Unreasonable expectations are one of the largest sources of disappointment and unhappiness, hands down. Not just among the internet manosphere, not just among men, but among all of humanity.
On one hand, we might wonder why this is so. This much sadness from expectations? Has the entire world turned autistic? Emotional and melodramatic? Don’t people know how the real world works, and therefore what is and is not reasonable to expect? Aren’t most people generally mentally sound adults who understand that life isn’t fair and we don’t always get our way? Why do people expect unreasonable things? And why are people so unhappy when confronted with the very normal life experience of not getting their way?
On the other hand, the world isn’t static. We’re all living in different places, born at different times, exposed to different experiences. Reasonableness is understandably subjective.
Here in the Red Pill corner of the internet, most of us men grew up believing if we worked hard, got a good job and a place to live, treated women with kindness and generosity (demonstrating what great people we are), and became friends with women, over time some of those friendships would turn romantic, then sexual, then one really great one might turn into a happy marriage and family.
Is that really an “unreasonable” expectation? There was a time long ago (mostly before the internet) when this was the normal way things happened. It still happens occasionally today, for some guys.
After a more realistic look at the world, the economy, the internet, and the modern way the sex, love, and relationship game works, maybe that expectation seems kind of silly. But it’s still a fairly logical expectation that follows a very logical line of reasoning, and is grounded in some actual history based on how things used to be. I’m using this example because many of us held that very same expectation ourselves, so it’s easy to see how a fairly normal person of measurable intelligence might make that sort of mistake.
This phenomenon isn’t limited to Red Pill stuff, obviously. Your local boomer grandparents are quick to tell you how lazy your generation is, and if only you’d work a few more hours a week, save money, eat out less and buy less Starbucks coffee, you could afford a house.
Is that an “unreasonable” expectation? There was a time long ago (mostly before the internet and a metric crap-ton of inflation and bad economic and political decisions) when this was the normal way things happened. It still happens occasionally today, for some guys.
But again, after a more realistic look at the modern world, that expectation seems a lot less realistic. Still, it was a logical expectation to have, that followed a fairly logical path from point A to point B, and was grounded in some actual history based on how things actually used to work. And many of us held that same expectation. We went to school, did well, got some paper rectangles from a university, got a good job, and have worked for many years without achieving what we wanted or advancing our life in the ways we would have liked.
The vagina-wielding sex suffers from expectation-related disappointments as well. Most modern women are pretty confident that they can go to college, not take dating or sex too seriously if they don’t want to because it’s important to get their career locked in before settling down anyway, get that good job, and not worry too much about getting older. After all, the men keep showing up to date and hook up, so she’ll just need to pick one for a relationship and marriage when she’s ready, right? And when she’s finally married, if having kids is hard, IVF is always an option, right? She knows people who did things this way, so that means it’s reasonable to expect it will happen successfully for her, right?
It may be that “unreasonable” isn’t the correct word. All of these examples of poor expectations are fairly logical, still happen sometimes for some people, and some even happened pretty commonly during previous eras of humanity.
It may be more accurate to state that many expectations of modern humans are unrealistic. Or that they are based on an inaccurate understanding of how the real world works today.
That factor, on its own, may make unmet expectations sting just a bit more. After all, if your expectations were perfectly reasonable and logical, just not realistic (but you didn’t know that), it seems extra unfair and painful when things don’t go your way.
One of the tools The Red Pill attempts to provide to men is guidance to avoid unreasonable expectations, most often regarding women. Some of this guidance takes the form of short, pithy quotes, like “She’s not yours - it’s your turn”, “All women are like that”, “Marriage is a bad deal for men”, and so on. Other times, this guidance takes the form of a more in-depth description of an issue.
These blanket statements are mostly there as counterpoints to the unreasonable expectation many men have: “If I work hard and treat this woman with kindness and generosity and don’t do anything wrong in our relationship, it will be a relationship that lasts, be a happy relationship filled with love, sex, and respect, and lead to a good marriage, and to a good, happy family.”
But that’s not a realistic expectation. Many of us know this first-hand.
Recognizing that it is only “your turn” and that this applies to “all women” acknowledges that women are capable of unfair and highly self-interested behavior, and are in fact incentivized to behave this way many times. You can be a great boyfriend who did nothing wrong — even did most things right — and this still doesn’t mean your relationship will last, or include love, sex and respect. And if you’re married, it doesn’t mean your marriage will last or include love, sex, and respect, or that you’ll get to keep your family.
Yes, it’s logical that if you’re a kind, generous person who does nothing wrong in your relationship (and in fact does many things right), your relationship ought to last and be a happy one, and sometimes that even happens for some people. But based on how the real world and the sex, love, and relationship game works, that expectation turns out to not be very realistic. Possible? Definitely. Probable? Uh… Let me sell you on a few crypto coins.
