I don't have time to refine this, nor do I care to, so here's some stream-of-conscious. Have fun.

THE BASICS

AWALT is an essential concept to understanding intersexual relational dynamics. Rollo has said a number of times that "hypergamy is everything." I agree. But hypergamy only matters if we also agree that AWALT. Otherwise, we're left asking: are 10% of women hypergamous? 50%? 90%? If your wife is one of the non-hypergamous ones, then we might as well throw everything we know out the window.

Now, let's get foundational here:

  • AWALT does not mean 100% of every woman who ever lived. There are outliers. To pick an easy example: mental health issues can create clear exceptions to any claim of 100% infallibility when it comes to human thought processes and behaviors.

  • AWALT is not meant to describe the behaviors of women, but the underlying biological and psychological impulses that influence their behaviors. Some women are more disciplined than others and therefore won't express AWALT traits, but the underlying desire is still there.

  • A few ECs on MRP have worded it: "Don't be surprised if your wife is like that too. Just because she doesn't act like that now doesn't mean she won't later."

BIBLICAL FOUNDATION

It's been brought up on reddit and in other Christian circles that "AWALT" as a concept is offensive to any reasonable interpretation of Scripture. Most of this stems from a misunderstanding, but their main rationale is a very liberal notion that everyone is unique and broad classifications over entire people groups is either sexist or racist. The Bible doesn't actually paint such a picture. God doesn't have any problem lumping entire people groups together:

Romans 3 is a great place to start, as Paul lumps all of humanity into an "All People Are Like That" framework: "There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” He's not speaking in hyperbole or exaggeration here. He literally means (while quoting OT) that every single person is like that.

Genesis 18 is another great example. There was an entire city of Sodom that God intended to condemn. Abraham argues against God, saying, "Surely NOT All Sodomites Are Like That, right?" He keeps pleading, "What if there are only 50? 45? ... 10? righteous people in Sodom?" God says, "For the sake of the 10 righteous, I would spare the city," yet God blows it sky high anyway. Why? Because All Sodomites Are Like That.

We could keep going throughout the times of the Judges and the Kings. God orders entire nations to be slaughtered. Surely we can't judge entire people groups by the bad eggs among them, right? And yet God does exactly that - and then he calls his people to be the ones to execute his judgment.

Or consider creation itself: Genesis 1. God creates men and women. Categorically, with limited exceptions for birth defects, have a head, a brain, two eyes and a nose, feet and hands. Men have penises. All Men Are Like That. Women have boobs. All Women Are Like That.

Then we go to Genesis 3 and see God intentionally setting categorical patterns in place:

  • The serpent is cursed to crawl on his belly - and not him only, but every snake who ever lived after that.

  • Adam is cursed with having to work hard and by his sweat to produce food for his family - and no man since then has ever had it as easy as in Eden.

  • Eve is cursed with greater pains in child-bearing - and every woman since then has had to face this (pain-killing medication notwithstanding).

Are we truly shocked, then, when we see that Eve's desire for control over Adam would be extended to all other women as well? And yet just as a man can cut off his foot, and therefore consciously deviate himself from his natural state, so also can women choose to reign in those tendencies. But just as a Christian determined never to sin again is always still tempted, so a wife determined never to act on her hypergamous nature still has a hypergamous nature.

What Are AWL?

I've never seen anyone actually list out the AWALT traits that get talked about. It usually comes up piecemeal when someone sees a commonality. So, let's figure this out. Feel free to add to my list.

  • Illimitable Men includes hypergamy, solipsism, Machiavellianism, and immaturity as underlying principles which prompt such behaviors as branch swinging, blame shifting, and emotional impulsiveness.

  • Rational Wiki uses words like: manipulative, abusive, sociopathic, destructive, drama-oriented liars. Yikes!

  • From reading MRP for as long as I have, I pick up traits like: hypergamy, emotional impulsivity, illogical thought processes, attraction toward bad boys, drying up to betas, being self-absorbed, conformity to strong leadership, etc.

  • Interestingly, after Googling around for a bit, the fullest list I was able to find was from our very own /u/Deep_Strength's blog: check it out.

