It’s just seven words long, but that’s enough to start a firestorm: “Real men provide. Real women appreciate it.”
A billboard containing the words sits along an interstate in North Carolina, and it’s inflaming passions.
Some people find the message sexist.
A group of those who don’t like the billboard’s message plan to hold a protest this weekend.
There is a truth in the message, and women should avail themselves of it before getting married.
I’m all for women working and having access to their own funds in a relationship. I get emails from women who accidently got married to narcissists and didn’t work themselves, and they are tragic. Lacking access to their own money, they are trapped and unable to leave because of their inability to support their children, so they stay in a household that is horrifying every moment of their lives. Knowing the beauty of the world out there, and what they are missing, it is heartbreaking. Their very lives are stolen from them day by day, and they are helpless to stop it without risking their children’s lives.
By all means, if you are a young woman, lay the groundwork to be able to support yourself, because the truth is that recognizing a narcissist is far from easy when you are young and in the marrying years. Nobody is sharp enough in their early to mid twenties to spot a narcissist 100% of the time. So if you do one day wake up and realize you got caught married to one, being able to take your money and split is an excellent back-up plan.
That said, the message of the billboard has a strong element of truth to it. There are two types of guys I see out there, namely r and K. The K’s have a very strong team spirit. They want to contribute. If they are on a sports team, they want to pull their weight. Making a key play to help their team is bliss and they would be horrified to fail their teammates and not contribute. If they are in a relationship, they similarly want to provide for their wife and children.
The r-strategist, in contrast, has no desire to contribute and no appreciation for any contributions given to them. In its mild form, it expects free resources, so it will gravitate to latch onto a wife who can support it, and it will merely not contribute or appreciate what is done for it. In its most extreme form, it so expects free resources that everything you supply will be viewed as sub-par, and even worse, you will be viewed as stupid for providing it without expecting an explicit quid pro quo in return, or recognizing how you are being used. r-strategists expect everyone else is an r-strategist, so your selflessness isn’t noble – it is a sign that you are a rabbit so stupid, and they are so smart, that they are just rolling over on you.
If you are normal, the idea that you would not only not be appreciative of a partner’s contributions, but that those very contributions themselves would make you marvel at how stupid your partner was, seems impossible. But if you have the misfortune of marrying far enough along on the r-selection spectrum, that is exactly what you will get. I have seen it first hand, and received additional reports by email. It is out there, and you do not want to meet up with it, let alone get legally bound to it.
It is surprisingly difficult to spot. This is partly because they learn early on in life to mask what they are, and partly because when you do something nice for your partner, and they feign appreciation, it is far easier to imagine that they are appreciative when they fake it. It is very difficult to imagine that under that faked appreciation, they just scoffed with a laugh to themselves, about how incredibly, unbelievably stupid you are to be doing such generous things for a user like them. In one case I saw, the guy actually laughed at how stupid his wife was to be so blindly loyal and giving. He literally laughed, at how unbelievable it was she could be so stupid.
If you are a young K-female, you need to attune yourself to seek out a potential husband that is perhaps slightly bothered by your most extravagant contributions to him, and perhaps feels a need to “even things out” by reciprocating with an equal or greater contribution to you to “get you back.” If you find a guy who feels competitive with respect to providing for you, you will have less chance of being tied on to an r-strategist or narcissist, and that will increase the chances of your marriage being successful in the long term.
SPread r/K Theory, because you do not want to be hitched to a narcissist
Can I assume that this advice is true for men as well or does it manifest differently in females? After reading this I’m becoming concerned that my girlfriend might be an r-strategist
[…] Real Men Provide, Real Women Appreciate? […]
What about the other direction? Does every woman have ‘rabbit’ tendencies, or do K’s turn lazy? My wife’s background told me she was full K like me, but her behavior after 10+ yrs is that of a rabbit.
Notice how much of Heartiste is about not being totally spoiling of women by blindly submitting to them, and applying subtle stress to them at times. According to him, spoil your wife totally and she will often end up ditching you to ride the cock carousel, while subtle applications of jealousy, criticism, and so on will keep her by your side and loyal. What Heartiste is advocating is applying amygdala stimulation, which in theory would prevent r-ification.
On the other side, take a girl who marries one guy early like Sarah Palin and settles down to raise a family, and you end up with a more K-girl. But take a girl like Paris Hilton, raise her beautiful, rich, and jumping from one party to another, up her notch count, and otherwise flood her with dopamine and ego-strokes, and soon it seems she will have a tough time finding her way to a loyal monogamous relationship, despite all of her beauty and wealth.
I sometimes wonder, if any one of us won the powerball, what would it do to us over ten years, especially if fate and coincidence took us down the path of full Charlie Sheen, with non-stop women, booze, pizza, and a neverending party? I’ve wondered if after ten or twenty years I would become more emotionally predisposed to avoiding the upset and conflict, and that would translate into an emotional drive to just give foreigners what they want to avoid upsetting them, keeping everyone disarmed, and spreading the welfare to make everyone happy. Brains are malleable, how much I don’t know.
Ah, that makes sense, I put her on a pedestal for the first 10+ yrs of marriage, she had no ‘stress’ to speak of, now that I’ve unplugged (1 yr ago this month) her level of ‘stress’ is rising and she’s reacting poorly too it (amygdala atrophy), not fun retraining a brain.
Thank God for the manosphere and the Red Pill. Life is steadily getting better.
This is worth expanding on — both r and K want to make the key play. The difference is that K is willing to assist a teammate in making that play, while the r won’t help someone else get the glory without recompense, and in fact will often “innocently” sabotage the teammate.
After reading the article my first impulse was to call my ex and tell her thank you for some nice things she gifted me after we divorced, but refrained after counting the balance of our years together, which included having been treated worse than a dog leading to suicidality and a light stroke.
Does that make me r or just a nice guy?
Less experienced?
The most K women are polite, quiet and great cooks. I wouldn’t date a woman who wasn’t a great cook. In a K environment I would bet that it is the men who approach the women socially. In an r environment the women approach the men. The men and women are honorable and polite. If a woman is impressed by a man’s display (his background/speaking etc.) she shows her domestic skills. If the man likes them the courtship progresses, but not too fast. The r strategist will likewise try to speed things up way too fast- or deceive- or try to pretend as if the past didn’t happen or matter. But judgement always matters, impulse control is largely genetic. This is why it seems the longest, happiest marriages I have seen are almost always a military man and his wife, a farmer’s daughter, married in their 20’s and living out in the country. I’m pretty sure this is the Anna Karenina principle.