I am going to start this with an email I received, with thanks to a young man named Jason who sent in a question that came with an overview of part of his life. In my mind that question was incisive and relevant enough that I want to answer it publicly, which he has granted me permission to do.

Without further ado, here’s the email:

I’m 21. I dated once when I was 16, and the way it ended hurt pretty badly. Naturally I blamed myself in the end, but looking back on it I see that, while I made mistakes, she was just as guilty. It took me until now to even discover the Men’s Human Rights Movement, and the more I watch, the more concerned with how cynical I become. I’m a University student attending school for a degree in Business Administration with a minor in Gaming Entrepreneurship with goals to go into the Esports Entertainment industry. I’ve never once considered anything other than the fact I was doing it for myself, so I’m not questioning my choices. However, there is one thing that I have become concerned about. You are right when you state in multiple videos you’ve posted that humans are naturally inclined to pair bond. I suppose my biggest concern is that, knowing female nature, and knowing that society is largely to blame for allowing it to get this far, is it possible to still love a woman and accept that nature may still exist even if she does respect your boundaries and values? I don’t want to believe swearing off women forever is the answer like MGTOW suggests, but I also have a hard time buying that I’ll really ever trust a woman knowing these things about how most women are. Really, the question boils down to this; is being Red Pilled synonymous with being cynical?

Ok, that’s the complete message; two brief paragraphs that cut to the core of a very important crossroads for those just ingesting the red pill, especially those doing it in the earlier parts of their lives.

Jason is 100% right about the paradox of modern relationships from a man’s perspective. Most of my observations force me to conclude that we live in a culture where men and women collude to produce a female psyche that, as it stands, is nothing short of a miserably poor investment for men.

It starts with the way we laud and encourage women for showing contempt for us.

If you don’t believe that, think of it this way. One of the subjects we see visited and revisited in men’s movement literature is that of male bashing in commercial advertising. We take issue with retailers for their treatment of men and fathers as hapless idiots who can’t tie their shoes without instructions from the women in their lives. With some regularity, you still see commentary and comments about boycotts of these companies.

What we don’t talk about too much, perhaps because it’s painful, is that advertisers are only doing what works. Stumbling, bumbling, pathetic men are a go-to option for advertisers because that is what the majority of women consumers want to see. Belittling and insulting men triggers them to buy.

Not to keep flogging the dead horse, but for this and other reasons we instill a level of assumed entitlement in women that we could reasonably use as part of the diagnostic criteria for personality disorders. We passionately encourage women to indulge in and brazenly exploit double standards that favor them as a part of the natural order. We make heroines of women when they viciously use the powerful tools we put at their disposal any time their privilege is denied.

If you notice I keep saying we, it’s because I mean it. None of this crap happens in a vacuum, which red pill men are well-served to remember (and often don’t). Remember the hateful way advertisers sell to women? Well, the trashing of you, your sons, your brothers and fathers has zero impact on male spending. You can belittle, bash, berate and derogate men all you want and their typical response is to reach in their wallet and give you their hard-earned money.

Like I said. WE.

So, Jason, is being red pill synonymous with being cynical? Well, to some degree it better be but I imagine that short answer doesn’t get to the heart of your question.

What I am really getting from this email is the question of whether your informed outlook on women will rob you of the positive parts of the pair bonding experience. It’s worth exploring, because as Jason pointed out quite rightly, another bit of reality in this picture for red pill men is that most all of them will continue to pair bond. That being inarguably true, we need an answer to the very legitimate question of whether taking a red pill is dooming a man to consciously chosen isolation for life.

Are there only two options for red pill men, the often-lonely life of a monk that most men don’t want, or living in hypervigilance, constantly wary of the women they’re with – and the lingering sense loneliness that surely comes with that?

It’s almost enough to make a man want a red pill detox. Almost.

I happen to think I have figured out a path through this problem. It’s a narrow, difficult path, but one that can at least nudge the problem toward the solved category. And it has a big plus. It is ultimately a huge step toward end-game red pill. It reveals the incredible usefulness of red pill thinking that goes far beyond our choices about women by forcing us to walk through some fire about our relationships with them.

I can even present you with a specific formula to make it happen. I call it, ‘how to stay red pill in a relationship with a woman in three incredibly difficult, torturous and painful steps.’ OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but you get my point. This stuff isn’t easy.

Step one is to get the difference between love and romantic love. This isn’t something you can intellectualize yourself into understanding. It is a big, big deal. It is so important that you are well advised spend a good deal of time thinking about it, and challenging yourself.

