“Never settle” is an expression of narcissism

The best thing written about modern dating is by The Last Psychiatrist, and it’s so good he felt compelled to delete it, Don’t Settle For The Man You Want. It’s about narcissistic monster Lori Gottlieb, a woman who can’t see herself for who and what she is but is compelled to ladle advice out to everyone else. She thinks TV shows like Will & Grace and movies like Titanic are somehow real… “Nothing characterizes the dumbest generation of narcissists in the history of the world better than using throw away cinema as a template for life.” Lori can’t find a man for many reasons, one being that “She wants someone who will see her the way she wants to be seen and fulfill various other roles she has planned for him, leaving herself free to ‘grow.'” People are people, not roles, and not props in another person’s drama, however much social media tries to convince us otherwise (the best women I’ve met and dated in the last decade use social media minimally, if at all: not a coincidence). Lori is an expert in the negative, not in the positive,

A reasonable question might be, what kind of a man is this woman looking for? I defy you to answer this question. She’s two books and at least three essays into the topic, and still I have no idea. What I do know, however, is what she’s not looking for. That’s where her laser focus is pointed.

She is all “want” and no “give.” Real relationships mean give and take. Too much of either makes them impossible or dysfunctional. But, lots of people (especially women) have been trained to think like Lori: the man is an accessory to their life, not a person with whom she’ll build a new thing. Religion used to try to fight against narcissism, but it’s dead, and now it’s all about you. Advertising tells us so. And we have good psychological defense mechanisms that prevent us from realizing that we only want to take and never want to give. “Gottlieb figures that because she’s attractive and intelligent, the problem must be her standards are too high or men are threatened by her. Wrong. The problem is she is daring someone to like her.” Well that is one problem, and not the only one. But the key word “standards.” Listen to single women and you’ll hear endless talk of “standards.” Listen to married women and they’ll talk about how much they love their kids. Coincidence?

Listen to women’s dating podcasts (I don’t recommend it, but xbtusd listens to them, masochistically) and the idea of “standards” recurs over and over again. It’s right up there with “Living your truth” and letting emotions rule, and ruin, your life.

“I Thought I Wanted to Go It Alone” Narrator: “She did not.”

“I Thought I Wanted to Go It Alone,” a woman writes, as if she is a snake or a lizard, rather than a human. Narrator: “She did not.” No one really wants to go it alone… everyone wants to go it with someone like +2 SMV… and if that cannot be achieved… then it’s time to “go it alone” as a pose. Humans are social beings and almost none of us really want to go it alone. When someone says they want to go it alone, male or female, they are almost always posturing.

This woman has the usual delusional woman problems, “What broke my state? A few things, really. I passed 35 and wanted a baby. I fell in love and was mercilessly dumped.” Of course she wanted a baby, no one gives a f**k about their career accomplishments, compared with their family networks… and that goes triply for chicks.  Somehow almost no one among professional women circles talks honestly about this. “Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think.” For chicks it’s worse, cause their SMV decline starts around age 30 and accelerates by 35.

Smart chicks understand the fleeting nature of youth and beauty and focus on having a family. They might go through a sexually adventurous and experimental phase lasting a few months to a few years, but they understand that they should have a good route from maidan to mother to crone. It’s not hard, and most chicks’s grandmas could probably tell them what to do.

I should stop posting this kind of shit… there’s so much of it… yet delusion is kind of fascinating… I think the best players understand delusion pretty well.

Why nurses or teachers are positive signs for longer-term relationships

Hard-core players who want to f**k around can ignore this one, but I mentioned to a player that teachers and nurses are good female occupations for long-term partners. Why?

smart men looking for a long-term partner should look at a woman’s job situation… a woman out of school who has no work or work history whatever is probably showing that there is something wrong with her… but a woman in a corporate job is not that appealing to most similarly situated men. When I am evaluating women for long term situations, two jobs in particular stand out, teacher and nurse. They are both jobs that are easy to leave at the job (don’t demand 50+ hour weeks) and they are both jobs that make it easy to leave for a year or two to have a family.

There are a lot of women who bring nothing to relationships apart from their p***ies… and then they are surprised… where are the GOOD men?

Teachers and nurses make fine money and both jobs can easily be left at work, unlike many modern corporate jobs. Both of them have a caring / empathy component that is good for men. Both jobs are easy to leave for a couple years to do child-bearing and early rearing. Both jobs convey that a woman is smart enough to get into a line of work that’s super compatible with having a family. Obviously, there are many teachers and nurses who would make terrible long-term partners, so you don’t need to tell me that in the comments. I know that and so do you.

