Tuesday, October 16, 2012

The Real "Happily Ever After"


It’s rare that I run across anything Red Pill friendly over at HuffPo, but  the other day I came across a very telling post from a blogger, Martha Lyles.  She is essentially writing a letter to herself, from her modern perspective as a wife and mother and grandmother to the 20 year old woman she was, who was so excited about her Big Party.  Ironically, this was in the “Religion” section, not the “Women”, “Weddings” or “Divorce” sections (and note there is no “Men” section...and the Democrats wonder why more men don't vote for them...) It’s entitled “Letter To A Young Bride After 43 Years Of Marriage”, and it’s a wonderful retrospective on her marriage (as opposed to her “wedding”).


 I’ll let you read the whole thing – it’s quite poignant – but there is one quote I want to hone in on:

“...The same goes for being a wife. You'll marvel at Dick's unswerving commitment. You'll learn to put him first and -- believe it or not -- you'll delight in doing so. You'll see your role as his helpmate and cheerleader. You'll pack his bags for business trips, tucking love notes under ties. You'll view all the joys in your life as gifts from above, like the six wide-eyed, rosy-cheeked grandkids who clamor for your cookies and your kisses. And you'll sense, time and again, the grace conferred in your wedding Mass sustaining you as husband and wife.”

Religious sentiment aside for a moment, consider the perspective: “You’ll learn to put him first and – believe it or not – you’ll delight in doing so.”

This is not, as you might think, a “see, I toldya so!” about male dominance in a relationship.  This is a “see, I toldya so!” about how you don’t get divorced.

It's also a glimpse into the real, Red Pill reality of Happily Ever After (HEA), the romantic nirvana that inspires romance novels, mommy porn, and soap operas.


When you want to study how to do something, the two areas you focus on are “successes” (to establish a base-line metric) and “failures” (to determine how deviations from protocol derail successes).  Athol spent a considerable time in marriage forums preparing for his book, and if you have to then you can see how learning from other people's failures can be valuable for avoiding hasty divorce.  However, if you want to know how to keep your marriage going, it's a good idea to not just focus on the failures but spend some time looking at successes to inform your marital toolkit.

After all, what is a “successful marriage”?  Certainly, one in which you aren’t getting divorced has to be held as a basic standard.  That doesn’t mean that your marriage is a success if you aren’t divorced, it just means that it’s “failing”, not “failed”.

When women in their youth begin to form their True Love inspired Happily Ever After fantasy, it rarely includes things like packing suitcases for their husband’s business trips or struggling through childbirth alone while your husband is on deployment.  Or the ugly reality that is early childhood development.  For many modern young women, the idea of “having kids” is so abstract and glamorized and sanitized for them by our culture that they don't understand the level of involvement necessary to keep them from becoming willfully ignorant drains on society.



To young women today, it's as if children were a status symbol, not a new life, merely an option like a new car with leather interior, and not a life-long personal commitment.  They are allured by the feminist ideal of “equality” and "equal opportunity", which means that they see family and children (and eventual divorce and remarriage) as part of the expected checklist -- and their dedication to "equality" means they expect that whatever poor Beta chump they marry will handle all the details.  (Or, conversely, that she will marry well enough to have servants to care for them like her favorite celebs.)  "Happily Ever After" is a gauzy  vague cloud of ill-defined bliss that follows the Honeymoon to them, the natural and inevitable conclusion to "True Love".

But True Love, Red Pill style implies a host of boring, mundane, petty little compromises that do little to empower you as a woman or see you reach “your full potential” in the feminist sense.  I recently read another screed at HuffPo (not important enough to hunt down the quote) about how Michelle Obama shouldn’t have said “Being a Mother is my most important job”, because that put too much pressure on everyone to reproduce and emphasize their children over their career elements.   She offered instead “Being a Woman is my most important job”, with motherhood and relationships and such secondary to her solipsistic “all about me” perspective.  She didn’t even mention a husband, except as an annoyance that got in her way.  Motherhood, to feminism, is a bother, a needless distraction away from the self-indulgent achievement-based Matrix climb for fame, cash and prizes. 

