“When a Boyfriend Joins the Marriage” is from the New York Times so it is about a bottom, beta guy in an “open” marriage (read: his wife directs everything). It’s what the typical Red Pill guys think about open relationships, because they are imagining themselves in the bottom-guy position. I wrote “Open or poly relationships from the superior position or inferior position” to look at the issue from the top, alpha guy position. For top guy guys, open relationships can solve retention problems.
Top guys have different problems and don’t get married. Or, if they do get married and their wife wants an outside lover, they get divorced.
It’s also true that guys need to f**k their partners good. This story by a spinster, feminist writer is about her mom getting pregnant by a man the mom isn’t married to, and how the feminist writer learns her actual father’s identity. You may think this is another “All women are like that” story, but the mom isn’t getting f**ked by her husband, and the husband consents to the mom living in New York City while he works upstate.
It looks like the husband is at fault as much as or more than the mom. He’s not f**king her, so she finds someone else who will. Red Pill guys are overly eager to blame failed relationships on women. If you’re a guy and in a relationship with a woman, you need to f**k her regularly and thoroughly, or she will legitimately look for affection somewhere else. I mentioned an occasional lover of mine who has a stronger libido than her husband’s, and she is out looking for the sex she isn’t getting at home. Same thing with Peaches.
Reciprocity is a two-way street. I would not put up with a woman who won’t f**k me (barring legitimate medical problems). Women will not put up with a man not f**king them.
For every hot girl you see, chances are someone is f**king her. You might as well try to make you be the guy who is.
Not sure why, but today I was reminded of a girl, “Katy,” who I met through the scene. She was married and poly but also, surprisingly, attractive. I thought so, at least. We’d flirted here and there, but she eventually broke it off with her long-term boyfriend, and I somehow ended up going on some dates with her. I expected things to go straight to sex, but she’s more of the “poly” part of the open relationship universe, rather than the “swinging” part of the universe, so we went on some dates.
I don’t remember much of the dates, apart from the fact that I liked her, and she liked me, especially because she couldn’t rattle me (though she kept trying, softly). I think when I finally got her back to my place, it was in an afternoon. She has an unusual job that oscillates between extreme hours and no work. We may even have gotten together on a weekday or holiday.
The thing I remember most is the letdown feeling when she was finally naked and I was there to f**k her. I’d seen her in lingerie before. I’d seen her f**king before, albeit from a distance and in dim lighting. She is very tall, but not quite as lean as I would have liked. She is the sort of woman who, if she quit sugar, would probably add a point. But she’s not as disciplined as me in that respect. She still wasn’t bad looking, but for whatever reason we did not match. She was not as hot as I would have liked, and some girls just drive me crazy by their smell, by their essence, by their being. She is not one of them. I hate to sound like a chick, but there is an element of “chemistry” in attraction, especially with chicks who are not 8+.
I like to say that you’re rarely fully aware of how hot a girl really is until you see her naked. Some girls get bumped up a point or two, some down a point or two. This one bumped down. Some of these girls I have way under-estimated, some, like Katy, I have over-estimated. In personality terms, Katy has an edge I like, but not so much edge that she loses her sense of playfulness. Yet I couldn’t get properly excited about her in bed. She is the kind of girl I would have happily f**ked as a teen or in my early 20s, for sport and pleasure, when just getting inside an acceptable woman was a monumental event. By the time I found Katy it was less monumental and I was more discerning. Too discerning, it turned out, or we were just wrong for each other.
I know some guys only want what they can’t have, and when they get a chick, they lose interest in her. That has not been me. But when I get a chick and am disappointed with what I realize I’ve gotten, I know it.
Now I still see her at parties every so often, but we say hi and that’s about it.
There is no real learning point to this story; it’s just a small slice of my life.
“U.S. Population Grew at Slowest Pace in More Than 80 Years” is not game related, but it is related to the way immigration is going to continue: there are simply too few workers, relative to the number of old people drawing benefits in the form of Social Security and Medicare.
As birthrates have dropped and death rates risen, immigration’s role in the nation’s continuing population growth has expanded. Last year, it accounted for 48% of the country’s growth, up from 35% in 2011
Until and unless native-born persons have more kids, we’re going to see the demand for labor come from other places. Seriously, go to an old folks home sometime, if you haven’t been. I have some elderly relatives. 98% of the workers there are foreign-born.
If you dislike this trend, you’re having a bunch of kids to compensate, right?
Right?
We get the society we build.
