TL:DR - One, you must be hungry to relish food. You can't do it while full. All human instincts run in cycles, regardless of what you believe about love and life. In love, separation creates the pull that brings union, and union soon creates a push towards separation for the next cycle. You forget about the cyclic nature of love somewhere and end up killing it. If you don't realize this, the next cycle of love might very well not involve you!

Two, you are a deeper problem -- forever needy, your instincts running without any sanity, and your unhappiness a deep rooted chronic suffering that'll never go away till you face the "unhappy me" that's never here and now. What "unhappy me" was really seeking, you can't pursue that one thing, because it's not there, but here. This is not the usual happiness that comes and goes in waves, this joy is freedom from slavery to happiness. You can't chase it, but only bring it into your life and express it. Only that can cure deep suffering

This started out as a comment as to a poster talking about why women don't ever seem happy even after they have the perfect life they've dreamt of and chased all their lives. They eventually initiate a cycle of withdrawal, using every trick in the book (all these are well known moves now), that left to itself will end the relationship. Sooner or later they just chase the next hot guy and often in the process wreck their own lives and the lives of others around them. Why doesn't happily ever after exist? How many times do we see that so and so is "Never happy?"

In the past, someone predicted that after machines take over all the jobs, we'll finally have time to relax and enjoy life and its pleasures. Well, think about being jobless for just one week, soon you'll be dealing with mass depression and suicide and unemployment and horror households. I am sure most women would totally lose all their attraction for their ambiton-less lazy men. Why do we dread the utopia?

Because everything in the physical universe runs in cycles.

There is a saying that wanting is better than having. Or that only a starving man knows the real taste of food. Or the sweetest water in the world is water in a desert. The best sleep comes after a hard day's work.

Your body can play tricks with your sense of perception, it will make you do fantastic things when its survival is under threat. If you're very hungry or thirsty, you'd swear that food and water themselves taste different, and like nothing they do on normal days. There was this guy (I think Joe Decker) who ran in the Badwater Marathon and got severely dehydrated due to salt. His team saved the day with a box of salt, and what when he got hold of it, he literally ate the salt right off the box. True story. I've seen very hot summers, and you just want to keep eating salty food.

And then once you have eaten too much, your body actually changes its sense of taste so you don't want to eat anymore. The same thing you devoured easily and effortlessly as a hungry guy might now actually feel terrible to keep eating. You might even get upset or irritated when someone forces you to eat more when you're full and just want to leave the table. Don't you see this with kids and even some grown ups all the time?

When loaded with adrenaline, you can exert yourself like pain doesn't exist. The next day though...

In old books on love, it is said that love burns stronger in separation than union. That's why you have all these stories of separated lovers pining for each other. Separation is a driving force, creating the pull between subject and object. Union quenches the thirst of separation, but eventually by corollary, union will create the push that again drives you to another round of separation, which then brings you back to enjoy the next union, and so on.

There could also be other things wrong - for one the women are always seeking the next adventure, the next high, the next moment and aren't satisfied being in this moment. As a result they are ever needy. Highs become an expectation, and the moment they do, one becomes unhappy.

No amount of anything in this moment that they can have now will satisfy them when they're always looking for the next moment and the next thrill.

The idea that you can have it all and then be satisfied forever is a myth we all tell ourselves to motivate our chase for the next big thing out there. In reality we are really just seeking drama of the chase and the finish line the whole time. The biggest myth you can tell yourself is that if the chase ends, you'll be happy ever after. Once separation ends, and the pain of seeking is gone, you'll be happy and stay together forever.

No way.

That feeling will last for a short time, then it will be time to get back to normal, recharge and start the next adventure. Any high of any kind will soon have to come down for a low or the baseline, any wave will have to pass on for the next wave to come in. Without the cycle of union and separation, love dies.

And that's also why in times of lockdown and home bound, not taking into account the impact on jobs, the financial stress and the economic crash, all the people who claimed they always wanted to spend more time at home sweet home with their families are getting restless and finding the other intolerable. I know, it's happening in my own extended family. In some cases, they even get abusive to each other in a matter of days. Domestic violence has indeed increased quite a bit in many places around the world during the lockdown. Just look at people who've finally retired from whatever they were doing, for a long time they can just be intolerable and forever upset and unhappy at home, like an addict with withdrawal symptoms, and they won't even know why or what to do about it.

