll calculate for how long she has to remain married to you to maximize alimony payments. Sadly, Joe allowed himself to get bullied into not signing a marriage contract, since doing so would be "unromantic", according to the 32 year-old he married who was desperate to get a guy.
In case there is no sound foundation in a relationship, be it because you are really only together with her because of her looks, and can't stand her personality at all, or because she only has an interest in exploiting you financially, then you're indeed sitting on a time-bomb that might go off any day. Every conflict will erode the little that keeps your relationship together. By forcing yourself to staying with her instead of leaving right now, you are only prolonging the inevitable, while also causing more suffering for yourself.
There is a different scenario, though. Imagine there was a woman you really like. Maybe you were fortunate enough toe meet one or two like that in your life. You enjoy her personality, you've got a similar worldview, but not too similar, and you find her physically attractive, too. You won't come across many such women. A sad realization guys who bang a lot of women make is that they normally can't offer anything besides their pussy. They may be uneducated, and even if they went to top universities, they can be stupid as fuck, with their business or sociology degrees. She probably can't hold her own in a conversation, and if you're particularly unlucky, she may have an absolutely obnoxious personality. Sure, such girls can be fun for two hours, if you don't know much abut them. Eventually, though, you'll think of the opportunity cost of hanging out with her, and will quickly kick her out.
It's really rare to meet a woman you like personality-wise, and who is attractive as well as reasonably smart. Like attracts like, so if you feel drawn to a woman, it's probably mutual. This reasoning does not apply to women who fall for any guy out of sheer desperation, similar to guys who are so messed up that they think any pussy is better than none. Instead, I'm describing how emotionally mature people would interact. Both of you are probably aware of how unusual your relationship is, especially when compared to previous ones. At the very least, this would require a woman who is not completely average, though, since I don't think it's possible to build a deep connection with some chick whose sole interests are doing her nails and having shouting matches with whoever poor soul who is currently banging her. There are a lot of shallow women out there and, yes, I do think they are completely unfit for any kind of relationship.
Thankfully, not all women are like that. With those, then you'll experience, for instance, that shared positive experiences help to reinforce the relationship. What will also happen is that your shared history will only make you fonder of your woman. Ideally, you both want to get the same or something rather similar out of life. It may be children; I think it often is a prime goal in life. You might think of one child, while she dreams of having a larger family. You can't be sure about whether you'd want to have another kid until you've gotten the first one, anyway. So, there are good reasons for staying together. Some goals are completely at odds, though. If your prime interest is sexual, and hers is to spend your money, then there is no common goal to work towards to.
Physical attraction is important, too. In my opinion, everybody who denies that is kidding himself. Sorry, Fat Jenny, nobody cares about your "personality" --- just like you don't care about the "great sense of humor" of a five foot tall guy of a low socio-economic standing. But what about aging? I mean, if you read "manosphere" drivel, you could get the impression that women turn 80 on their 30th birthday. Neither of you will remain 20 forever. However, if you take a girl in her early to mid twenties as your wife when you are in your early thirties, which I consider a reasonable age of marriage for a guy, then you'll grow older with her. She will become the mother of your children, and when she's entering her thirties, you'll be around 40. I don't see why, as long as both stay in shape, physical attraction should suddenly evaporate. On the other hand, if you're a young engineer of 25 and are stupid enough to let yourself get pressured into marrying a 32 year-old woman, then I can easily see why the little physical attraction you might have felt in the beginning will eventually disappear, and why you wonder how come you wake up next to a monster every day.
To summarize this post, I think there is only one way to make a relationship work, and it depends heavily on the starting position. On the other hand, there are countless reasons why a relationship won't work out. In the US relationship counseling is big business --- quite possibly as shady as the PUA industry, but quite certainly a lot bigger. The big elephant in the room those "counselors" don't want to talk about is that many relationships are doomed from the start, and that there is no way to fix them. But, hey, why bother with pesky facts? The alternative is to be very selective about the kind of woman you're getting involved with, and growing the relationship.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!
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Good post Aaron.
ReplyDeleteI think, for the record, that age shouldn't form a hard and fast rule for who we select, but rather a general guideline. An above-30 woman who is attractive and intelligent yet single is to be taken with caution, but if upon seriously getting to know her she displays contrition over past relationship mistakes, understands what it takes to make a marriage work *right now*, does not show an obsession with having a family, etc. there is no reason why she wouldn't make a great catch (at least if you aren't primarily looking for children). If she is healthy, health-conscious, and shows a great commitment to fitness and personal improvement (i.e. no drinking/smoking/tanning, exercises, eats healthy foods, hasn't had kids, is mentally active as well), she might age phenomenally and be a better physical investment than the average "hot" twenty year-old. Some women are finished at thirty, while others are still fetching in their 50s and even beyond (although admittedly not many).
