Guys, Prioritize Your Efforts On Yourself

Guys, Prioritize Your Efforts On Yourself

In my ongoing research efforts to find good information about attraction and dating for the post-divorce crowd, I often turn to Reddit, a vast collection of news stories and subsequent comments. In particular, this subreddit, The Red Pill, contains hundreds upon hundreds of discussion where guys are brutally honest about attraction, dating, and masculine self-improvement. This part of the Internet is not for the faint of heart. It is also quite public. Anyone can read what is being said, regardless of membership status.

Because of the strong feelings and very direct words, this subreddit – with over 130,000 members – receives some very direct criticism and there have been calls to shut it down. This means that essential truths are being presented and discussed and such truths are so uncomfortable there are calls for censorship. This fundamentally means that this subreddit is a go-to place to read what men are saying honestly to each other, particularly about women, dating, and relationships.

A recent topic discussion raised an important issue of how a man must prioritize his efforts at “fixing” things. The white knight (profanity-laced page, cool!) instinct is strong in men and when confronted with an issue faced by a woman (or women), a man is sorely tempted to attempt to fix the problem. This includes attraction and dating issues. The very solid subreddit post, by PemBayliss directly and cogently addresses this very issue. I’m highlighting some of the more relevant text but readers can view the entire post by clicking the link just above. My own comments are in boldface.

Women have problems with dating and sex. And they are tough problems.

But they’re not your problems.

Let me explain.

Take your average woman. She’s a 6 in attractiveness — attractive enough to get a male 7 as a boyfriend. She’s also attractive enough to get male 9s and the occasional 10 for sex, but getting commitment from one of them is never going to happen. Come on guys, you know these women. You know 25 of them in real life and you go to school or work with at least 10 of them.

She’s got a tough row to hoe, a needle that is very, very difficult to thread. She has to find a man she’s attracted to and who is dominant and confident, able and willing to support her and sire/father her children. She has to find a man whose clothes she wants to rip off and whose cock she wants to suck twice a day; but who she’s also willing to pad around an apartment with in her fuzzy slippers and sweats. She has to find a man she really, really wants sex with; but the catch is that the man also has to be one who really, really wants to keep her long term.

Her prime problem is that almost all the time, she can find men who fit one bill or the other, but not both. Most of the men she can find are either (1) hot but don’t want to stick around after they fuck her a few times; or (2) want to be her boyfriend and will offer a relationship; but she doesn’t want to fuck them at all because it would be like fucking her brother or her bestie.

She’s in a tough spot.

But… and pay attention here. All that is not your problem.

The author has summarized a woman’s attraction and dating dilemma quite nicely. This dilemma is sometimes played out in the rather cynical game of Fuck, Marry, Kill where girls get together to rate men. It’s extremely important to understand that there is a separate category for sex and another for marriage. This is the woman’s dilemma stated succinctly through a parlor game. This dilemma is exacerbated by a dual message that women, especially young women, receive from social expectations. Have sex with the bad boys, marry a stable provider. It’s more tersely and severely explained in the four words, “alpha fucks, beta bucks”. Sheryl Sandberg in her book “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead” even admits it:

âWhen looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.â

Here we have a successful executive exhorting the dating dilemma at full volume. She’s telling young women to sow their wild oats sexually, just as young men are biologically driven to do. But Sandberg is completely blind to the biological realities that men and women are different. A woman’s biological motives are very, very different than a man’s biological motives. To make the dilemma worse for younger women, consider this Twitter hashtag that is percolating through the Twitterverse: #nohymennodiamond.

This only describes the nature of the woman’s dating dilemma. The other part of social expectations, as well as an element of biology, is how men are expected to respond to their dating dilemma. We men supposed to help in some way. The subreddit author presents this well:

Society and the culture tells you it is your problem. You have to offer yourself up to be her Boyfriend, because that’s how you’re going to get sex. Society tells you this is your problem because our hypothetical girl is Not Happy, and it is men’s job to Make Her Happy. What’s more, you’re told that if you Make Her Happy then She Will Make You Happy (“happy” being you will get your dick wet).

Well, no. No, being a Boyfriend will not Make Her Happy. You undertaking herculean effort to satisfy her will just make her less happy. Your beta boyfriends don’t enrapture her with joy; you just piss her off.

Stop trying to solve your dating/sexual problems by taking on and trying to solve HER problems. Her problems are not your problem to solve.

This is crucial for men. The white knight instinct must be completely stifled. In effect, a guy shouldn’t be a schmuck.

Men, YOUR dating/sexual problems will be well on the way to being solved when you focus on yourselves, your wants, needs, hopes, dreams and desires. Your dating/sexual problem is that you are not awesome and your lives aren’t what you want them to be. You’re overweight, you don’t eat well, and you don’t take care of yourself. You don’t exercise, you don’t take care of your body and you don’t dress well. You don’t look and feel your best. You don’t like your job or you’re not all that good at your job. You don’t have anything in your life you really enjoy being or doing, just for you.

You don’t need to be nicer. You need to hit the gym. You don’t need a girlfriend; you need more men around you to sharpen and hone you. You don’t need to spend time figuring out how to be what she wants; you need to spend more time deciding who you are. You don’t need to spend money on her; you need to get some better clothes and a haircut.

Her problems are not YOUR problems. Let her figure out that Chad’s not coming back. Let her figure out how to get commitment from a suitable man. YOU need to figure out how to be the most awesome man you can be. When you are, then you’ll be the one who decides on commitment or not; you’ll decide how and when and where your resources are best allotted.

But the thing is, it’s not my problem to solve [her dating problems]. And it isn’t yours either. Identify it. Mull it over, empathize if you want. But don’t try to fix it, solve it, resolve it, change it, alleviate it, or wish it weren’t so. Just don’t. Because you can’t alleviate it one bit. You cannot change it. Wishing it away is totally ineffective. The ONLY thing you can do is to get better yourself.

Here’s a great irony to all this. If a man does help a woman with her dating dilemma, he’s helping her to be more attractive to other men rather than working on his own attractiveness. So, the schmuck helps some dame have a higher sexual/relationship market value and along comes Chad Thundercock to sweep her off her feet. Or, sweep her onto her knees. No, the man must work on himself first and work on himself for only himself, not to impress some mythical, unicorn of a woman.

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