I recently have lost about 25 pounds and about 10% body fat. My positive experiences with strangers since, coupled with a comment I made in another thread got me thinking about the types of value an ‘alpha’ male has versus the type of value a ‘beta’ male has.

Women are essentially forced to choose between two types of high quality men. There are men who are big, strong, aggressive, and correspondingly physically attractive. It is beneficial to have children with these types of men, as your children are likely to take on their attractive and useful characteristics. These are stereotypical 'alpha' characteristics.

The other type of high quality man is one who is beneficial to have around and reproduce with because of his material possessions, skills, and willingness to sacrifice himself for his family. It is beneficial to have a man like this around for access to their resources and labor. These are stereotypical 'beta' characterizes.

As you can see, alphas have intrinsic value, whereas betas have conditional value. Ideally, a man would be both big and strong, as well as wealthy and self-sacrificing. This is the female equivalent of a unicorn, and aptly describes 99% of romance novel love interests. The problem is that people who are genetically gifted with strength, good looks, etc. have much, much less incentive to act in self-sacrificing ways. Their attractiveness is not primarily based on self-sacrifice, so there is no incentive to do so; they get laid without needing to engage in ‘beta’ behavior. On the flip side, men who are not gifted will try and make up for their shortcomings by providing value in other areas. They do not have innate value to rely upon, so they must come up with some other value-add to be competitive.

We avoid attracting females based on 'beta' characteristics, as it requires more effort for a less enthusiastic reward. A lot of the anger in TRP stems from the realization that one isn't good enough to be found innately attractive, and that anger gets projected towards the people who have not found them attractive. On some level, these men also feel duped into believing that their romantic partners found them valuable intrinsically as opposed to merely for their sacrifices. The gender swapped equivalent would be a woman getting pissed that the guy she has been seeing only liked her because she was hot, and didn't care about any of her thoughts or interests.

The take away from all of this, is that the goal in TRP is to become so intrinsically valuable that it is no longer necessary to rely on self-sacrificing behaviors to be reproductively competitive.