Kill Your Idols

The Family Alpha had a motivational post about getting over a past lover this week.

Getting Over Your Relationship PTSD Pt. II: Give Love One More Chance

I thought this was a reasonably good post. My only reservation (and this is no reflection on TFA) is I’m seeing a lot of “get back on the horse and ride” positivity attempts to replace rational understanding of intersexual dynamics when it comes to men’s bad experiences with women or break ups in the Manosphere these days. I’m not saying that “steel sharpening steel” encouragement or a sharp kick in the ass isn’t helpful for these men. Lord knows I’m apt to do just that myself with what I’ve been writing for over a decade, but it’s my view that understanding the mechanics of why that experience happened, and learning about women and oneself is vital to a man’s personal development.

It’s not enough to say ‘sack up, go lift and get over it’; a man’s got to learn from that pain, go through the process of developing insight from what Red Pill awareness shows him about it and grow from it. Yes, men can dwell on it and let it consume them or they can utilize those feelings to motivate them to understanding how they came to be in these circumstances. I don’t think I’m exaggerating here when I say that the most common way most men come to my blog (or any number of other Red Pill blogs) or the Manosphere proper is as the result of going through a traumatic breakup.

I’ve mentioned this in many prior posts that, unfortunately, the time men are most receptive to Red Pill awareness comes when they’re experiencing the loss of a lover whom they believed was a key goal of their Blue Pill idealism. Their “perfect” Blue Pill world was destroyed for them, but more importantly their ego-investments in that world reached a point that Red Pill reality would no longer sustain for him. It’s at this juncture men seek out the Red Pill community. Some of the most common search terms The Rational Male blog gets linked to are phrases like “How do I get my girlfriend back?” and “How do I get over an Ex?”

While I can empathize with men in such circumstance, I also recognize that men need to Kill the Beta before it kills them. A lot of guys reeling from having the Blue Pill rug pulled out from under them resort to either suicide, self-improvement or a long-term dwelling upon what they believe was a loss they will never be able to replace. And even after the acceptance of that loss becomes normalcy for him, his subconscious still wont allow him to move on – even when he thinks he has.

Studies have shown that while women may take a breakup the hardest (generally, only when they’re the ones being dumped) it is men who suffer more in the long term, and, because of men’s mental firmware and differing sexual strategy, may never truly get over it:

But men are more “competitive” in their approach, meaning the loss of a woman they see as a good catch could be deeply felt for months or even years.

Anyone familiar with my essay War Brides, understands the evolutionary reasoning behind why women have an ability to move on after a breakup so much quicker than men. However, much of men’s inability to let go is dependent upon his investment in his Blue Pill conditioning; that and how his subconscious believes in where he fits in a sexual marketplace founded on Blue Pill idealism:

“The man will likely feel the loss deeply and for a very long period of time as it sinks in that he must start competing all over again to replace what he has lost – or worse still, come to the realization that the loss is irreplaceable,” says Morris.

And because women have more to lose by choosing the wrong partner, they are also more likely to pull the plug on a relationship – with 70% of divorces in the US filed by women.

Kill Your Idols

This only reinforces my stance on Blue Pill men investing themselves in the fallacy of Relational Equity. One reason men have such trouble getting over a previous lover is because Blue Pill conditioning predisposes men to idolize women on whole, while their old books perspective fosters the idea that their investment in the relationship should be what sustains it – rather than accepting the cold, harsh reality of Hypergamy.

TFA writes:

Many men have given the power over their inner-self entirely to the women of their lives. They let their ex-relationships dictate their future relationships, trying to do the opposite of before or they’ll fall into the same routine ultimately leading to a love life filled with redundancy without progress.

You need to break the cycle.

Married men, divorced men, guys coming out of a shitty LTR, and even the men who had a plate cheat on them thus scarring their soul permanently are not acting in accordance with their masculine self if they’re basing decisions off how they can avoid heartache again.

This is good advice, but I think one of the mistakes Blue Pill men make when they exit (or are ejected from) a relationship is that they see a relationship as the only legitimate form of intersexual dynamics. Once a man unplugs, for better or worse, that idolization, the giving over power of self to the Feminine has to be dispelled – but not at the expense of a full understanding of the Red Pill awareness that brings him to unplugging in the first place.