So there are 2 solutions. One, after people have had their fill, create hunger again. Most of your base firmware instincts work only when there's a real need, not whenever you want it, and definitely they don't work the way you believe they should. Love isn't anything what people believe it should be logically - it is base firmware. This always works only in cycles, just like everything else in nature. That's why dread and separation matter and why push and pull or sex-comfort-sex works. You have to respect these facts about your instincts. Even breathing works only push and pull. Try and see what happens if you hold your breath with your lungs full or your lungs empty. You won't last very long at either end. You cannot be active 24 hours a day, nor can you sleep as long as you want. Sooner or later your body will demand sleep or force you to get your ass out of bed. Sex too is cyclic. Even muscle building totally needs you to nail the cycle of exercise vs recovery, or else it doesn't work.

Life leads to death, and death is ground for new life. If cycles are true for everything in existence, why do you think a base instinct like love is an exception to the rule?

Although you might think that union is forever, sooner or later, union is bound to create a pushing force again. As bad or as angry as it makes us feel, this is actually natural. No really, your anger only comes out of failing to realize that all emotional highs and lows are temporary and that love is not what you believed it would be. There will be a push that creates separation and dread again, and this is essential for the next round of attraction and union.

There is a reason why it is said, "Familiarity breeds contempt". Old proverbs, lots of experience talking.

So your best bet is to create these cycles yourself. Don't overfill the tank or don't let it drain all the way to empty. Treat love like a Lithium ion battery. Organize the cyclic nature of your own instincts, or else they'll do it in a very reckless indiscriminate way and you'll screw up the life you've created.

Most men allow themselves to go beta simply because they don't realize the cyclic nature of human needs and instincts. They think it's over once you're in a committed relationship. What they don't know is that it's over for just a brief while. Then love needs to start off a fresh cycle, or else sooner or later it will happen subconsciously. Women don't believe it either, but our bodies know better.

So the guy stops doing everything that made him attractive as a lover, he destroys the very cycle of push and pull, union and separation. There're no cycles of love in being a provider, just a routine and chores. He tries to empathize with her pain by trying to make her happy (rather than she empathizing with his abundance), not realizing that she can't shine by her own light, but by his, and that's what is lacking. He tries to do more of the filling her up with niceness and she gets sick of over-eating on what he thinks is love. Eventually she pushes herself away for good, to feel hungry for love again and jump into another cycle of push-pull that someone else gives.

Also, discipline is not natural to base instincts. In the past life was super hard enough on its own to enforce its own discipline, but we are just not used to easy good times where we have to consciously keep up the discipline. So in good times, people's minds and bodies just go awry. Just look at the obesity epidemic these days! Left to itself, love, just like any base pleasure instinct, will try to keep its cycle going in very disorganized and wild ways that can be destructive in modern times if left undisciplined.

That is one essential skill we learn here in RP and MRP, is creating a healthy cycle of separation and dread followed by sex and comfort. There are many of us who know first hand that if we don't maintain healthy cycle ourselves, it will try to go by its own devices nevertheless, and we might very well not be a part of the next cycle!!

EDIT : Every time your relationship changes from one stage to another on the hierarchy ladder, the old cycle of push-pull attraction changes or is broken. Marriage is the worst offender here, but it can apply to all levels. Before an LTR or marriage dating came with a natural push and pull cycle, but afterward you end up spending most of your time sharing space and time which can kill the old cycle. Without starting off a new intimacy cycle and getting into a new rhythm, attraction can very quickly plummet in the next stage of a relationship. A similar thing can happen in long running marriages after retirement. The work-home division itself created a cycle of its own that most people don't pay attention to and when it goes, it can come with a lot of issues.

That solution addresses the immediate problem - not allowing the cycle of love to flow naturally. Not creating enough dread and separation to bring the hunger and attraction back for the next round.

Two, and this is the bigger, deeper problem here - is that regardless of which situation you find yourself in, you're unhappy one way or the other. You chase love because you're unhappy and then you push it away because you're not happy having got everything you wanted. You're not at ease in any situation really. This problem is purely internal and you are doing this to yourself. It is this that has been referred to by some wise guys as the root of suffering. This is an illness. If it was a situational issue, changing the situation should have solved it. When you've made all the changes and you / she is still not happy, it's high time to recognize you have a deeper problem -- with yourself.