Romantic love, the kind that western humans have been steeped in for nearly a thousand years, is a gynocentric cancer that you have been afflicted with, likely since your days in the womb. You don’t need to be cynical to see this. You only have to have your eyes open and set in front of a functional brain.

Romantic love is a narrative of male sacrifice in exchange for sex and to some degree approval. It is likely based on and driven by the state of infatuation, a naturally occurring form of psychosis that serves human reproduction. Romantic love takes that temporary insanity and turns it into a mandate for men to maintain it in perpetuity. On its face, it’s a perfect storm of sexual selection, male sacrifice and male disposability, which is really just three different ways of saying gynocentrism.

It’s a fairy tale, gents; a dime store romance novel that should have no more place in the thinking of sane men than the synonymous self-castration. It is the “You complete me,” Jerry McGuire bullshit fantasy of love that delivers the upper hand to women. And it needs to be dispensed with.

It is funny how some westerners look condescendingly at arranged marriages. In other words, marriages between people who may not even have met, and who know next to nothing about each other. These are marriages that don’t originate with the spark of infatuation.

I have seen lots of westerners talk about these marriages in mocking terms, as though they were the quaint practices of some primitive cultures that are not up to their enlightened standards.

They sneer at the formation of arranged families, and fancy that marriages starting with a temporary, insane rush of neurochemicals is a more sophisticated standard. And in doing so they all but totally destroy the possibility of love.

Love and romantic love are two entirely different things. Love is a product of learned experience, negotiating conflicts and outright battles for control. It comes from enduring hardship as a team and to some degree developing mutual dependence.

It is an arduous, often bloody affair that requires both people share interests that serve them both, and sometimes to scratch and claw at each other resolve conflict. And interestingly, for couples first bonded by romantic love, it requires them to grieve the loss of that which brought them together. The expectations and standards of romantic, or more accurately gynocentric love, are simply impossible to maintain. And trying to only breeds a toxicity of which men are the primary victims. So, for love to arise, romantic love must die.

The point here is not to just compare east and west in how they traditionally choose to pair bond, but to point out that as a western, red pill man, your programmed beliefs about pair-bonding are deeply flawed.

Just because you have found great benefit in learning red pill philosophy doesn’t mean you are no longer affected by those beliefs. After all, ideas can change rapidly with new information. Beliefs, on the other hand, linger. They quietly and unconsciously pull strings in our thinking long after information to the contrary registers consciously.

Changing this requires a man to constantly challenge his beliefs. If a man thinks that women are responsible human beings capable of accountability, but he struggles to treat them that way, then it is because despite what he thinks, what he believes is that it is wrong to hold a woman’s feet to the fire. Thus, he feels guilty and stays silent and cowed.

Note what Jason said in his email. I am going to quote him again. “Naturally, I blamed myself in the end,” he said, “but looking back on it I see that, while I made mistakes, she was just as guilty.”

Naturally, I blamed myself in the end. Or, allow me to paraphrase him slightly here, ‘Blaming myself is natural.’

Straight out of the gynocentric handbook. A living artifact of romantic love, powerful enough to prompt any man who really looks at it to find an escape, into sexual isolation or perhaps into lifelong cynicism.

And here is where I am going to suggest that pragmatism is a lot more valuable than cynicism to a man contemplating pair bonding. The problem with romantic programming, which I remind you is your programming, is that infatuation, the very foundation of romantic love, prohibits pragmatism. It lends you toward creating an idealized picture of the woman, and then creating a fiction around her that fits your unrealistic view. In other words, it tends to have you making shit up because reality might destroy the neurochemical glow of infatuation.

How many times have you heard men say, “Oh, no, my Cupcake would never do that,” when cupcake is broadcasting at 50 thousand watts that she can’t be trusted any further than you could throw her car?

Most men, the lion’s share, are utterly doomed to mindlessly waxing poetic about Cupcake till she moves in for the kill. They are hopelessly mired in the gynocentric bog. They won’t be heard from again till archeologists in the 30th century unearth their mummified, and completely fleeced remains.

I don’t think that Jason has to be one of these men, and I don’t think that cynicism, or the isolation of a monk’s life is what is going to prevent it. If he chooses, Jason still has at least a shot at the only kind of love or contentment with pair bonding people ever really experience, as long as he is willing to hold his own feet to the fire, as well as any woman with which he gets involved.

I will be explaining all this in part two of this series, coming next.