The Real "Happily Ever After"

It’s rare that I run across anything Red Pill friendly over at HuffPo, but  the other day I came across a very telling post from a blogger, Martha Lyles.  She is essentially writing a letter to herself, from her modern perspective as a wife and mother and grandmother to the 20 year old woman she was, who was so excited about her Big Party.  Ironically, this was in the “Religion” section, not the “Women”, “Weddings” or “Divorce” sections (and note there is no “Men” section...and the Democrats wonder why more men don't vote for them...) It’s entitled “Letter To A Young Bride After 43 Years Of Marriage”, and it’s a wonderful retrospective on her marriage (as opposed to her “wedding”).

 I’ll let you read the whole thing – it’s quite poignant – but there is one quote I want to hone in on:

“...The same goes for being a wife. You'll marvel at Dick's unswerving commitment. You'll learn to put him first and -- believe it or not -- you'll delight in doing so. You'll see your role as his helpmate and cheerleader. You'll pack his bags for business trips, tucking love notes under ties. You'll view all the joys in your life as gifts from above, like the six wide-eyed, rosy-cheeked grandkids who clamor for your cookies and your kisses. And you'll sense, time and again, the grace conferred in your wedding Mass sustaining you as husband and wife.”

Religious sentiment aside for a moment, consider the perspective: “You’ll learn to put him first and – believe it or not – you’ll delight in doing so.”

This is not, as you might think, a “see, I toldya so!” about male dominance in a relationship.  This is a “see, I toldya so!” about how you don’t get divorced.

It's also a glimpse into the real, Red Pill reality of Happily Ever After (HEA), the romantic nirvana that inspires romance novels, mommy porn, and soap operas.

When you want to study how to do something, the two areas you focus on are “successes” (to establish a base-line metric) and “failures” (to determine how deviations from protocol derail successes).  Athol spent a considerable time in marriage forums preparing for his book, and if you have to then you can see how learning from other people's failures can be valuable for avoiding hasty divorce.  However, if you want to know how to keep your marriage going, it's a good idea to not just focus on the failures but spend some time looking at successes to inform your marital toolkit.

After all, what is a “successful marriage”?  Certainly, one in which you aren’t getting divorced has to be held as a basic standard.  That doesn’t mean that your marriage is a success if you aren’t divorced, it just means that it’s “failing”, not “failed”.

When women in their youth begin to form their True Love inspired Happily Ever After fantasy, it rarely includes things like packing suitcases for their husband’s business trips or struggling through childbirth alone while your husband is on deployment.  Or the ugly reality that is early childhood development.  For many modern young women, the idea of “having kids” is so abstract and glamorized and sanitized for them by our culture that they don't understand the level of involvement necessary to keep them from becoming willfully ignorant drains on society.



To young women today, it's as if children were a status symbol, not a new life, merely an option like a new car with leather interior, and not a life-long personal commitment.  They are allured by the feminist ideal of “equality” and "equal opportunity", which means that they see family and children (and eventual divorce and remarriage) as part of the expected checklist -- and their dedication to "equality" means they expect that whatever poor Beta chump they marry will handle all the details.  (Or, conversely, that she will marry well enough to have servants to care for them like her favorite celebs.)  "Happily Ever After" is a gauzy  vague cloud of ill-defined bliss that follows the Honeymoon to them, the natural and inevitable conclusion to "True Love".

But True Love, Red Pill style implies a host of boring, mundane, petty little compromises that do little to empower you as a woman or see you reach “your full potential” in the feminist sense.  I recently read another screed at HuffPo (not important enough to hunt down the quote) about how Michelle Obama shouldn’t have said “Being a Mother is my most important job”, because that put too much pressure on everyone to reproduce and emphasize their children over their career elements.   She offered instead “Being a Woman is my most important job”, with motherhood and relationships and such secondary to her solipsistic “all about me” perspective.  She didn’t even mention a husband, except as an annoyance that got in her way.  Motherhood, to feminism, is a bother, a needless distraction away from the self-indulgent achievement-based Matrix climb for fame, cash and prizes. 