Most men, the largely 80% Beta majority, are conditioned to be serial monogamists. They are taught to identify with the feminine to the point that only what he believes women’s (old books) sexual prioritization should be is correct and valid for himself. A lot of well-meaning Red Pill men think monogamy is the only rational decision to break the cycle.

One of the maxims of the Manosphere is that the best way to get over a woman is to go fuck 20 more before you consider monogamy with another one. This advice actually makes, an albeit simplistic, sense in that the best way to avoid ONEitis is to Spin Plates. Usually, that’s what a bad Blue Pill rejection amounts to; a losing of the best thing that Beta has ever had in terms of sexual access. The Blue Pill conditioned mindset predisposes men to a scarcity mentality and it does so by training men to believe that exclusive monogamy is the only meaningful condition in which a sexual, intimate relationship can take place for him.

So, stemming from this scarcity mentality, we get generations of preconditioned Betas latching on to self-induced ONEitis-prone relationships. Thus, you get pitiable Beta men just this side of suicidal over average HB 5-6 women. I would argue that the reason we see such a preponderance of men bemoaning their post-rejection state (suicide or self-pity) is directly attributable to Blue Pill conditioning and then taking it from there.

Telling this post-rejection Beta, who thought he’d had his Blue Pill dreams come true, that he ought to Spin Plates, fuck 20 women and go lift is like speaking a foreign language to him. His Blue Pill mindset can’t comprehend it, at least at first. Getting past this state of shock usually involves despair, anger, disillusionment – he’s as likely to fight you for being misogynist as he is to fall apart in tears – but as I’ve always said, unplugging guys from the Matrix is dirty work.

Now, just for sake of comparison here, it should be noted that if we go by the Pareto Principle and presume 80% of men are Betas and 20% are some shade of Alpha, we’ll see the dynamics for a breakup change accordingly. I would argue that for the 80% of Beta men, they are the ones women are breaking up with. And the logic of women’s sexual strategy would also suggest that if a woman perceives her mate to be 1-2 steps in SMV above herself she would be less (if at all) inclined to initiate a breakup with a guy she sees as Alpha. Thus, the more Alpha a man, the less prone to ONEitis and lingering post-breakup psychosis he’ll be.

Doing the Work – Pre vs. Post Unplugging

Recently there’s been a push to paint Red Pill aware men as bitter guys who get stuck in the anger phase of unplugging. No doubt this can happen, and considering the mass effect of Blue Pill conditioning in men it’s easy to see how it happens for them. For the larger part I concur with what The Family Alpha is suggesting here; for both psychological and personal reasons it can be all too easy for men to get stuck dwelling on an experience with one woman and then transferring that anger and regret to a self-limiting outlook that holds him back from interacting with women. I imagine some of my MGTOW readers see this as being pragmatic, but as with everything for men, isolation is dangerous.

On the other hand, however, I still think we need to guard against falling into the trap of thinking that a man’s holding onto his Blue Pill regrets, or transferring that pain to a real misogyny means that fundamental Red Pill awareness is the source of his self-limitations. The point of Red Pill awareness isn’t to make a man ‘hate’ women, but rather to inform him of women’s nature so he wont hate what he’d never expect from women.

I really think there are two opposing sides that evolved from Red Pill awareness. On one extreme we have hardline MGTOW men wanting to remove themselves wholesale from interacting with women – largely because of their Red Pill awareness. And on the other we’ve got the Positive Mindset brokers believing that Red Pill awareness leads to the anger and resentment that causes men to limit themselves with women.

In the middle of this we have men who’ve found a new balance in their lives because they became Red Pill aware and created a new, healthier paradigm for themselves with it. It becomes a game of exaggerated nihilism vs. exaggerated optimism, but in the middle we have to find a healthy pragmatism in how we will use this awareness to redefine ourselves. It appears to me that at either extreme there comes a limiting of just how much Red Pill awareness either set is willing to embrace.