Of Love and War
Rollo Tomassi's follow-up to Men in Love, exploring where men's ideal of love comes from, and why letting it go is one of the hardest parts of the Red Pill.
Where the ideal comes from
Love is personal and hard to define, and people resent having it defined for them. But Tomassi argues men's expectations of love trace back to childhood. A boy's first experience of intimate, nurturing love comes from his mother. Even before he can talk, he learns that love has conditions (developmental studies like the "still face" experiment show how quickly infants react when a parent stops responding). Commenter Yohami describes how the patterns formed then become the base everything else builds on. Many men spend their adult lives trying to recover that feeling of being safe, defenceless and cared for, now from a girlfriend or wife.
We learn early that love is conditional, but we want it to be unconditional. That longing pushes men to achieve and excel, but it also creates the false belief that a woman can, or will, love him that way.
"A place to rest"
A commenter, Peregrine John, put the longing well: men want a safe haven, a place to stop performing, drop their guard and simply be accepted. But, he adds, once a man fully lets go, he soon can't any more. Tomassi argues this is the lesson men only learn inside a relationship: there's no permanent rest from being the man she's attracted to. He suggests traditional vows ("for better or for worse… in sickness and in health") were written partly to secure exactly that unconditional love.
A cautionary story
Tomassi describes counselling an older man who was divorced once for not providing enough. In his second marriage, after a few months of unemployment, he came home to changed locks and a note: don't come back until you have a job. He said he was grateful for the push. Over 20 years he had completely adopted his wife's conditional view of love, constantly qualifying for it. Now in failing health, he realised his efforts had been expected, never appreciated, and he was losing the ability to keep earning her affection.
Coming to terms with it
Tomassi links this to his "War Brides" idea: that women, as a survival adaptation, can move on from former partners faster than men. He admits it sounds nihilistic, and that this is the point. Letting go of the "blue pill" ideal feels like losing an old friend, but it opens the way to a more realistic, and in his view more hopeful, outlook. He stresses he isn't questioning whether women's love is sincere, only that it isn't what men are raised to expect.
See also
Summary of a post by Rollo Tomassi (The Rational Male, 2012).
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