And the term “wife” is anathema to feminists.  When a feminist reflexively uses the term, it’s almost apologetic.  “Husband” is often used with a proud sense of ownership, like she just got a great lease on a car, but a feminist woman rarely describes herself as a “wife” unless she’s in trouble.  And a feminist has very little, if any, ideological instruction on being a wife save how to end the practice.   Feminism celebrates divorce and punishes success when it comes to marriage.

Now, if you’re a long-term carousel rider with a fat trust fund, then sure, a string of wealthy ex-husbands while you assert your feminist privilege doesn’t hurt anyone but those poor chumps.  Such childless, often sexless unions in the UMC have been a social bloodsport for decades.  But once you start getting kids involved, shit gets real.  You aren’t just splitting up the CD collection when you divorce, you’re splitting up a family with people who depend on you, and that’s got jack to do with your self-important career goals.  The feminist approach to "family" in general is little better than their approach to "marriage".  Gentlemen, you are warned.

But back to the successes.  As I was saying, it’s important, if you want to avoid divorce, to study what goes right, as well as what goes wrong.  This wonderful article is by a woman with a 43 year track record willing to impart some cosmic wisdom on you, ladies.  Listen up.  This is what Happily Ever After looks like, not three ex-husbands and a lonely condo full of cats in Miami.

Feminists can often manage to get married . . . they can rarely manage to stay married.  And very, very few can be said to be in "happy" marriages (marriages in which both parties can consistently say that they are happy with the way things are going).  And part of the reason has nothing to do with ideology -- it's because they don’t know how to be married.  In attempting to re-write the social rules of marriage, feminism's built-in escape hatch made the effort to work on a marriage a lot harder than ending it.  Feminists can become brides pretty easily, thanks to the power of pussy.  They can just as easily become ex-wives, with a stroke of a pen.  They rarely become "wives" (under the Rectification of Names).  So for all of their vaunted empowerment, it seems that feminism insists that an empowered feminist woman can do ANYTHING . . . except be a good wife.

That, of course, fuels hypergamy and divorce and other crap, but the plain fact is that feminism has rejected the Happily Ever After in favor of the EPL divorce, and now we have a nation of women bellyaching that they STILL aren't happy, despite getting everything their heart desired for 40 years.  They want their Happily Ever After, but they aren't willing to do the work required.  And Happily Ever After requires a lot of work.  Just ask Martha Lyles.

This woman was a wife.  She had a husband.  She didn’t have a co-equal partner in her relationship, she had a captain of her ship to whom she was loyal and respectful.  She did things for him that a feminist considers demeaning: packed his suitcase, quit school, ended her career aspirations for his benefit, raised his children, cooked his meals.  She deferred to him in important ways, and often in unimportant ways, not because the custom or religious rite demanded it, but because that’s how successful marriages work.

She doesn't write about the sacrifices her husband may have made -- that's his story, not hers.  She doesn't write about how hard it was and how regretful she is of her missed opportunities.  She writes of the sacrifices of a woman in her marriage, but she also writes of the rewards.  The Happily Ever After.  Grandchildren, a big happy family, and a great husband she adores and looks up to.  And she doesn’t just mention he’s a “great husband”, she describes an important attribute of his greatness in his devotion and thoroughness in helping her fight cancer.  No mere domineering chauvinist is likely to do that.  He repaid her sacrifice and devotion with his loyalty and steadfastness, not merely providing practical support during her struggle, but being her unwavering rock to which she clung as she wrestled with her own mortality.


Any of your weak-willed Beta future ex- husbands going to do that, feminists?  Good luck.

The important thing to take away from this success story is simple: the author was not merely extolling the virtues of marriage, but she was demonstrating the necessary dedication to fulfilling Happily Ever After.