“We get the society we build” is also why I love the Zero electric motorcycle. It’s an amazing product to ride and puts $0 into the coffers of Saudi Arabia, a country whose religious lunacy fuels its anti-sex and pro-terrorism stance.
Like I’ve said, don’t get married. The risk-reward ratio is way out of whack. Notice that she’s trying to conceive while at the same time having an affair.
I’ve written this before, but there is a real chance that a woman I met at a business conference years ago may have had my kid, in a situation not too far off from this one. The timing matches up. Could easily be her husband’s. Or some other guy’s, for all I know.
“The 5 Years That Changed Dating.” I think Tinder worked well up to 2015/16, then stopped working well, but I got on that bandwagon before most other people.
Today, cold approach is more powerful than ever because most guys simply won’t do it. Yet most women long to be approached by a hot guy who can push her buttons.
Flaked out on Ms. Slav again this weekend. I think she’s surprised by indifference and by the speed with which replacement happens, or has happened, to her… she used to being the queen, the one chased, the one with all the options, and then she runs into me. Don’t get me wrong, I like her a lot. We talked on the phone and danced around the subject. She’s so used to being chased that when a guy (me) doesn’t chase her as she expects him to, she’s uncertain. I’m pretty sure she expected the “primary partner” conversation to go differently than it did, as she’s used to tooling guys.
I’ve written quite a bit about reciprocity and I really mean what I wrote: she became less regular and flakier, and I’ve done the same, in about the same proportion, with her… I’m highly sensitized to female bad behavior. Even small amounts of it trigger defense mechanisms in me, defense mechanisms I’ve learned the hard way. Like the way I’ve learned that “Attention is the only tool modern men have,” which is probably the most important thing I’ve written, and the one it seems many guys have the hardest time implementing. Another way of using attention properly is to follow tit-for-tat after the first couple lays. This strategy is not as good for the very beginning parts of a relationship, when the guy typically has to do more work.
Previously, regarding Ms. Slav, I wrote that I’m unaccustomed to being in the inferior part of the relationship, and I think she is the same. She’s used to being chased. She’s used to having guys adapt their schedules to her, as I used to, and don’t anymore. She has many stories of boys and even men chasing her, desiring her, giving her (sometimes expensive) gifts, prostrating themselves before her, begging attention from her, etc. Guys who get a taste of her puss and fall in love with her. She’s used to saying, “See yah!” and hitting the road. Now she’s encountering all of that in me. Such is the power of even modest game, or, more likely, experience. I have f**ked hot chicks before, I have seen almost every manner of female bad behavior, and I know how to reply to it. I know Ms. Slav can be replaced. She knows that I know, and I know she knows I know, although I don’t thinks she would use the words I’m using.
Indifference is more shocking to her, I think, than love or hate. Being relinquished or released does not happen to her often. But I am not fond of being the #2 or #3 choice. I, however, am used to chicks experiencing sudden temperature swings, and me being dropped by them. Chicks and secret society guys can go colder faster than normal people.
Readers can probably infer that the consensual non-monogamy and sex party world have some problems of the traditionally monogamous world, just transformed but not wholly eliminated. Many adventure stories see the hero transmitted into a dark “mirror world” that is similar to but different from the normal, daylight world. Non-monogamy works similarly.
I still like Ms. Slav more than not, but she has been focused on school and is much more heavily into the scene than even I am. In my view she says, “Yes” too much. To almost all invitations. To guys on Facebook.
I wrote a variant of this previously, but some of you are probably thinking that if I’d just managed Ms. Slav better, she would still be firmly in my orbit. That is possible, but doubtful. She has greater interest in this world than even me.
She is also willing (semi-willing?) to let pictures of her be used for social media purposes. I’m not sure she’s tracking what’s happening closely, or as closely as she should be. But the number of super hot chicks in the world is small, and the number in the scene is small. The number who are willing to be photographed is smaller still. This may come back to bite Ms. Slav… or it may not. She may fully “come out” in a way that most participants are reluctant to. If it weren’t for peculiar aspects of my own life setup, I might be willing to come out. Men are more willing, on average than women. Especially single men.
Ms. Slav is popular as a photograph target because almost everyone understands basic principles of consumer advertising. How do you sell to a man? Tell him this product will bring him hot chicks. To a woman? This product will make her one. Ms. Slav could not be a professional model, but she is willing to be undressed and trussed up in front of the camera.