Satiation is like the mid point between need and abundance. Problem and Solution #1 can help you stay managing the cycle of need <-> satisfying said need. But Problem #2 is about the deeper issue of not knowing abundance of life, and always living in a needy dependent state.

Real needs run in cycles or they're a one time thing. When needs are met, they become satisfied. One time needs don't come back. Suffering however, is a bottomless pit of neediness, no matter how much you try to fill it, it just gets worse. It's like the social media news feed.

You try to solve this suffering through any number of means. You think if you just find that one ideal thing missing in your life, it could be love or money or power or that perfect car or job or woman -- that will be happily ever after, and you are very disappointed and angry when you find that the thing you sought wasn't anything like what you believed it was, and even more disappointed when it did not solve the root of your misery.

Ever observed that over time Valentine's Day has become "Expectations Day to be loved" rather than a "Day for love"? That's what happens when highs become an expectation rather than a gift. I joke with my cousins' husbands that they're just dreading Valentine's Day, and they laugh. What went wrong?

The solution needs a bit of spirituality -- stop resisting this moment. Need is always looking to the future for fulfillment. Your dysfunctional patterns with a proven history of failure are stuck in the memory of the past. Abundance however is only in this moment. Your mind is never here, it's always looking for the grass on the other side. That will help you achieve your goals and chase your dreams, but it will lock into a pattern of perpetual seeking if it becomes an addiction and you forget that life is only ever happening here and now. You will never find fulfillment you seek in the end, because abundance doesn't come from outside, it's actually generated from within.

Your addiction to pleasure is not a journey to happiness - it is a journey of misery trying to numb itself, unable to face the truth of itself or life. That's why those who fill their lives up with every pleasure the world can offer turn out to be the most broken and depressed, messed up individuals you can find. Binge on YT and netflix for hours together, and you wonder why you feel so depressed at the end of the day. If you look too far into the future for your salvation, you'll only see death, not life, because life is now. All those people around you who're pursuing the dream of happiness? Nah, they're really just running away from their own suffering.

The secret of lasting happiness is this - you will never find as long as you seek. Unhappy people seek happiness, and the more you try to seek it, the more you convince yourself that you are unhappy, and the unhappier you become. Lasting happiness doesn't exist until you are free from this incessant need to be happy, caused by the root of your own suffering. Pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin. Of late your quest for happiness has become so bad, you can't even focus on a task for a few minutes because your brain's too addicted to dopamine. You must become free from the grip of happiness itself to find abundance and fulfillment.

Actually it can't even be called happiness, it is abundance beyond happiness, or freedom. Freedom from the whole pleasure-pain trap. Happiness is just a wave on the surface of the water comparison, it throws you up to a high, and then you crash back down to a low / baseline. That forever comes and goes, no point in getting upset over it and trying to hang on to a high - that is futile - don't resist its flow. Lasting abundance comes from the depth of the ocean, which is ever there regardless of what waves are doing on the surface. When you're ok with this fact, you start experiencing freedom to create the life you've wanted, because now you're no longer afraid of discomfort or growth, or the waves of life, or facing the truth. That's freedom.

That inner freedom / abundance is what deep down you really want, and it is that which frees you of your chronic inner neediness and suffering. Every other thing in this universe you can chase and pursue, but this one thing you can't pursue, because it's already here and now. The more you chase it, the more you'll lose it, and the more your life gets fucked up.

It took me 12 damned years of breaking my head over the happiness problem - whether I'll find happiness or not, or whether this will make me happy or not in the future, to why people were still unhappy despite having it all, to why I was becoming increasingly unhappier and depressed, to finally realize my mistake. A simple, but dreadful mistake -- my frame was a fucked up one. My idea of happiness was fundamentally fucked up.

You cannot really pursue true happiness or abundance. You can only express it and bring it into your life. The more you pursue it, the less you will find. Every other thing - goals, achievements, things, people - can be pursued in this universe, but this can't. Abundance can only be brought in. That's the secret.

If you ever in your life want to know the nature of abundant love, you'll have to stop trying to escape this moment. So long as the root of suffering exists, you'll keep sabotaging your life by any number of means. Your "unhappy me" wants to live just like everything else, and it will keep doing anything to fuck up its life so it can feel the pleasure of unfucking itself up. It's a disorder - where you want to make yourself sick because you are wondering if the medicine still works and because the process of getting well is more important than actually staying naturally healthy.