Regardless of what any sector of the manosphere might think, we can at least reliably contemplate the things the Bible says. Deep listed many of them, but off the top of my head, here are the ones I believe I could biblically support:

  • Basic anatomical commonalities

  • Sinful with an innate sinful nature

  • Hypergamy

  • Idolization of being in a relationship

  • Subconscious preference for being a follower

  • Overt impulse to control the man she's with

  • Imperative to have babies with a strong man

  • Emotional impulsivity

  • Comparative weakness (though the interpretations on this vary)

  • Nuturing

If we allowed anecdotal evidence from Scripture to be representative, we could add to this list with things like opportunistic, materialistic, manipulative, etc. - but I don't want to over-reach here. It's important to note that not only is this list non-exhaustive, it's also non-exclusive. These traits are not necessarily exclusive to women. Men might share some of these traits also, either en masse or ad hoc.

+/- APPLICATION

It's important to note when contemplating AWALT traits that there are both positive and negative traits on the list. Even more fascinating is that many of the allegedly negative traits can have positive application or function in a relationship. After all, there's a reason men are designed to desire women and not other men (of course, I'm not going to address homosexuality here). Let's take a look at a few of these, so you can see what I'm talking about.

  • Hypergamy: The sexual dynamic of the red pill is to make hypergamy work for you. And it can! It's not bad that women are hypergamous; you just need to know how to make hypergamy work for you. Guns aren't bad - they can be incredibly valuable to a person, but it takes handling them properly to make them work for you instead of landing you with a prison sentence.

  • Overt impulse to control the man she's with: Yeah, this one's a pain in the butt. But it's also what forces men to become better men - not because he strives to live up to her expectations, but because he must eventually develop an emotionally dominant frame to stand up to her in order for him to find peace. And for thousands of years this worked perfectly, until the feminine imperative shifted from uplifting women to also include weakening men - now to the degree that men can be thrown in jail for merely emotionally upsetting his wife enough to make her concoct a story of how she has somehow been abused (not to be confused with actual abuse cases).

  • Imperative to have babies with a strong man: Be that strong man and this means lots of sex.

  • Emotional impulsivity: Trigger her emotions and unbridled passion erupts in the bedroom too.

You see, as much as MGTOW and other guys may complain about some of these qualities, they're also part of what makes women women - and I, personally, love women a lot. Take these traits away to make her more man-like and suddenly we're either not attracted or we find ourselves leaning a little more gay.

MY EXPERIENCE

Many of you know my own story with this. I thought I'd found a unicorn. My wife seemed perfect to me with all those rosy colored glasses I had on at the time. I used to call her Mary Poppins - "practically perfect in every way." Then she admitted years into our marriage that she had faked a lot of it just to get me to marry her. Turns out she was like that too.

In the reverse: when I first started posting on MRP, explaining what had gone on in my marriage, I was told that my wife was an outlier and that even the red pill didn't hold hope for me - that I needed to leave her and move on. A few short weeks later, turns out they were wrong - AWALT stretched even to someone the red pill community thought was an outlier.

The reason it's so easy to be fooled is because AWALT describes the subconscious tendencies of a woman toward certain attraction patterns and behavioral choices. Many women act overtly on these subconscious proclivities, whereas others have been conditioned to hide them. Those who have been conditioned to hide them often have conscious paradigms in which they operate that affect their overt thinking, producing the subconscious repression of their AWALT tendencies. When this occurs, if you never trigger one of their AWALT traits, you'll never notice the suppressed tendencies at all, reasonably believing your wife is NAWALT. But if you do trigger one of them - such as being cocky/funny toward her when she says she can't stand cocky men - you'll notice the dissonance between her speech and her physically reactive cues ... hence the saying: watch what she does, not what she says.

MAKING IT WORK FOR YOU

Now, as I've been saying, if you think your wife is a special little snowflake, you need to think again. She's not. She hasn't avoided AWALT. She's like that too. She just hasn't acted on it ... yet. Or maybe "yet" never comes. But even if she goes her entire life without expressing AWALT traits, that doesn't mean the core desire and impulses aren't there. And if they're there, what do you do with them? You make them work for you.

I knew a guy whose wife was neck-deep in churchianity culture. Okay, I know a lot of guys like that. Let's call this particular guy Bob. Bob's wife was hard-core "NAWALT," so he thought. His wife never once contemplated divorce as an option - no branch swinging. She refused to spend any time with men who were not her husband. She was against all the liberal feminists and totally believed in things like biblical headship and male-led church structures. She didn't gossip. She didn't use Facebook for validation. She wasn't prone to hyper-emotional outbursts and was overall logical and even-tempered. She didn't boss Bob around or place harsh expectations over him. When she was wrong, she owned up to it. She was constantly focusing on others' needs, even at her own expense. That's how she was raised to be.

