The Story of My History with Women – Part 3 – Being Monogamously Married
This is the third installment of the ebook that I never published, regarding my history with women and the lessons I learned from it. If you haven’t yet, you should read parts one and two before you read the below article, so you can be up to speed on where the story picks up. We left off where I had just stopped seeing Penny; the woman I had lost my virginity to…
Finally, finally, finally, not being a virgin anymore was like discovering superpowers I thought I never had. I was suddenly more confident with women, more confident with kissing women, escalating to sex, and was much less afraid of the really pretty women. After having sex with Penny for about a year, I finally had the balls and the mindset to go start meeting women and actually having sex.
Over the next year or so, I dated around. During this time, I encountered both Athena and Blondie, who I talk about in Blackdragon Podcast #2, so I’ll skip over them to not repeat myself.
One day, in January of 1997, at age 24, I came to a hard decision. I knew I didn’t want to get married and didn’t really want a “girlfriend.” I didn’t want to end up hip-deep in drama or have my balls removed like all the other girlfriend-guys or married guys I knew. I also knew the divorce rate was 50% and had a gut feeling that I would be facing high odds of divorce no matter what I did if I actually got married. I didn’t realize how difficult this situation was though. Oh, if only there had been a Blackdragon blog or manosphere back in the 90s!
The problem was that I really wanted kids. Having just gone full-time with my first business just a few months prior, I would often visualize my goals, and one of the key ones was me driving home after a long day’s work, getting out of my cool black sports car, walking up to my beautiful house, seeing my gorgeous blonde wife in the doorway smiling, and having two little kids, one girl and one boy, run out to meet me.
Little did I know that I would soon have that exact scenario, and little did I know the modern-day dangers of such a scenario. As they say, be careful what you wish for.
“How can one have kids and not be married?” I asked myself. At age 24, with limited experience with women and relationships, no books or websites on this subject, and no role models in this area, I had no answer. (I do now, but back then I was clueless.) So I made the decision that I was emotionally and financially ready to get…ahem…married, and set out to find a wife to bear my children. I even wrote down a list of traits I wanted this future perfect woman to have.
A few months later, I found her (or, more accurately, thought I found her). One day, while working at one of my client’s offices, out of a nearby office walked Lacy; a very cute 31 year-old. Long blonde hair, brown eyes, trim body, huge ass. She was so close to the Christy template that I could barely contain myself. Later that same day she started asking me if I had a girlfriend. Two weeks later, when my business project had completed at her company (since I never have sex with women I work with, even back then), I asked her out.
We hit it off very quickly. NRE raged within both of us. Not understanding any of the concepts or realities I understand today, I threw all logic and self-control to the wind and did everything wrong. I stopped dating other women. I saw her many times a week. I told her I loved her. I stopped using condoms with her and started cumming inside her even when I knew she wasn’t on any birth control. (I figured, “Hey, I want kids, don’t I?”) I betaized myself and assumed a total boyfriend frame. She loved every minute of it, which meant her attraction for me started dropping like a stone.
She had a five year-old son from a prior fling, and soon she was begging, literally begging, to move in with me. I pushed back for a few weeks, but my betaness was no match for my NRE… I said yes.
She moved in, and we became engaged a little later on two conditions I gave her. The first was that we were going to have more kids. She said she would have as many kids with me as I wanted until she turned age 35; after that, no more.
Secondly, that her son become my son, and he would call me dad, no one else, and that there would be no stepfather in the picture at all. I knew from my research that dealing with step kids and step parents is the number two most common cause for divorce, and I didn’t want any “step drama” from baby daddy. She hated her son’s bio-father and had no contact with him so she happily agreed. (This was one of the few things I did right back then.)
By November of that same year we were married… way, WAY too fast. I was stupid. My idiotic, irrational justification for being married as a 25 year-old beta was that I wanted kids badly. I felt I had waited enough and could afford them. And, like many of you, I moronically assumed that “the only way to have kids is to get married.” God, I was so fucking stupid.
For the next nine years, Lacy and I lived in “marital bliss,” such as it was. Her son became my son, and we had a daughter together. I had my two kids, one boy and one girl, just like I had always visualized (visualizations work, folks).
That part of the marriage I liked. I also liked that I could come home to a clean house and a cooked dinner everyday. I enjoyed going out on weekends with my wife and kids as a family.
