Relationship Autopsy: A post-mortem examination of your failed relationships

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“When you ask of the dead, they often reply in hushed tones and whispers… it is their legacy to you… but you must be prepared to ask…. and be unafraid to listen for the reply…”

(Paraphrased from a Gypsy woman, in Germany, who first read my palm at the age of 13)

“The unexamined life is not worth living”-Socrates (the Original).

Bust of Socrates

The Inner Awakening

Exploring our psychological makeup is often utilized for the spiritual development within ourselves, as it leads to an awakening of the consciousness about us, our natures and our possibilities. One cannot understand what is left unexamined. Most people only have a superficial observation of their own lives, they only understand the tip of the iceberg, but remain ignorant to the vast extent of the psychological subliminal forces that are actually directing and influencing control of their conscious self, below the surface of awareness. It is these explorations; I feel that lead to true self-confidence and self-awareness.

The Common Denominator

The only common denominator in all of your relationships is you… taking the time to understand what drives your behavior, needs, wants and desires for the relationship, and within them, can, and frequently does, result in finding dependency needs that are lurking within your psyche and sense of personal identity and personal narrative. These traits, more than likely, have been the underlying fault in any of the relationships you have been in, including the last one… By examining your past relationships you are in effect utilizing them as a psychological mirror to yourself. To be able to look beyond the immediate of your self-projected identity and more deeply into the identity of the person who is really driving the decisions you make, for yourself and your life. This is an immense tool to discovering and resolving these often deeply seeded issues.

Slow Deaths

Relationships usually die slow deaths… a series of broached boundaries, violated expectations, broken promises and poor behavior that lead up to a building resentment within the parties. Normally there is vastly more to it than the ‘initiator’ was ‘unhappy’ or a specific deal killing issue or betrayal.

The Autopsy (the Asking)

By performing the relationship autopsy you are looking for the underlying choices, behaviors and actions that lead to the demise of that relationship. Once identified the next task, in each case, is to determine what was driving those choices, behaviors and actions… how they came to be and how are they manifesting themselves now. By addressing the underlying drivers, you will resolve the plethora of symptoms that they ultimately manifest. Seek to address the causes, not the symptoms of the choices, behaviors and actions that lead to self-defeating patterns of behavior within yourself and your relationships.

Taking Stock (The Listening)

The value of taking stock when a relationship ends is that it teaches you a lot about who you are and what developmental tasks (what you’re trying to learn, develop and grow from) has been. If you pause to evaluate your old relationships you can see what your next developmental tasks will likely to be and can then choose a partner who is more appropriate partner for you, both in terms of your emotional preferences in life and values and your growing edge of personal development of being. These types of choices almost without a fault lead to healthier and more fulfilling relationships than those selected and based only upon attraction alone.

The Sexual Market Place

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Image of a storm at sea

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore…”

The Sexual Market Place

The SMP (Sexual Market Place) is the nebulous environment in which a multitude of social, cultural, socioeconomic and sociopolitical factors influence the dating environment. These are the same powerful factors that are shaping our society and in fact the SMP is a reflection of those. Ultimately upon studying the SMP, one can come to the realization that the current dating environment is essentially a commodity market… where raw or primarily products are exchanged and the harsh realities of it are no different. Markets vary in form, scale, geographic and types of participants as well as goods and services being offered and sought from…with both macro and micro environments, but in this case we also have the differing biological sexual market values (SMV) trajectories of men and women, which will play an enormous role in ones timeline within the SMP.

The SMP is being shaped by hundreds of factors, but four major cultural drivers are shaping the macro-SMP and they are giving rise to delayed age of first marriages, rising divorce rates, decrease fertility and hookup culture;

Cultural Factors:

Readily available contraception (condoms, the pill and abortions): In the past there were extreme consequences for women should they become pregnant out-of-wedlock. Contraception liberated women from these life altering situations and resulted in a permissive environment in which women were free to explore their sexuality without fear and gave fuel to their hypergamy, women’s natural biological attraction triggers and drive to sexually select men who differentiated themselves via physical, social and status dimorphisms, which are most often at odds with monogamous partnering and parenting traits. Sex has always held incredible exchange value, now with readily available contraception women were free to yield it without having to suffer the dire consequences of an unwanted pregnancy.