You don’t ever plan to get cancer in Happily Ever After.  But you do get a strong and resilient Prince Charming willing to stand over your wounded body with a sword, keeping the monsters at bay.  You don’t imagine that you’ll get piles of diapers and bills and bad report cards and problem children in Happily Ever After.  But you do get a strong, disciplined father to keep order and enforce policy among your children until they can do it on their own.  You might conceivably envision grandchildren in your Happily Ever After, sitting around rosy-cheeked and respectful of you.  But you probably don’t understand how to get to that point – and truly appreciate it – because you have to first raise your own brood to adulthood and steer them toward their own productive relationship before you get rosy-cheeked grandbabies.

 For those feminists who feel they can have a “co-equal partnership” with a man, while secretly exerting feminine privilege as a means of manipulating and controlling your husband until you lose all respect and desire for him, you are forever denied this Happily Ever After.  Because you refuse to do the work and be a wife to your husband.  You get the EPL version, in which you marry a billionaire after spending your ex-husband’s money on eating, praying, and loving.  Oh, and good luck with that billionaire – I hear there are simply scads of them around.

(Or was that cats?)

But it's not just a bust for single feminist career gals.  It works both ways.

For those men who have eschewed the possibility of marriage in the pursuit of a permanent ticket to the Puerarchy, letting your bad experiences and fear of rejection give you a rationalization why you shouldn’t be required to invest in a 50-50 shot at success, please believe me when I tell you sincerely that I appreciate your willingness to Go Your Own Way.  But you, too, are exempt from this Happily Ever After.  In truth, you may change your mind at some point, when you are older and your perspectives change.  Our sperm is viable into our 70s, and a mid-life family has a lot of advantages.  But if you are committed to being uncommitted to a woman, then expect a long, slow decline with fewer friends alive every year, until you are alone, babbling incoherently to robots in some distant future retirement community.


Marriage is by no means for everyone.  But it is not, as some would contend, not for anyone.  It’s a trade-off, an exchange of commitments and obligations and sacrifices and dedications and courtesies and fears and delights and secrets and trusts and weaknesses and power and – yes – financial considerations and sex, and if you are not prepared to indulge in that kind of personal commitment and dedication (and few 20 year olds of this generation are) then I encourage you to avoid the issue entirely.  Believe me, it will take the pressure off to not have to worry about marriage and family.

So put “Happily Ever After” away in your mind not as "mythical" but merely as forever out of reach.  Substitute some government-subsidized retirement plan at a tropical resort where you’ll expire on the golf course or in your sleep . . . alone.  Imagine a world in which you are by yourself at age 50 and the doctor mentions cancer and you realize that since your sister died you have no one in the world to call and talk to about it.  That’s the "swinging single" alternative to Happily Ever After.  When you’re writing up your last will and testament, and you realize that everything you own and collected and cared for will go to your niece in nephew who live in another state and who might pass you in the grocery store without recognizing you, that’s what you get when you’ve lost Happily Ever After.  The real Happily Ever After.

Because Happily Ever After doesn’t mean a blissful paradise of champagne and strawberries and anniversary dinners in four-star restaurants.  It doesn’t mean kinky hotel sex and romantic walks on the beach as a matter of course.  There are few diamonds in for-real HEA.  You want the truth?  Happily Ever After can be brutal, as anyone’s life can be brutal.  But Happily Ever After softens the brutality with a thick protective layer of humanity, wherein the love you pledged at the altar has grown between the two of you and expanded and transformed until it supports a web of such love that echoes across generations. 

When you’re surrounded by your wife and your children and their spouses, all deeply concerned about your well-being and quality of life when your body betrays you, that’s Happily Ever After.

When your sons, grown men all, and your grandsons drop everything in their busy lives to rush to your bedside and then spring into action to build a wheelchair ramp you didn’t think you’d need, that’s Happily Ever After.