However, the rest of the arrangement I hated. If I wanted to have sex and she didn’t, which was usually the case, I was a seething volcano of blue balls. As I went through life looking at other hot chicks, I couldn’t stand that I was not allowed to touch them just because I had signed a piece of paper called a marriage contract. Sometimes pretty women would flirt with me and I knew I couldn’t do anything physical about it. It physically hurt to be sexually caged like this, like a defanged, toothless lion in a crate.
And the drama. Oh lord, the drama. We generally got along and she was good at giving me my space, but it was still a marriage. Every move her or I made had to be discussed in committee with the other. Lacy was a good wife and a good mother, but that didn’t change the fact that every major financial decision, household decision, child decision, family decision, or whatever had to be discussed, argued about, concessions made, and compromises agreed upon. God damn, it was a lot of work. It took at least as much work, time, effort, and emotional energy as my full-time day job.
For what… a clean house and a cooked dinner? Couldn’t I just pay a maid to do that and skip all that drama and compromise at a tiny fraction of what a wife cost me? This wife was very expensive during my marriage, as most wives of middle class men are.
At least all the other married guys I knew were going through the exact same thing in their marriages. I found solace in listening to other 3+ years married men bitch about not getting very much sex, arguing with their bitchy wives, having their checking accounts drained with stupid wife expenses, and all the other crap monogamous married guys must suffer through. So I felt like I wasn’t doing anything wrong per se. I was just like everyone else. Regardless, I loved Lacy and I loved my kids. I wanted it to work.
So I gritted my teeth like a good little boy, a good little citizen, and kept going. Every time I saw some hot babe at the grocery store I wasn’t allowed to touch, I gritted my teeth again and smiled. Every time I got home and Lacy yelled at me for some trivial thing, I grit my teeth and pushed through. Every time I wanted to have sex with her and she said she was too tired or whatever and wouldn’t have sex no matter what I tried, I put up with it and took the pain like a man. All of my married buddies were doing the same with their wives.
It was normal. It was marriage.
How sad is it, that when the negative and harmful becomes normal, it becomes encouraged?
I’ll spare you the details of the divorce. To summarize, when Lacy hit her early 40s, she had premature menopause, which can sometimes drive women insane. Lacy was a handful to begin with, but with the menopause, she started crossing lines. The doctors and psychologists prescribed her all kinds of prescription pills which just made it worse. Soon she was throwing things, smashing pots and pans against the wall, and smashing CDs on counters, shattering them. My little daughter would come running into my home office, tears in her eyes. When I asked her what was wrong, she would reply “Mommy’s smashing pans in the kitchen again.”
To make matters worse, I had recently started becoming more Alpha, so my tolerance for bullshit was rapidly declining. The more I “Alphaed-up,” the more conflict we had.
Eventually, Lacy’s violence against objects became violence against me. It was no big deal, but with a psychologist as a father, I was well aware that if someone is violent once, they will be violent again. The good news was that I was much more Alpha at that point and prepared to deal with the problem. I said in my new Alpha-ish tone, “Lacy, I love you. I want to be with you forever. You can do drugs, become an alcoholic, fuck other men, whatever, and I’ll stay with you, but this violence thing, that’s not something we can ‘make work.’ This can never happen again. If there is a second time, there will never be a third time.”
After much fighting, she finally relented and we went to marriage counseling. The counselor was very good, but it didn’t help things. It was simply too late. Things between Lacy and I were too far gone, and my tolerance for drama and BS was declining every day. I was becoming the man I was meant to be: a happy Alpha who doesn’t do drama, rather than a weak but appropriate beta who puts up with all kinds of crap so he can look normal to society.
After about two months of that she crossed the line again. Again, it was no big deal. Didn’t matter. I’m a man of my word. Within 48 hours, my stuff and I were moved out of the house and into an apartment.
Lesson Four
Pair-bonding is fine, but don’t get traditionally, monogamously married. It’s a system that used to work decades ago when society was very different, but it’s not a system that works anymore in the 21st century.
After much drama for several weeks during the separation, Lacy and I met for lunch one day and she said, “That’s it. I want a divorce.”
