This is a guest post by a good friend and “retired” Manosphere blogger. For now, this post is anonymous.
Almost all of us who began their journeys after discovering this corner of the internet began from a place of low self-esteem, little confidence, no real value – out of shape, badly dressed, no money. All or some combination of these things. In one way or another, we were betas.
At this stage, we needed game. We needed to understand how attraction worked at a biological level, and how to emulate the behaviours of attractive men, so that we could begin to have some sort of success with more of the kind of woman we desired, all the whilst we worked tirelessly on our self-development.
THE PROCESS
Being a holistic process, gains in one area led to a confidence boost, which then improved results in another area. Rung by rung, we pulled ourselves up the ladder. As the months and years went by, many of us then found ourselves in the position of finally being able to attract the quality of girl into our lives that we’d wanted all along. We’d internalised the lessons, got into shape, improved our style, found greater financial success. We’d put ourselves head & shoulders above 90% of the rest of the male population through our hard work and endeavors, and could rightly be considered “alpha” at last.
This is usually the point in a man’s journey at which one girl comes along who is significantly better than any of the previous ones. So much so, that you don’t want to stop seeing her. She won’t put out for multiple dates, she’s not that type of girl. She’s interesting and clever, can make you laugh, can even teach you some things about life.
Naturally, you end up in a committed relationship with her, since after all – isn’t this why you learned all this stuff in the first place?
THE FREE FALL…
Things go well, the honeymoon period is in full effect, she’s bringing the best version of herself to the table, you never argue. And then naturally, the hormones die down a bit, and you begin to have minor arguments. She starts acting out, in a way you think is unreasonable, over small things that shouldn’t matter.
You come down hard on it, as you don’t want to tolerate this kind of thing. After all, we know from our red pill knowledge that women don’t respect a weak man, and when she does this kind of thing, it’s a shit test, isn’t it?
And she’ll lose attraction for you if you pander to it?
It works a little at first, but then something is not right. The outbursts become more frequent, more intense. You try to withhold attention, maintain frame, all the things in your arsenal – and none of it works.
She becomes unhappy. She doesn’t leave you, but starts making your life so miserable you end up unable to cope, and consider walking away from the whole thing.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
What went wrong is that we carried on applying techniques designed for betas in our relationships, long after we ceased to be betas. These methods are to be used for low value man to be able to hold their own against women who might ordinarily consider them out of your league, to allow us to maintain the upper hand.
Except we’re not betas any more – through all the hard work we put in ourselves and the confidence we gained, we became alphas. The girl you are with, she’s head over heels for you.
She needs no convincing of your worth.
The acting out, the moodiness – all these things are signs the girl is crying out for some comfort and reassurance from you. She’s scared you might leave her, and she needs to know you’re not going to.
Remember, when a girl becomes emotional, it’s normally either insecurity, fear or hurt. What comes out of her mouth is tangential to what she’s actually feeling.
What needs to be understood, is that to “come down on this like a ton of bricks” is the single worst thing you could possibly do, as a higher value man. You are just compounding the issue.
This girl, she needs you to see through her words, to not react badly even though she may have spoken out of turn to you. She needs you to be the bigger person, just “know” why she’s behaving the way she is, and go to her, hug her, settle her down and reassure her, tell her you love her and you won’t leave her, and be there for her when she needs you.
By reacting with tactics designed for low value men, you are destroying her emotionally, bit by bit — dooming your relationship to fail.
I understand though, it’s hard. We all lost girls in the past through being too needy. We vowed to ourselves that never again, would that happen to us, we’d never show weakness, allow a girl to speak badly to us. When her words call our character into question, we feel threatened, because we still fear on some level it may be true, so we respond with anger.
THE NEXT STEP
Except you have to let go of this at some point, just relax, and start being a normal human being. We started off from one side of the pendulum as betas, it swung all the way to the other side of extreme red pill, and now we have to let it find the centre.
Of course, don’t be a doormat.
There are some occasions which really do require a stern response. But we’re not children any more, we should have enough life experience to be able to use our own judgement to know when is the time for this. Chances are, if you’ve got a good girl, this will in reality be almost never.
As you may have guessed, I write these words from experience. I screwed up the best relationship I ever had, by not letting go when I should, and being the bigger person. I was loving and reassuring to my girl when times were good, sure – but it’s easy to do that. It’s easy to be nice when things are going well. That’s not when it’s needed most though. You have to be able to do it when your girl has just verbally attacked you for something you feel is unjust, and suppress your instinctive reaction to be angry. Put yourself in her shoes, try and see why she’s doing it, and be big enough to go put the arm around her shoulders.
Not in a pathetic pleading manner of course, but as a man.
She won’t lose attraction for you, but rather gain it.
If you want to make the final step into having a successful, long term happy relationship — the reason you got into this whole game in the first place — this is a lesson you’re going to need to learn, and it’s better to learn it sooner rather than later.
Otherwise, the only thing that’s going to teach it to you is losing something you care about, and only realising it when it’s too late.
In other words pickup fucks you up. Much better to just wait until exercise alone makes you attractive enough to bond to a good girl, then be on your way. It’s the short cut that ruins your ability to relate to women as people. It’s also why pickup artists keep writing field reports every week, 52 weeks a year, blogging away to try to make a living wasting all their entrepreneurial time out meeting strangers with paying clients tagging along. They can’t hold onto any normal relationship! When a normal fit guy finds a girl, he is good for a year or two at a time, eventually marrying to have kids like normal people do, since he is in fact normal.
There are some men who crave the adventure and crazy stories. Some of them are truly happy.
The more time passes though, I’m beginning to think I’m not cut from that mold.