When your daughter-in-law enlists the aid of experts and researches the furthest reaches of medical science on your behalf, motivated by love and pure, unadulterated respect for the only father she has left, that’s Happily Ever After.

When an entire community floods your house with calls assuring their support, based on their deep respect for who you are and what you’ve done to touch their lives, that’s Happily Ever After.

When your wife holds your hand and cries so you won’t have to when you tell the doctor to go ahead and take the leg, that’s Happily Ever After.


This month, Papa Ironwood got an up close and personal look at the stark nature of Happily Ever After . . . and compared to the alternative, he considers himself a very blessed man.  I think it made the decades of sacrifice and effort and toil to keep his marriage and his family a going concern worthwhile.  Whether or not you agree with him, well, let's just say that he's got the benefit of experience to support his position.

But then, he's always been wiser than the rest of us.  He wanted Happily Ever After . . . so he built it for his wife and kids, one hug, one kiss, one drop of sweat and one tear at a time.

39 comments:

  1. One of the biggest breakthroughs in my marriage was when my wife and I were both struggling to define our roles within it because we'd both had shitty role models growing up, and we went to my family Christmas. Watching my grandparents surrounded by kids and grandkids and great grandkids who adored them, thinking about all they had been through in their decades together, the relationship they had developed raising a family and running a business together... we just looked at each other that night and knew that was the model we wanted to pursue. It took awhile longer for us to realize that pursuing this model would require divesting ourselves from some of the sacred touchstones of the American culture we had been awash in since birth... which was not too difficult because she had always had a foot in another culture and I was raised in a sort of rural island of old-school values (which I had dismissed at a young age as naive and uninformed).

    Great post, Ian. One of my favorites of yours.

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  2. Beautiful post, love the artwork you use for this blog!

    "So for all of their vaunted empowerment, it seems that feminism insists that an empowered feminist woman can do ANYTHING . . . except be a good wife."

    My latest post I've been working on is exactly about this, but now I see I'm going to have to edit it thanks to some of the things you've written here.

    Keep up the great work!

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  3. "For those men who have eschewed the possibility of marriage in the pursuit of a permanent ticket to the Puerarchy, letting your bad experiences and fear of rejection give you a rationalization why you shouldn’t be required to invest in a 50-50 shot at success, please believe me when I tell you sincerely that I appreciate your willingness to Go Your Own Way..."

    Sorry, but bad experiences and constant rejection for the most mediocre reasons (e.g., you're not tall enough, you don't make more money than me, you don't have a glamorous job, you don't drive the 'right' car or have the 'right' haircut or wear the 'right' clothes or have the 'right' line of patter, etc., etc.) gives one a jaundiced view of today's privileged princesses.
    And the odds of a man having a marriage that doesn't end in 'Family' Court are not 50-50 -- they're more like 60-40 or 70-30 against him (with a 70% probability of the wife initiating the divorce), even though he is a great provider, loves his kids, isn't abusive and doesn't smoke, drink, gamble, or cheat. His only fault is that the wife finds him 'boring' and isn't 'happy'.

    "But if you are committed to being uncommitted to a woman, then expect a long, slow decline with fewer friends alive every year, until you are alone, babbling incoherently to robots in some distant future retirement community."

    As revolting as the above sounds, I think that I would much prefer the above scenario than to be in my 70's and have to go to work using a walker, all so that I am able to pay my court-mandated 'alimony' until the day that I drop dead.
    With Marriage 2.0, feminist-approved Churchianity, and the legal system the way it is, the only way for a man to protect himself is to GHOW.

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    1. Or do a MUCH better job at Wife Selection and Vetting.

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    2. I don't think it works that way. A good wife has to be extremely counter culture. Do you really mean that there are a lot of counter culture women around, but that it is not easy to identify them?

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  4. This is a perfect way to say what I've had rattling in my brain for weeks now. We must raise children to be prepared for what happens after the honeymoon. I wish I had known.

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  5. Outstanding post. It truly captures the beauty which is possible in marriage.