I said, “Are you sure? You know me. You know what I’m going to go do. I’m not going to wait a year or two for lawyers and judges to get their shit together so we can get legally divorced before I go have sex with someone like a normal human being. If you want to get divorced, that’s cool with me, but if that’s what we’re doing, I’m getting laid immediately. Once I do that, I can’t exactly un-do it.”
She responded with a “whatever,” and the decision was made. The next day, I filed papers. The day after that, I texted three women whom I knew in my social / work circle (though none I currently worked with). I told them that I was officially single and ready to mingle, which means fuck. I invited all three to come over to my apartment, hoping that at least one would say yes.
One said no. The other said yes, but her schedule was crazy and wasn’t able to come over any time soon. The third one said yes, and was ready to come over the day after tomorrow.
Her name was Marci. She was a very cute and crazy 35 year-old blonde with huge DD tits whom I used to work with. That Friday night, 48 hours after my conversation with Lacy, Marci and I were having sex in my apartment. It was the first time that I had sex in about six months (the longest I had ever gone without sex since losing my virginity), and the first time that I had sex with any woman other than Lacy in almost 10 years. Thus, my cock didn’t work very well. (I tell the full story of what happened in the open marriage ebook.)
Regardless, we both had a fantastic time. What a relief it was! To finally be a man again! We had sex a few more times, and soon my body “remembered” how to do it and it all started working fine.
Thus, in early 2007, and at age 34, I entered into the greatest, happiest, most exciting, most wonderful, and most important time of my entire life, a time that continues to this very day.
My transition from beta to Alpha, from bondage to freedom, from drama to happiness, from boyhood to masculinity, had officially begun. It was all going to get better from there.
To be continued…
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Thanks for the post, BD! God bless the internet, speeds up the learning curve so much.
Are you familiar with book Cupid’s Poisined Arrow by M. Robinson? I learned a lot of stuff from you, and I think this can be incorporated into your OLTR techniques to prolong (maybe indefinitely) the NRE phase with the OLTR.
It has to do with different kinds of sex, they go into science of orgasm and pair-bonding.
Here’s a good summary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6jOp7XmjGY
Have you read the book or have any experience with that?
awsome
I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on visualizations… effectiveness, how/why they work, how you specifically use them, etc.
What you would be doing, had she stopped doing all the drama or was simply not doing it? How you could have coped with sexual boredom and sex denial by your wife?
Never read that book; usually books like this tell me what I already know, but I’ll check it out.
It’s a little off-topic for this blog. Go read my business blog, and if you want more specifics, join my membership program where I talk about this stuff in great detail.
Very good question. I would have probably stay married to her for an additional 10 years for the good of the kids and then divorced her after the last kid left the home, but, I would have immediately opened up the marriage so I could get laid, even if she objected.
Her and I were actually discussing a semi-open marriage during the final years of the marriage, but she went crazy and we got divorced before we could actually put anything into practice. Her idea was to have a Hillary Clinton-type marriage were I could fuck other women on the side as long as they were married and had something to lose if word got out. The premature menopause hit her before we got more into that though, which is a good thing. I’m very glad I got divorced.
CMIIW, but the book basically suggest us to prolonging and withholding any sexual activity with our partner, without orgasm/ejaculation goal in the end. *mostly directed for the man, I think*
They call it “Karezza“; which in my opinion doesn’t work well for horndog-guy like BD (and me) 😛
I guess the silver lining is that you figured out your mistake at a younger age. I know guys that are just now plunging into legal marriage, no prenups, etc… at around age 40. None of these relationships are particularly positive but they all feel they have to get married to have a family and/or because they feel they are old now and female prospects are minimal. It’s ironic since I’m 39 and they all know I’m dating multiple women-I haven’t even done any dating sites or apps at this point and meet plenty of girls of all ages. They all like to assure me that I’ll “settle down” one day- I wonder if that attitude is to validate their own decision. If everyone is doing it, it must be right!
I don’t want kids myself so I can’t see any benefit to legally marrying anyone. I can cook my own food and clean my own house thank you.
Yes, I’ve heard this kind of advice before. Regardless of if it works or not, such a system would only work for low sex drive men. Myself and most other men could never pull it off.
Absolutely correct. That was, and still is, my exactly thinking. I got out and learned my lesson at age 35. Getting out at age 25 or 30 would have been better of course, but even at age 35 I was young enough to be able to recover logistically, sexually, and financially pretty quickly.
