Look. There's not a relationship skills gap. It's that no one has relationship skills because society has degenerated and demoralized so violently that no one know what love is, or even how to love.
What this means is that no one knows how to build a functional relationship. Men don't, women don't, rightists don't, leftists don't, authoritarians don't, libertarians don't. Nobody does except sometimes religious zealots, but they normally don't even know why what they are doing works.
Love is literally a lost art.
But, I think I'm figuring it out...
My best friend got married, and he asked me to be his best man, so I had to give a speech, so I've been thinking a lot about this for months. One thing that I thought was very useful was Luke Avery's discussions with Carl Benjamin on the LotusEaters premium videos discussing biblical verses. That's kinda where I started to realize that ancient civilizations had a lot more arranged marriages because it didn't really matter who you married so long as you understood how to maintain a good relationship: you basically always had a good marriage. There's always a ton of stories about basically chad men who marry low value women, and it never hurts them, and the women become beautiful from the relationship. I think Lancelot was one of them, I think there was something like this in the Epic of Gilgamesh; hell, I think that Taming of The Shrew might have been this.
The focus on finding "The One" is completely wrong. Yes, there's people who will be bad for a relationship, but if you are actually really good at handling relationships, you could be good with many people. The ancient stories actually talk about beauty emerging from ugly women because of how their men treat them. And it's not like princesses.
I think it was the Lancelot story (I could be wrong) that went something like: he was required to marry this hideous witch-hag thing, and he was given a choice. She could be outrageously beautiful to the world and in public, but would be a ugly bitch at heart when alone with him; or she would be ugly and horrid to the world, but she would be an excellent lover, and bring him unlimited joy & contentment only in private. He basically said something along the lines of, "I choose not to choose because I have chosen to marry you regardless of how you may appear to others or me. My vow to you will help you reveal who you are to yourself, then me, then others". This then breaks a curse that was planted on her, and she morphs from being a witch-hag to a beautiful maiden. The lesson it's trying to explain is that men's loyalty can unlock the beauty of femininity of women.
Now, love is not a feeling, it's a duty. Men have an obligation to women, and women have obligation to men. A man's obligation of discipline, of stoicism, and of fidelity to a woman can unlock her potential as a feminie animus; as his feminine animus. The thing which animates his agency. It is his agency which she finds most attractive after all.
And that's when I realized that I figured out what a woman's obligation is to men. It occurred to me while I was thinking about Psalm 23.
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
As an anti-theist materialist, a lot of these ideas don't make sense literally. But if I accept God as a literal personification of "truth" and "light" as a metaphor, this verse makes a ton of sense. When you hold steadfast to the truth, and walk straight into the valley of the shadow of death, being unflinching in your recognition of truth and reality, the positive benefits of your disciplined efforts will be self-evident even in the face of those who seek to destroy you.
A man's agency is valuable because he is the one who must take that step along the narrow path of truth and righteousness into the valley surrounded by the shadow of death and lies. This agency is what women want most in men because they can not venture into the valley of the shadow of death themselves without being mauled, tempted, captured, defiled, corrupted, or destroyed.
So, a woman's obligation to a man, must be that animus which animates him to take that step in to the valley of the shadow of death. She must be his inspiration. The core of her femininity is that she neither pushes him into the valley, nor pulls him back from it, but inspires him with her femininity to have him return, and have him go out into the darkness. She must inspire him into the dangerous dark, and she must inspire him to return to her with success. She must build him a home, a family, and a community which is both why he goes out, and why comes back. In this home, and with this family, and with this community; this is where and how she repairs him from the day's struggles. This is why women cook, and are in medicine, and are predisposed to care. He must bring the food, but she must bring the meal, and it must be brought to him. He must eat the meal so he can recover, and then he go out again for her.
A man's love, is his obligation to his woman. His obligation to her is his stoicism, his fidelity, and his discipline.
