Case Study: It’s not just the losers who end up here
She was perfect. He was perfect. It still wasn’t enough.
She is gone and he’s at the same place that that sexless loser. How did it happen? I’ll save that for the field reports, right now it’s important to point out the lie. I’ve used the lie myself. Sometimes it’s useful. So what’s the lie?
The lie is that this niche space we find ourselves in is a collection of losers learning to be better. It’s not. It never was. It only seems that way because losers are loud, losers love the sound of their own voice, and losers are more entertaining so we pay attention to them more often. That’s why this case study took me years to even find.
His name is Frenchie, he was in his 60s, and his issue was that he lost his wife and didn’t know what to do.
My takeaway, and yours, is that there are no guarantees. You can be the best dad, the best husband, have the best wife, go to the best church, have the greatest job and a frequent sex life while your amazing kids grow up to be great adults … and it still won’t matter. When you get Zero’d out, it doesn’t imply it’s your fault. There’s no shame in it. We’ve all been there. To a lesser extent, I was there.
I wrote about the two types of men in Praxeology volume 1. There is the guy you marry and the guy you fuck, and how both guys can end up in this same space. Frenchie was the guy who fucked. And he gets the same anger phase that everyone else gets. He does the same requisite work that everyone else needs. He has the same sidebar everyone else reads. Nothing changes because you think your situation is unique or special. We are all special, so it’s not that special.
There’s a reason for all the vitriol, all the misogyny, all the anger. If you’re angry you can’t read someone using therapist speak trying to calm you down. Fuck you I’m angry and I have every right to be angry! You don’t need to calm down, you need to know your anger is valid, is heard, and maybe you just want to be angry around angry people. It’s as close as it gets to therapy that doesn’t make you feel like a twink.
Note: I owe a lot of what I learned and my growth from Frenchie. He was the guy who encouraged me to write, who encouraged me to be better, and when I was being overly angry would point me to a more useful sort of banter in this space. He saw potential and it’s good to see that I’ve managed to achieve a bit of it.
Frenchie
I have just come home from a happy hour get together with six couples — and me. In the last few months I have created and deleted six Reddit accounts all with labels referencing some religious memetics. Why? Who knows? I no longer have any faith. I am in fact the angriest motherfucker you will ever meet. I keep hoping the anger is temporary.
I have to admit that it is the anger running through the redpill that keeps bringing me back. It embarrasses me to admit it, I guess the schadenfreude of it all draws me in. I read it and feel certain I am not so pathetic after all. I find I miss my favorite posters (MattyAnon, Training the Brain, and that one guy Inv3okerer or something like that who makes indiscriminate use of the word fag, so belligerent and very amusing.)
I should say, I am a widower of 8 months. I hate the term widower, but there it is. I am trying to emerge from a soul crushing grief. I haven't been incapacitated, but I’m close.
Compared to the marriages I see described here, mine was sublime. We met in college. We took turns supporting each other through grad and law school. We had four kids and all four were a joy. Every day was a holiday, every meal a banquet.
“For real,” as my youngest daughter would say. And she is so like my late wife that sometimes I just look at her and can’t even speak. Why am I even here? My youngest daughter told me it would help me understand the zeitgeist of young women. She says her current boyfriend has no ‘game.’ She says I need to develop some.
I am apparently, too sincere.
I’ve been on a few dates. My children try to push me back out there. I’ve never had any trouble meeting women, even while married. That remains true although I don’t understand these 30 year olds at all. Both my dates were very much younger than me. One 28, the other 31.
They just give it all away. I guess that’s dating.
I don't wish this on any of you.
It’s a typical first time field report. It’s less of a man working on an OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act) and more of a victim puke. In fairness, guys have never learned how to express ourselves in a way that jives with now having a vagina. I don’t know we ever have, historically. It turns out the Chilton manual for auto repair was a useful template, I don’t know how we didn’t think of that earlier. He gets there.