Ms. Slav will be at home for a few weeks, and it would not surprise me if she’s had enough of me by the time she gets back. It’s rare for casual relationships to survive the “primary partner” or “be my boyfriend” talk if the outcome is not positive. But Ms. Slav has been exceptional in many ways, which is why I’ve been writing so much about her. Long-time readers will remember “Bike Girl,” who is (was) a more normal relationship than Ms. Slav. Bike Girl was into me and very much wanted to develop our relationship. Most chicks want one or at most two primary relationships. Very few go all the way into Ms. Slav territory, f**king seemingly everyone. Some. I’ve f**ked some of those girls. The girl I cut loose a while ago is like that. We got coffee the other day; I still like her. She lacks diet discipline and that is showing, even at her age. I looked through some of the sex tapes we made, and I can see the difference happening from the first to the last. Remarkable. It’s also weird to see that I wrote that post about her in July… it seems like last month.
I emphasize how rare Ms. Slav is in the preceding paragraph because I think some guys will think her behavior is common, when in fact it’s not. Because it’s so uncommon, it makes a good story. I’ve written far more about Ms. Slav than I did about Bike Girl because Bike Girl was pretty normal and Ms. Slav is not.
People doing consensual non-monogamy successfully often have quite orderly, regular lives apart from the sex clubs. Most lives can only tolerate so much disorder before they collapse or spiral out of control. To be totally debauched in one area, one must be very stable and responsible in others. Most people in the community are employed and have a reasonable financial base, too; it’s hard to explore alternate relationship styles if you can’t pay rent first.
If I have the opportunity, I might go a couple weeks or month without chicks, as a kind of psychological or physical challenge. Some of the regulars may drop off. But that depends on Peaches’s scheduled.
Does anyone else reading this, and in the game, like Stoic philosophy? I’m not religious, but there is a slightly religious impulse behind my interest.
There is a very large amount of randomness in pickup and game, and I’ve written too little about the role of randomness: it should be emphasized by guys writing about the game. If you’re interested in the psychological parts of pickup, in the “why” in addition to the “how,” you’ll develop a theory of human nature… but that theory needs to have a whole lot of space for “random” in it. When I was younger, I wrongly thought people are pretty consistent. Now, too much evidence to the contrary has changed my mind… I’ve seen girls be harlots on Saturday nights and nuns Tuesday nights, and sometimes vice-versa.
Girls are so random that part of what guys learn in the game is to accept her randomness. Some of the way chicks run hot-cold is them testing a guy. Some is just them being nutso. It’s just noise in the process. There is experimental evidence for the noise:
I’ll tell you where the experiment from which my current fascination with noise arose. I was working with an insurance company, and we did a very standard experiment. They constructed cases, very routine, standard cases. Expensive cases — we’re not talking of insuring cars. We’re talking of insuring financial firms for risk of fraud.
So you have people who are specialists in this. This is what they do. Cases were constructed completely realistically, the kind of thing that people encounter every day. You have 50 people reading a case and putting a dollar value on it.
I could ask you, and I asked the executives in the firm, and it’s a number that just about everybody agrees. Suppose you take two people at random, two underwriters at random. You average the premium they set, you take the difference between them, and you divide the difference by the average.
By what percentage do people differ? Well, would you expect people to differ? And there is a common answer that you find, when I just talk to people and ask them, or the executives had the same answer. It’s somewhere around 10 percent. That’s what people expect to see in a well-run firm.
Now, what we found was 50 percent, 5–0, which, by the way, means that those underwriters were absolutely wasting their time, in the sense of assessing risk. So that’s noise, and you find variability across individuals, which is not supposed to exist.
And you find variability within individuals, depending morning, afternoon, hot, cold. A lot of things influence the way that people make judgments: whether they are full, or whether they’ve had lunch or haven’t had lunch affects the judges, and things like that.
Now, it’s hard to say what there is more of, noise or bias. But one thing is very certain — that bias has been overestimated at the expense of noise. Virtually all the literature and a lot of public conversation is about biases. But in fact, noise is, I think, extremely important, very prevalent.
Accept this in pickup and pickup should become more pleasant, because you won’t take rejection personally. Young guys ask themselves, “Why does she like Mike and not me?” There may be great reasons for her to prefer Mike, but often the reasons are that she’s not that into you, she has a boyfriend she genuinely likes, she’s not in the mood, she hates men that day, etc. etc. Frequently, there will be no reason at all, and your searching for a reason will be futile. Your approach will fail no matter what, because of matters internal to her own mental state. The higher your value and the better your game, the more likely she’ll go for you, but higher value and tight game aren’t guarantees. They improve the odds, but any given girl will be random. You can sometimes ask girls why they do things or don’t do things related to men, and often the girls themselves will admit, “I don’t know.”
