A lot of TRADCON types love to use vetting as the be all and end all. Personally, I can't stand the sentiment, and it's exactly the kind of disney esque lies that screw men over. I know a lot of guys in here are 'looking for a wife.' and think vetting girls is the way to get there. There's so much in that statement that needs to be unpacked and fixed, and plenty of guys who are better than me have done far better work on that front. I'll focus on vetting, and why it never worked.

How can I have any confidence? I never had the TRADCON experience, my christian friends did. I fell back on boundaries, some by accident, and some as I got better at enforcing them. I'm watching guys zero out left and right. There's something to it that isn't useful, and it benefits a guy to walk through whats so great about it.

Vetting

Vetting is the relationship strategy where a man takes a list of values and qualities he prefers in women and uses it to assess the viability of the woman he is currently dating so that he can know if she is worth committing to over the long term. The quintessential strategy for the type of men who readily identify with being traditional and conservative within a modern and liberal society. Note, these are little ‘l,’ and little ‘c.’ This isn’t about tribal politics, this is about men. The vetting strategy is thrown around as if its the same strategy men have used throughout history, when in reality it’s a horrible mental model; a narrative guys use to provide comfort for the grim reality that relationships all end, and most end well before the man is ready to move on, or his children have had the full biological father experience.

Vetting is a horrible strategy for the following reasons:

1. Men do not know what they want in life. Men have a wonderful ability to rationalize what the world offers, transforming it what men wanted all along. A vetting list is guesswork and post hoc rationalization.
2. Vetting a woman is vetting for values. The question is, whose values? Men today are instilled with feminine values, created by and for women to meet their own needs, not his.
3. Vetting only works if everyone is doing the same and is immunized from everything else.
4. Vetting for values is a narcissistic fantasy, and serve to hide the true nature of women and men in order to live in the narrative it presents. By the time the masks come off it’s too late.
5. Vetting creates an ego investment, where a man ignores anything that is outside of his vetted criteria. If the list is wrong, it’s an attack on a mans ego, and he will fight tooth and nail to protect it.
6. Even if the masks are off, and humans are naked and honest in their interactions (which they aren’t) vetting offers a snapshot into someones values, not a longitudinal assessment. It has the same longevity as an MBTI assessment; it’s astrology for the educated.
7. Vetting is often done to the exclusion of actual relationship strategies. Boundary enforcement is far superior and doesn’t require a lifetime of instilling feminine values in a man in order to understand them.

I.

Men do not know What they want in life. The idea of taking a man at his most inexperienced and encouraging him to develop a list of qualities that give him the best choice in a long term relationship is naive. Vetting is touted as mitigation of risk, but risk is a wonderful container word that we can fill with whatever feelings we want. What exactly is a man risking?

...

The risk is ones ego. Most men who tout vetting as a relationship strategy tend to be early into their relationships. It’s not that a man knows it works, it’s that he hopes it worked, even though it was largely guesswork and coming to terms with the person that took interest in him. Our ego tells us that this one of a kind girl is the kind of girl that we carefully observed and concluded that she was one of a kind, one in a million of her kind. For most men, the one of a kind girl wasn’t one of a kind, she was the one girl who kind of showed us any affection at all. The girl we were the kind of man that she was able to attract, he was her niche.

She had a specific type of man she could attract, and we let life happen to us. And this is why vetting does not work. Vetting implies we are taking control over our lives, and in reality, most men are letting life happen to them, and vetting provides a narrative that allows a man to pretend he doesn’t sail to wherever the winds decide to take him. For the inexperienced man (most men) he doesn’t get to decide, others will decide for him and he has to come to terms with that, hence, vetting.

All 7 parts here