Softek has had the almost predictable move for The Talk from his current (I believe BPD) “girlfriend”. Just to clarify a few things here before I dig into Softek’s questions I think it’s necessary to define what “The Talk” is. Generally, there comes a point with a particular plate you’re spinning when a woman believe it’s within her feminine entitlements to force the issue of exclusivity upon a man. I’ve written several foundational posts about non-exclusivity and the reasons men should opt for (Plate Theory) and I’ve also covered The Talk from practical considerations in Ultimatums, but feminized pop-culture has made what essentially amounts to a Frame shift into a life event.
The Talk is literally the defining of a relationship, and in a feminine-primary social order that defining power is presumed to always reside with a woman according to her “needs”. I should also add here that as men have become more feminized and uncomfortable in describing themselves as masculine, the feminine security need for a confirmed relationship status puts these men into the feminine role of initiating The Talk themselves. There are few grosser indications of a Beta / Blue Pill mental point of origin and a self-confirming lack of options than a man negotiating for exclusivity by formalizing it with a feminized relationship event.
What does Negotiated Desire mean for a relationship when a woman has resorted to it?
They’re powerless, yes, they feel helpless, yes.
But what does this mean for their perception of the man they’re trying to Negotiate for?
Ultimatums are declarations of powerlessness. Let me be clear before I get the standard, “you need to be a Man and set boundaries with her” retort – as with all things for men, it is better to demonstrate than to explicate.
However, in this instance, we have a woman issuing the ultimatum and the sense of powerlessness comes into contrast. The very act of having The Talk is a negotiation of desire. The medium is the message. We can separate a woman’s entitlement to an “official” relationship with it, but the fact that a formal talk would be necessary to legitimize it is the message she ignores or hopes you won’t recognize – it’s a negotiated obligation, not a genuine desire.
Making a euphemism out of this ultimatum by calling The Talk and dancing around the want for a long term security is a form of Buffer for women. And as with all Buffers, the intent is to lessen the impact of rejection by preemptively buffering the seriousness of it should it come to that.
There are a few reasons women will move for something like The Talk. First and foremost is the Hypergamic need for certainty. When a woman presses for exclusivity with a man she tips her hand in the Hypergamic scheme of things. In this instance the root message is twofold – she perceives you as high enough value to seek some kind of exclusive permanency and / or she acknowledges (or is beginning to) that her capacity to attract other prospective men is depreciating. Women with greater sexual market options and a commensurate self-impression rarely push for this relationship formality.
Another reason for The Talk is that women, on some level of consciousness, seek to alleviate the competition anxiety that comes with making an emotional investment in a man she perceives is 1-2 steps above her own sexual market value. A passive form of Dread almost certainly plays a role in the prompt to formalize an LTR, however, what’s prompting that Dread can range from an emotional investment based on a genuine desire to the pragmatic necessity to settle on a guy who meets her security needs in contrast to her ability to attract a better prospect.
As women enter the Epiphany Phase the need for a Talk becomes more urgent. As a woman’s attractiveness wanes Hypergamy cannot afford uncertainty or the risk of a loss of emotional investment. This is yet one more reason women tend to opt for dutiful Betas during the Epiphany Phase. Unattached higher SMV men entering their peak SMV phase are less inclined to look for or agree to, exclusivity when they have more available sexual options. Blue Pill men, unused to a sudden interest from women, are usually eager to formalize on exclusivity irrespective of a woman’s sexual history or her necessitous reasonings for exclusivity.
Have they lost respect for him? What is Negotiated Desire, on the woman’s part, indicative of in the relationship?
Again, this is somewhat subjective and depends on the man and woman’s conditions. As I mentioned above, the push for exclusivity on her part is prompted from necessity or Hypergamous anxiety. Genuine desire cannot be negotiated and it’s important to consider that this is equally true when it’s women doing the negotiating. Blue Pill conditioning has acculturated generations of women to expect that a man formalizing monogamy with her is not just her right, but that men will understand and accept that it is “the right thing to do” if he want’s to be accounted as a man.
We have an entire fem-centric world of women and men reinforcing this male-shame narrative in every branch of society – from church to popular media, you’re not a “man” if you so much as question your role in an exclusivity founded on a woman’s correct need of it.