I've found that my telling women that I'm likely not able to have biological kids for medical reasons (which is actually totally true) is a great way to thin the herd. If she is truly interested in you as a potential life companion and not as a sperm donor, that is an acid test.
On the flipside, it's the rare woman under 25 that is really suitable for, or even interested in, settling-down right now, either. A lot of them will be, if not actively pissing their life away by partying every night and having a number of one-night-standesque relationships, just too shallow and stupid to understand the first thing about attracting, selecting, and keeping a quality guy. Some of these girls will learn from this and become great girlfriends/wives someday, and others will reach their late thirties without having progressed one bit (and then be bitter at society about it). These girls might be one-night-stand material, but for most of us, shouldn't be anything more. Nonetheless, there are those diamonds out there who at eighteen had more sense than the majority of forty year-old women. The catch with them is that they are probably not going to jump into a relationship, especially with a significantly older man. They're also not likely to put out with anybody outside of marriage or at least a very committed relationship, which isn't a bad thing.
Problem. Since a lot of chicks around 25-26 are already "old" an unattractive. I find that when I'm together with a woman I'm already bored of her after a few days. Sexually and on personal level. After the fucking and cuddling and holding hands you just want to turn off her bullshit- and drama-radio. But then, I'm thirty and I'm still crazy about those tight 16y/olds. I seem to only get the older chicks that have a double agenda. When I see such man with a woman, few years younger and maybe a baby and kids I feel such a pity for them. What is the chance for them to ever again have quality sex? They put ALL their time and energy in their unattractive wife and their kids. Is it me, or what? Sometimes I think my sex-starved years when I was younger made me crazy...
ReplyDeleteBe glad that you're only bored after a few days. I couldn't stand most after a couple of hours, which of course relates to the point that the only thing most women can offer is pussy --- and sadly it's not the case that they are all amazing in bed either. So screwing around can get rather frustrating at times, too.
DeleteI feel pity for the average guy. A plausible agenda to have is to either marry a quality woman or stay single. The alternative is, as you pointed out, not very attractive.
Good post. There is nothing to add , this is how it plays out in RL.
ReplyDeleteon a side note , you were mentioned here
http://www.goodlookingloser.com/2013/11/19/the-numbers-game-what-are-my-odds/
I m interested in your take on this.
I dislike the fact that he and his regulars keep droning on about shaming guys who ask for numbers/ratios/stats - accusing anyone who's interested in ratios/stats of being "a keyboard jockey virgin" that needs to just shut up and leave the house.
DeleteThere is also this false equivalency that any discussion of ratios/numbers is immediately branded a "geeky obsession with numbers". I see this accusation thrown about ANYTIME anyone even asks to even get a ROUGH idea of which method/strategy produces what kind of results.
Let me tell you something. I know plenty of naturals (the kind who hit triple-digit lays before they were 21), and most of them do it through social circle, status, warm-approaches etc.
For most of them, if they discovered the community, and the first thing they saw were the stats on cold-approaching, they'd NEVER bother with it [they already get pussy 10x easier and more than they can handle from other methods]. So I think stats are THE most important thing that anyone who's honest should lead with, not something they should shame people away from discussing.
Now, suppose one of these naturals discovered these blogs in curiosity and asked for stats to know if its worth exploring cold-approaching - they'd immediately be branded "a geeky number obsessing dork" and that's just bullshit.
TL:DR;
I disagree that discussions of numbers/stats are "geeky mental masturbation". In fact, EVEN IF one went all out super-geeky and obsessive about it (which is a strawman, I've never seen people plot excel charts and do statistical backwards regressive analysis or whatnot on ratios)
Let's suppose THEY DID, let's even suppose someone DID spend 30-40 hours hyper-analyzing each method statistically in a scientific geeky way (which I again say is a strawman, never seen it done) ---> EVEN IF people did that, it would be some of the best spent 40 hours of their lives, they'd know where to direct their energy.
If you spend 40 hours to learn that method A produces 500% less pussy than method B per hour/unit of effort - then that is going to save you THOUSANDS of hours over a lifetime of wasted effort. TENS OF THOUSANDS
AGAIN: The vast majority of people are just asking to be reassured whether/which method is worth investing time/effort in - a reasonable request. Most of the time they're told to just shut up, leave the house and apply the method blindly and not worry what the returns are (fucking bullshit).