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  6. Extremely profound. Thank you so much. This quote rocked me:

    "When your sons, grown men all, and your grandsons drop everything in their busy lives to rush to your bedside and then spring into action to build a wheelchair ramp you didn’t think you’d need, that’s Happily Ever After."

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  7. That was damn good writing. Fess up; you felt it didn't you?

    I weigh all the bullshit that could happen to my marriage - drifting apart, infidelity, ass-rape in court, etc. - against my son telling me that for his birthday he wants me to stay home from work and my daughter telling me to grab her feet and do the rocket ship, and I'll take the risk of transplanting my red pill mentality inside of marriage any day. When I'm at work, or when life sucks ass, those memories of my kids erase all the grief. All we'll have left after a long life, regardless of whether we take the marriage path or single game path, are our memories. And kids are some powerful, awesome memory makers.

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  8. Or do a MUCH better job at Wife Selection and Vetting


    relationship with ANY female in the matriarchy -- especially marriage under feminist Civil/Criminal/Family Law -- is placing your life in the hands of woman, and her state

    the fantasy that if men just "took reponsibility" and "manned-up to do a better job" at vetting and selection is willfully to obcure reality, and to place the onus (yet again!) on men to find haystack needles

    . . . and when those men inevitably fail in the gynocracies, and are crushed by the gynocracies, they just need to shoulder responsibility, and try harder in "vetting" and "selection" next time

    what nonsense

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    1. Yeah, I would also say that you're not marrying a woman, you're marrying a culture. You either have to move to a better culture or find a counter culture woman. I think it is easy to IDENTIFY such a woman, but hard to FIND her.

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  9. @Ray: I knew the system was fooked before I got married. But I needed/wanted to have kids. The impulse was too strong. So what is a man like me to do? That's an honest question I'd like answered. Way I see it, my only other option besides getting married is finding a woman who wants to birth a kid and sign over her rights to be in the kid's life and I can raise him without fear of her divorcing/cheating on me and taking half my shit. That just seems like an impossible alternative to me. So, I chose to risk marriage. Now that I've found game and frame I'm better equipped to avoid divorce/cheat/ass-rape court. Sure the risk is there still, but damn, man, a man can get killed by over 600 ways - risk is everywhere.

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  10. But Happily Ever After softens the brutality with a thick protective layer of humanity, wherein the love you pledged at the altar has grown between the two of you and expanded and transformed until it supports a web of such love that echoes across generations.

    so true, this is my favorite post of yours, you just keep getting better. (I liked GFE a lot too)

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  11. Great post, Ian. We didn't do everything right but I guess we did enough. Since both of us finding the Red Pill recently so many more things fell into place and we are living that Happily Ever After. No, its not easy and we let our children see that in our lives; we never shielded them from the realities of what marriage is (nor did we let them watch Disney). They know its hard, and they have each said they want a relationship like my husband and I have and they know what it takes to get it. They see the improvements and the changes over the past couple of years and we've talked to them about it so that they understand more and can make good choices and be prepared to put in the hard work of marriage.

    Thank you for this post. It's a must read for all.

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  12. Ian, I have a question that came to mind after commenting above about our children seeing an example of Happily Ever After marriage. As the last of those who enjoy Marriage 1.0 die who will write letters like the one referenced in your post. Will there be enough Happily Ever After Marriage 2.0 examples for the younger generation to see and witness what needs to be done to achieve it? Many sites such as yours give the positive side of marriage and that a good one is still possible today; but is it enough to influence the future? Will there be the continued trend we see or will there be a turning as more people have their eyes opened and see? Are there enough voices like Athol's to make a difference? I know it's more than one question, but I am curious what your thoughts are on this, or will that be in your book? If you covered this and I missed it somewhere in the archives you could just direct me there. Thank you.