Changes to Family Law (‘No fault’ divorce, asset division, and alimony): In the past, a divorce was only granted upon misconduct of a partner, with a dramatic decrease in quality of life due to a woman’s inability to be independent and self-supporting. Now the law and society has changed so that a partner needs no stated reason to abandon these life vows and is yet still entitled to child custody, property asset division and alimony, even though most women these days are capable of being self-supporting and independent. These incentivize the destruction of marriage and cause untolled emotional and financial destruction upon men, who lose their family, access to their children and typically are forced to support these endowments, at no fault of their own, just because she became “unhappy”.

Advancement of Feminism: The social movement of advancing equal political, economical and social rights for women has gone through a series of progressive waves of movement; 1st wave was to remove the 2nd class status from women and provided basic civil rights. The 2nd wave advanced a wide range of women’s issues from family law, workplace rights and reproductive rights, that we currently recognize as ‘women’s rights’. The 3rd wave has more diverse strains of feminist activity and can be viewed as developing a sense of empowerment for women from their given stereotypes, as being assertive, powerful and in control of their own sexuality, but with these new expressions has led to criticism that feminism often promotes misandry (hatred of men) and the elevation of women’s interests above men’s. Overall culture and society goes to lengths to shield, protect and liberate women from the consequences of their actions and to confer the rights of privilege status upon women. With time this has grown to become a deep trough of self-derived sense of entitlement for women, removed from any reality of actual achievement, merit or award.

Rise of the Post-Industrial Knowledge Economy: We don’t live in the Post-Industrial Age anymore…we reside at the footsteps of the Information Age and with it have come a dramatic shift in our social and cultural construct and expectations. The economic shift of globalization, the digital revolution and a massive shift away from manufacturing to knowledge and service base economy has been a tremendous advantage to women, which has rushed to fill and expand it, as this new market place is indifferent to men’s advantages of both size and strength and plays more to women’s strengths of emotional intelligence, such as consensus and team building, relationship skills and relationship development and aesthetic awareness and design. Women have not only expanded the original economy, but have created new markets where they hold sway. This is made more striking when one realizes that the growth in both college and graduate degrees came almost entirely from the female half of the population. Currently young women are now earning 117% of what their male peers do, even though men dominate the science, technology, engineering and math professions that are typically are higher paying fields. Even with these clearly defined demographics, society still further highly promotes, safeguards and rewards for women in the work place, through a number of incentives, programs and regulations. Women today have the same choice to be independent and self-sufficient as men, but make other calculated choices, then cry foul at the outcomes.

While the social attitudes and work place opportunities regarding women may have undergone a revolution, the rules of sex appeal have not and the Darwinian realities are not pretty for women in the long-term and a very rough ride for men in the short-term.

Biological factors:

Sexual Value Trajectories of men and women are vastly different.

Women in their early 20’s hold an extremely strong hand in the SMP, especially with men roughly their own age. Their sexual market value (SMV) is high, spans multiple age groups, creating an abundance of excellent prospects and many women are able to leverage this situation and effectively hit above their weight class sexually (have access to men they normally wouldn’t if it were not for their sex exchange value) for a decade or more. By 35 women’s sexual and fertility values within the sexual market place greatly diminishes and so too does the pool of interested and eligible men, at the same time they expect to settle down, find a man and start that family… Men on the other hand have a much lower SMV at the beginning of their lives, which spans relatively within their age peer group initially, but increases with age and their SMV doesn’t start to decline until well into their 50’s. As with any fish bowl it is the dominate fish that command the food supply.

As a women move from their 30’s to their 40’s they remain less enticing to men of their age than women who are ‘younger, firmer, tighter and free’, as the refrain goes. Just as a woman’s sexual market value (SMV) is in steep decline a man’s is typically continuing in an opposite trajectory and are leveraging that value for relationships with younger women, who are less used up sexually, are free of the immense emotional and physical baggage from previous marriages and the accompanying children and responsibilities that come with those children.

