I was recently asked by Die Hard to add my personal input regarding fidelity on SoSuave. Rather than post an overwritten essay on the forum I thought the broader readership might be interested in the discussion:
So you guys are married… Rollo recently told me he has never cheated on his wife and I’m pretty sure Slick and Back haven’t either.
My question is: Why?
Before you guys were married, you had (or would have had) absolutely no problem with spinning plates and banging several chicks at the same time. So why do you have a problem with it now? What ADVANTAGE does it bring you to be monogamous with your wife?
I constantly get asked this, “how can you propose the ideas you do and still be married?” It’s actually because of my marriage that I feel qualified to do so. On this blog and in my SoSuave posts I generally make a point not to include too much personal details about my individual experience; first because it contributes to bias in analysis, and second because it always comes off as self-aggrandizing in some respects. However, to answer your question I have to give you some background about myself, so I apologize in advance if it sounds like I’m glossing myself here.
A Brief History
I was a stereotypical, but extroverted beta in my adolescence. I got played and/or rejected constantly until my senior year. I got laid for the first time at 17 with really the first girl who’d be my “girlfriend”. I literally rearranged my life to accommodate us having regular sex, to the point that I would travel from one end of L.A. to another by bus over a weekend. I wont bore you with the beta details, but suffice to say it didn’t end well.
It was after this that my 20 y.o. mind decided I liked getting laid more than I liked playing up to the Nice guy bullshit that got me raked over the coals with my “girlfriend”. I was already playing in bands at that stage and the Hollywood metal scene of the late 80’s and early 90’s was just begging me to come play and at 21 I was finally old enough to realize it.
I was a kid in a candy store. Rail thin, long blonde hair down to my ass, playing in two very popular bands and opening for national acts, doing session playing for Paramount TV shows occasionally; by 22 it was so easy to bang women I didn’t even consider trying to get with them. I had Game at the time, but it was the unpracticed default Game that comes from the confidence in knowing you have instant social proof and women will approach you. Which was funny because for most of it I was flat broke, but somehow managed to have women buy me drinks and all kinds of ‘gifts’ to offset that.
Of the 40+ women I’ve banged, about 38 of them were during the times I was between the age of 21 and 25. And there were all kinds of women; mostly the club sluts that guys in the community like to complain about, but also some nice Latinas, two MILFs (one was a manager for the band I was in), one brief single mother, two strippers, a nice church girl, even a Vietnamese girl who could fuck like a Tasmanian Devil. I had them as young as 17 and as old as 45 . Blondes, brunettes, redheads, big tits, small tits, one fatty, one coke addict, a girl with an MBA, and several from community college. I didn’t give the girls who’d rejected me in high school an afterthought. I was doing naturally what I later came to understand was spinning plates.
It got so easy I could walk into a club in another state, where no one even knew me and could still pull top shelf ass that most guys only whacked off to porn over. But all that came crashing down when I met the BPD psychotic girl I mention here. This was the real test of my true beta-ness, I wanted her to be my ‘dream girl’ but she was the daughter of Satan. Every high I was experiencing at that time turned into the lowest misery I could’ve imagined. It was a living hell, but one I wanted to be in. I had opportunities to get away, I had other women still throwing themselves at me for a time, but I wanted that BPD to be ‘the ONE’.
It was at that lowest point that I knew what it was like to be lower than a beta, I was an abject omega with her.
It wasn’t until mercifully after 4 years that I extracted myself from her web of neurosis, that I gradually transformed myself back into an adult Alpha mindset. I changed my mind about myself and got back on my feet by putting myself first.
Afterlife
In the time before I met Mrs. Tomassi, I’d been the cheater, and the cheated. I banged other guy’s women on GNOs, I’ve had sex with girls within 2 hours of meeting them. And I got cheated on and LDR cuckolded by the BPD girl. I’ve done all of that. A lot of guys drop the line that they’re monogamous because they’re sick of the game, but they never really experienced that game. They settle because they’d rather trade mundane ‘sure thing’ sex for risking more real rejection. From my personal perspective I laugh at this rationalization – especially when I hear a guy married for 3 or 4 years tell me how he’s tempted to cheat on his wife or wonder what banging this new girl would be like if only he hadn’t married so early. They can’t escape the nagging doubt that their lives could’ve been something different if only they’d held out longer.
I think it’s vitally important for guys to ‘get it out of their system’ and experience women in as visceral, emotional and practical a way as possible before even considering monogamy. A lot of my critics like to say, “well we can’t all be like Rollo and get everything right” but I profess what I do because I got more things wrong. I attribute the success of my marriage to having gone through what I did in my 20’s.
When I was considering proposing to Mrs. Tomassi the one overarching concern I had wasn’t about pre-qualifying her for some laundry list of wifely qualities I had in my head. My first thought was “is she someone I can remain faithful to?” That was my primary concern, is she someone I’ll just cheat on? I know me, I’ve seen me do it. I got lucky in that for 15+ years she’s been a great wife, mother and companion, but honestly I wanted a woman who would keep my sexual interest in perpetuity. She’s much more than this, but in all honesty I wanted a woman to stay as hot and sexually available as possible for the longest time possible. Call that shallow if you like, but I’ve never cheated on her in over 16 years because she has, and in my line of work the opportunities are always there.
Infidelity
What most people don’t understand about infidelity is that, for cheating to occur two primary elements must be present – cause and opportunity. Women tend to get caught up in the minutiae of cheating because it stokes their need for indignation; even vicariously through their girlfriends they’d rather wallow in the chemical rush that jealousy, suspicion and betrayal induce for them. Guys do too to an extent, but I think they focus more on the loss of the investment, especially the emotional investment. What both fail to see is the reasoning behind that act of infidelity.
