Over the weekend, Assanova had a great post up titled You Define The Roles. Essentially, Assanova points out that as a man in a relationship, you have no one to blame but yourself for the behavior of your woman. If as a man you step back and force your woman into the masculine role in the relationship (loosely defined as being the decision maker, assertive, and logical. Feminine being nurturing, the social organizer, and emotional) then you are forcing her into a role she probably isn’t comfortable with and she will resent you for it. David Deida wrote an entire book covering this idea titled The Way of the Superior Man. Dump all the new age crap out of the book and the rest should be a slap in the forehead moment. One where you say to yourself, “yes, it is so obvious, I already knew that.”
Assanova writes about men who take on the passive feminine role, but there is another angle I want to examine. There are men I’ve known who don’t take on the masculine role as defined above, but they also don’t take on the feminine role either. They are, either by nature or personality, comfortable as followers. Willing to go wherever they are led. Oh they can take on some masculine or feminine roles, but the impulse to do so is external. They are most comfortable when someone else is directing them, when someone else takes the responsibility for the action.
The end result of these guys relationships, when they have them, is often no different than that for the man that takes on the feminine role forcing his woman to adopt the masculine role. The woman quite often ends up some combination of confused, resentful, and angry. She will often move on to a man who can make her feel more feminine, more comfortable in the role that she wants to play.
But what about the guy here. He may feel no more comfortable in the masculine role than the woman he forces into that role. He is, by his nature or upbringing, not naturally a decision maker nor is he decisive. He may be logical or at least inclined to think logically. If he is in a relationship, or even pursuing a woman where he is forced to act more masculine in order to woo, attract, and keep her faithful, he is just as likely to be resentful and angry when forced into a role he doesn’t believe he can fill.
So what route is open to a man like that? Well, there is obviously game. Pushing and testing one’s limits and accepting the masculine mantle. Wearing the clothes and taking on the frame so to speak until it sits comfortably on his shoulders. There is MGTOW, swearing off women because it is not really possible to make other conform to the way one may wish things to be. There are those few who come to view women as the enemy, lash out, and get angry when women don’t grace them with the attention they feel they deserve. There is, of course, doing the same thing over and over again and hoping to find that one woman who will accept you for who you are, love you just as you are.
If you are not willing to step out of your comfort zone to woo and seduce women, to push yourself to be the masculine paradigm, then it’s not their fault they rebuff your advances but yours.