And the term “wife” is anathema to feminists.  When a feminist reflexively uses the term, it’s almost apologetic.  “Husband” is often used with a proud sense of ownership, like she just got a great lease on a car, but a feminist woman rarely describes herself as a “wife” unless she’s in trouble.  And a feminist has very little, if any, ideological instruction on being a wife save how to end the practice.   Feminism celebrates divorce and punishes success when it comes to marriage.

Now, if you’re a long-term carousel rider with a fat trust fund, then sure, a string of wealthy ex-husbands while you assert your feminist privilege doesn’t hurt anyone but those poor chumps.  Such childless, often sexless unions in the UMC have been a social bloodsport for decades.  But once you start getting kids involved, shit gets real.  You aren’t just splitting up the CD collection when you divorce, you’re splitting up a family with people who depend on you, and that’s got jack to do with your self-important career goals.  The feminist approach to "family" in general is little better than their approach to "marriage".  Gentlemen, you are warned.

But back to the successes.  As I was saying, it’s important, if you want to avoid divorce, to study what goes right, as well as what goes wrong.  This wonderful article is by a woman with a 43 year track record willing to impart some cosmic wisdom on you, ladies.  Listen up.  This is what Happily Ever After looks like, not three ex-husbands and a lonely condo full of cats in Miami.

Feminists can often manage to get married . . . they can rarely manage to stay married.  And very, very few can be said to be in "happy" marriages (marriages in which both parties can consistently say that they are happy with the way things are going).  And part of the reason has nothing to do with ideology -- it's because they don’t know how to be married.  In attempting to re-write the social rules of marriage, feminism's built-in escape hatch made the effort to work on a marriage a lot harder than ending it.  Feminists can become brides pretty easily, thanks to the power of pussy.  They can just as easily become ex-wives, with a stroke of a pen.  They rarely become "wives" (under the Rectification of Names).  So for all of their vaunted empowerment, it seems that feminism insists that an empowered feminist woman can do ANYTHING . . . except be a good wife.

That, of course, fuels hypergamy and divorce and other crap, but the plain fact is that feminism has rejected the Happily Ever After in favor of the EPL divorce, and now we have a nation of women bellyaching that they STILL aren't happy, despite getting everything their heart desired for 40 years.  They want their Happily Ever After, but they aren't willing to do the work required.  And Happily Ever After requires a lot of work.  Just ask Martha Lyles.

This woman was a wife.  She had a husband.  She didn’t have a co-equal partner in her relationship, she had a captain of her ship to whom she was loyal and respectful.  She did things for him that a feminist considers demeaning: packed his suitcase, quit school, ended her career aspirations for his benefit, raised his children, cooked his meals.  She deferred to him in important ways, and often in unimportant ways, not because the custom or religious rite demanded it, but because that’s how successful marriages work.

She doesn't write about the sacrifices her husband may have made -- that's his story, not hers.  She doesn't write about how hard it was and how regretful she is of her missed opportunities.  She writes of the sacrifices of a woman in her marriage, but she also writes of the rewards.  The Happily Ever After.  Grandchildren, a big happy family, and a great husband she adores and looks up to.  And she doesn’t just mention he’s a “great husband”, she describes an important attribute of his greatness in his devotion and thoroughness in helping her fight cancer.  No mere domineering chauvinist is likely to do that.  He repaid her sacrifice and devotion with his loyalty and steadfastness, not merely providing practical support during her struggle, but being her unwavering rock to which she clung as she wrestled with her own mortality.


Any of your weak-willed Beta future ex- husbands going to do that, feminists?  Good luck.

The important thing to take away from this success story is simple: the author was not merely extolling the virtues of marriage, but she was demonstrating the necessary dedication to fulfilling Happily Ever After.

You don’t ever plan to get cancer in Happily Ever After.  But you do get a strong and resilient Prince Charming willing to stand over your wounded body with a sword, keeping the monsters at bay.  You don’t imagine that you’ll get piles of diapers and bills and bad report cards and problem children in Happily Ever After.  But you do get a strong, disciplined father to keep order and enforce policy among your children until they can do it on their own.  You might conceivably envision grandchildren in your Happily Ever After, sitting around rosy-cheeked and respectful of you.  But you probably don’t understand how to get to that point – and truly appreciate it – because you have to first raise your own brood to adulthood and steer them toward their own productive relationship before you get rosy-cheeked grandbabies.

