Masculine power is mainly power over yourself. You wilt in front of someone through lack of self-mastery, generally not because it is gun to the head type threatening. A dictator may be powerful over others but is personally petty and childish and has low self-esteem (i.e. he doesn’t feel worthy, so he reacts by just being mean. He thinks people won’t give him what he needs voluntarily, so has to take it).
You can’t really do what needs to be done in the outer world without self-mastery. A fitness test aka roadtest is just a little push to see if your gyroscope will get knocked off course, what your reaction is to the adversity of life. If there are no dragons to slay in the immediate vicinity, she will make some up. The common explanation of why women do this is that to protect her you have to be able to stand up to threats from outside, so you should at least be able to stand up to her. I have a twist on this. She wants you to lead, so to have a good relationship, you have to protect it from her trying to take over. She knows she there are times that she will become emotional and crazy and what she says shouldn’t be taken at face value. First and foremost, you have to be able to stand up to her and be a rock of stability who can hold her steady as she is going through an emotional grand mal seizure. That is the first area you have to have self-mastery in. If you don’t have that, self-mastery in other areas doesn’t matter because the relationship won’t truly function or may not even start. You can do it by truly having self-mastery and being able to absorb her attacks, or you can do it by being a sociopath who truly does not care anything about her except as an available cum dumpster (a roadtest only has a chance to rock you if you care about her opinion.)
What unmans you and causes you to not have this self-mastery? A girl doesn’t find herself threatening. The threat you feel is to pride if you crash and burn. That is totally happening within yourself, not from her, from your beliefs about how you might feel in the future. This is a frustrating thing, that we seem to have pretty good self-mastery in almost all areas of our lives except for with girls. I theorize that this is because the desire at a gut level for a pretty girl (love, respect, sex, envy of friends and society, basically anything emotionally or status wise that you could want seems to be satisfied by “pretty girl likes me”) goes way deeper than other desires in what you think of yourself. It is much stronger than what we feel in other areas, a desire to succeed, or another biological desire like for food and water. Being hungry or thirsty doesn’t make you feel like an unlovable person; your pride doesn’t suffer if you skip a meal.
The longer desire is unsatisfied, the keener it is, especially when you can reach out and grasp the object of it. If you haven’t eaten for 3 days, you don’t want a long meal with lots conversation and many small courses, you want all you can eat (I’ll pick on Golden Corral), and you want it now, and don’t talk to me, I am eating. This is one factor in wanting to force things forward with a woman you are interested in.
What is the strategy of getting it? With food, getting it is the easiest it has ever been in history. Drive to Golden Corral, pay, eat. All the heavy lifting is done by other people But what if it is closed? Someone else is definitely willing to take your money. I don’t doubt my ability to get food (or girls) because I am turned away at the door, even if they are letting other people in (she is interested in other guys just not in you) because I know that for someone who wants my business, I have what it takes (in the restaurant example, the money, in the girls example I know I am not physically or personally objectionable, so I am just waiting for someone who is mutually interested). This actually parallels the “Next” strategy you should have with girls. If she doesn’t seem interested pretty quickly, you should scratch her off the list of possibles. This doesn’t mean you need to immediately stop talking to her anymore than you wouldn’t talk to a friend, but don’t start investing emotions and fantasies into a situation that can never work out. Assuming Golden Corral is open, when the object of my desire is within my grasp, does it resist me? Do my nacho chips covered with liquid cheese and shrimp tell me I’m not their type and walk away? No of course not. But of course most girls will resist if you try to push it because as mentioned in a previous post, 90% of girls won’t be interested in any particular guy. Yes, there are some guys (generally tall and built) that a lot of girls seem to flock around, but this is the male reverse of the universally pretty girl. Guys flock around her because she is pretty by current societal definitions, not because she is their type, the most attractive girl to them. I think all guys can agree that, for example Shakira is attractive, but for just about every guy, there are plenty of everyday girls that are way more attractive to him because they match his personal tastes better.