Many detractors of The Red Pill dislike these negative (but realistic) generalizations about women and relationships. Because like all generalizations, they are not 100% true 100% of the time. Sometimes, women behave amazingly well, and sometimes relationships last and are happy. But information does not have to be 100% true 100% of the time to be useful.
If the notion “all guns are loaded” reduces the number of accidental deaths, injuries, and discharges associated with firearms, even though this statement is not true all of the time and many guys are not loaded, this information is useful. Even if it is not always true.
Local internet manosphere hero Rian Stone sometimes gives an absurd example to illustrate this concept: if believing the moon is made out of cheese, for whatever reason, gets you to go to the gym every day and start talking to girls, then as far as you’re concerned, the moon is a gigantic wheel of brie and this is very useful information for you. Even if there is zero actual cheese on the moon.
Similarly, the notion that “she’s not yours, it’s just your turn” and “all women are like that” — the acceptance that even if you do nothing wrong (and many things right), a woman may still dump you, cheat, or behave badly for her own self-interested reasons — is useful information, even if that outcome does not happen 100% of the time for 100% of women in 100% of situations.
Accepting that women can behave badly and are self-interested humans prepares you so that if it happens to you, you aren’t blindsided and can simply accept this unfortunate but not-completely-unexpected outcome.
The Red Pill’s detractors often argue that engaging with women and entering into relationships, both casual and serious, with these negative expectations inside of our heads is something that is likely to cause the relationship to fail.
There’s some nuance to this argument. Obviously, these people don’t think that the statement “all guns are loaded” causes bullets that are not there to magically manifest inside the chamber of a pistol, all because your Red Pill mind is so powerful that you can affect the very fabric of reality with a mere thought.
After all, if expecting bad things might happen causes the bad things to happen, then all of those years we spent expecting good relationship outcomes and good behavior from women in response to our kindness, generosity, and upstanding relationship behaviors should have caused good things to happen, right? But it didn’t. Instead, many of those men who expected good things from women were blindsided by the women behaving badly.
Our detractors’ idea is that if you expect bad things to happen, you will behave in a paranoid, suspicious, accusatory, unpleasant, and unattractive way that leads to your woman becoming unhappy and leaving you. There may actually be something to that, if you’re the sort of person who has a problem with acceptance.
For example, if you know a bad outcome is possible, but you still desperately don’t want it to happen, you fear it, you harbor a secret belief that you may even be able to avoid it if you do things exactly right, and if not, you harbor a secret belief that if you are super-duper-mega-overprepared mentally for that outcome then it won’t hurt when it happens — you might change your behavior in … strange ways.
If that sounds like you, even a little bit, you haven’t truly accepted that possibility yet. You’re still fighting against it, hoping to beat it so it doesn’t happen after all, or to beat it badly enough to neuter it so it doesn’t hurt when it happens.
But more important than the above, if you spend your life moping around worrying about the worst possible things that might happen (many of them beyond your control), you are going to spend that life of yours being an unhappy person. Some people live in the past, some people dream of the future, but you — you are living in the hypothetical. Essentially, you are trying to pre-feel your grief over something that hasn’t happened yet so you’ll be fine when it does happen.
But when it does happen and all of those thoughts of yours turn out to be right, it’s still unhappy, it still hurts, and not only are you unhappy now, but you spent the past few months dwelling on this very thing and being more unhappy than you needed to.
Plus, if it doesn’t happen, and all of those thoughts of yours turn out to be wrong (at least so far), here you are having spent the past few months dwelling on this idea and being unhappy about it.
Things are going to happen that hurt. That’s just how life is. And while it sucks a lot and hurts even more if we’re completely blindsided by it, it also sucks to live under the dark cloud of what might go wrong but hasn’t yet. The sweet spot is to acknowledge the possibility — yes, women are self-interested humans who occasionally (often?) behave badly — but still enjoy the good. Enjoy the hurt, too. As much as you can anyway. It’s all part of the journey.
A failure of acceptance makes us un-fun humans, and to that extent, our detractors may be right. Nobody likes un-fun men.
At the end of the day, our ginormous sun is actually a really tiny star compared to most stars. Our enormous planet earth is less than a speck of dust next to the sun. And you are the tiniest of microbes on this speck of dust we live on. And you share this speck of dust with over 8 billion other insignificant microbes, the overwhelming majority of who don’t know you and don’t care about you at all.
These problems we prepare for, the emotions we feel surrounding them, are all very tiny things on our very tiny journey. And the things that haven’t even happened yet aren’t just tiny — they’re absent. At least for now. Try not to stress too much and enjoy the adventure.