 For those feminists who feel they can have a “co-equal partnership” with a man, while secretly exerting feminine privilege as a means of manipulating and controlling your husband until you lose all respect and desire for him, you are forever denied this Happily Ever After.  Because you refuse to do the work and be a wife to your husband.  You get the EPL version, in which you marry a billionaire after spending your ex-husband’s money on eating, praying, and loving.  Oh, and good luck with that billionaire – I hear there are simply scads of them around.

(Or was that cats?)

But it's not just a bust for single feminist career gals.  It works both ways.

For those men who have eschewed the possibility of marriage in the pursuit of a permanent ticket to the Puerarchy, letting your bad experiences and fear of rejection give you a rationalization why you shouldn’t be required to invest in a 50-50 shot at success, please believe me when I tell you sincerely that I appreciate your willingness to Go Your Own Way.  But you, too, are exempt from this Happily Ever After.  In truth, you may change your mind at some point, when you are older and your perspectives change.  Our sperm is viable into our 70s, and a mid-life family has a lot of advantages.  But if you are committed to being uncommitted to a woman, then expect a long, slow decline with fewer friends alive every year, until you are alone, babbling incoherently to robots in some distant future retirement community.


Marriage is by no means for everyone.  But it is not, as some would contend, not for anyone.  It’s a trade-off, an exchange of commitments and obligations and sacrifices and dedications and courtesies and fears and delights and secrets and trusts and weaknesses and power and – yes – financial considerations and sex, and if you are not prepared to indulge in that kind of personal commitment and dedication (and few 20 year olds of this generation are) then I encourage you to avoid the issue entirely.  Believe me, it will take the pressure off to not have to worry about marriage and family.

So put “Happily Ever After” away in your mind not as "mythical" but merely as forever out of reach.  Substitute some government-subsidized retirement plan at a tropical resort where you’ll expire on the golf course or in your sleep . . . alone.  Imagine a world in which you are by yourself at age 50 and the doctor mentions cancer and you realize that since your sister died you have no one in the world to call and talk to about it.  That’s the "swinging single" alternative to Happily Ever After.  When you’re writing up your last will and testament, and you realize that everything you own and collected and cared for will go to your niece in nephew who live in another state and who might pass you in the grocery store without recognizing you, that’s what you get when you’ve lost Happily Ever After.  The real Happily Ever After.

Because Happily Ever After doesn’t mean a blissful paradise of champagne and strawberries and anniversary dinners in four-star restaurants.  It doesn’t mean kinky hotel sex and romantic walks on the beach as a matter of course.  There are few diamonds in for-real HEA.  You want the truth?  Happily Ever After can be brutal, as anyone’s life can be brutal.  But Happily Ever After softens the brutality with a thick protective layer of humanity, wherein the love you pledged at the altar has grown between the two of you and expanded and transformed until it supports a web of such love that echoes across generations. 

When you’re surrounded by your wife and your children and their spouses, all deeply concerned about your well-being and quality of life when your body betrays you, that’s Happily Ever After.

When your sons, grown men all, and your grandsons drop everything in their busy lives to rush to your bedside and then spring into action to build a wheelchair ramp you didn’t think you’d need, that’s Happily Ever After.

When your daughter-in-law enlists the aid of experts and researches the furthest reaches of medical science on your behalf, motivated by love and pure, unadulterated respect for the only father she has left, that’s Happily Ever After.

When an entire community floods your house with calls assuring their support, based on their deep respect for who you are and what you’ve done to touch their lives, that’s Happily Ever After.

When your wife holds your hand and cries so you won’t have to when you tell the doctor to go ahead and take the leg, that’s Happily Ever After.

This month, Papa Ironwood got an up close and personal look at the stark nature of Happily Ever After . . . and compared to the alternative, he considers himself a very blessed man.  I think it made the decades of sacrifice and effort and toil to keep his marriage and his family a going concern worthwhile.  Whether or not you agree with him, well, let's just say that he's got the benefit of experience to support his position.