What that unhappy me doesn't realize (or doesn't want to face) is that it itself is the root cause of the problem that doesn't let it stay happy for long in any situation. Pretty much everything you do in this state is driven only by suffering. There's no abundance in the suffering condition. What you normally call as love is just the sweetest most acceptable form of psychopathy. Almost everything you do, every distracted moment, every unhappy thought, every dissatisfied emotion, every attempt at trying to escape the misery in this moment with drugs or alcohol or games or sex or suicide, all originates from a chronic malaise to escape the moment of experience (this moment) and then try to recapture your lost abundance chasing it elsewhere, but not where it really is - here.

This behavior is not unlike a black hole - no matter how much you throw at it, it doesn't seem to go away, but only get bigger. And it's not going to go away till you realize what you're really doing. You have to have the balls to face this, that it is indeed your fault and responsibility to face this and deal with this. If every thing is always a problem, then perhaps you are the problem.

Why does your unhappy self resist this moment so much? Because it knows the solution to suffering will finish the ego. So it will do anything to keep up the drama of being unhappy and then seeking the next solution, the next high, the next lover, the next big thing. Deep down, unhappy me, subconsciously knows that it is the problem, and when it becomes too unhappy it tries to take itself out by trying to kill itself in many ways on the outside - suicide, addictions, depression, violence, abusive relationships, you name it. But those are not solutions. The real solution is mindful awareness of unhappy me itself, knowing that it is there and observing it in this moment, catching it as it arises -- that will take the air out of it, deflate and dissolve it.

Well, so if women are never happy no matter what, maybe they should look inside for the answer... in the meantime, you better too. After all, regardless of whose fault it is, it's going to fall on your head, and only you are responsible for your life and salvation.

Ok, if you don't like the word spirituality, at least learn the word discipline. If love could be seen as food, virtually every other person you meet is either starving like a famine victim or has some kind of eating disorder, and has absolutely no consistency or discipline maintaining even their mealtimes, let alone their calorific balance. Healthy eating with a bit of discipline isn't as hard as it seems, in a matter of time your mind and body will get used to it as the benefits begin to show. The brain is very flexible and can indeed be trained consciously. You gotta to be fine both bulking and cutting if you want to stay lean and build muscle. And now you need a similar approach with love -- it's high time to go on a healthy love diet. At least do this much.

So putting both together, You'll have to train yourself to be ok both in the chase and the peace afterward. Regardless of weather you're chasing your dreams or just being content, if you can be at ease with yourself, then whatever happens, you can use it to your advantage rather than suffering every single thing that happens to you and making others suffer around you as well. You'll have to know when to play and when to stop and be happy in both. Most are usually one or the other. This is far more challenging than it looks - most people's biggest problem is that they will seldom acknowledge that much of their suffering today is what they're doing this to themselves. Very few people solve this, reconciling two seemingly opposing forces and getting them to dance together. You've got to fulfill your needy side but also allow your abundant side to flow in to your life.

You've gotta learn to be at ease in both - if you succeed, you're free. You can do whatever you want. The root of suffering is finished. Now what happens is driven not because you're always unhappy, but by awareness and abundance seeking to express its potential. You've become closer to a white hole now. Your needs are actually needs now - they're not a bottomless pit that can never be filled - there's a difference between the two. Your energy is abundant and infectious in a good way and inspires others too. The real reason for your suffering is that the abundant and capable life that is you has never found expression. You have been trying to fill a needy you up with pleasures to numb the pain, and it just made it worse, because at the end of the day, your life was suppressed and just became even unhappier.

An aware life will actually bring you a lot more abundance and life than the needy guy who operates from a point of origin of pain and suffering. That's the ultimate challenge you'll ever face in your life. Very few people ever reached this kind of mastery where they live this way.

You cannot remain "high" forever. And you shouldn't. In fact once you realize life goes in waves and cycles, it's actually best to run them optimally as they were meant to be. But you can always be present, and once you look closely at it, you'll see you're always present, it's only the mind that always wants an escape. Then the highs become gifts you are grateful for, not expectations that ultimately disappoint you, and the lows become moments to bring in abundance. Life goes from running entirely on reactive mode to a more proactive and responsible mode. You go from being victim to channeling your inner creator. That is freedom, freedom from the very need to escape to freedom.

The utopia of your bluepilled dreams does not exist. And that's actually a good thing to know. It sets you free.