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    1. The only way that marriage, as such, will survive is if it IS rescued by us. The alternative is broken homes, miserable parents, half-orphaned children without fathers, and the reign of the Puerarchy getting worse and worse. I expect that in the next few years, as the 40-something single career gals start to realize that no one wants to breed with them, the next generation will start to wise up.

      I foresee a definite split between those who have a tradition of successful family life and those who have missed it. We'll see people gravitate more towards the two ends -- hard monogamy on the one side and hypergamous serial monogamy on the other -- and eventually there will be a cultural flip as enough people see the advantages to a robust and healthy family life and the disadvantages of raising a kid as a single mom subsidized by the state. Hell, the kids know the advantages and disadvantages already.

      Am I hopeful? Of course. More than most of the Manosphere, actually. It will take a decade or so of education and re-training, but once people understand that civil rights are one thing and gender-based reproductive rights are another, and truly appreciate the realities of their fertility options, then this little mess known as feminism will dry up.

      Dudes will stop marrying feminists, stop breeding with them, and they'll eventually die out. Not that they are the only culprits, but you can't run a patriarchal household (the only kind that can raise and transform a boy into a man) with feminism in your back pocket.

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    2. I think we should stop referring to it as feminism and instead call it fommunism or femmunism. Too many people associate feminism with equality for women. Eliminating alpha males is necessary to (and an end-goal of) achieving an all powerful communist state. Female equality was simply a means to and end.

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  13. Great post Ian, and great original letter. Thanks for drawing our attention to it. Some of the comments were sadly predictable.

    I liked this line from the letter: "the man who gives you a racing heart and peace of mind" which is the most succinct summation of a perfect alpha/beta combination I've ever read.

    Cheers, MrBurgundy.

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  14. This was just outstanding, Ian. Fantastic.

    deti

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  15. My three favorite blogs since stumbling upon "the manosphere" have all been written by married men (Rollo, dalrock, and Ian), and this site seems to be the most underrated (possibly due to the length of Ian's writings). It's ironic that his most popular entry seems to be a "man up and marry" article, veiled in anti-feminist red pill rhetoric. Ian seems to be the man in his marriage (as do dalrock and Rollo), so I enjoy their perspectives on relationships a great deal, but their situations don't really reflect a conceivable reality for most of us born after 1980.

    I'm glad some of the viewers have picked up on the subtle shaming language, like not marrying is some decision men make out of "fear," or the downsides of marriage boil down to a "lack of vetting." I would expect that from the Huffington Post or Slate comment section, but not Ian. 1) The assumption that there is a significant amount of women of marrying age, who are marriage material, anti-feminist, attractive, and single, is a huge reach. 2) If you manage to find one who you think fits this criteria, and decide to marry, you still have a far less than a 50% chance of having a successful marriage. 3) Culture is changing drastically. You can argue it's for better or for worse, but one thing is certain: American society is no longer a place where nuclear families are the norm, and government/women are not doing anything to slow this down or even acknowledge that it's a problem. Fatherhood and husbandry are not seen as necessary for society anymore, and that has serious implications for the future of the institution of marriage.

    It also seems strange to argue that marriage's best sell is essentially a retirement plan. For a man to trade in his freedom, risk financial ruin, and entertain decades of daily inanity so that he won't be lonely when he's 70 seems weak to say the least. First there's the obvious, that most men who get married die alone anyway. But more importantly, being a single man for 30-40 years and possibly dying alone is a much better deal than being married for 30-40 years and possibly dying alone anyway. This article is sweet and touching (I mean that seriously, not in a condescending tone), but honestly, what kind of trade off is 4 decades of your life for a storybook ending on your death bed, that may not even happen? WTF

    Anyway, I'm not on the "any man who gets married is an idiot" train, and I am genuinely hopeful that the men who do marry get it right. However, I think it's time that men seriously prepare themselves for alternatives. There's nothing wrong with being alone in old age; this is how you were born and how most men die. What you do in between is of far greater importance, and that can include maintaining multiple long-term relationships, serial monogamy, going your own way, or focusing on building a better network of male friends. There are so many opportunities afforded to men now, partially and unintentionally due to feminism, that it's not even necessary to marry to get the benefits of marriage. Women figured this out decades ago, and replaced us with government assistance, child support, and office jobs, yet so-called red pill men are still looking to women to find solace, life-long commitment, and personal fulfillment. Rollo said it best, men are the true romantics.