But then, he's always been wiser than the rest of us.  He wanted Happily Ever After . . . so he built it for his wife and kids, one hug, one kiss, one drop of sweat and one tear at a time.

Read more »

Game As A Tool Towards Recovering A Lost Masculinity

Over at Alpha Game yesterday morning I caught a great quote byVox, as he was advising someone on whether or not to return to a woman he’d lost pre-Game for a second chance post-Game.  While that conversation was fascinating enough, the quote is what got me:

I appreciate the positivity from the non-predatory crowd. I would simply say that what I am attempting to do with Alpha Game is to apply the basic principles of Game more broadly to socio-sexuality rather than focusing solely on a particular subset of sexual relations as other Game bloggers do. My interest also tends to be more theoretical, whereas Roissy and Athol, just to give two of the more substantive examples, are both relentlessly practical in their applications of Game to pick-up and marital relations, respectively. This is not a criticism of either of them in any way, as I both appreciate and respect what both men are doing in their tangential areas of interest.

His point is well-taken, and vitally important to the evolution of the Manosphere.  Pay attention:

Right now, Men in our culture are divided into three groups.  One is the group bravely trying to build a family in hostile conditions, against all odds, in the fulfillment of the traditional quest to be a Family Man.  Call them the Old Married Guys.  We’re the ones at the far end of the spectrum, hacking our way through our individual relationships, counting our blessings, and despairing of what’s happening to other men around us and to masculinity in general.  Some of us have been divorced, some are bitter, some are hopeful.  All of us have some unique and valuable insights to share with younger dudes.  Some of us even are younger dudes, men who against all reason got married young and tried to start a family, and who have the wisdom to look to other men for advice and answers. 

I would try to call this group the “Patriarchy”, but that term has been maligned by feminists so long as to be tainted, on the one hand, and the fact is “patriarchy” means “ruled by the fathers”, and let’s face it: fathers haven’t “ruled” in this country since 1970.  So instead call them the Patriologists, “those who study fatherhood (and, by extension, masculinity)”.  While fatherhood isn’t the end-all, be-all of masculinity, it’s a pretty potent defining characteristic. 

But then again so are our dicks.  The single dudes, whether single by choice, circumstance, or by divorce decree, are the second group.  They’re the ones taking advantage of the culture of promiscuity and running Game like it’s a lotto system.  The “PUA” and the “MGTOW”, racking up notches and enjoying the tight, moist fruits of the land while spending their off-hours watching sports, playing fantasy football, and killing at HALO.  These are the “peter pans” that the feminists created but can’t stop bitching about.  The “boys” who wouldn’t grow up. 

And obviously it’s their inherently evil nature that makes them want to indiscriminatingly tap anything in a skirt, according to feminism, and not the fact that most of these dudes had absent or distant Beta fathers who were actively prevented from passing on the mature paternal wisdom that usually allows a young man to “grow up”.  Testosterone is a powerful force, after all, and left unchecked and untempered you get . . . well, you get what we got.  We lost control of masculinity, and let it be defined and regulated by feminism.  The result is not a Patriarchy – they successfully crushed that – but a “Puerarchy”, or “rule by boys”.

That’s not to say these “boys” (some in their 40s) actually “rule”.  In fact, thanks to the wholesale diminution of masculinity in the last forty years, their chances of actually getting to the “halls of power” are slight.  Despite the myth of male privilege they have largely eschewed the “successful self-made man” model – they don’t want power any more.  Money is better..  And who can blame them?  The “rewards” for most of the dudes who make that run are usually divorce court, custody hearings, and a loss of faith in all of womanhood, so why take the risk?  Internet porn, Game-driven hook-ups, and videogames make contemporary life for a single dude in the Puerarchy a kind of techno-Valhalla, if he can keep from damaging romantic entanglements. 

For a few years there’s been some acrimony between the first two camps over the definition of masculinity and the role of Game in it.  Their goals are slightly different.  The Patriologists want to see family life made less challenging for men, and re-claim some of the respect and legitimate prerogatives of mature masculinity and fatherhood, as well as improve their marital lives so that they get laid more.  The Puerarchy wants to get laid more, too, but it doesn’t see the advantage of being an OMG and often treats such men as either sell-outs or willing dupes.  Both have very definite ideas about what Masculinity is.  Unsurprisingly, both have an especial emphasis on Getting Laid, whether it’s by their wives or a succession of hot young gullible girls.  But don’t discount the bonding possibilities of sexuality – we’ll come back to that in a moment.