Sexual Biological Prerogatives of men and women differ immensely. Women control sex, men commitment…

Females

Evolutionary psychologists continue to prove that women exhibit mate-selective preferences for spouses/mates that hold greater physical attractiveness, educational level, job status, social standing and capital accumulation which is defined by the term Hypergamy. In colloquial terms it’s simply defined as ‘marrying up’. In practice, women delay marriage until their careers have been established (ramification of the knowledge economy), enjoy a parade of alpha cock during their roaring 20’s & 30’s ( thanks to the pill & feminism), thus rewarding the players over the commitment minded men, which gives rise to douchebaggery culture. Not only are women getting the types of men they deserve, but the men they select.

Males

Males on the other hand primarily seek sex from a variety of women, with the dominate trait of physical attractiveness , youthful vibrancy and femininity being the overwhelming characteristics for selection. Men playing the field are exercising their biological prerogatives within the frame-work women, feminism, culture and society have enabled.

Sexual Chaos

In the past dating was a means to an end- with the goal of marriage and ultimately parenthood… no more. The social and sexual freedom the last decades have brought has created a realm of sexual anarchy to the SMP. No one knows what is expected. Both men and women have escaped historical dating ritual, rules and gender roles by being financially and sexually independent exercising their rights and freedoms. They are free to do whatever they want and the opportunities for pursuing happiness on their own terms are like none before in human history.

Evolving Relationship Structures:

Serial Monogamy- the practice of having a number of long-term romantic or sexual partners in succession, which has given increase rise to disposable of relationships and the people in them. Serial monogamy gives people some kind of certainty and security by providing some sense of stability and exclusivity, that enable them to devote their resources to other issues…but for a limited time… It currently is the most prevailing form of romantic relationship, even though the sought-after ideal is still that of long-lasting monogamy. Fear of commitment and perfectionism play a large part in the serial monogamist’s thinking… they are often unable to cope and with the pressures of a relationship and incapable of sustaining a relationship over common hardships for long periods of time and eventually seek novelty and their independence once again or escape from a troubled relationship. Often the patterns of behavior are so established that the individual can predict and anticipate the time period in which a break up will occur well in advance.

Hookup culture– an intentionally vague term that can vary from person to person, event to event that spans from light sexual contact to an intense sexual interlude and everything in-between, with no connotation for a relationship and is expressly designed to avoid commitment and to liberate the parties to pursue separate agendas. It is quickly replacing traditional dating in the general population and has become the norm on most college campuses.

Relationships are no sanctuary from the forces that influence and make up the sexual market place, but what is surprising about the current dating environment is that both males and females tend to grow out of it and take the leap of faith into marriage with disastrous results. Marriage in its current form is a social mechanism designed to exchange sex for a modern form of indentured servitude. The easiest way to prevent divorce and its ugly fallout for men, is to NOT get married. Over 50% fail, with a +70% chance your wife will initiate it, and if a recent AARP poll is correct 25% of the divorced men state they never saw the divorce coming, compared to 14% of the women.

Relationships and especially marriage hold dangers for the man who enters into them foolishly. A relationship isn’t a panacea for the emotional, psychological and sexual needs that you haven’t resolved on your own. When you take on a relationship with the intent of being monogamous, you take on a tremendous series of obstacles, problems and issues, that needs to be negotiated with another individual… going into one without preparation, knowledge and appropriate skill set isn’t just foolish, it’s downright stupid.

THE VALUE OF INTIMATE (committed monogamous) PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS

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Picture of couple holding hands

THE VALUE OF INTIMATE (committed monogamous) PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS

So much of the men’s community is so focused on the male biological prerogative (picking up and fucking women) and to a degree on inner personal development, that it blindly shuns the notion of men’s desires and needs emotionally to be in relationships. This is a gross error, but one that is understandable when viewed with the prismatic lens of men’s movement history- which has too often been forced underground and yet proudly trumpets its anti-cultural/social underpinnings.

The reality is that for most men, they desperately want, need and desire to be in a committed relationship, with a woman of their choice, but unfortunately completely lack the knowledge, resources and abilities to do much about it. To make matters worse society and women are not in your corner…

Most men are presented with a choice… in Matrix parlance either swallow the ‘red pill’ or ‘blue pill’… embrace the ‘realities of life’ or stay ignorant. Of course ‘red pill’ always means embracing the sexual market place (SMP) as it is, learning game, developing ‘Alpha’ traits and fully committing yourself to a life of pumping and dumping as many women as you can… without any thought or possibility of maintaining a relationship with a woman of your desires other than a soft harem of rotating women…

Too often the men’s community is filled with social misfits, oddities and the just outright deranged… This isn’t really a fair statement, because it isn’t true, but the socially inept do stand out and they make people anxious and nervous to have them around, they get branded as such and so too does the community. The underpinnings of this, of course are obvious…. These people lack social skills… they lack relationship skills… and while the community has been outstanding (and notorious) for developing a measure of social skills it has been negligent in fostering the same spirit when it comes to developing and nurturing relationships skills.