I know many men, Alpha and manosphere types included, getting legally, traditionally mono-married at age 40 or beyond. Good fucking god, these guys are in a world of hurt down the road. I’ve talked before about how horrible it is for men to get divorced in their 40s or 50s; it’s a true nightmare scenario; getting divorced in your 20s or 30s is still bad but isn’t nearly as big of a deal.
What happened to her since the divorce?
My kids are all legal adults now, so we don’t talk, so I don’t know any details. I know she’s still single and lives about 40 minutes away from me. She got a college degree and works as some kind of counselor(?) I think (I could be wrong on that).
She gets along with both of our kids; my son lives with her at the moment (though he’s moving out soon) and my daughter lives with me but goes over to her house most weekends. My mom and her still have lunch occasionally. She’s even met my OLTR, who came to came with me to a family event a few months ago. She’s on good terms with everyone.
If Son of BD (my son) or Indie (my daughter) is reading this, they’re welcome to chime in with more details, since I don’t have any.
Good read, I believe we all want more historic posts/difficult lay reports to see how the great BD thinks and acts in different situations with different kind of girls.
Question: You said in your book that you discovered the manosphere/pua community after the divorce, how could you “started becoming more Alpha” while still being married and got betaized day by day?
I’ve got another post about that coming up on Monday.
I started consuming non-manosphere Alpha sources. I started listening to Tom Leykis on the radio and that was a big help. I started reading novels featuring Alpha male heroes, from writers like James Clavell and Ernest Hemingway. I also read a few non-PUA dating books, and by the time the divorce actually happened I was already reading David DeAngelo’s email newsletter (though I had no idea there were other men like him and had no idea what “PUA” was; that would come later).
And of course I grew up on Alphas like Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Captain Kirk, Indiana Jones, etc, and started to realize that I wanted to be more like them and less like the typical beta husband.
I witnessed that firsthand when my mom ran out on my dad. My dad’s romantic life never recovered; in the 9 years between his divorce and his death, he dated exactly one chick, and the chick friendzoned him. And he was approaching his 50s. So even since high school, I kind of knew that marriage wasn’t the best idea just based on that. But paradoxically, I still did all the stupid beta things most boys do to try to acquire chicks. I wasted my teens and most of my 20s confused, anxious and very mad at the opposite sex because of this paradox.
I wound up having to request in writing to stay with my dad. And he never made my mom pay child support despite me shouting at him to do so (out of principle more than anything, I didn’t really care about the money).
We can laugh at MGTOW all we want, but they are spot on about not giving chicks agency and stuff. I treat chicks exactly like my male buddies nowadays.
Damn, back in 2007 I was in 4th grade. You’re helping out many young readers including myself, and it’s really appreciated. I’ve been following and enjoying your blogs for a year, and will continue to do so for the years to come.
Everyday I read this blog I feel lucky to have found BD’s work at 25 and single. For a longtime after I found the manosphere, I too couldn’t reconcile the fact that I want children but won’t touch marriage with a 100ft pole. Now with these sort of candid confessions, the pieces are falling into place. BD please keep writing, can’t wait for the next piece!!
BD was once beta. We have all been there. It’s been a year for me since the blinders were knocked off. I am thankful for this blog because at the tender age of 33, I armed with knowledge my father never told me and my mother would cringe at.
Haha! Did you really verbalize it like that? With zero game? One out of three saying yes to it is a good rate. Why did Marci say yes and the others said no/didn’t have time? What do you think in retrospective was the reason for Marci’s attraction to you and the reason why the others weren’t attracted to you?
Yep, Peri-menopause…Nobody, I mean nobody wants to talk about this because it’s the third rail to feminism, to admit its hormonal effects is to admit that yes women really don’t have a lot of control over their emotions….. Unlike a lot of marriages, sex was not used like a weapon in mine, sex was on the table at least four times a week, nor did my X get fat, slovenly or bitchy. I guess one could say I had a great marriage and I’d have to agree, 24 years with very few regrets. Then at 44 menopause began to kick in, my X changed into someone neither the kids or I recognized…within a year I was single again at 56.
What it boils down to is there are no guarantees. You can do everything right by the Alpha book, Eg. build up your own life till your mid 30’s, find a girl in her early to mid 20’s with a low partner count from a solid family with no divorces and make her jump through all the hoops before you marry her…but, at menopause all bets are off.
