This was a moderately popular comment I wrote on r/purplepilldebate in response to a blue piller. u/StingrayVC suggested I post it here. In no way do I claim these as original ideas, they come from real life women I know and many of the posts here on RPW.

blue piller wrote:

I believe in giving and taking in a relationship. You give an amount and they give you an amount back. You only give them as much as they will give you back.

Now, on paper, this seems rational, or "fair." It's really not a terrible logical failure of any kind, and I don't believe the poster to be an idiot for writing it. I just think that it lacks nuanced wisdom about what makes real life relationships work, and by work, I mean both people happy. I'll even tentatively hypothesize that in a capitalistic, transaction based society, people are especially prone to this sort of thinking, but the point of this post is not to bash Capitalism or start a DAE Sweden??!! circlejerk. It's simply to point out that a "business" view of relationships where giving is measured against taking in concrete ways is not likely to lead to happiness for most people.

So I replied:

This is the transactional thinking that kills genuine connections (if they ever existed) in relationships imo. Its funny because TBP usually harshly criticizes TRP for viewing relationships as a transaction, then pulls shit like this out and shows their true colors. Thinking like this leads to a culture of combat dating, which women usually win at, and this is exactly what spawned TRP in the first place. TRP = advice for how to win at combat dating.

RPW, especially the women I know IRL who think very similarly to the sub but have no idea what reddit is, have helped me to grasp the concept of having character. The happily married/LTR women I know don't think of their relationship as a transaction. They view their treatment of their SO as a reflection of their character, and being a good wife as a goal unto itself that is not dependent on their SO's behavior. Yes, this can hypothetically lead to one sided situations, but with the amount of screening such women typically do for their husbands, it rarely does.

I don't have anything to add to that at this time, but there's no reason the OP needs to cover all the bases, that's what the comment section is for :)