I used to be married. In the final downhill slide, my ex used to say, "I'm not your mom, I'm not going to tell you what to do." I had no idea what she was talking about.

This is a roundabout way of getting there. This is what the Red Pill has lead me to:

I have a daughter, and in preparation for being the best dad I could be, I read parenting books. One set of them particularly appealed to me. "Love and Logic" by Jim Fay and Foster Cline. One aspect of it is giving your child choices.
Me: Don't want to go to bed? Okay, do you want to brush your teeth first, or put on your pajamas first?
Her: No! Me: Okay, Ill decide then, pajamas it is. Do you want to pick out your pajamas, or do you want me to? Her: I want to! (she runs off to her bedroom to change into pajamas) And I want a story too!

The thing is that we are not arguing about going to bed. There's no power struggle. I'm the parent, and she's the child. This is an easy example, and it comes up nightly. There are going to be lots of situations where finding two choices that are reasonable is hard. It's my job as the parent to frame the situation in the right way. There are lots of things that a 4-year-old shouldn't be responsible for. Deciding her own bed time is beyond her ability to decide. Decisions that she can make are things like "purple socks or pink socks", or which crayon to use.

Framing the world in terms of choices teaches your child that their choices do matter, and they do have control. If I always leave the choices in 4-year-old-appropriateness, then I will fail as a parent. It's hard to do the framing. You are the one who has the power and ALL of the responsibility.

I abdicated that responsibility in my relationship with my ex wife. The things that I should have been deciding, I didn't decide. I left it up to her, and took the much easier beta route. I let myself go physically. I didn't pay attention to what was happening. The situation changed out from under me and I didn't notice. "Why didn't you say something?", I'd whine. "Just tell me what you want me to do and I'll do it", I said, abdicating responsibility for my own actions.

So I didn't let my wife operate at the level where she wanted to operate. I didn't let her be the most responsible teenager in the home. I didn't take the big decisions on my own, framing the world for her, giving her the decisions that she was most comfortable handling. Deciding whether to buy one house, or another? There are pros and cons to each, so we should have a discussion, then I decide. What color to paint the house? Unimportant, really, so that can be left up to her. Which contractor to use? Mine. How to finance the house? My decision. She can give input, and voice her opinion, but the responsibility and the decision should be mine.

She wanted me to be the alpha male that she could look up to and depend on. But I just didn't know. I would have gone my whole life without knowing, if not for finding the red pill. It's not easy being the alpha. It's not easy taking full responsibility for the whole kit and kaboodle. But if you want to have the privileges of the alpha, you have to be the alpha.