When I had the opportunity to speak at the 21 Convention, which squarely has its roots, but has grown vastly beyond the pick-up community, I knew I would be speaking against the winds of popular opinion (Pick-up community) when championing relationship skills development. As such, I spent a considerable degree of time talking about the fertile ground relationships are for self development and men actualizing their lives as they envision them. The following is a general list of some of them;

You have to be in them to understand them.

No amount of keyboard jockeying will substitute for real world experience and application. If you ultimately want to be in a relationship, developing those skills BEFORE you’re in one, might be something you want to consider… Being in a relationship is not like observing one; being in one changes your decision making value process. You literally see and feel things differently when you’re in them as opposed to being an observer of them. While you can study them academically, being in one takes it to a completely different level. Very much like how you can learn and study on how to approach a woman, there is no substitute for field work. Same for relationships.

Acts committed without risk hold little value.

As long as you have a safety net you act without commitment- (being vulnerable and invested to one person or situation). Only acts undertaken with commitment have meaning… Only your best effort matters… No one applauds the tenor for clearing his throat. Furthermore, you cannot numb selective senses without imparting similar results to other senses… Shield yourself from vulnerability and you shield yourself from the benefits of intimacy… and those benefits are many. The greatest of which is your own humanity.

The biggest failures of the community

Most men do not go out looking for a girlfriend, but end up with one… worse yet a wife!!! If ultimately this is important to you, shouldn’t you have an understanding of how to achieve the end point (goal) other than serendipity? Most goals are achieved by having the end result in mind. No difference here, even if it’s just to improve the quality and nature of the relationships you do have.

Second most important investment of your life…

The most important investment you’ll ever have is the investments you place on yourself, the second is the relationships you maintain for life, and expressly the choice of a life partner. Your destiny hinges upon those choices… approaching them as such isn’t just smart, it’s wise…

The mirror to the self

Relationship can be amazing mirrors to the reflections of your own values, needs and abilities. They are snapshots of where you are currently at, what you’re able to develop and achieve and reflective of the values you hold. Life has a way of telling you where you’re at… Listen when life is telling you something… I learned long ago when in the Arizona desert that when you’re quite, the desert will speak. Life will speak too when you actively listen to it.

They will showcase a number elements if evaluated.

Your emotional baggage- we project onto our partners anything unresolved at a deeper level. “You complete me” is an outreach from this notion. How you think and regard yourself, others and the quality of your life. Your relationships will indicate maturity development that may need to be expanded and developed.

They are amazing testing grounds.

They will showcase your real abilities in action and under pressure. Knowledge of an issue isn’t enough. Knowledge coupled with appropriate action is. It is also well known that stress and hardship clarify commitment and awareness of those risks. You really learn who you really are during hardships.

They showcase your aspirations and dreams.

The nature and quality of your relationships will also be a reflection of your life’s ambitions… Just as ‘Steel sharpens steel’ and ‘Like attracts like’ healthy relationships will share similar values, outlooks and ambitions typically of your own. The nature of the relationship as well as whom you chose to have a relationship with will be telling of where your steering your life.

This is where the damage is done!

This can’t be overstated enough. This is where you get hurt. This is where you hurt others. Emotionally. Financially. Culturally. Often for life. The more invested you are in a relationship, the more you project your sense of self in the relationship, the more dependent upon the relationship, the more apt you are to be seriously hurt. This is where the power of injury not only can shape the life of an individual, but families, children, society and our culture. Preservation through avoidance and abstinence isn’t the answer though. Developing appropriate skills sets, awareness, and knowledge is. If we are to truly change our lives, our personal narratives, our legacy and family trees (through our children), we need to realize and develop our relationships so they are healthy and vibrant.