See, I’m just thankful my mom wasn’t cringing. She even gave me advice more or less similar to BD’s: Don’t get stupid one-itis, make sure you know how to make chicks orgasm, don’t fuck around when asking a chick out just ask her out, good company/sex is better than any gift. And when it came to relationships, These were her exact words: “You do whatever you want, just don’t get in trouble with the law or anything like that. And if you do get in trouble with the law don’t expect me to help.”
And she’s Jewish. AND was a member of NOW in the 70s. I don’t know either lol. You’d expect someone like her to be bugging me about her having grandchildren as soon as I hit 25 or so but no. She doesn’t care. Which is nice. Way less pressure for me.
My dad was the one who gave me all the shitty advice: Say nice things to her, try to impress her with gifts and dick measuring techniques (by FAR was the WORST piece of advice), and more or less try to white knight her into your bedroom. Its sad, in the theater of dating, my dad was less masculine than my mom. Divorce can truly destroy a man if they let it. Probably chicks too but not as much.
Since there seems to be some BD-appreciation comments on this thread, I’ll throw in mine for good measure. I found this blog quite serendipitously, maybe in late 2014: I was a paradoxical quasi-omega with weird, occasional “accidental alpha” tendencies which I then never knew were the reason some hot girls inexplicably liked me (I believed all the bullshit about the “real” ways to attract girls); except that the rising hedonist in me was increasingly pushing me towards alpha because, more and more, I was realizing that I really didn’t want to be unhappy and that the thought of not sleeping around made unhappy, and maybe (since I’ve always loved evolutionary psychology) humans just aren’t wired to be long-term happy within monogamy (something I hinted at to the girl I broke up with that year). So I started googling “open relationships” to see if that was a thing, and lo and behold, this blog with a weird D&D like title started repeatedly coming up in my searches, and what it said was un-PC and matter-of-fact in a way that I immediately liked, and I learned a ton. For reasons unrelated to the blog’s subject I still haven’t dramatically improved my results (though I did improve them to a degree), but for some reason I’m way, way happier than my quasi-permanent melancholic state of 2014 and earlier. So hell yeah, I’m happy to have found this blog.
There are a lot of painful truths that come through in this piece about the price of monogamy (and Joelsuf – man that is heartbreaking to read about your late father).
The fruits of your faithful monogamy are all bad. Women don’t appreciate your monogamy. Your monogamy is a trigger-switch that causes women to treat you the worst they can get away with. The ‘happiness’ women very temporarily feel (or claim to feel) when you commit to monogamy is something that cruelly strokes your ego for about 5 minutes and thereafter, the cascade of negative consequences arrives everywhere in the relationship.
I regret every moment I have ever spent in monogamous relationship with any woman (even the 1 LTR I still look back on as being an otherwise healthy, good one). When BD writes “Sometimes pretty women would flirt with me and I knew I couldn’t do anything physical about it. It physically hurt to be sexually caged like this, like a defanged, toothless lion in a crate” – hot damn. From your lips to God’s ear, man.
Not exactly. I just said I’m officially single and that we should “hang out” or “go out” or something (I don’t remember the exact words I used). That’s it. However, all three of these women were women I already knew and that I felt were already attracted to me (at least two of them were).
Remember, beta males with no game get laid all the time. People like to have sex, and that includes women. Game just gets you more and easier sex with higher quality women.
Again, these were not complete strangers from the internet or a bookstore. They were women I already knew and who already liked me to some degree, so you can’t compare that rate to any cold approach game or online dating.
Of the three, there were two women I knew were pretty attracted to me. Marci was one, and there was one other. The second one planned to come over the following week but her schedule was screwy. Within another week or two after that, she went back to an ex-boyfriend and married him.
The third one, I’m not sure. Maybe she wasn’t attracted to me that way. Or maybe she was already fucking someone. Don’t know. (All three of these women were over 33.)
Yep. Menopause is just like women getting bitchy on their periods. You, as a man, are never supposed to talk about it no matter how bad or inappropriate it gets. You’re supposed to shut the fuck up and take her abuse. When on her period/menopause, she has the “right” to scream at you and treat you like shit because it’s “not her fault” or something.