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  16. Ian:

    Outstanding post. This is the best answer I have seen to the anti-marriage rhetoric employed by both feminists and (some) MRA's.

    Tilted:

    You have identified some genuine issues with Marriage 2.0. However, most married men do not die alone. Their wives are likely to outlive them, and even if that is not the case their children will almost certainly do so.

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  17. Thraymachus, that may have been true previously, but the math doesn't add up today. If the majority of marriages end in divorce instead of death now, the woman may outlive the man but they're not husband and wife when he dies. Devoting your entire life to a marriage, on the off chance you may have a 70 year old woman at your bed side when you die, is a classic example of the male hamster.

    As for children, you can have those whether you're married or not. American women have figured this out and seemingly prefer it (thanks to the benefits they receive of course), but men are still clinging to the HEA for dear life, even after supposedly taking the red pill. "Learn game, learn game....so you can spend 40 years gaming the same woman everyday so she doesn't divorce you." This is like learning advanced culinary skills so that you can eat the same sandwich everyday. What a waste.

    Again, I sincerely do wish the best for men who DO choose to marry, and those who already are (especially Ian, dalrock, and Rollo- they provide invaluable info for men everywhere). I'm just against this emotional reasoning that marriage is a good bet as long as you "pick the right one," or more importantly, the best choice a man can make. This is simply not true for people born after 1980. Marriage is one of the least desirable life paths a man can take, especially if he has game. Build your wealth, travel, keep a harem, follow your dreams (your real dreams, the ones most married men have to give up), do what our fathers and grandfathers could only imagine. I'll gladly sacrifice a romantic death bed for a higher quality of life in my prime years.

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    1. Tilted, I understand what you're saying. Thought about that myself before the plunge. But I kept imagining me not marrying and having a kid then having my kid spend time with his mother with some other man in the house. Creeped me out. I'm trying to mold my own son, not share that influence with another man that may or may not be a danger to him. Know what I mean? But, yeah, fucked up trade offs with either path. A dude's just got to do his best and maintain frame and take no shit from wither a wife or female fling regardless of the path he takes.

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    2. Good luck to you brother. Quick question: What about getting married, in your opinion, is going to prevent your wife from divorcing you and having her new boyfriend around your son?

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    3. It's not the institution of marriage that prevents that, it's the active and proactive running of your marriage, coupled with adequate wife selection/vetting, that prevents that.

      Even then, there are no guarantees. Did some one make you some?

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    4. I don't expect any guarantees or absolutes in life. I'm speaking strictly of risk vs rewards. I honestly fail to see a rational argument for how the rewards of a relationship increase with marriage, yet 100% of us can list the objective risks. There is no equivocation or emotional language involved in the liability column. As soon as you ask a man to tell you what he gets out of marriage that he can't get with game and LTR (or mLTR), all of a sudden the red pill turns into the male hamster.

      Even ignoring the mountain of legal and financial reasons to not marry, just the concept of dread alone (Rollo and Roissy have numerous posts on this) keep you in a better position if you don't tie the knot. In a sane society, patriarchy is supported by the law (default fatherhood custody, ie: legal check on hypergamy). In our society, patriarchy is supported by keeping the law as far away from your relationship as possible.

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    5. @Tilted: I guess the way I saw it was, if I marry, with conventions the way they are and the constraints on infidelity the union "supposes", the odds of some other man raising/or being around my son were less than the 100% chance that would happen if we did so out of wedlock. But I see your point that having game would allow you to have your cake and eat it too. But from what I gather, the alpha with game can't even hold on to some chicks long enough to get a kid out of the house. I believe two years tops is all the alpha can tolerate even the hottest of chicks. Then what happens? The unmarried chick wants to share custody and if you've lived with her for any period time, the ass-rape courts might view you as a union anyway. As I said, fucked up situation all around. Game and frame are essential with whatever path we choose though. I believe I would have been divorced by now if I hadn't found it.