Developing a culture of failure.

You will make mistakes. While you cannot change the past, you can learn from it. You make your mistakes worse by staying blind to your own errors. Learning to fail without becoming a failure is an essential success trait. It’s frighteningly easy to choose the wrong person. Attraction and chemistry mixed with familiarity and sentimentality are easily mistaken for love, but they are far from the same thing. A failed relationship will underscore your weakness in a huge number of interpersonal skills. Learn to be able to identify those to then be able to address and develop them. Pair this with your strengths of what you did well and stand out in the relationship. Often they are traits you would not normally have identified as your strong suite.

Winning the client again, and again, and again.

I might be inherently lazy, but there’s just sheer economic sense in investing in quality relationships that you want to maintain for the numerous benefits that are inherent in a committed relationship. I simply have no illusion that I want to find a fantastic gal and then replace her immediately with someone else the next day… I don’t operate naturally that way, and nor do I think most guys do. The alternative is you’ve got to kill for your dinner each night. That gets old really quick, and it’s highly improbable. While ruthless economic efficiency and efficacy rules here it’s still a solid reason none the less… The real reality is that I firmly believe that guys don’t have a commitment problem… We have a commitment problem when we feel we’re committing to anything less than what we really want… Learn to develop the knowledge, skills and mindset to go after what you really want, rather than a pacifier.

Highs and low of your life have little to do with fucking…

Each of us invariably will have moments in our lives that will define a time in which we will be at an extreme high or low and several experiences near those. At times like those I doubt anyone truly wants to be standing on their own. These will be deeply troubling, soul searching moments and moment of extreme personal achievement at the end of the road less taken by. The notion that last night’s one night stand, no matter how amazing the fucking will play anything but a marginal role in those events to you is absurd. The true meaning of loneliness won’t be realized until you are at one of those points and utterly alone to contemplate and to endure it alone… Don’t be so foolishly cocksure that you ultimately regret it…

Towards a New Sexual Market Place…

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Picture of a Candle in the Dark

 

 

 

 

 

 

“It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness”- Chinese proverb

For those of us in it, the Sexual Market Place (SMP) is a screwed up place… we intuitively feel what’s going on, but may not fully understand it. We’re inundated with poor advice from those that are detached from realities of the SMP, have social agendas, or just simply clueless, that the advice they give would be laughable, if not for the very real damage it’s creating. We are faced with poor advice, heady goals and the opposing stark realities, in a very unforgiving dating environment. We reach out into this darkness and try to grope our way through it… too often with disastrous results.

Sexual Freedom… that would summarize the current Sexual Market Place and was fostered and created by a number of sociological events and drivers that came about and together in the last 50 years, to what we now have and would currently recognize. Freedom implies a choice… and with that choice comes the opportunity to create the sexual life you want. That freedom is also re-writing the social rules, contracts and assumptions upon which men and women relied upon to engage each other in the pursuit of committed monogamous relationships.

These assumptions of old, no longer hold sway, which creates an immense amount of ambiguity. This ambiguity is compounded by the multitude of possibilities, interests and lack of shared assumptions which leads to mass confusion. There are no rules for the road for this SMP. It is as though the driving laws were suspended on the highways of life, love and happiness. In fact they have not been re-written, but removed. The social implications of this are astounding.

I can scream, wail and rail into this social wind of change, but I will affect little change, maybe some awareness, but little else. Or I could do something else…

I have always been fascinated by the location of events where minds gathered and creative ideas took to life and shed new light on old ideas and ways of doing things. They always seemed to stem from just a few minds that interacted to set the world ablaze. Where historically those minds needed the physical presence of the others, we don’t live in a world with those constraints. We don’t have to physically meet over beers or coffee in ale and coffee houses of old, to share thoughts and ideas that will give birth to new enlightenment. We also live in a time when we have precedence for just a few people to shape a concept into a new reality that sparks a revolution. That is a rich inheritance of existence that I intend to exploit.

This blog is intended to be utilized as a meeting place and stepping stone for men who desire to shape and author their lives and embrace the responsibilities in having committed relationships. In effect, those wishing to ‘Man Up!’, but doing so with wisdom and honed ability.

I hope to be but one voice, reaching a thousand lives, that will drive a revolution….