Then there’s the third group: the Blue Pill dudes who don’t have a clue.  There the ones who bought into the idea that Marriage is an equal partnership between you and your soon-to-be ex-wife.  They “respect” women, that is, they defer to them at every turn regardless of their own interests.  They’re the Chumps.  The vast, vast sea of Betas who are the grist for the divorce mill.  They have unrealistic expectations of marriage, not just because they’ve bought into the “Twu Wuv” one-itis meme to the point where they get blinded by pussy, but because they really believe in all of that “union of equals” crap without understanding that “equal” in that context means that their wives are always more equal than they are.  Without good fathering, they don't know any better.  There's no one left in their lives who feels comfortable passing along that kind of valuable information.  Until the Manosphere.

And for that sacrifice, for which they believe they will receive the divine feminine favors (i.e., getting laid more), they instead find that their wives don’t respect them, resent them, and eventually actively despise them for doing exactly what they’ve been told by women is what women really want.  They put their own interests and issues at the lowest priority for fear of being accused of being a chauvinist or something.  They’re far more concerned with being liked and not respected by their women.  Keeping the woman happy is their primary focus, whether it’s her request for more security, more affluence, or more “emotional support” (that is, agreeing unconditionally to every thing she says).

They are, in other words, completely divorced already . . . from their own masculinity.

Between the Puerarcy and the Patriologists lie these true Beta Lost Boys.  Despite their age and apparent maturity they will, indeed, remain “lost” to manhood in their hearts and their lives.  They might become Adults, but they won’t ever be real Men.  That’s because their self-loathing ideas about manhood and masculinity have been tainted by feminine and feminist critique for so long that they’ve abandoned all hope of controlling their lives, and have descended to merely managing their lives . . . and usually doing a piss-poor job of it.  And an almost universal element of masculinity, across culture, is the idea that a fully-formed Man is in control of his life.

Those poor Blue Pill Betas are the ones who need the Manosphere the most.  They need to be taught that it’s not just okay to be male, it can be fucking fantastic if you quit worrying about what women think and approach it from a masculine perspective -- 'cause that Blue Pill perspective just leads to misery and depression.  That’s the Red Pill message.  The Red Pill is nothing less than the attempt of Men in our culture to consciously revalorize masculinity.

“Revalorize” is an obscure word, I admit.  It was coined by Mircea Eliade, one of the great Religious Studies scholars of the 20^th century, based out of the University of Chicago.  He used it to mean taking a term, idea, or meme from the past and reconstituting the traditional with new and more useful meaning.  In this context, the Red Pill revalorization of masculinity is vital and necessary if we don’t want to see the mistakes of the past four decades promulgate into our sons’ futures.  Or our daughters: things are looking just as grim for our girls as our boys.

The current popular ideal of masculinity, ala the Blue Pill, is essentially “a person who just so happens to posses an XY chromosome and lives to serve women”.  Bereft of all the “bad” masculine qualities (which also happen to be all the Alpha qualities women get their panties wet over) – honor, bravery, aggression, anger, stubborn determination, leadership, and yes, violence – Blue Pill masculinity leaves “good provider” and “has a functioning penis” intact at the expense of all the rest, and the latter isn't even really required. 

Now there are plenty of feminists who have no problem with this definition, and don't think that seeing two generations of miserable men is too high a price for their trouble.  They don’t want a new masculinity to include, well, masculine traits.  If aggression and achievement are considered “masculine”, then they don’t feel like they can play with the boys properly.  If they re-define masculinity to include a bunch of Beta skills and get rid of all of the Alpha skills, then they have an opportunity to control the balance of gender-based power in our society.  Which is essentially what they’ve done for two generations.

The problem is, it doesn’t work.  Not for men, at least, and not for our kids.  When you allow women to define masculinity for men, you get what we have now: a generation of men largely bereft of maturity and wisdom, growing up without dads, with overbearing mothers who encouraged them to hate their own gender, and feeling shame and guilt about those natural inclinations towards traditional masculinity that inevitably arise.  Particularly around sex and violence. 

