Go read Matt’s post. Every word of it.
I agree with a lot of it. I won’t “fisk” (is it a fisk if you agree?) him here, or repeat what I said in the comments verbatim, but I have some thoughts —
– Regardless of what has happened to you. Man up. I had just made the decision and was working to get into shape last year when I had to have a knee surgery. My quadriceps still hasn’t come back entirely, but I’m working on it every day and I intend to drop some fat and gain some muscle as fast as possible. I’m going to start doing the Stronglifts exercises I can do with my knee still weak until it catches up. I’m not on here whining about it. I’m not posting to body-building websites whining about it. So whatever your knee surgery is, be it being divorced or cheated on or whatever — man up and improve your own life.
You can’t make someone do what you want them to. If that were possible, every person on earth would have bought all of my books and I’d be sitting in the mountains somewhere right now drinking thirty year old Scotch in a hot tub. You can’t force your wife to want you, or to stay married to you. And you shouldn’t want to. I don’t want someone to feel obligated to do anything for me; I want them to want to because I’m fucking awesome.
Be more awesome.
– Everything isn’t women’s fault, and every woman isn’t the same.
I was pretty fucking bitter before my wife and I got together, when it came to women. Mostly, because I made really poor choices about who I tried to date. I even, at times, compromised my preferences thinking I was asking too much. No, I wasn’t. I chose shitty women. It’s not their fault I chose to try and date them. They had all sorts of stupid orbitters (and for a time I was one), they felt like they were awesome princesses, and I didn’t bring enough to the table. But right now? This isn’t me trying to be egotistical or anything. Right now? I’m better off than any of them, and my wife is more attractive than any of them, and she and I are more sexually compatible.
Yeah, some of them were bitches. Yeah, some of them took advantage of my good nature. But some of the fuckups were my own fault. Some of them had blazing, neon signs above them that warned me to stay away. Some of them even warned me that they were crazy bitches and I got involved anyway.
If I pulled the pin on a grenade and stuck it in my pants pocket nobody would have sympathy for me.
Stop pulling pins on crazy bitch grenades. Learn the signs.
If you get burnt, fine. Tell us, fine. Don’t feel the need to paint with a broad brush. It doesn’t do anything other than give ammo to the crazy bitches on the internet who are obsessed with the Manosphere, because men dare disagree with their batshit crazy ideas.
Whining isn’t attractive.
Stop whining.
– If you have to say you’re alpha, you aren’t.
Don’t even talk about it. And the phrase for doing something beta isn’t beta. It’s “being a pussy.” The concept out dates the manosphere.
Stop being a pussy.
Finally, to me, the best parts of the Manosphere are the ones focusing on improving things — improving yourself (Art of Manliness for example), improving men’s standing (MRAs of all stripes), improving your financial situation (Cappy Cap), improving your aim (Say Uncle, etc). I like Matt because, despite being a bomb thrower on occasion, he seems genuinely interested in helping other men, and helping the Manosphere.
All that said, I cannot resist a crazy bitch story. I have a friend, who for the purposes of this post I will call Richard. He and I were both going through a dry spell with the ladies, and we were just out of our teens and thus ornery as fuck. We were conversing along those lines when probably the single craziest woman I’ve ever known put in her two cents that, when we were ready… the right girl would fall into our laps. This aggravated the living shit out of me, but Richard — the calm, collected, gentle giant — lost his shit. He replied as follows (part of it; I left off a few personal details):
People who haven’t been in this situation have this fucking annoying habit of saying, “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. It’ll work itself out.” They assume that there’s some inherent quality of the world in general that brings happy endings to good people. That’s a fucking lie. It’s like telling a person with cholesterol problems or diabetes to ignore their eating because it’s upsetting them. It’s the polite thing to do, and it’s a good way to fucking KILL someone. It doesn’t help. Problems don’t go away.
There are two lessons that I’ve learned from my experience with women, romantic and otherwise. One, women are natural hypocrites, and it’s damned nearly superhuman of a woman to not lie to herself, and thus everyone else she speaks to. Two, going with the flow gets you absolutely nowhere with a woman unless you’re rich, well-hung, or extremely attractive. Or if you have the potential to one day be rich–say an artist or musician–women sometimes fall for that, but generally just the gullible ones.
Don’t feed me bullshit about things working themselves out eventually. I’m not dumb enough to fall for that line.
His situation has since improved and he seems happy; she, for all her bluster, married a man in a different country who keeps her as though she’s some sort of decoration, and she has little to no freedom. I haven’t heard from her in years, probably since around the time of this discussion. Anyway, it goes with my general point — the outlook that things will improve themselves, and you just have to suffer and whine through them will fix them… not so much. You have to go out and make life happen.
Or, maybe she just fell into his lap.