Aldabruzzo's Story

143 points26 commentssubmitted by AldabruzzoMod to r/WhereAllTheGoodMenAre

I was brought up in a two parent home, breadwinner dad, housewife mom. Dad was an only child of an overbearing mom and a kind but passive father. Looking at him objectively, he has Asperger's. He was more or less alpha at work (he owned his own business) but a pathetic beta at home. Spent most of his adult life anxious and depressed working a job he hated.

Mom has one sibling. She was the daughter of a phone company worker and a junior high schoolteacher. In around 1955, her dad died of a heart attack when she was 10, her mother never remarried. To manage, my maternal grandmother took tight fisted control over everything and everyone in her circle of influence. Grandma quickly got hooked on Dexedrine to get up in the morning and Valium to calm down at night. As a result, my mom developed undiagnosed borderline personality disorder. Her younger brother became an alcoholic (but recovered in his 30s).

Mom finished college (where she met Dad) and started teaching school. She was going to go out of state to get a master's degree but she decided to get married to Dad instead.

I am their second child, born 2 years after they married. I have an older sister and a younger sister. Mom's borderline personality was the defining feature of my childhood and family life. All of life was centered around walking on eggshells to make sure not to ruffle mom's feathers. Everyone did this - Dad did, and made sure I did too. All dad could do was try to keep the peace and avoid her periodic emotional volcanic eruptions. My sisters did as well. I tried to rebel. My older sister became the peacemaker. My younger sister became withdrawn.

No one could predict what could set mom off. We never knew what could precipitate an emotional explosion with mom. Sometimes, things were going terribly that day and mom was fine. Sometimes, it was as little as not having any Kleenex around that could cause her to rampage.

I never had any grandfathers. Both were dead before I was born. So my grandmothers had lived a good portion of their adult lives alone, as widows, without the tempering influence or calming presence of a man. They didn't even have to compromise with another human being to get through a day. My grandmothers had learned as adult women to live their lives on their own. They learned that what they say goes, that they get their way how they want it, when and where they want it, and that everyone must bend the knee, bow their wills, and do their bidding.

This is how my mother learned to live life as a woman: That you must control everything and everyone around you, and if you do not, bad things will happen - you might go broke, lose your house, become poor, not have enough to eat. You are the woman, and therefore you run things. You get your way, every time. You just decide it and do it. If that doesn't work, all you have to do is yell, scream, bitch, complain, pout, or explode, loud enough, long enough, or in the right way, and you'll get your way.

And so, I grew up believing that this is normal. That this is just how women act. I believed that all women acted like this, all the time. And that it is a man's job to either control or avoid a woman's emotional outbursts and episodes of uncontrollable rage or anger.

I am 50 years old. I was in grade school in the 1970s and in high school and college in the 1980s, during peak second wave feminism. These were the prevailing messages I was being fed on a daily basis. These messages were coming at me from every corner: parents, church, school, extended family, mass media:

"Nice guys are sexy! Nerds are sexy! Be nice, be yourself, and someday someone will love you just for who you are!"

"If a woman wants something, it is your job to get it for her, do it for her, or give it to her."

"If you want something from a woman, you have to ask for it, nicely and kindly and deferentially."

"Women are better than men. They're better human beings than men. Men are evil, sex crazed perverts. Men's sex drives are evil, bad, perverted, sick, and criminal. But women are good and pure. Women's sex drives exist because they just want to be wives and mothers. The only reason girls have anything to do with men is because they want those men to marry them."

"Women never ever sleep around. If they do, it is because bad men tricked them into sex, or it is because those women are stupid, slutty, crazy, or damaged. You, my son, must never ever do this. If you get a woman to sleep with you and you don't offer her whatever relationship she wants, you are a bad man and you must have lied to her to get her to sleep with you."

"Women never lie. Women especially never lie about sex."

"A woman will not have sex unless she has an emotional connection with the man she's having sex with. For women, that emotional connection is an absolute prerequisite for sex, and they won't have sex without it.

"Your job as a boy is to get trained to be a husband and a father. Your sole role as a man is to be a husband to a woman who will have you, and to be a father to her (not your, not yours together, but HER) children."

And so I was trained to pedestalize women. To supplicate to them. To give them whatever they asked for. To engage in extreme self-abnegation with women. If they wanted it, they got it from me. I would do ANYTHING for any woman who asked. I asked. I begged. I pleaded. I cajoled. On a date, if I wanted to kiss a girl, I asked first.

But: Those messages were NOT coming from the real world. In the real world, The Red Pill was on full display. From junior high school on, it was all the cute girls attracted to the hot guys: the star quarterback, the basketball player, the burnout smoking his Camel no-filters on the back porch at the high school before shuffling off to advanced shop class. It was sluts having sex with guys but keeping it mostly on the downlow except for the neck hickies they showed up to class with.

Most of the girls weren't fucking yet, but they sure made it clear who they were attracted to, and it was not me - Mr. Nice Guy, Mr. Deferential Supplicant.