As a culture under the influence of feminism we have been taught since birth that men are all secret sexual predators one step away from brutal abduction-and-rape, and we should therefore despise all aggressive male sexuality or we’re essentially condoning rape.  We’ve also been taught that men are all power-hungry despoilers or ignorant idiots messing up the world – that is, the world women live in – by killing and exploiting everything in sight at every chance.  We’re the ones responsible for all of the wars (that we fight and die in).  The level of guilt about this has been raised to such a high degree in an attempt to remove the violent impulse from men that it has left us with a bunch of unassuming Betas who honestly feel, in the depths of their hearts, that they are bad people just because of their penis, and nothing they can do – however much they try – is ever going to make up for that.

The intriguing thing about the evolving Manosphere is that the Patriologists and the Puerarchy, while they’ve been learning various aspects of Game from each other (because our common goal, to have more sex, is truly universal) have also been revalorizing masculinity.  Most of the essential nuggets of Game theory are re-hashings of old masculine paradigms long discredited under feminist dogma, after all.  And while the two groups have been volleying Game back and forth, some of those poor Blue Pill Beta bastards have started to notice, hey, why are these guys having so much more sex than I am?  What is their secret?  Teach us, oh Wise Ones!

The desire and even yearning for the Red Pill is out there, but it isn’t just about Game.  Game is the vehicle, because Men are motivated by sex, and Game is about how to get laid.  But the things that Game teaches us go far beyond managing our sex lives.  Game informs our new definition of masculinity by returning to the essentials of our mating toolkit instead of talking about our feelings with our woman until she’s so bored she’s sleeping with the pool boy.  Beyond that, it gives us a medium through which to pay respect to each other for our masculine achievements. 

Hard-core Alphas in the Puerarchy can learn, for example, that getting married doesn’t have to mean the end of your sex life and the beginning of servitude, it can become an empowering and richly masculine experience.  Conversely, the Patriologists can learn from the Puerarchy that the apparent solid wall of feminist thought that seems to dominate the intellectual landscape is actually made up of a new generation of very, very fallible young women who are just as frustrated with the mess their mothers made of things as we are – and that in a relationship its more important that your woman be attracted to you than that she like you.

But between them both you have a sea of Betas who are staring at the single dudes getting laid with a single text message and the OMGs getting laid like tile by their wives like it’s a porn movie and running their stable households the way their grandfathers did, and they’re starting to wonder: what do those guys know that I don’t? 

And that’s the secret we need to tell them: the Manosphere means it’s not only Good To Be A Man, once you quit deferring to the women in your life, but that it doesn’t matter which end of the spectrum you prefer – both fatherhood and eternal hook-ups are two sides of the same masculine coin.  They are not mutually exclusive.  Nor is Game the end-all, be-all to masculinity, it’s just the beginning.  A man who learns Game (single or married varieties) and learns it effectively will soon find himself much-improved, spiritually, and that’s not just all the sex talking.  In a re-defined masculinity, Game is an essential tool, but it’s not your only one.  You need to talk to other men, have solid male friendships, enjoy a solid culture of masculinity by learning from the old dudes and teaching the young dudes, and accept in your mind that while men and women might be technically equal under the law, that doesn’t mean we are the same.  Our differences define us.  Men have their own interests and issues, and we have just the same rights as women to pursue them . . . just as aggressively.  We, not women, and certainly not feminists, are the ones responsible for defining what masculinity is in the 21^st century.

And the most important thing the Betas need to discover?  They don’t need any damn woman’s permission to take the plunge, swallow the Red Pill, and rediscover their own masculinity.

And heck . . . we’re willing to help.

So if there is one thing I’d like to see the Manosphere accomplish, it’s to inspire a Revolt of the Betas.  Because if a significant portion of the men in the West were to learn Game on the way towards embracing our own masculinity, then collectively we might be able to improve things for all men.  Once they are convinced to stop working against their own masculine interests, realize their own value in society, and give them the tools to recognize that, then we’re going to see a lot more Red Pills going down the hatch.  And that’s a good thing for everyone.

Read more »