Just to make it clear in terms of the last comment. I want to make it clear I respect and like GLL a ton so my comment shouldn't be misread as a dislike on GLL - I just dislike bashing "interest in stats", that's all.
DeleteAs a unattractive guy with a lack of resources you just don't know the data. Pua's claim they get laid a lot with "hot" woman, which is not true. It's an ego-protection thing. Most people with social circle say they don't get laid. Because they're not high status enough in their social circle.
DeleteIf you are starting from zero you still have trouble. How to build a healthy sphere of influence where you have enough high status to get girls attracted to you?
I read somewhere that GLL site keeper has approached more than 6000 girls while getting laid with less than 200. There are many fan boys in there like Amir who approached 4000 girls while getting laid with less than 20 ugly girls :)
DeleteApproach to sex ratio is essential in determining if the activity makes sense or not.
Aaron, you will love this comment I found in the trash can over at AVfM:
ReplyDeletePerhaps you aren’t a virgin, but your commander Black Pill is. He alone generates all your twisted anti-game ideas. Then you and your friends like Jalon launder them through yourselves in the failed hope men won’t catch on that anti-game is the verbal diarrhea of a bitter loser virgin. We have caught on. We know better than to think that liberals, conservatives, WNs, and gamers all worship pussy. All four groups are getting laid more than you and your commander.
You can’t deny that you launder anti-game because you did it in the first comment and even gave credit to Black Pill for the original anti-game.
Wait, I thought you were Black Pill. Then again, there are people who think you are me, and vice versa, or that I'm Black Pill. Amusing bunch of people.
DeleteOn a related note, I find it quite amusing that it's normally guys who hardly ever get anywhere with girls and who think that phone numbers, even flaky ones, are so eager to defend "game" and its proponents. This leads to the result that it is "loser virgins" who call anti-gamers, who are commonly guys who do get laid, virgins. You can't make this up.
@Aaron Sleazy
ReplyDelete"I feel pity for the average guy. A plausible agenda to have is to either marry a quality woman or stay single. The alternative is, as you pointed out, not very attractive."
Really? Only if they can find as wife a willing quality woman (and first I suspect you are overestimating the ease by which average males can achieve this goal, as a sex, especially in the prevailing mating landscape)
Not surprising, as I would expect that most such beautiful females rarely settle down (disassortative mating) with average joes to begin with, forever chasing their greener grass on the horizon mating their attractive male peers (or riding the cock carousel, in the case of less attractive females).
@Anonymous,
"When I see such man with a woman, few years younger and maybe a baby and kids I feel such a pity for them. What is the chance for them to ever again have quality sex? They put ALL their time and energy in their unattractive wife and their kids. Is it me, or what?"
The single biggest difference between happily paired individuals, and those toxic singles rotting away in dating limbo, is that the former have learned to stop chasing day-dreams and invest in a sure thing.
I don’t think these average joes for being brainless, but rather they are smart for not jeopardizing a assortative female prospect, instead of chasing rainbows (i.e pursuing unattainable gorgeous girls).
Individuals face this problem of adaptively calibrating their levels of aspiration.
What would be your suggestion? waste their lives pursuing young girls that are higher in value than what they can realistically obtain/ hold and staying singles finally?
You do not need to have a girlfriend or wife. If your only realistic chance is to settle down with an unattractive woman, then I really have to ask you why even bother? There is this well-known "choose 2" meme where the options are, "attractive", "emotionally stable", "intelligent". There is some truth to it, primarily because attractive girls get the strong signal from society that they can get away with everything, and plenty are stupid enough to think that they can be bitches for life. Reality will catch up with them.
DeleteHowever, what if poor Joe Average only has the option of an unattractive, older, emotionally unstable, and pretty stupid woman, maybe with a kid from some other guy? Why on Earth would he think that it's a good idea to pair up with a woman like that?
So Aaron, unattractive men are destined for a life of unhappiness and loneliness? That's harsh.
Delete“You do not need to have a girlfriend or wife”
DeleteI doubt that many men can lead a happy life without romantic relationships and involuntary celibacy. According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, humans need to love and be loved, both sexually and non-sexually, by others. Most men become susceptible to loneliness, social anxiety, and clinical depression in the absence of love, sex or belonging element. This need for belonging may overcome the physiological and security needs, depending on the strength of the peer pressure. A life with chronic near-total or total absence in intimate relationships or sexual intercourse is not going to satisfy your self actualization need, because simply it is an expression of the more evolutionarily fundamental need to reproduce.