So here's a powerful exercise for your mind and self. Identify a few things that give you that rush of happiness and dopamine, that always keep distracting you or making you addicted and deliberately avoid them for sometime. Don't resist the reality of being free of them. Just spend sometime away and witness all the garbage inside your mind rise to the surface. If this happens, sit down and be fully present and aware of the one who's mind is bothering them, you, the living life in you. Your mind will trouble you for a while, but then it will begin to settle down. It might feel like dying for a while, the burden of time that you were trying to kill might start to hurt you hard, but stay present - in times of suffering, your mind narrows down and naturally comes back to this moment as this is the only place where there's really no stress. But that's the whole point -- you have to come to ease with yourself. Then you may go back to doing those things -- but always remember to withdraw and withdraw completely - don't just do it half way, go all the way. Push and pull.

You might initially feel strangely empty not filling up that void inside yourself, or having a lot of time that you can't kill somehow, but don't do it. Soon you'll realize it isn't emptiness but freedom, like a load of compulsion lifted off your mind. That freedom contains way more possibilities for you to create your life as you should have. Once you start coming to ease being present, the dreaded burden of time will start coming down a lot - this is a sign that suffering or the unhappy me is losing its grip at last. The need to kill time by any means begins to vanish when you find the one timeless thing there is. Time is no longer stressful or restless - it is now an opportunity.

Sometime after knowing this, you may find a new original idea, a fresh inspiration, or you might just go back to your usual life, but that peace of being unburdened will now come into whatever you're doing.

This will strengthen your inner muscle of mindfulness to be present with whatever situation that presents itself, and stop resisting what is needed for your growth. You have to be at ease with the fact that everything is a wave and everything comes in cycles and everything comes and goes. When you're fully present here, you don't hang on or resist the facts of life. Remove the friction and life feels lubricated. In time you will find you can be inspired to do things you never imagined you could do. You will stop being "never happy", by being free of this incessant quest for happiness itself. Then you can just surf the waves of life. If a high comes, enjoy it. It it goes, you come back to normal, be grateful and be at peace. Nothing is forever, but you now accept it for what it is and realize it's indeed for the best. Inner peace and living presence will always be there no matter what you're surfing - that alone is ever.

The next step is important. Once you feel this, stay in it for a while, and then when you have to get going, actively bring some of that mindful presence / peace / abundance / awareness (whatever you call it) into your every activity. Bring this awareness in whenever unhappy me raises its head, when the voice in your head talks too loudly, when you're feeling both high and low. Your pain will soon start losing its grip. Soon even simple things will become surprisingly fulfilling once this incessant need to find happiness comes down. Bring it in, intensely.

It even changes the way you want and desire. The "If only I have that one thing, I'll be happily ever after" - the victim's script goes down. Now you will find yourselves desiring to do something or get something directly (a simple "I want this"), or you may find yourselves driven to address something needed, and above all, now you're willing to embrace pain and discomfort if need be. You own the consequences of your desires. You desire more like a great achiever and less like a needy guy.

What we've done in society is we've given ourselves too much freedom without the consciousness to handle so much freedom safely. Our biology simply can't keep up with our pace of evolution. We've made ourselves too comfy, too technologically advanced, eliminated outside suffering, kept nature far away (or so we think, Coronavirus has made us think again), but our instincts work like they're still in the wild, and unhappy me is big as ever. We've given children loaded guns. The way we are right now, we are way too needy still, and therefore we're compulsively and indiscriminately creating push pull cycles subconsciously without any thought for the consequences. Until we evolve consciously, and learn how to handle ourselves in the good times sensibly, we'll always be unhappy and make our lives a mess no matter what happens. It's time to bring in a better consciousness.

So to sum it up - life and love works in cycles. In love matters, separation creates the attractive pull that leads to union, but sooner or later union is going to create a new push, leading to another round of separation and the start of another cycle. If you are not alert, that next cycle might not even happen with you. Part of why that happens is due to the cyclic nature of our physical instincts and needs, but beyond that, the deeper reasons for perpetually "not happy" is due to a perpetual unease and unhappiness with this moment, that just guarantees you'll suffer in any scenario. The first one can be solved with a proper dose of dread and separation, the second one is a disease that runs deep and is never going to be solved from the outside. If you are not really happy in any situation, the problem is you alone. That will only go away when your unhappy me that forever struggles against this moment is gone.

Hopefully poor cheated husband might one day wake up, find this place and read this. This applies to women too and well, everyone.