It’s also true that some corporate women or flakey artistic bohemians who would make good long-term partners. Judge an individual in her totality, not just her profession. But if I hear “teacher” or “nurse,” that’s a grain of sand on the “long-term partner” side of the scale, and if I hear “boring corporate harridan” that’s a grain on the other side. If a nurse starts telling me about how she cuts herself, how she hates men because of her non-existent relationship with her father, and about how she is a women’s “rights” (special privilege) advocate… then she’s out and it’s on to the next one. A boring corporate harridan who talks about how she has chosen a set of skills and abilities that make it easy for her to have a family… about how she prioritizes family over work… about how she is close with her parents… that’s the opposite…. she’s a good choice… a sign of something is not the thing itself.

Age discrepancy is also an important question for longer-term relationships. I’m very unlikely to get into a serious relationship with a woman younger than 25 or who is still in school. That way lies madness. Yes, younger-hotter-tighter is cool, but that’s also setting yourself up for dissolution and, worse, divorce. The number of exceptions here is super small. If the age gap gets too large, a man is probably setting himself up for failure. If I met the right 23 year old who wanted to be a co-parent… maybe… but we’re also getting to very unusual fringe corner cases.

Yes, it is possible to consciously seek and seed a co-parenting relationship with a much younger women… I know another player who seems to be doing something like this… but it’s so rare that I mention it to be complete without expecting it to be relevant to most guys. If you want such an arrangement and find such a relationship, congratulations, but I don’t think many of them are out there.

Unlike some of the guys excreting their bile online, I’m also fine with the woman making more money than the man, if many other factors are in her favor. Many guys are insecure or threatened by this notion, but I’m not. If she makes $$$$, that’s nice, but the number of attractive women who make a lot of money and also have other good characteristics for long-term partners… we’re again talking about a super small group. I have run into some, most of them being physicians. It’s like hot female engineers… I have run into one or two of them, too… they’re super rare as well. Generic advice needs to aim for the median cases, not the cases three and four standard deviations out there. There are many millions of attractive teachers and nurses out there, some of them young and cute, and the jobs are easy enough to train for and get that they don’t exclude the overwhelming majority of hot chicks, as engineering, computer science, starting your own company, and law tend to do.

An article that inadvertently reveals why women who don’t have kids are permanently damaged

The article is not about that, however, “An Ode to ‘the Moms:’ My friends’ mothers gave me Band-Aids, drove me home, and taught me something about grown womanhood.” The amount of anti-maternal material in the media is epic, so it’s nice to see a small corrective. One unstated point, though, is that women aged 40+ (maybe 35+) derive the majority of their meaning in life and status among others from their children.

The corollary is that women who don’t have kids are (typically) damaged in ways that cannot be easily reversed. There is adoption, though that is unusual. The vast majority of women care much more about their families than their bullshit careers (most of the women the author praises are teachers: I have said before that my ears perk up when I hear about women who are teachers or nurses, as both jobs allow women time off easily for families). Most of our society and media work hard to conceal this point, and a disproportionate amount of media narrative is produced by spinsters.

It’s super fun to be a woman at the height of sexual market power, ages 16 – 28, but it’s not so much fun for childless women over the age of 40. Sexual market power shrinks and will never go up again: that is why so many spinsters are bitter, and no amount of feminist posturing will change that. It’s like being exiled from paradise. Default_friend has a bit where says that a healthy society needs a pathway for women to go from maiden -> mother -> crone. In our society, a lot of women try to ride out being maidens way too long, skip motherhood, and hit being “crones” way too early. 

Guys can derive more meaning from sex and sexuality well into their 40s (perhaps beyond), though I argue that most guys should also have families. Many guys are well placed to build their skills and careers in their 20s and start families in their 30s, because it takes that long to build up your game, your career, and your knowledge of and experience with women. Smart guys, however, if they find the highest quality, most-family-oriented woman, should keep her. There are a lot of emotionally vacuous women out there focused on the short term, and finding a woman who is neither and who is family focused is a significant thing today. 

I really, really, really hope this comment is just a troll

I really, really, really hope this comment is just a troll. Because if it isn’t, it’s incredibly sad. Yet the state it describes also seems to be becoming more common.

There is another long and interesting comment from the same person here.