Sometimes she likes Mike even if he is “worse” than you in ways pickup artists would identify. Take Peaches. She is still seeing her original guy. He is worse than me in most ways… dumber, worse body, worse career, worse social skills… doesn’t matter, she still likes him, for whatever reason. I may be too masculine for her. Seriously, some chicks like guys a little more feminine and androgynous. Not most chicks, but some, including some who are pretty attractive.
Randomness also leads to the conclusion that “Women don’t think that women can make adult decisions and be held accountable for those decisions.” How a woman feels is often more relevant to her than what she promised or previously decided. Her feelings rule her logic. For men, ideally our logic rules our feelings. Fundamental irresponsibility also helps explain why so few women make it to the top of big corporations, where internalizing responsibility is vital to improvement.
You cannot judge your own game skills based on a single interaction. You can try to improve one thing from every single interaction, but you can only average your skill across many interactions. The underwriters in Kahneman’s experiment have great incentive to be consistent, but they are not. The underwriters are “noisy.” They are operating in the Fooled by Randomness world of Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Guys also have some randomness, though we often call it “state.” I have been the funniest, sharpest, most socially wonderful guy in the world. I have also been mopey, miserable, depressed, anxious. In one state I do pretty well, in the other I don’t do well, most of the time I sit between them.
Guys in the game need to do at least two things:
Improve themselves.
Approach women, then escalate them from “Hi” into observation or comment into chat into a date and into bed from there.
Many guys who think they’re in the game seem to get stuck at point one. Some guys do a lot of point two and none of number one and then wonder why their fat, floppy, sloppy selves can’t get chicks. Combine them and you will maximize the likelihood of getting the good chicks.
Almost every guy learns that chicks are random… Chris at Good Looking Loser calls it “Sexual availability” and some other names too… guys get confused by female randomness because 1) guys are more logical than chicks in general and 2) guys have a simple mating algorithm: we want to have sex with as many as the hottest chicks as possible. Chicks have a much more confused and nuanced mating algorithm that chicks themselves don’t understand.
And they frequently can’t explain why they feel or why they do what they do, as I said above. If you try to interrogate a chick’s logic, you’ll often get such confused garbage and babble that you’ll still not understand it and, worse, make the chick angry by quizzing her about it (I did this some in high school and college). Chicks feel more than think. It’s important for guys to lead for many reasons, one being that most chicks are psychologically incapable of leading in a romantic situation. Their evolved psychology compels them not to lead. Guys feel too, but the feeling is much simpler… “Is she hot enough to f**k? I want to f**k her.”
Novice guys want to do what they could have done differently with “this one girl.” The answer is often, “Nothing.” Or, “Something, but she still might have said no.” Don’t let any individual girl get in your head. She probably says no for reasons that have little to do with you and a lot to do with her.
Internalize this lesson and you’ll do better at the game, while taking whatever chicks say less seriously. The rejection is often not about you. It’s about her. Did you open her when she’s hot for male attention and feels like she’s not gotten enough? One reaction. Did you open her when she’s on her period and is antisocial? Another reaction. Did you open her when she bought a new outfit recently and feels she looks cute? Another reaction. Did she get into a relationship with a great guy? She might like the sexual attention but decline, because she’s not in the market right now.
“Chicks are random” is also one of the many factors explaining why few women reach the top of companies and organizations. Guys figure out that women are random and keep that in mind when choosing colleagues, promotions, etc. And randomness in dating life also manifests itself at work. That’s why your female colleagues are more likely to have weird random meltdowns, be inconsistent, etc. Chicks are wired that way and can’t help it. The randomness players see in the dating market, you will also see in job markets.
The book about non-monogamy, sex clubs, and game is now about 41,000 words, up from about 31,000 words in the first completed draft. Three or four guys have read it and returned it with feedback… if you are one of those guys, thank you. I still don’t have a good title for it and may default to “Sex clubs and non-monogamy for players” or a similar title. The title may be too direct but the book is trying to demystify things, much as players demystify the dating market.
I’ve been looking around for anyone who wants to make a cover image. One beta reader suggested I put the cover image and layout jobs on Upwork. I’m reluctant to plow money into a free book, even small amounts of money, but maybe that is worth doing.
