Summary: I've been a closeted MRA for a number of years (I live in SJWville), and recently unplugged myself. I'm feeling reflective today and have noticed a trail of truths girls left behind as they interacted with me or other men that I knew. It's faster to change if you admit a large mistake instead of many small ones, and this thread is my admission of my great error.

Story 1: I was somewhere between 14 and 16, working my first job scanning groceries in a supermarket. A hot girl I worked with, around five years older than me, told me straight up how things work: "/u/cucumber_vaccine, you're a great guy. You're the kind of guy I could see myself marrying as a second husband, when you're rich and established and I'm ready to settle down." I was plugged-in at the time, of course, and rationalised that away to "everyone finds someone eventually".

Story 2: My uncle is an interesting character: he's got a great deal of natural game and manages to regularly pull good-looking women much younger than he is, but he still wants to do the LTR-settle-down thing despite being divorce-raped at least once, divorced a couple of times more and burned a few more times again. One story stands out in particular. I'd seen him meet, seduce and fall for a girl and their relationship was going swimmingly, up until the moment she had a miscarriage. I don't think they were trying for a kid, but she knew her chance to become a mother had nearly gone. I blinked, and the next thing I knew, she'd broken up with my uncle, flown home to the other side of the world, hooked up with the BP provider that she'd picked out years ago and gotten herself married.

Story 3: I used to work with a pretty hardcore feminist, which makes this story all the better. She was telling me about her latest boyfriend and how great he was, and like the chump I used to be I was listening. After she got past the boring stuff, she started saying things like "he takes charge, and I really like that. If I go to get myself a drink, he'll remind me that I should've offered to get him one as well. However the relationship goes, he's made me a better person." That might sound whiny in text when I write it here, but I met the guy once and there was nothing whiny or bitchy about him, just straight-up alpha.

Processing: I've spent a fair amount of time studying LessWrong-style rationality, and on one section of the site there's a sequence of articles about letting go of old ideas. There's one called "the importance of saying 'oops'", and while I won't link it because I'm new, I will quote the choice parts:

After I had finally and fully admitted my mistake, I looked back upon the path that had led me to my Awful Realization. And I saw that I had made a series of small concessions, minimal concessions, grudgingly conceding each millimeter of ground, realizing as little as possible of my mistake on each occasion, admitting failure only in small tolerable nibbles. I could have moved so much faster, I realized, if I had simply screamed "OOPS!"

And I thought: I must raise the level of my game.

There is a powerful advantage to admitting you have made a large mistake. It's painful. It can also change your whole life.

It is important to have the watershed moment, the moment of humbling realization. To acknowledge a fundamental problem, not divide it into palatable bite-size mistakes.

Better to swallow the entire bitter pill^* in one terrible gulp.

And so here I am. Having come halfway down this path in small concessions and little realisations of my mistake, I'm now stopping and screaming "OOPS!". Everything I did to build my current life of sexual frustration and lack of success with women was mistakes building on mistakes building on mistakes. The Litany of Gendlin tells me that it'll all work out:

What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.

^* This doesn't refer to TRP specifically but it's too appropriate to not quote.

Lessons Learned:

  • Story 1: AF/BB, straight from the horse's mouth.

  • Story 2: Women's years of peak fertility mean that there's a second wall that doesn't line up 100% with the decline of looks. If she wants kids at all, she'll have plans in place to ensure she gets them.

  • Story 3: Women like to be led. Even the ones who say they don't.

  • Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change. Admitting a large mistake lets you make bigger changes and potentially bigger improvements compared to digesting your mistakes in bite-sized pieces.