If you’ve ever wondered why I get so abrasive with guys claiming celibacy as an identity, or the ass model of Instagram-turned masculine influencer, this is why. There are guys like this, everywhere. Frenchie was like this. I was like this. A hundred other guys whom you’ve never heard of were like this. I can only speculate how many more are like this, but they are being gate-kept by the church, by their henpecking wives, and sometimes by their own egos. The wanting to live vicariously through the anger of the other sad sack men in the world was the only way the men of potential could find the help they need; now they are drowned out by the sound of faggotry.
What color is your Bugatti? Is it maroon? No, it’s useless pig slop.
Back to Frenchie.
He had a romanticized view of his marriage. He was happy, but she died while she was young, which is a whole other level of grief. Anyone he dates now is going to be compared to her. Not to his wife, but to his imagined ideal of his wife. No one can live up to that standard. She couldn’t meet that standard.
Agree to Disagree
When I was just getting my own red pilled shit together, there was me, and there was JackTenofHearts. You only remember a fifth of what you read, what you write, or what you listen to. You remember almost everything that you teach. We were both learning by teaching. If you’ve ever watched my Youtube series ‘Mids Watch’ you may know that Jack and I had diametrically opposed views of how to do this thing properly. In this case, how to get past one-itis for someone thats never coming back:
Jack
The traits you probably enjoyed most with your wife are her high self-esteem and low neuroticism. I would recommend avoiding the age 27-34 demographic because they will literally be the exact opposite. They'll "give it up early," and then become obsessed with the idea of getting married if you keep dating them for more than a few weeks. If you're looking for meaningful but gradual romantic companionship, these women probably aren't your best bet.
I would imagine you would like something like this. Meaningful, but gradual romantic companionship. Clearly a woman that is sexually interested in you will have sex with you, but some of them will also present that attraction in other ways. This is what I mean by high self-esteem and low neuroticism. If she's interesting enough and putting in her own work in the early dating period, and is otherwise physically affectionate, then you're less likely to have these moments where you wake up and think, “I just had sex with a woman I don't think I actually liked that much.”
And there's really no morality in my statement there. When I got divorced I very much wanted to have sex with a lot of women and liking them was tertiary criteria at best. But if you don't care to spin plates, don't. Your daughter just doesn't like seeing her dad feeling lonely and thinks some companionship with a ladyfriend would help and the most direct way is to "get good at dating." If that is enjoyable for you, then do it. If it's not, then don't.
You may want to consider talking to a grief counselor. You won't really understand why, but you'll feel better afterwards.
Being a filthy sailor who spent his 20s as a hobbyist of PUA, I found this horrible advice. It was the equivalent of what they call ‘monk mode’ where you shut off the outside world and then do inner work, whatever that means. It’s why I loved RuleZeroDad’s quote on Jack
“I’m pretty sure this guy doesn’t fuck, at all”
In reality, he was living in a fantasy world, and comparing modern women to that fantasy. No wonder he is miserable. I was 10 years common-law at that point, but I wasn’t so far from the single world that I forgot what it was like. RooshV put it best: until you fuck, nothing else you do even registers. By turning himself into a 60 year old eunuch waiting until marriage, all he would accomplish is paying chicks dinner tabs.
The issue is, and this goes for a lot of divorced guys as well, to embrace the hate-fuck. If no woman can meet the standard of your ex wife, or your departed wife, then stop trying. They are just women. They are neurotic and give it up easily. A good wife or even a bad wife takes years to build up that wife-goggles image where she can do no wrong and was the best thing ever. But a hate fuck is easy.
And here’s the thing. Every hate fuck I ever had was great. I get to work through some shit going on in my life, and the girl gets to feel like she made a man go crazy with her seductive prowess. It’s win win. And even if she suspects something may be up, chicks love mysteries like that. The only downside is you start getting interrogative, which feels strangely vulnerable when your nuts are airing out. Case in point, this next section:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Rian’s Substack to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.