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    6. @Tilted....

      To quote.... "Of course the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you--if you don't play, you can't win." - Robert A. Heinlein

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  18. Well this is an impressive tribute to the upsides of a life-long pair bond.

    It all reminds me of a family ski trip from last year. My aunt celebrated her 50th birthday, so she reserved a few cabins from the wilderness and invited all extended family in there for a dugout weekend. Her mother - who is my maternal grandmother - was naturally also present.

    The weekend program wasn't anything extraordinary. At daytime we skied in the -25 Celsius chill. In the evenings the women cooked dinner and us men proceeded to get drunk and shoot the breeze about boats, motorbikes & other accessories. Even though it was nominally my aunt's birthday weekend, my grandma was usually the center of attention. As the oldest living member of our little 'clan', she's the de facto matriarch whenever these family gatherings take place. We like it that way, and she enjoys the chance to chat with all of her children and grandchildren.

    It's like a scene from a comedy. We take turns talking with grandma and when the current one is exhausted, the next one steps in and continues the conversation. But grandma never stops, she's a living family chronicle all the way to 19th century and she has a sharp (and very much red pill) eye on current event and social trends. You know how grandmas usually are.

    But I remember sitting there that weekend and thinking that that's her Happily Ever After. Not in those exact words, though, I thought of it more of as a reward for a well-lived life. My grandfather died in 1990, so it's been a long slog alone for her since, but she played her cards right along the way and now she's in a situation where all her children and grandchildren (who are on the same continent) are happy to sign up for a weekend in the middle of icy tundra for a family gathering. That's her reward. Us and our relationship with her.

    Women probably don't include 'leaving a legacy' among their life missions, at least in such extent as us men do, but that's the phrase she used when I discussed the family relationships, structures and duties with her. We, her progeny, are her mark in the world. And she's pleased with that.

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  19. That was a beautiful fairy-tale, directed, as it sometimes is, at the wrong audience.

    Improved "Wife-Selection and Vetting" would be a viable strategy if the recipients of such exercises actually existed. I'm not certain these kinds of women do, especially in the US.

    Dying alone, to be sure, would be a bitter pill to swallow. It is something I suspect even the most hard-hearted PUA and Game-practitioner thinks about at some time.

    For those increasing numbers of men who have taken the Red Pill, perhaps what should be made available--when the end arrives--is a Cyanide Pill.

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  20. "Le suicide est le dernier acte par lequel un homme puisse montrer qu'il a dominē sa vie."

    "Suicide is the last act by which a man can show that he hath dominated his life."

    - Henry de Montherlant

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  21. Beautiful post. It left me teary-eyed!

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  22. perhaps 100 years ago, we would express our agreement and appreciation for this essay with a golf-clap and "huzzah! huzzah!" Laconic internet shorthand for agreement and appreciation is "^WORD".

    My experience doesn't reconcile with [what I see as] paranoid and aggressively hostile rhetoric towards 'feminism' or 'chicks today' -- more so in the comments than Ian's essays. the women I know at work, socially, and everyday life are not exaggerated caricatures of Feminism. It smacks of sour grapes.

    However, when I exit my comfort zone I see a more complete cross section of society, and I realize that shallow, avaricious, vain, destructively promiscuous women exist. A couple of hours in a major airport shows couples that should never have married, parents who are indifferent or actively annoyed by their children, middle aged people soured and scarred by two-sided selfish relationships.

    I still say, good people exist. you won't find them in bars. if you are unhappy and lonely, lower your standards for appearance and you will find loyal and loving companionship.

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  23. You really work great for this post. Thank you for sharing!

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