Of course it’s bullshit. Any drama should be met with an instant soft (or hard) next, regardless of the hormonal reasons. Drama is drama, I don’t care what the reason is, and I know plenty of women who can control themselves when in the grasp of these hormonal problems, so I know it can be done.
The woman you marry on your wedding day is not the woman you’re with 10-20 years later. Completely Different Person.
It’s so hard for men to admit that. As the saying goes, “Men marry women hoping they’ll never change, women marry men hoping they will.” They’re both wrong.
Oh stop it. You’re all making me misty.
To be fair, men don’t appreciate women’s monogamy either.
Humans, either gender, are not monogamous creatures. They are pair-bonding creatures, but not monogamous creatures. Two different things.
Correct, and my very next post on Thursday is about this. You read my mind.
Yup. Once again, we human beings are not sexually monogamous creatures. We need to play around a little. It’s the way we were designed 100,000 years ago, and this won’t change because of societal preferences or pressures.
My last LTR was with a much younger woman. We were both in college at first, and she essentially spent her undergrad years with me. The degree to which she boosted her SMV by keeping N = 1 is an interesting question which is entirely beside the point. The last 2.5 years, after the NRE wore off and she began to really get noticed by guys she liked, we both knew what was what. Still, we verbalized everything decided to stay together until she went to graduate school. I drove her out there, helped her move in, backpacked the coast, fucked one more time and flew home alone.
Here’s my point: At first the sex was otherworldly. I mean, she is 20 years younger, a real hourglass figure, submissive….wow. But after some time went by, frequency went down some. Then we had “the talk” where she (rightly) said she owed it to herself to date other people in graduate school, and immediately after that an Alpha type nearly seduced her. These two events ramped up our sex life back to NRE levels. Knowing she was going to leave motivated me to go for it every chance I could. Nights where before I might have waffled, I took advantage and went for it. Having been in another man’s arms (fully clothed, if she lied she’s good) absolutely stoked her passion, too.
Honestly, this led me to Alpha 2.0 lifestyle. I hate it when people get complacent in the comfort of a relationship. It remains to be seen how well I handle the fact that women I’m fucking are fucking other men, but I got good at condoms from that last LTR and I honestly don’t mind competing. My last girl made me make her cum every time, and I was adept before that, so whatever.
The time limited model is problematic and hard to replicate. The Blackdragon MLTR/FB/OLTR model has many of the same benefits, plus the additional one of not being left with your cock in your hand every time she (inevitably) leaves. Signing up to be someone’s Beta Bux would be trivially easy for me. Forget it, I’m going to date as high as I can, the younger, hotter, and smarter, the better. The thrill of fucking someone way out of your range for LTR‘s is incredible, as is the peace of mind knowing that an LTR is impossible with her.
BD, it would be very interesting if you write a post about how you would have acted differently “knowing what you know now”. Assuming you read a BD-ist blog when you were 25, would you take it at face value and refuse marriage/kid altogether, or would you still wanna taste all it yourself (with pren-up this time and better pre-selection ofc)?
Why do I ask? As one of your younger “2x” readers, I feel thankful for all the info of Alpha 2.0 lifestyle that opened my eyes and gave me good directions in life. However, given tons of SP and OBW out there, I’m not sure if I don’t experience some life events by myself, feel the pain and trauma in it, then I will never make this knowledge mine and truly set for the A2.0 path as a bullet train without any doubt.
BTW, is it bad to make achieving completely Alpha 2.0 lifestyle the first phase of my life mission?
Being Alpha 2.0 is having a mission, codex and goals, then following the (path to) the Financial and sexual baselines.
As I was already well-underway to finishing my education in the pharmaceutical field, implementing the Financial baseline only took about 1 year (since the starting salary with only 32 hours of work a week is very high). I had already had plenty of insight into seduction/PUA, so the sexual baseline wasn’t hard to set up either. This means that I could implement the Alpha 2.0 lifestyle (w/o the self-employed part, which I don’t think is important if you love your job and that you have high job security, low amount of hours, high flexibility etc., which I do) within a year of discovering it. And thus, your question answers itself: your mission can’t be something that’s finished in just a year; it has to be for decades or maybe even an entire lifetime.
But from first hand experience, let me tell you: Re-programming your entire life, including your mindset, to fit the independent, freedom-oriented lifestyle that is Alpha 2.0 is the best decision you will ever make.