Seen from a fundamentalist evolutionary sense, our sole purpose in life is to propagating our genes, and our needs are honed to relentlessly drive us in this direction. The first step towards procreation is in staying healthy and alive. This means finding food and shelter and, if necessary, beating other people in order to get it. Once we are reasonably secure, the next step towards procreating our genes is finding a mate (and doing the deed, of course).
“There is some truth to it, primarily because attractive girls get the strong signal from society that they can get away with everything, and plenty are stupid enough to think that they can be bitches for life. Reality will catch up with them”
One could argue that for those men displaying sufficient indications of genetic quality, attractive girls would have made for more agreeable company. Thus, perhaps a female “bitchy” attitude may be a sign indicating that they are trying to sabotaging male approaches/courtships or an even some initiated tentative (disassortative) relationship, in passive aggressive terms (which is strategic optima of females, considering inferior aptitudes, given that passive aggression shifts the energetic onus onto other parties).
“If your only realistic chance is to settle down with an unattractive woman, then I really have to ask you why even bother?. However, what if poor Joe Average only has the option of an unattractive, older, emotionally unstable, and pretty stupid woman, maybe with a kid from some other guy? Why on Earth would he think that it's a good idea to pair up with a woman like that?”
DeleteI would say that accept mating assortativement (i.e.if you're unattractive pair with an unattractive woman) is not such bad option from an evolutionary point of view, because it increases the genetic additive variance. However I admit that we all want really (regardless of our own mate value) an attractive female partner. The matter is that mate choice is two-sided matching (not a one-sided search) and each sex has a bias to prefer individuals of particular qualities because that bias has advantages in realms other than mating. All this meaning there are only two options: loneliness or assortative mating. (* or maybe international dating / foreign marriage opportunities, where mail order brides do not share the same frame of reference as in developed world populations (and thus, the forces of balancing selection provide opportunistic niches in the form of outgroup-seeking females).
By the other hand, although unfortunately most men faced with a limited set of romantic /sexual options, anyway I would bet each average/unattractive man can find a nice, warm and emotionally stable mate within that subset of unattractive/average ( and same age range) women.
Anyway the limiting factor in mate choice is mainly aesthetic appearance. I’m an average guy and I've had dates who were girls about whom I've thought: "I really like this girl. If only she was physically cute!" I'm sure a lot of men can relate. If a man wants to find a woman, he is naturally concerned both with her physical appearance and her personality (at least in most cases). Attractive men has to take appearance into consideration (i.e. he knows his female options will be attractive anyway), he will find it much easier to find a mate.
To the anon above: Loneliness is a state of mind. Surely many married men feel very lonely, and really unhappy, too. What is true, though, is that unattractive men won't have a lot of luck on the dating market. They can either settle for some equally unattractive woman, or stay single. I think that in that case the latter option makes more sense.
Delete@Aaron Sleazy,
Delete“Loneliness is a state of mind”.
True that loneliness is subjective complex experience, but mainly occurs as an emotional response caused by isolation or lack of companionship, encompassing reactions to the absence of intimate and social needs. Many studies suggest that one romantic partner can be sufficient to buffer those at risk of loneliness. Feelings of anger, frustration, self-doubt and even depression, are all invariably linked to living without sex & not having a partner.
“Surely many married men feel very lonely, and really unhappy, too. What is true, though, is that unattractive men won't have a lot of luck on the dating market. They can either settle for some equally unattractive woman, or stay single. I think that in that case the latter option makes more sense”
Men are not wired differently per se (after all, male monogamy evolved out of strategies in monopolizing the reproduction of an individual female). *Promiscuous* males, however, *are* wired differently, and for evolutionary reasons, physically attractive guys (10-20% of male population) will tend to be overwhelmingly promiscuous (exceptions do not disprove the rule).
Still, I think it should be pointed out, that the *vast* majority of males are not promiscuous, even if only because they lack the options. But, many women who are fixated on the top %10-20 of the most handsome males who *have* really those options, are apparently blind to this false generalization (I have met very few western women who either had the intuitive faculty, or the integrity, to acknowledge that *most* males aren’t promiscuous).
What western women need to reconcile (something that women in developing world populations already know) – is that LTRs are – and always have been – about ‘settling’ (trading off male physical attractiveness for commitment). Are there attractive exceptions? Yeah, sure – but even so, these exceptions tend to commit to the most beautiful women.
And since females are *vastly* more selective, these very good looking guys are prohibitively rare (and thus have more attractive women to choose from) – meaning that even for an attractive woman, the odds of pairing off long term with a reciprocally attractive male is anything but certain.