His stoicism means that he can parry every assault. That he can her rock in trying times. He can withstand the beatings and terror of the darkness, the lies, and the death. His discipline is his reliability to succeed over time when the odds are bad and good, it keeps him from deviating on the righteous path, it denotes his vision into the future. His fidelity is what grounds him to his righteous efforts, his fidelity in his friends and family is what grounds them and supports his family and community, and his fidelity in her is what gives her confidence, and the freedom from fear to actually grow ashiswoman.
A woman's love, is her obligation to her man. Her obligation to him, is her inspiration, her repair, and her creation.
With her inspiration: she provides to him his goals & meaning; she inspires him into the face of danger and death, and also inspires him to return from the fight should he push too deeply, be distracted, or tempted. With her repair: she tends to the wounds he suffered for her, she rejuvenates his courage, and she strengthens his resolve to his Love (discipline, stoicism, fidelity). With her creation, she builds him a family, she builds him a community and social group, and she builds him a home of refuge in his mind. These form the aesthetic of his animus.
And with these obligations, the heartbeat of a relationship forms. As a heart pushes blood out, and pulls blood back in, it can only function in a perpetual rhythm. A relationship must also have a perpetual rhythm. The woman must inspire the man to chose to leave, even if part of her would otherwise protest. Then the woman must inspire his choice to return, and she must restore him from his efforts, and he must adorn her with his glory from the fight. Then, he must leave again, then return, and the cycle continues. Within this cycle, the relationship builds from the knowledge of the man and the woman learning each other: the man learning how best to use his agency, and how best to quell her fears; and the woman learning how best to inspire his agency, and how best to restore him to the fight.
I will not gaslight you by pretending to think that we live in a civilization that knows what Love is. We do not.
But the greatest part of truth, why I am a materialist, and why I studied science, is that the truth exists regardless of every lie, deception, myth, or obfuscation piled on top of it. It simply exists, eternally and perpetually.
If I'm right, and although we live in the valley under the shade of death, then all we have to do is walk down the path, and endure every hardship along the way. (I mean, we already are enduring every hardship, so why not?) It is possible to remoralize society and restore (or build anew) civilization through Love, but you have to know what Love is, and actually commit to your obligations. Once we understand our obligations, we will have to teach others their obligation along the way.
Men don't, women don't, rightists don't, leftists don't, authoritarians don't, libertarians don't. Nobody does except sometimes religious zealots, but they normally don't even know why what they are doing works.
The moment I realized this is when I realized that my fiancé and I seem to know how a relationship works and creates that old standard of love, but we are both Autistic and therefore literally dont think like normal people.
We have been together for almost 11 years now with few fights (and none over anything major or long-term), and have hit that point where we literally can not conceive of life without each other in it. And when people ask me what our secret is that makes this work, I cant tell them because my thought process is so unusual they cant conceive of it. And when I do try to explain or say things that we do with each other, they look at me like I grew a second head.
Yeah, I know one other person who basically married the only woman he had sex with, which was his highschool sweetheart, and they've been married now for what must have been 15-20 years.
This is why I say we live in an utterly degenerated society. This was shit that was nearly intuitive a hundred years ago, and now is an alien concept. The fact that you can't explain it to people is why I'm trying to. It's like I'm a fucking missionary to a foreign land where the churches are run by Christian Heresies that are basically doing a mimicry and an approximation of what they think a moral system should be, because none of them read Latin.
Every single normie presupposition around love is false, that's why they don't get it, and that's why they can't figure it out when you explain it to them. How could they? They aren't even operating off of the right assumptions.
One of those assumptions is that you find love. You don't. Love is that obligation that you give to yourselves, and what they are calling love is the benefits of a love that's already been built for decades.
How do I put it? You don't find an apple tree. You have to plant a seed, grow the tree, wait until it matures, then wait for the right time of year, wait until the apples are ripe, then and only then can you pick an apple and eat it. Nobody just finds an apple tree fully populated with apples. And most likely, if you did, it ain't yours.
I'm trying to explain it to people so that I can help some of them. The most frustrating part is that it's entirely doable, it's just no longer intuitive.