There’s a weird paradox though about being Alpha 2.0 and having a mission…*any* mission. Being location independent and independently wealthy was sort of the goal all along – so having achieved that, there seems to be little else to strive for other than enjoying each day/night to the max. Also there is the question of striving vs. arriving/being – the latter being a far better and higher state. There are a million good philanthropic causes to get behind, but I just don’t care that much about any of them. I will participate in charitable events to some extent for others’ sake (friends/family who ask me to participate), but I wouldn’t be motivated to do this at all without being asked/expected to. One thing that seems to be a low-level ‘mission’ of mine lately is to talk to older down-and-out drunks at various bars and try to give them a little hope with empathy and listening, put a little light back in their eyes. I could realistically see myself winding up there in 20 years if I were to make the wrong big life choices, so maybe that’s why I give a shit.
Congrats for the great job-to-come JB. Since we are on the Life Mission topic, I would elaborate some more. According to BD, a mission could be multi-layered if needed, I envision mine could be broken down into 3 phases:
Phase 1 (7-10 years): Completely integrating and living the Alpha 2.0 lifestyle, with location-independent incomes that yield 6 figures (instead of 75k/year). I need this to jump start on phase 2.
Phase 2: (10 – 15 years): Travel all over the world, stay whenever I want for as long as I want, explore all the best things life on Earth has to offer in all its beauty and abundance. Blend in, taste the best local foods, study their famous history, enjoy their arts, fuck their women… while also working and writing a blog that shares my journey/adventure to the world. This is what I always wanted to do from my childhood and how I will quantify if my life was worth living or not at the moment I lay down and move from this world.
Phase 3: (lifetime) focus on helping solve a world’s problem (hunger, aid, electricity…) or pushing a scientific breakthrough for mankind as a whole, either via investment, philanthropy or by get direct involved if possible. This I haven’t been able to clearly define yet, but after all those years traveling and experiencing things I believe I will certainly know what I want to do by then.
Am I delusional?
I’ve answered that before. I would have put her into an OLTR, moved her in, kept fucking FBs on the side, not gotten legally married, filed a parenting plan, and had my daughter with her.
Knowing my ex-wife and how women are in nonmono relationships, the likely outcome would have been that she would have moved back out in about three years (when I was about 28). There would be no divorce, no alimony, no legal battle, and little to no hard feelings. I would keep her on as an FB and just pay child support for my daughter, who I would see every week. It would have been just fine.
It all depends on you. Yeah, there are some men out there who won’t believe the stove is hot until they mash their hand on it, melt their skin off, howl in pain, spend a painful day at the hospital, have a bandage on their hand for a few weeks, suffer permanent scarring, then spend the rest of their lives bashing stoves on manosphere forums and blogs.
Hopefully that isn’t you.
That’s not a Mission or a Mission Phase. That’s a goal. Put a deadline on it and get to work.
That’s just a list of goals.
That’s a Mission.
@Leon
Thank you very much! But I actually already have that job. I kind of find myself somewhat like BD did when he was in his mid-twenties and had his first big income (Though as his own boss): It’s strange to make more money than your parents, who have worked their whole lives to try and accomplish such a financial baseline. I’m serious, it feels weird as hell.
If you are also in the Scientific field, I can recommend going with the “breakthrough” as part of your Mission: Integrating your work-life into your Mission makes even the trivial tasks at work feel more meaningful, because they all count towards a greater cause. (If you are not a scientist, do not try and go with the direct approach to Scientific breakthroughs – There are enough delusional pseudo-scientists that have no clue how research, evidence and so on really works).
@Joe K
Enjoying each day and night should be part of your Mission, or rather some part of your codex. It is not a mission itself. A mission is something you wake up towards every single day of your life. Leon’s examples (Help solving a major world problem) are examples of Missions.
If you are on your way to solving world hunger, do you really think you’d care about that one girl? Do you really think you’d care that your mom was sour last time you talked to her, your best buddy is acting up a little these days, the barista at Starbucks gave you one pump of caramel instead of two? No. You don’t. You have important things in your life that need to get done.
LMAO it astounds me that people even get stressed out about this kind of nonsense. I mean a short burst of frustration could possibly be warranted but that’s about it. Even if you don’t have a real mission that shouldn’t bother anyone ever.