This presents an interesting conflict for women. Women want men who just get it, but the necessity of petitioning a man for The Talk in the first place conflicts with the organicness of his understanding of women. Pushy, loud-mouthed, outspoken women raised on the Fempowerment narrative are often the most insecure in respect to this conflict. On one hand the narrative has bred her to expect a man to be her-equal-who’s-better-than-her-equal and ‘man up’ and formalize on his own. On the other hand, when he doesn’t, the anxiety that comes with the countdown to her Wall pushes her to force his compliance or to provide her own security for herself.
Now imagine this scenario with an Empowered Woman® dealing with the Beta in Waiting who represents her only viable LTR option. Yes, she may have lost respect for him, but her situation frustratingly compels her to force the issue of exclusivity with a guy who doesn’t get it.
Is it a sign of a failed relationship?
I don’t have any other experience, so my base assumption is that ALL WOMEN will push for commitment eventually, and want to pressure you into it, and ‘make things official.’
What does this mean for the health of the relationship?
Should it just end?
The necessity of a Talk in the first place puts this assessment into doubt. Women who don’t eventually push for commitment understand the nature of that relationship is temporary or there really is no potential, so there won’t be a Talk. The problem I see with making this formality something overtly public is that it has the opposite effect of qualifying what may be genuine desire without it. When The Talk enters into out popular consciousness it then becomes yet another ‘typical male’ fault.
Men become infantilized for not understanding women’s correctness in wanting a formalized declaration of monogamy. Once that infantilization becomes the accepted truism for women, what might’ve been a very good pairing of a man and a woman based on an organic genuine desire, turns into an obligation on his part to convince her that he’s not a child by living above that truism. The relationship becomes less about the genuine interest between the two and more about satisfying the “official” nature of it among men and women plugged into a Blue Pill social conditioning.
Should it just end at that point? If a man’s first act of a coerced monogamy is his capitulating to what amounts to a socially mandated ultimatum I think the woman he surrendered to will subconsciously lose the respect she had for him while they were “undocumented lovers.”
In a case like Rollo’s, or any other married guy here:
How did it happen? How do you get married without Negotiated Desire?
Is it IMPOSSIBLE, and it’s just a matter of minimizing the degree of Negotiation?
Same with having an official girlfriend. When you COMMIT even on the level of a ‘steady girlfriend,’ isn’t that Negotiating Desire by default?
I get this question a lot and for a lot of hard-line guys, even the best thing a married man (or LTR man) can say will always sound like he found a unicorn. You have to understand in my case the last woman I’d been in a formal LTR with before my wife was the BPD I described in the Two Guitars post. I had no intention of getting into an LTR at the time and for a long while, Mrs. Tomassi was one of four plates I was spinning at the time. All of this was above board and we dated non-exclusively for the first 3-4 months.
I began with a rock solid Frame at this time not because I was focused on establishing it, but because I had three other women in rotation and I was entirely indifferent to any idea of exclusivity with any of them. Of those four, Mrs. T was hottest and funnest in and out of bed so I gravitated to seeing her more regularly. I also appreciated her from the new perspective I had in contrast to the psychotic mess my BPD had been. She expected me to be conventionally masculine and I was already filling that role by default because I had a new outlook on women as a result of all that.
We never had a Talk when it came to exclusivity; she simply said that she didn’t like the thought of me banging other women and asked me if she could be my girlfriend. She literally asked to be part of my world during that brief conversation. I’ve had the Frame from the moment we started non-exclusively to where we are now 20 years later.
I’ll say it again, don’t use my example as some model for your own life, but there needs to be an organic flow to how you enter into any LTR.
It is vital to the health of any LTR that a man establish his frame as the basis of their living together before any formal commitment is recognized. As I stated in the beginning, frame will be fluid and conditions will influence the balance, but the overall theme of your relationship needs to be led and molded by you. Even very influential, professional, intellectualizing women still crave the right man to establish his frame in her life. They may fight it bitterly, but ultimately it’s what will make for the best healthy balance she can achieve. There’s a growing undercurrent of mid-life women questioning and regretting their past decisions to remain single into spinsterhood. And for all their late game rationalizations, the one thing they still simply refuse to accept is acknowledging that a man’s frame, the frame their “fierce independence” wouldn’t allow for, was exactly the salve their egos so desperately wants now later in life.
Gentlemen, you will establish frame in any monogamous relationship you have. You will enter her reality or she will enter yours.