With hunger and thirst, when the objective is at hand, but it resists us, our immediate impulse is to violence. You see a deer and want to eat it, but you don’t go up and say “how long have you lived around these woods?” No, you shoot it. If something is wrong with the water faucet, your first impulse to hit it out of frustration. Obviously these are not winning strategies with women, at least not if you want to avoid long prison sentences. In the restaurant example, what if you showed up and ordered, they handed you a receipt and you said, no I’m worth it, I deserve it. Of course it won’t work because it is a transaction; they are giving you a defined item in return for you giving them a defined item. If you try to use money directly in a transaction with a woman, even if it works, you may wind up in jail again since that’s a crime in a lot of places. Anything that smells of a transactional mindset on your part is off-putting, not necessarily because she is offended by you trying to “buy” her, but because of what it says about your image of yourself. From the obvious: buying drinks, expensive meals, gifts, pickup lines, to the subtle: trying to be confident because you think she will like it, not because it is something you want all the time. These aren’t all bad in and of themselves, but if they are what you are doing to try to get the girl, on some level you are signalling to her that you don’t think you are good enough as you are for her to want you, so you are doing something to get up to her level. I call this the me+ strategy, and in the short term and the long term, it does not work. Here’s a scary thought. Imagine a girl actually like you as you are, and you do this stuff and she realizes you don’t think you are good enough for her. She doesn’t know why you are doing it, since she likes you, but pretty quickly your behavior makes her feel all weird. Since you aren’t acting like the person she thinks you are, sooner or later, she accepts that you are who you seem to think you are, her attraction dies, and she leaves. Ouch, it was all smooth and good until you started acting like a puss because you thought you needed to do that to get her. I guarantee this total backfire has happened to you at least once.
To put the nail in the coffin, this whole thing with women isn’t transactional, anymore than any of your friendships are transactional. It is about a relationship. Why do you want a relationship? Sex? That is certainly at the root of what makes it different than a friendship. So, it can just be about sex, and they can pretend that it is something more as long as it lasts. Plenty of guys are looking for just that at the moment, and there are plenty of girls who will do one night stands, but they’d all rather be in a great relationship. Sex is the immediate, but of course everything I mentioned above that your gut says a pretty girl could provide is the whole package you are looking for. Sex, or (assuming you are waiting for marriage) at least the desire for it with each other by both parties, is not the goal of the relationship, but a signal that everything is firing on all cylinders. Sexually attractive for us starts with liking her looks, but have you ever known a girl like that to, for example, have a super annoying voice that just killed it for you when you thought of still hearing that voice 30 years down the line. If you are willing to overlook stuff like that because she is hot, you need to do some work on your personal standards (by which I mean what things would you need and what couldn’t you stand in a woman you would be with for the rest of your life). And your unwillingness to have standards and not know your own tastes is definitely not attractive. Even if you have well defined standards, that gut level halo effect that a pretty girl will provide all you want is a temptation to throw away your standards. If she really is the right person, she will match your standards and be appreciative that you have them, when so many guys she meets only seem to have the Standard that she is hot, and that is a box she has already ticked in their minds. Of course, like anything else, this can be turned into a silly pickup technique “I already know I want to sleep with her, but drawing boundaries with her will make her seek my approval (Mwuhahaha!), so I’ll draw some bs boundary ‘Can you cook, because if you can’t cook then I can’t be with you.'” Cooking skill actually is something I care about, but here the standard is being used in a me+ manner as a technique, not as a genuine question about something you actually care about. The halo effect of a pretty girl is why you can’t assume qualities. Ultimately, it’s a once in a lifetime choice, so she has to prove the qualities you are looking for before you believe them. She says she is y or z, and you need to watch her behavior to see whether it is just talk. Everyone thinks they are moral and make good decisions. Of course it is easy to create prideful standards: she has to be a multimillionaire supermodel with doctorate in philosophy. Real standards are what after consideration and experience you know is a fit with your personality, not a wishlist, but what you know will make you happy. Think for a moment about why your friends are your friends. You both are close enough matches for each other’s standards of what a good friend is like, otherwise you won’t be friends for long. This I would call personal attractivness. Sexual attractiveness is quick and easy for both you and the girl to evaluate. Knowing whether you have personal attractiveness for each other is something that takes longer and requires using your head a lot more, but in both dimensions, either you are feeling it, or you aren’t. As you confirm more and more that you are what each other is looking for, you are able to progressively let your doubts go away and really fall in love.
Michael’s comments:
I really liked this. The point is that you have standards. You don’t “need to have standards”, you already have standards that are more or less inborn; you may need to spend some time discovering what they are. Betraying your standards, paradoxically, won’t get you what you want. She will sense that you are betraying your standards and what that communicates about you. At that point attraction dies.