Its also my high school sweetheart, and the exact nature of how we got together is so convoluted and relies on so many coincidences that if you made it into a Hallmark movie, people would say it is cheesy and unrealistic.
For me, the issue is that there is a lot of it that seems so intuitive that I cant explain how it works, because it would be like trying to explain air. They also feel like there needs to be certain things in the relationship that are usually the sort of things that come about from the corruption of the culture.
I have found the usual sticking point is related to sex. Because it has been so forced into the culture and corrupted that, to some people, if you dont get it on at least once a day, it means your relationship is in decay and will collapse. And when I tell them that for us, while sex is nice its not the end all, be all, and we can get plenty of emotional fulfillment by just touching and holding one another, they start treating us like we must have the fortitude of a Buddhist monk. Even though for most of history that was exactly the attitude of most husbands and wives. And then the issues seem to grow out from there, and leads to cascading issues down the line.
And of course, a lot of them do nothing on actually building a relationship, giving and taking with their partner to make both of you happy, and doing what you can to start a family to continue it onward. And so they are shocked when it all comes crashing down in months or a few years at best, because they confused lust with love.
And when I tell them that for us, while sex is nice its not the end all, be all, and we can get plenty of emotional fulfillment by just touching and holding one another, they start treating us like we must have the fortitude of a Buddhist monk.
I've heard these terms referred to as "love languages".
Yeah, the normies see this as temptation to sex, because they see sex as the achievement of emotional and physical intimacy... because they don't actually have regular physical intimacy.
It's worse because we know that men effectively don't get any emotional or physical intimacy outside of sex, but what's changed is that even women don't get physical intimacy outside of sex because men are conditioned to steer clear of physical intimacy with women.
So, any normal physical intimacy that you might have is just understood as "teasing" towards normies who are relegating all physical intimacy to sex 2-3 times a week if that's the case. What we're actually seeing is that millennial and Zoomers are the most sexless generations in American history, by really alarming numbers. Let me remind you what the regular, everyday, normal guy has for sexual performance.
The numbers of men who are virgins by 25, by 30, and even 35 are much higher than in recorded history. Millenials and Zoomers are reporting less sex both inside and outside of relationships. They are having less sex, less frequently, and they are in fewer relationships which would allow them to have a sexual outlet. The only good news is that America happens to be less worse off than the rest of the developed world. Japan is facing a demographic nightmare because I think 1/8 men by the age of 30 have never been on a date. In China, the situation is even worse.
It's like we stumbled into a sexual Dark Age. Actually, I'm going to use that from now on. When Rome receded, a lot of the knowledge of Rome was utterly lost, and quality of life dropped. Subjugated tribes basically receded back from the villas and into the hills to live how their ancestors had, and then it took a few hundred years for civilization to re-emerge and for those hill people to build their own kingdoms. People didn't even know what Romans looked like. They didn't know what bathhouses were. They didn't know what the names of abandoned cities were. They were stumbling blindly around the ruins of places they'd always lived near, but no one was left to tell them what they were looking at.
For us, something similar has happened. No one even knows how to build a relationship. The foundational premises aren't even there. They know they want love, but they don't know what that means, they don't know what it looks like, and they don't know how to get it. So it has to be rebuilt from the bottom up.
At least you guys are doing it. That's two down, just a few billion to go.
I think I just went over something like this. And I've been trying to talk about how women fail to understand mens' systems for socialization for years now.
Look. There's not a relationship skills gap. It's that no one has relationship skills because society has degenerated and demoralized so violently that no one know what love is, or even how to love.
What this means is that no one knows how to build a functional relationship. Men don't, women don't, rightists don't, leftists don't, authoritarians don't, libertarians don't. Nobody does except sometimes religious zealots, but they normally don't even know why what they are doing works.
Love is literally a lost art.
But, I think I'm figuring it out...