I’m going to publish the book under the Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution license. Anyone who wants to distribute the book can do so as long as they acknowledge this website and “The Red Quest” as the original writer. Because I’m likely to quit the community at some point, I want to give the book a license that will make it easy to copy and remix in perpetuity. Maybe someone will make a nice physical edition of it.
Right now, I still haven’t found anyone who has written on this subject at the level of depth and knowledge that I’m writing at. I’m sure some guys have discovered what I’ve discovered through trial and error, but it’s exciting to be the first person to discuss a topic in detail.
Finishing the book and making comprehensive edits has sucked up far too much time, but at this point I’m determined to see it through and produce a book that is novel, useful, and accurate.
I also think monogamy is dying. In response to some observations by the beta readers, I have added this to the conclusion:
In my view, monogamy is also failing due to the prevalence of Facebook, smartphones, and other technologies that make it far too easy to surreptitiously hook up with exes. When a woman has been with a man for a couple years and is going through a tough or boring period with him, she can easily start a Facebook chat with her old boyfriends or crushes. The very low friction required for women to begin an affair today is corrosive to conventional relationships. For most women, social media is like crack, and most women lack the willpower to say “no.” This world of easy sex-on-demand is revealing all the cracks in the facade of monogamy. Social media is revealing the many problems with elite institutions, a topic dealt with in The Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri—a book players should read, though it is not directly applicable to the game.
Social media weakens existing relationships, increases non-monogamy, and also makes it easier to discover cheating. In this environment, consensual non-monogamy makes more sense than ever. Many guys fantasize about a monogamous relationship with a woman, but they fail to realize that few women will remain in a long-term monogamous relationship with them. We’re only just now coming to terms with the way social media tears apart relationships of all kinds. But as old relationships and bonds dissolve, new ones will take their place. What will those look like? What should those look like?
As we learn about why and how monogamy doesn’t work, we also have to ask what comes after monogamy. This book is a partial answer to that question, although I haven’t framed it as such until now.
By now, people are recognizing that social media is changing almost everything about social and political dynamics in our society. How thoroughly these dynamics have been and are being changed is still not widely appreciated. When a woman has infinite, on-demand access to her exes at will, monogamy is not going to endure. Even many players haven’t fully understood these implications yet.
But don’t fear, the bulk of the book is “how to” and “how to do this” rather than being jerk-off philosophizing.
It’s conceivable I’ll publish the book within a week or two of today, depending on how quickly other beta readers get back to me. I thought the book would be shorter than it has been and I thought it would take me less time to put it together, but many questions and observations have revealed missing segments that I’ve been trying to fill. I can’t make any timeline promises because this is a totally peer-to-peer process. I’m not going to charge for the book and am not paying anyone reading it, so paid work takes priority.
Experienced guys can quit this post right now, as it’s about an obvious topic, so they don’t need to read it. But the topic comes up with such frequency online, usually among young guys, that I want one, comprehensive discussion.
A guy on Reddit says, “Anyone else find themselves increasingly distant from female ‘friends’?”
Those scare quotes around “friends” are good. The guy goes on, “Have you guys also found it more and more difficult to have girls around who are only friends? I struggle to see how other guys have girls around only as friends (unless they’re ugly).” He’s right. If a guy is around a girl he finds attractive, he should make a move on her within the first week of meeting. Maybe slightly longer in some situations, like if they go to school together and will be forced into a lot of proximity. I don’t subscribe to the “three-date rule,” but I do subscribe to the “don’t fall into the friend zone” rule and “don’t hide your balls” rule.
One commenter said something smart,
Almost none of those women you call “friends” are friends, in the sense that they are loyal, caring, trusted people in your life. They are people who know you, and may occasionally hang out with you.
But you would be less than nothing to them the instant you start to be a social drag on them. Most people are that way, so it is not necessarily a woman thing. It is just that, in my experience, very few men are any good at being a friend, and almost no women are.
As a young and stupid guy, I liked being “friends” with hot chicks because it meant I hadn’t yet been told, definitively, “no.” So I’d grind away much of that initial attraction, if any existed, by hanging around the hot chick and not making a move. I achieved a paradoxical situation: I found it very easy to lay out girls I was a little bit attracted to, but very hard to get with chicks I was highly attracted to. With chicks I was a little attracted to, I’d do almost perfect push-pull, hot-cold game… without knowing what I was doing. I genuinely didn’t care, so I’d run great game and generate loads of attraction. With girls I was attracted to, I’d supplicate and avoid making a move, thus killing the attraction. I didn’t have the means to understand what I was doing wrong.
The Red Quest 