Starting in college in the fall of 1986 it was much the same except on a much larger scale. Because I was an unknown in college, I was attracting women and I had no idea why. So called "girls next door" to sketchy sluts to smart girls to working class girls - many were attracted to me. But I had no idea how to handle them, so most of them very quickly lost attraction. I also had no idea how to keep attraction going once established. Compounding the problem, I didn't understand that girls had their own reasons for pursuing men, only some of which involved affection or interest in long term relationships.

I knew some normal women. Women who were attracted to me and treated me well and actually wanted to have sex with me. But I had no idea how to relate to them, because I had never seen a woman act like this. I had never seen a woman treat me well.

I had never been taught, or paid attention, or learned, about women, normal women, or why they act the way they do. Some women fall in love. Some of them want to use you. Some women want to have fun with you. And some just want to get laid right then. I met every one of those kinds of women in high school and college. But I had no idea what I was seeing, because I'd been trained differently and carefully steered away from the truth of what I was actually seeing.

I had seen some glimpses of this back in high school - that sometimes girls just wanted sex and attention. I saw that girls were attracted to good looking, in shape, self-absorbed boys who didn't care about girls much, didn't take girls seriously at all, didn't treat girls very well, dated girls but didn't care too much whether anything came of it, and had sex with girls who would have sex.

But whenever I pointed this out to anyone, i was quickly crushed with

--"You're not really seeing that. That's not what is happening. Boys don't act like that. Girls don't act like that."

--"Boys who act like that are bad, evil, sick, perverted, and criminal. If you act like that, you will get kicked out of school, be unemployed, live in poverty, never get married, and no one will ever love you.

--"Girls who act like that are slutty, stupid, crazy, or damaged. You don't want a girl like that, do you?"

--"If boys and girls are having sex, it is because the boys are bad and evil, and they are tricking and deceiving those girls into sex. It is because the boys are lying to those girls.

"Those girls don't really want this. They are doing this only because bad boys and bad men trick them into it and lie to them."

--"You had better never do this to any woman. No self respecting man should EVER be treating ANY woman like this."

--"This is because men's sex drives are uncontrollable, bad, evil, sick, and perverted. If men would just control themselves and just be better people, like women are, we wouldn't have all these problems. If men would just get in touch with their feminine sides, life would be better. Because women think that sensitive, kind, caring, quiet, docile, and controllable men are hot, sexy, sexually attractive, and desirable."

I still didn't pick up on it through grad school, mostly because I was in a horrid long distance relationship for 4 years with a young woman of divorced parents, who consistently refused to have sex with me. I was also working my ass off trying to finish school, get out, and get a job.

So it was when I got out of school I moved to my new city to start my new job. I was 25 and instantly inundated with women in their late 20s and early 30s who really really REALLY wanted to date me. I had no idea why it was older women who were interested in me....

So I dated, and ended up married to, a woman who is 3 years older than I am. I thought everything went OK. She had quite a colorful history. And I found out later that history is even more colorful than I thought. (She had lied about her N.) She is also a borderline, just like dear old Mom. She also came from a dysfunctional family with "issues", just like mom. She also was prone to violent mood swings and volcanic emotional eruptions.

She took control of everything, mostly because I allowed her to. I let her run the marriage. I let her decide how our lives would look. I let her decide how our sex life would look. Let's just say that our sex life was OK for her, but dismal for me. And I had no way to rectify it.

Why did I do this? Because I thought women were just like this. I was carefully trained that this is just what I was supposed to do - put up with a woman treating me like shit. It was all I knew, all I had ever really seen.

Fast forward, 2 houses, 2 kids, 8 cars, 3 jobs, and 15 years later. Our marriage had deteriorated to the point where I was just muddling through. I had been internet surfing at work and found the fledgling manosphere. And one day after church, I demanded to know why she was treating me so badly. She said "sometimes I am just not physically attracted to you."

I snapped. That was the straw that broke the camel's back.

I went away for a few hours and returned to talk with Mrs. Aldabruzzo.

"If you're so unhappy with me, perhaps you'll be happier without me. I am not putting up with this shit for one minute longer. Frankly, I think we should end this marriage. I'm not changing any more for this marriage. I've changed and twisted and contorted myself enough. If this marriage survives, you'll have to carry it on your back, because I don't care anymore. I will do whatever I have to do to protect myself. I don't care what happens from here on out. We stay together? Fine. You want to end this trainwreck of a marriage? Fine. Let's go see lawyers on Monday."

Her response was... surprising. No fighting. No complaining. Lots of waterworks "don't leave me" "I'm sorry" "OK I'll do what you want".

And that was what started my journey as a recovering Nice Guy, a recovering low beta.

Since then it's better. It's been some roses and lots of thorns. I have better sex. I live a life I want to live now (mostly). I don't put up with getting treated like shit. I make clear what I expect, what I want, and what I need. And I don't walk on eggshells and I don't put up with emotional eruptions.

In Part II: The lessons learned.