the secret sauce? men only have two levers to find a relationship: proximity and power. power is status, wealth, athleticism, competence, social approval, authority etc. we’ve known 80 year old male celebrities dating 20 year old girls but if you look around, you’ll also see the average guy who can fix the kitchen faucet doing just the same. the difference? the celebrity has almost entirely solved the proximity problem by way of popularity. his power also has a rare compounding effect: when you have solved both proximity and power by an order of magnitude than the average man, it attracts more girls which alone attracts even more girls. girl math is being attracted to higher demand.1
as a man you either have to have power or show enough confidence to exude power. there’s a lot to unpack here, probably worth writing a book about but i resist the urge to open the can of worms. dating apps were supposed to solve for proximity for everyone but they exacerbate the darker sides of both human nature (eg. hypergamy) and social progress (eg. liberation). i’ve written more than i wanted to about this.
plenty of fish? the average single man’s rarest commodity is attention (from others), unless he has managed to earn both proximity and power. don’t squander it when you get it! our lives are astonishingly insignificant considering how important we feel about ourselves. we live in a solipsistic thought-bubble. life is but a momentary sensorial perception made possible by abiogenesis inside a gravitational well. so when you have the chance, create your progeny. sustain life and your lineage. after all that is the crux and purpose of every life that has ever been on earth.
the easiest chance to build a family might be that sweet cutie you met (or avoided meeting) in college because college has the biggest shoal of fish you’ll ever find around you. don’t miss that catch! sure, it might be boring later on and has a statistically significant chance of ending in divorce. but all of life is only as happy and as nihilistic as it ever is. there’s nothing more! unless you have an overarching purpose - like eschatological bliss or building interplanetary civilization - you’ll regret having to die without a trace if you don’t have children.
how to avoid a breakup, lesson 1. feminine nature is an emotional storm. the capriciousness you feel from her is only a fraction of what she feels inside. arguing with women is definitely a sport. but once a man participates in it he will be disqualified. he ceases to become the rock she can lean on. think of it as evolution’s way of making women test a man’s strength. evolutionarily she has a lot to risk by giving you a chance (although things have changed in the last 100 years). this is where rational, logical, and analytical men fail. add a bit of emotion and sensitivity into it from your effeminate anima (if you have one), the relationship disappears!
set boundaries if you’re dealing with a wild card. leave if they are consistently broken. but don’t stay and try to refute her. my male canon event was a hyper-conflicted relationship with mutually deep chemistry. i was supposed to leave it long before i finally did, but i still respect her for what she taught me.
how to avoid a breakup, lesson 2: be desirable. this could mean anything from hygiene to maintaining your dad bod to being powerful enough to attract other females. it sounds wild but women find men who are taken highly attractive. you don’t have to cheat. in fact don’t cheat. but be desirable.
the heartbreak: this one's brutal! no two people ever fall in love with each other. only one does in every love story on earth. well, not a showstopper for long term relationships because we evolved prefrontal cortex (long term planning, decision making) on top of the limbic system (emotions, sexuality). but if you must make the tormenting walk from limerence (attachment) to anagapesis (detachment), it’s brutal. we all deal with it differently. some of us traipse over tomes of poetry. some of us reinvent ourselves. some go to dark places. the one helpful skill would be spotting and not falling for a narcissist2. despite the popularity of the term, narcissists are rare predators. they can entice more than one prey at a time. if your relationship runs through the below loop, be careful.
attraction —> ambiguity —> inconsistency —> unaccountability —> lovebombing
if each of these stages, good and bad ones, feel unbelievably intense you might be dealing with a narcissist.
demand-based attraction doesn’t work the other way - women orbited by men are undesirable due to evolutionary reasons. in defense of women though, they are attracted to things men have some control over - both power and proximity. but men are primarily attracted to something women don’t have much control over - genetics or how good-looking she is. but i will defend men here since we’re talking about the average man. in an online gender-equitable dating market, men and women have equal control over the power-proximity duo. so the average man will struggle to differentiate. but a woman who’s not severely dysgenic and takes some care of herself can slalom through the dating market and have her way. as a man “taking care of yourself” will get you zero attention on hinge.
note that most mental health studies have been focused on male perpetrators due to reported cases of victims being mostly women. women talk more - to mothers, sisters, friends, and therapists. but it has been recently shown that female narcissists are under-reported. they aren’t testosterone-driven aggressors but they can be dangerously manipulative and emotionally fatal. narcissists can be upstanding citizens, loving husbands, wives, and caretakers. they are simply shielding a glass deep inside, not actively preying on everyone that comes along.