Most men never cheat simply because they don’t have an opportunity to do so. Either they’re not in the correct environment or they just lack Game or aren’t attractive enough to really be a consideration for cheating with. These are the guys who’ll self-righteously declare how proud they are of their convictions in remaining faithful to their wives, when in fact they make their necessity a virtue due to circumstance. When you look at how most infidelity progresses it’s often prompted by the proximity of a willing partner. Opportunity is circumstantial.
Cause to cheat is much more complex. For men it’s often a feeling of not being appreciated, but more so than this is their wife’s lack of sexual interest or their own lack of interest in her because she devolved into something they never thought she would. As I stated before, if you don’t know what you’re missing, you’ll think you’re missing out. I know a disproportionate number of men who’ve cheated as the result of having cashed in on their potential in exchange for the ‘safety’ they thought marriage offered.
There are plenty of men with ample cause to cheat, but never do because they simply lack any real option to do so. That may not be enough for some men and they’ll extend that cause into creating their own options to do so; they hit up a prostitute, or put themselves into situations where they could cheat. Then there are guys like me who have plenty of opportunity to cheat as part of their work, but don’t because they don’t have any real cause to motivate them.
I’d love to speak from some Pollyanna, Promise Keeper’s moral high ground, but I really don’t have a reason to cheat. That isn’t to say I haven’t been tempted, but in the back of my head I know I’ve nailed some comparative girl in my past. I don’t dwell on wondering what it would be like to bang one of my ‘pour girls’ or the hot receptionist at one of our distributors, because I fondly recall fucking a girl who looked like her 20 years ago. For me, one of the benefits of having lived plate theory (albeit inadvertently) is knowing I climbed that mountain a while ago.
Yes, I love my wife, we have a mutual respect, and were are a good fit, but I don’t feel crushing guilt for finding some other woman attractive. In fact Mrs. Tomassi tells me that when I stop looking at hot women, that’s the day she’ll start to worry. For the last 16 years she’s been someone I could be faithful to. My wife trusts me implicitly; in fact she’s been the inspiration of, or planted the germ of an idea in me about a lot of post topics most of my readers would find surprising. In 2010 I left for a product launch in Aruba. I was surrounded by stunning women, not one of which could be rated lower than an HB8.5. They had put me up in one of the best suites in the hotel. When I told Mrs. Tomassi I’d be gone for 4 days in Aruba she said, “if you’re gonna do any fishing there you’ll need to bring extra cash”. How many married men do you know whose wives would’ve gone ballistic over even the consideration of doing that? How many men’s wives would “forbid” him to go?
Advantages
You also asked if there’s a particular advantage to monogamy that can’t be achieved in spinning plates, and besides having raised a whip-smart, beautiful, honor-roll-student, 13 y.o. daughter, not really. Does that sound odd or callous? It probably does because I don’t think a comparison of advantage to disadvantage in either lifestyle is really an issue. I think they’re two different ways of living and one is not necessarily better than the other – just different for different people at different phases in life. For the record I’m not anti-marriage, I’m anti-never-saw-it-coming-pollyana-how-could-she-do-this-to-me?-hypergamy’s-a-bitch marriage.
Do I know that marriage is a racket and puts a man legally and socially at an extreme disadvantage? Yes. Am I aware of the divorce fraud industry? Yes. Do I understand that for a woman to achieve her sexual imperatives I necessarily must sacrifice my own? I’ve written volumes about it. Do I know that women fundamentally lack the capacity to appreciate the sacrifices a man makes to ensure her sexual imperatives? You need to ask? So why get married?
Before he died, I can remember a conversation I had with my father where I was asking him about why he married my mom. I could never get a straight answer out of him, but he wasn’t being elusive. I was younger and unmarried then, now that I’m older I think I understand that he was telling me the truth when he said “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” He honestly thought he and my mother could make a life together when they got married in their mid 20s.
The reason I asked him was because I knew virtually nothing about their courtship and how such disparate personalities could come together and thus have me. He passed away back in September of 2010 and I rooted through his old photo albums with my mom. Here was this life my father lived in these photos that I had no inkling of. Shots of my parents years before my brother and I even came into existence. Lots of shots from their sailing days in the early 60s, friends whom I had never heard mention of, and an early life where no children were present. Just from perusing these shots I got a whole new perspective of my old man. He was in love with my mom, my mother who’d left the family in the mid 70s. They divorced when I was about 8 I think, and since then I’ve only ever known them as separate entities.
I think if most guys are honest with themselves, on some level they buy the idea that they and some idyllic woman can live out a plan or be happy together for a lifetime. I honestly couldn’t tell you why I proposed to Mrs. Tomassi. I wasn’t forced by pregnancy or emotionally coerced by some BPD’s neurosis. I can only echo my Dad’s words now, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” I still do, and I’m not naive to knowing what could happen, and that women are fully capable of betraying a man after 20 years of marriage. There is no security in marriage.
Men are the true romantics, not women. They talk a good game, but it’s men who are the real slaves to romanticism. It’s men who conceive every romantic gesture. Mrs. Tomassi wears the wedding ring my father picked out for my mom all those years ago. The back story is kind of lost on her, she just loves the ring and life goes on. We want to believe in the fairy tale. We want to believe we’ll be the exception against all odds and every horror story. My father was probably the most uninspired man you’d ever meet when it came to women. He was very analytical, he was very ordered in his life, but he was also a hopeless savior for the women in his life. I wouldn’t call him a White Knight; he was much too rational for chivalry, but he did what he did because even he, the staunch atheist, believed marriage could make you happy. At some point my old man looked at that ring in the jewelry store and thought “yeah, that’s a good one, I could see that on my wife.”