You are clueless. Women don’t just go for guys who are in good shape. Sure that helps, but that alone without knowledge of who women really are will get a man’s heart broken a thousand times. Women are so fickle that a man can do everything right, and still lose her. You wonder whyyyyy there are pick up artists? Women created them. If just being yourself and being nice to women worked, then every guy would be that way. PUA tactics work, even for guys who can’t normally get a date to save their souls. No, not a date with a 10 for a guy who is a 4, but with a 6 or 7. Women are the problem, and they do not even know it. Have a nice guy, who really treats you well? Oh, that bad boy over there gives me more tingles! I want him instead!
I fully agree. The PUA industry exists because of women, not for them.
However, there’s an extent. You need to truly become that confident man underneath the veil.
If you’re just faking it, eventually you can’t
Jack Murphy (@jackmurphylive) had the best definition of game related to this.
He said that “Game is the temporary scaffolding there to support you while you build yourself up.”
Basically, it helps you hook-up as a LVM while you build yourself into a HVM.
You shouldn’t be using game for more than a couple years because by that point you should have made significant improvement to your life and become a HVM.
Girls will simply recognize your value and the rest will be easy.
Funny thing is that Jack is good friends with Roosh who…is still doing a lot of game these days if I’m not mistaken. Though his new book is excellent.
Yeah, I haven’t read much of Roosh, what I have seems to promote the “All women are evil” message a little to aggressively for me. Nothing against it, just not for me. Good sales though, Beta guys who’ve been destroyed by chicks eat that stuff up.
I prefer GLL, Cernovich’s archives, McQueen, Murphy & Yourself. Those are my go to for social development.
Quite happy to be put in the same category as some of those other guys. Much appreciated!
Do you know exactly where Jack said that quote? It’s so good.
I think there is something more to it, too. You have to “get lucky” as a low value man with game. It’s essential to becoming high value. It truly is a necessary part of the process.
It was originally in one of his posts, but his site is currently offline. This tweet captures is well though. (screencapped)
And I completely agree. Not only do you have to actually “get lucky” but you yourself view it as “getting lucky” which, I think is the much bigger issue.
This is because it’s tough to develop true confidence when every time you hook up with a girl you tell yourself you “got lucky” or that your “game” got you laid.
If you do this for long enough you begin to identify “game” as part of yourself rather than seeing it as a tool. It becomes a dependency, a drug of sorts.
This article speaks volumes.
I discovered this corner about 2 years ago, got my number count way up, and within half a year I was bored of the player lifestyle. (What has taken Roosh years only fortunately took me a bit over a year.)
So I found a good girl and got married not too long ago and decided to have a kid with my wife – we want a big family. So how much RP mindset applies to the married life?
Suffice to say, we’ve had some nasty fights – which always do end in sex. However, I had no idea how I should handle them. When my wife as pregnant, I wasn’t sure whether I should come down hard and take no shit or if I should be supportive. I’ve been thinking lately there has to be a balance and reaction for each situation. Sometimes I need to maintain frame and sometimes I might need to just go giver her a hug.
My wife knows my worth and she has told me before she is afraid of losing me. Constantly she deals with issues of self-esteem and insecurity. To her, I’m a kind of prize. I’m trying to build her confidence up the way I’ve built mine, but that’s a different program.
What a fantastic comment.
That’s the double edged sword of female confidence:
1.) I don’t think that it can be built up in the same way you can build a man’s confidence. It just doesn’t seem to work like that — because I’ve tried before. And it makes sense because nothing is ever the same for men and women.
However, I still don’t have an answer for that.
2.) If she becomes too confident that she’ll never lose you that impacts the relationship negatively.
It’s all about balance.
I don’t even know where to start- This article is brilliant. Pure brilliance from a guy who has clearly been there. Not theory, but real life. The comments are spot on. Sometimes baggage from your Frustrated Chump days follows you. It keeps you on your toes and it takes time to adjust.
There is a book I’d recommend called Way of the Superior Man by David Deida that is basically this post fleshed into an entire book. It’s not a game book, it’s more advanced. If you play the game and work on yourself long enough, you eventually get to a point where you actually are a HVM, or Superior Man, and you finally become the prize. David Deida has an entire book on how a Superior Man behaves and handles himself. Having been frustrated myself, my biggest issue was the pent up anger. Like this article and Deida’s book suggests, if you are Superior, you only follow your woman’s emotions “to a point.” You comfort her. You support her. Because you are comfortable and happy with yourself. When she gets a little over the top you don’t go there with her. You step back and laugh. Embrace her. Be the bigger man. A superior man doesn’t go there with her. He grounds her. But like the article says, it’s a tough balance to achieve -AT FIRST. Like all the things involved in game you just have to keep plugging away until it CLICKS. You recognize it and feel it in your bones and you just know what to do. Unfortunately that happens at different speeds for different people (Like when @armenia4ever:disqus said it only took about a year in his comment). For me, the best way to describe when that instinct kicks in is when one TRULY internalizes abundance. Then it snowballs from there.
Great comment, I’ll definitely have to check it out.
I’ve realized this more as I’ve continued to date this girl: thisistrouble.com/2016/08/18/live-a-happy-and-fulfilling-life/
She’s sharp as hell, and stunning. Beautiful hair and eyes. Could grace the pages of a fitness magazine if she so wanted. And yet she FAWNS over me, but yes–has some insecurities.
Yet I’m finding (thank God my buddy wrote this post) that being the “better man” is better for the relationship. Punishing her for those insecurities only would drive her away from me. It makes a ton of sense, but it has taken some “re-programing” so to speak. Just a year ago I would have blown up for her “stepping on my frame”, but now it’s more of an “Aha!” kind of moment.
Cheers bud. I see you’re digging deep in the archives.