04/06/19

A quick story came back to me last night which I wanted to share. It was from 2015 when I was still with my girlfriend – we’d been together for about a year and a half at this point – and she’d come to visit me at my university. We saw each other roughly once a week and we’d alternate going to see each other.

I remember we used to argue quite a lot. It would always begin with her saying something that didn’t sit right with me; for example in this story it was about the gender pay gap. I then told her about how it didn’t exist when you controlled for all the reasonable factors that influenced pay but she would never accept my line of arguing. I remember her go-to saying in any argument was to describe what I was saying as “unacceptable.”

Anyway, these arguments would go on and on and I wouldn’t back down because a) I felt that her logic had not yet been straightened and acquiescing to her illogical argument would be lying, and b), it had become a dominance battle and I sure as hell wasn’t going to back down. Both of these I felt on an instinctual level.

So eventually, of course, she would begin to cry: crying is the girl equivalent of GYDO. Oh, and this happened in public many, many times (her crying, not me whipping my member out!). I would sit or stand there with my arms crossed not saying anything but mentally trying to work out a way to get her to stop crying without losing frame (though of course at the time I had no conscious understanding of what frame was).

On this particular occasion we had taken the fight from the kitchen to the bedroom – the crying had continued – and she said:

“I’m scared that I love you more than you love me.”

My response was (and looking back this is pure comedy):

“I think…” pause, “…that it’s impossible for two people to love each other absolutely equally.”

She was stunned for a second and then the crying began again with a huge wail.

What a fantastic shit test and the sort you can expect in a relationship the longer it goes on: more drama, more fights, more crying. When a woman is single her hypergamy acts on her anxiety to ensure she looks for the highest value man she can attract. However once she’s in a relationship that anxiety goes towards testing the value of her partner. She’s no longer asking herself “can I find the right man?” and instead asks herself “did I choose the right man?”

Issues which she didn’t make a big deal out of to start with suddenly become big because her anxiety will use them as the logical fuel for the next test. An argument over the gender pay gap would have been laughed off as silly to begin with; it was just getting in the way of the fun. Now it becomes the conversation topic of the next big shit test. However it’s important to remember the content of the argument isn’t the shit test, it’s her emotional outburst. The shit test is to see how you deal with her breakdown.

Over time, as the shit test arms race intensifies, you’ll see more and more of the drama, fights and crying. I think women are programmed to expect a man to revert to a beta nature over the course of a relationship; this is of course helped by social conditioning which promotes ‘taming the bad boy’. Taming is evolutionarily beneficial: get the alpha genes and the beta provisioning and all from the same man so there’s no risk of being caught for infidelity. As she tries harder and harder, failing to turn her alpha into a beta, her brain short circuits, like a spanner getting caught in the works, which leads to ever greater swings of behaviour.

I could have given the ‘failed’ response: assure her we loved each other equally or that I loved her more. That might have calmed her down in the moment but it would have just killed the hypergamy right there and then. Remember that for a healthy relationship the woman has to love the man more than in return because that means he is the dominant one in the relationship. If he loves her more, he’ll be needy, clingy and possessive, all sure-fire signals that’ll cause her to realise that she needs to find a stronger man.

Luckily I responded as I did but not because I was Game aware. It was because (as I said earlier): I wouldn’t lie and I wouldn’t lose.

Just a few thoughts on relationships and what to expect.

Yours unfaithfully,

Thomas Crown