Thus, the average western woman with astronomically high standards has two realistic options – either lower their standards and ‘settle’, or keep riding the carousel, hoping they luck out (but expect otherwise).
And for the 80-90% rest of male population (average Joes & unattractive men), a plausible expression of male resentment are:
1) In being entangled in a LTR, which poses obvious trade-offs in short-term goals (i.e. she resents having a long-term mate who ‘tingles’ her less than other prospective mates).
Moreover, since things are rarely equal, gender-biased legislation combined with female hyper-selectivity makes it all but certain that those females who marry, will tend to practice a bait and switch style of marriage(with minimal sexual concessions). Marriage has thus become a ‘sucker’s bet’ for the very these males who are most likely to pursue it, and thus a much inferior mating strategy.
I should add that as long as marriage represents an ideal strategy to reap direct benefits, it will always be coveted, in some measure, by opportunistic and mercenary females.
2) They have trouble finding what they want, what are some of the systemic and personal problems hindering their prospects. Seen from the perspective of hedonic adaptation, many men can’t engage in post-decisional dissonance reduction and persuade themselves that those wives they have chosen to mate are in fact more appealing than other
@Aaron Sleazy
DeleteAre you 100% positive that as an unattractive male you are destined to have no/very little success in dating? I mean thanks to your books I know that all pick up advise is absolute bullshit and stoped watching all the Videos etc. about it, but it apprears that TD [don´t know if I can write the Name of the Company here, starts with Real...] seems to have at least some success with women. Because I can´t imagine that all his stories about having threesomes, different girlfriends etc are made up.. And this dude is far from attractive
There is a new meme flying around the manosphere lately. The claim that "game saves lives." For example:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.returnofkings.com/22409/why-game-is-necessary-part-3
Apparently the problem here was lack of game. Seriously.
I don't know what to say to this. Really, how much more stupid can the "manosphere" get?
Delete"how much more stupid can the "manosphere" get?"
ReplyDeleteA lot more actually... Grizzly (whom you're talking to right now in the other post about neo-liberalism) actually tried to test this... He actually created a troll blog just to see how ridicolous and idiotic CAN manospherians get.
He wanted to find out what the limit was to manospherian stupidity - by creating a game parody blog where he went more and more outrageous and crazy with his faux-game theories and alpha-beta-this-that pua theories, just to see how far he can go before gamers called him out on it and said "dude, you're going too far".
He never got to that point :D In fact the crazier the stuff he put out, the more manospherians fans and props he got... So he never completed the experiment.
This sounds fascinating. Do you have the link?
DeleteIt was Lord of the Alphas: lordofthealphas.wordpress.com. To be fair I only got 3 posts into it. One week of posts. You will see maybe 3 or 4 comments total that are showing, but that's because I stopped approving comments very early on. I had over two dozn comments in my queue that I didn't approve. They were just too depressing.
DeleteWhat's interesting is, I only had it up for a week but manospherians started linking to it by day 2, and by like day 4 I was already getting 100 hits a day. Doesn't sound like much, but considering I had zero pedigree and was talking absolute nonsense, getting that much traffic in 3 or 4 days was surprising. I was also going on manosphere blogs and commenting under my new persona to drum up support for my faux-blog. My comments were incredibly stupid and over the top macho keyboard jockey stuff but no one batted an eyelash. I thought even the name Lord of the Alphas would have been a tipoff but people totally engaged me and gave my comments props. Based on my stat tracker, a lot of them came over to my blog to read or comment.
My plan was to get more and more ridiculous as time went on, including totally misinterpreting studies to support game and racism like Roissy does, but the strain of deliberately trying to channel that type of stupidity was draining and taxing on my sanity. Reading the stupid supportive comments I was getting too started really depressing me about the state of mankind. A week of it was too much.
One funny thing that happened was one of the first posts I did was about how game can save lives. There was some mentally ill guy with a history of psychotic episodes who eventually snapped and went on a shooting spree. Among his problems was that he got friendzoned once. I made a post saying that if he had game, he wouldn't have gotten friendzones, would have had a harem of chicks, and never would have gone insane. I thought maybe I was tipping my hand and being too obvious, but coincidentally (I don't take credit for starting the meme) I saw the same story and same rationale appear on different manosphere blogs without a hint of irony.
@Anonymous,
ReplyDelete"So Aaron, unattractive men are destined for a life of unhappiness and loneliness? That's harsh."
Even moreso, given that women consider a shocking 80% of males to be unattractive.
(http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dating/).