Of course, Bob wasn't happy with his sex life. So he asks me how he can make it better. I start sharing with him some concepts we've talked about here. "Oh, no. She'd never go for that," Bob snaps back. "My wife has always hated muscular guys. She's more interested in stimulating conversation. She also doesn't like dominant men. When she sees guys acting alpha on TV shows it disgusts her."

Brother, she's fitness testing you! He was clueless. Every time she says she doesn't like alpha guys, she wants to know if you're going to beta-up to try to appease her, or if you're going to do your own thing. And you wonder why your marriage is sexless. "No, you don't get it. She's being serious. I'd totally push her away if I tried that. Things would get even worse." Even worse than what? No sex at all? What's worse than no sex? You already said she didn't consider divorce an option.

Bob believed his wife was NOT AWALT. She was the exception to the rule, in his mind. But I persuaded him to start acting on some basic principles anyway. What did he have to lose? Surprise, surprise: sex started returning to their marriage. What happened? I thought she was NAWALT?

  • Bob discovered that his wife was merely suppressing her innate desires because they were in conflict with her present reality. When her husband changed to start triggering her innate tingles, she suddenly shifted from subconscious suppression of her AWALT tendencies to overtly embracing them.

MADONNA/WHORE

This probably deserves more time than I'm going to give it, but suffice it to say that many Christian men suffer from the Madonna/Whore Complex. This is when a man polarizes his view of a woman to place her in one category or the other without seeing the possibility of the opposite traits in her. Consider two somewhat extreme cases:

  • He might look at an actual prostitute and see her only as a sexual object without understanding who she is as a person and that she desires love, relationships, and all those fuzzies as well.

  • In the reverse, he may see a nun and contemplate her as a source of emotional comfort, empathy, and an overall uplifting spirit, all the while not realizing that she also has sexual urges and all kinds of kinky tingles as well.

What makes it most problematic is not the lack of awareness, but the impossibility in the man's own mind of seeing the reality in this. A man might fantasize about having sex with a nun who wants to get dirty, but if he were to meet a hot nun in real life, he'd never try to pick her up the same way he would a girl at the bar. And yet her vagina doesn't work any differently than any other woman's - he merely thinks he must approach her uniquely.

And this is how many Christian (and non-Christian) men see their wives. They are so used to her NOT being a sexual person that they forget that she IS a sexual person. So, even after they make a few basic improvements to their lives, they're either not willing to initiate with her properly or not willing to experiment toward the sexual lifestyle they want with their wives because they believe "she won't go for that." But AWALT - the prostitute wants fuzzies (BB) and the nun wants sex (AF), even though they have publicly repressed those aspects of their hypergamous nature.

Ultimately, a man must understand both the madonna and whore in his wife and the spectrum of AWALT tendencies that aren't fully expressed in their relational context before he can have both a happy marriage and a satisfying sex life.

BACK TO THE BIBLE

Now, I couldn't reasonably end without going back to the underlying theological premise of everything I teach here at RPC: that our human relationships are parallel with our spiritual marriage with Christ.

How does Christ view the church? Does he see us as dirty, nasty sinners, like the whore, whose only redeeming function is that we can spiritually reproduce more disciples for him? I think not. Does he see us as an upright, holy body that is lovely and pleasing and glorious in his sight, and would never degrade in reproductive passions? Of course not. Christ sees us as pure and holy [here's the kicker] BECAUSE of himself - Christ - in us. Our holiness is a byproduct of our groom indwelling us, which is what makes Christ love the church so doggone much, even though we are so doggone filthy all the time. And he also sees our spiritually reproductive capacity and desires to use it to create more holiness.

Now, you know biblically that Christ sees both your holy and whore-ish attributes. All people are sinners and all Christians are holy. AChristiansALT - and as Christ's bride, it's not too far off, in the parallel, from saying AWALT. But in practice, my guess is that you believe Christ views you as one or the other, and that's affecting how you relate with him. Do you believe God sees you as holy and upright already, and therefore has no need for using you as a tool for his spiritually reproductive purposes? Or do you see yourself as an object of his use, failing to recognize the delight he takes in the holiness you have through him? These questions matter. They will affect what your mission is, or what's holding you back from living it out.

And if you struggle with how you believe Christ views you (not to mention how you view him on this dichotomy), there's a good chance that you project the same thing onto your wife, and that this is equally holding you back from experiencing the relational and sexual fullness you could have in your marriage.