“If you are on your way to solving world hunger, do you really think you’d care about that one girl? Do you really think you’d care that your mom was sour last time you talked to her, your best buddy is acting up a little these days, the barista at Starbucks gave you one pump of caramel instead of two? No. You don’t. You have important things in your life that need to get done.”
OK, let’s break this down…
“Do you really think you’d care that your mom was sour last time you talked to her, your best buddy is acting up a little these days, the barista at Starbucks gave you one pump of caramel instead of two?”
Obviously that kind of shit is not even on the radar of an Alpha 2.0. Maybe you’d care about your mom’s happiness, or your best buddy’s mental stability, but only out of kindness for them. It would matter a very small amount regardless of one’s quest to solve (or not) world hunger.
“If you are on your way to solving world hunger…”
This presupposes that world hunger could be solved, or that it’s worth caring about. It is my opinion that world hunger will never be solved, no matter what.
“do you really think you’d care about that one girl?”
Aha, there it is. If you’re a married guy or a guy who’s been in an LTR – and you have a family with that woman or you were planning on starting a family with her – that’s a whole ‘nother thing by a mile. If there’s a family/prospective family to consider, than that is by definition, on some level, a mission for a man who’s made that decision. A family involves ‘one girl’ – a wife/LTR. Even in an OLTR, there’s a huge investment there.
Back to the ‘solving world hunger’ thing – with any large-scale, vague humanitarian aim – I tend to think like Hillary Clinton: “what difference, at this point, does it make”. All of us here know how irreversibly fucked human relations have become in the modern era. We all know that the solutions to these things have existed for decades if not centuries, and that there is simply no meta/aggregate-human willpower to effect any real change for the better, human nature being what it is. I cannot see how this type of mission, or anything in that ballpark, would cause any RP-aware man to jump out of bed excited every morning.
Depends on the mission, if it’s impossible or too huge to get done quickly it can drag one down. The one that involves me at the moment is small, but has very measurable, immediate and positive outcomes. I recycle wheelchairs that people no longer want or need and give them away to people who could not afford to buy one. Seeing the look on a housebound and dependant legless Vet near suicide when he recieves his powerchair and can come and go as he pleases is a powerful motivator…
Good introspection. It’s common for alphas get bored of gaming chicks and start looking for “something more”. That’s when SP kicks in and men start making stupid decisions.
If you decide to experiment with traditional relationships, remember the line: “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner”. Don’t make long-term commitments that can fuck you, don’t co-mingle assets, all the usual stuff BD talks about. Eventually you will see the signs of betaization and increased woman drama, and you will want to get out. Make sure you always have an out.
I’ve almost gotten married three times, but backed out every time. And in retrospect, I feel incredibly lucky.
Like Joe K, I don’t feel the need to do any charity (Though being an ENFP and can easily sympathy with ppl around, it’s weird). However, I have a payback belief, if you take something you should always give some back, even more. Once I’m benefited from earth’s resourcefulness and the warm of ppl on my path, I will be more than happy to give back to the world, even if my effort wouldn’t make a complete change, it makes me happy and fulfilled.
“If it’s impossible or too huge to get done quickly it can drag one down”
This is damn right, thinking about solving world hunger at the moment doesn’t empower me much but drain me out. I’m not here to save the planet, nor having the ability to make drastic changes like Einstein or Darwin. I’m just a normal guy, lucky enough to be born as human on earth, so my goal is to live a life worth living, enjoying my time here before it eventually ends. I would love to raise the stakes and bring greater impacts to more people, but only after my life is considered fulfill somehow, hence the mission phases.
Maybe I need to word my phases better, polish those into a real Mission instead of a list of goals, but it already gives me good strength and excitement to wake up and tackle, because it’s congruent with me, and feasible.
What I like about this article is the detailed transition in your life. And allows us to see what took place and the events and scenarios that surrounded your change . Very interesting and a good read!
Sorry I’m a bit late to this one. A very open and honest account. Thank you. 🙂
Hi BD,
You mentioned that during most of your marriage you acted very Beta, but almost at the end of it you began to act more alpha. You said that after this your wife acted more violent against you, but exlcuding those violent events, did you notice any increase in her libido and desire for you after you “Alphaed-up”?
Cheers!!!