Because there was a recent post that attempted to pathologize people who adher to TRP or are receptive to TRP ideas, I decided to repost (with some minor updates) what I have written a couple of months ago at /r/theredpill about a friend of mine who for all intents and purposes wasn't in some way "broken" yet because of his life experiences he came to pretty redpill conclusions by himself.


Some time ago (a year and a half) I've reconnected with an old childhood friend of mine with whom I've grown up. After having had pretty much no contact for over a decade, life (or rather, work) brought us into the same area, and while we're not exactly neighbors, we still can occasionally see each other.

Some months in we had a guy's night out and after getting over our hangover and hanging out at my place, we had a conversation about how life, love and happiness has went for us (we still have some catching up to do, after all). And the funny thing was how we had an hour long conversation of how believing what we were told sucked and how a feminist-influenced upbringing has had a negative impact on our lives, and how we both have come pretty much to the same conclusions independant from one another. I didn't bring up the topic of TRP or ever mentioned it by name, we just talked about relationship stuff, yet what we were talking about was thoroughly compatible with it, despite him never having had contact with it as a theory at that point.

To give you some background: Unlike me, my buddy, let's call him Zac, has always been good at socializing. He is comfortable with strangers regardless of gender and can talk them up out of the blue without it getting awkward. He also was the first in our social circle to lose his virginity, and after that ice was broken, he had a string of short-time girlfriends over the next two years (though to my knowledge, he didn't get much further than third base with them, even though he could have with at least some of them) before finally getting together with his LTR of almost a decade. He is also very intelligent, can be quite charming, 5'11 and attractive (a wispy Justin Bieber-like attractiveness during his younger days, and a more manly look now that he's grown a beard), and has a well-paid engineering job. However, nothing good comes without the bad. He was raised by his (widowed) mother, a psychologist, who had the feminist-influenced idea that gender is socially constructed and deep down boys and girls were fundamentally the same if it wasn't for education and nurture, and the fact that he had a sister who swallowed these ideas like jelly beans and consistently spouted them only exacerbated this (fun fact: The same sister who was constantly complaining about "stupid machos" and misogyny in the media also had a small-ish share of bad boy-BFs, and actually never hooked up with a pussy pedestalizer). He claimed to not being very sex-driven, but my assumption is that this was at least partially due to him being raised with the feminist idea of gender relations, which would explain why he abstained from getting down and dirty with his STRs though quite a bunch of them would probably have been very receptive to the idea. But I digress.

So Zac grew up believing that women were basically just guys with fannies (and, later, breasts) and treated them as such. Which meant for him a lack of pedestalizing (good, especially outside a relationship), but also not taking their female needs and subconscious desires into account (bad, especially inside a relationship). With his disposition (see above), he might have been a legitimately awesome with women, but he never went the extra mile for it because he had a totally skewed perception of how they are. He also put up with a relationship with a domineering and nagging SO (his LTR of almost a decade mentioned above) who was kind of a control freak. For example, hile he liked slacking off in his private life (not when it came to work or studying, though) and he left the decisionmaking at home to her for that reason, she started resenting him because of that. Actually, she was actively looking for things she could hold against him (like him having hobbies she didn't like or not waking up with her to entertain her whims), and his attempts to smooth it over by being supplicating only made it worse in the long run.

And it took him until his twenties to wrap his head around the fact that yes, women who have an interest in you like to be courted and not just to be treated like a pal (it's one thing if you make a conscious decision to not spoil her, but another if you are totally oblivious to the fact that token romantic gestures can be appreciated). Later she broke up with him after he had to move away for his work at a critical point in his life, which ironically switched the dynamic of their relationship (she regretted it later, for him it was the final straw that made him cease bending over). As he told me later, at that point he also got into contact with the PUA culture and this (seeing what could lead to dating success and that, opposed to what he was taught, women can indeed be DTF if you properly push their buttons) probably only added to his disenchantment. For a time his ex-GF was more or less his FWB when he was back home, though he had a bad conscience about it because he knew she somehow hoped they'll get back together while he didn't want to; but he also didn't want her to waste her time since she was already in her 30s, which had an impact on her options while he knew that he could still date down age-wise. And he mentioned that he wouldn't put up with a woman anymore who pulls off the stunts like the ones she did, and that experience taught him that leaving the lead in a relationship to her was a bad idea. I didn't have to coax anything out of him - he was raised with pretty much the same ideas I was raised with, and he just came up with the conclusions he found out for himself the hard way as I did, though by another route.

So, for the non-redpillers: That's the stuff what makes guys at least receptive to TRP ideas. That's what makes people reject feminist ideas, even if one actually believes the claim feminism isn't about vilification of men and manliness. Zac wasn't an incel. He wasn't divorce raped. He wasn't an introvert, but is fairly good with people regardless of gender. He doesn't dislike or disdain women (though he came to the conclusion that men make better friends overall simply because hanging out with them is more entertaining and produces less drama), and would - despite his disenchantment - be probably be put off if he read the vitriolic comments at /r/theredpill. He's also very unlikely to get into the whole plating lifestyle. He was just disappointed that the stuff he was told during his childhood and youth holds no water, that women weren't as awesome or as rational as he thought they are, and that everything he believed to be true was just the product of a combination of wishful thinking and misguided social engineering.