My best friend got married, and he asked me to be his best man, so I had to give a speech, so I've been thinking a lot about this for months. One thing that I thought was very useful was Luke Avery's discussions with Carl Benjamin on the LotusEaters premium videos discussing biblical verses. That's kinda where I started to realize that ancient civilizations had a lot more arranged marriages because it didn't really matter who you married so long as you understood how to maintain a good relationship: you basically always had a good marriage. There's always a ton of stories about basically chad men who marry low value women, and it never hurts them, and the women become beautiful from the relationship. I think Lancelot was one of them, I think there was something like this in the Epic of Gilgamesh; hell, I think that Taming of The Shrew might have been this.
The focus on finding "The One" is completely wrong. Yes, there's people who will be bad for a relationship, but if you are actually really good at handling relationships, you could be good with many people. The ancient stories actually talk about beauty emerging from ugly women because of how their men treat them. And it's not like princesses.
I think it was the Lancelot story (I could be wrong) that went something like: he was required to marry this hideous witch-hag thing, and he was given a choice. She could be outrageously beautiful to the world and in public, but would be a ugly bitch at heart when alone with him; or she would be ugly and horrid to the world, but she would be an excellent lover, and bring him unlimited joy & contentment only in private. He basically said something along the lines of, "I choose not to choose because I have chosen to marry you regardless of how you may appear to others or me. My vow to you will help you reveal who you are to yourself, then me, then others". This then breaks a curse that was planted on her, and she morphs from being a witch-hag to a beautiful maiden. The lesson it's trying to explain is that men's loyalty can unlock the beauty of femininity of women.
Now, love is not a feeling, it's a duty. Men have an obligation to women, and women have obligation to men. A man's obligation of discipline, of stoicism, and of fidelity to a woman can unlock her potential as a feminie animus; as his feminine animus. The thing which animates his agency. It is his agency which she finds most attractive after all.
And that's when I realized that I figured out what a woman's obligation is to men. It occurred to me while I was thinking about Psalm 23.
As an anti-theist materialist, a lot of these ideas don't make sense literally. But if I accept God as a literal personification of "truth" and "light" as a metaphor, this verse makes a ton of sense. When you hold steadfast to the truth, and walk straight into the valley of the shadow of death, being unflinching in your recognition of truth and reality, the positive benefits of your disciplined efforts will be self-evident even in the face of those who seek to destroy you.
A man's agency is valuable because he is the one who must take that step along the narrow path of truth and righteousness into the valley surrounded by the shadow of death and lies. This agency is what women want most in men because they can not venture into the valley of the shadow of death themselves without being mauled, tempted, captured, defiled, corrupted, or destroyed.
So, a woman's obligation to a man, must be that animus which animates him to take that step in to the valley of the shadow of death. She must be his inspiration. The core of her femininity is that she neither pushes him into the valley, nor pulls him back from it, but inspires him with her femininity to have him return, and have him go out into the darkness. She must inspire him into the dangerous dark, and she must inspire him to return to her with success. She must build him a home, a family, and a community which is both why he goes out, and why comes back. In this home, and with this family, and with this community; this is where and how she repairs him from the day's struggles. This is why women cook, and are in medicine, and are predisposed to care. He must bring the food, but she must bring the meal, and it must be brought to him. He must eat the meal so he can recover, and then he go out again for her.
A man's love, is his obligation to his woman. His obligation to her is his stoicism, his fidelity, and his discipline.
His stoicism means that he can parry every assault. That he can her rock in trying times. He can withstand the beatings and terror of the darkness, the lies, and the death. His discipline is his reliability to succeed over time when the odds are bad and good, it keeps him from deviating on the righteous path, it denotes his vision into the future. His fidelity is what grounds him to his righteous efforts, his fidelity in his friends and family is what grounds them and supports his family and community, and his fidelity in her is what gives her confidence, and the freedom from fear to actually grow as his woman.
A woman's love, is her obligation to her man. Her obligation to him, is her inspiration, her repair, and her creation.
With her inspiration: she provides to him his goals & meaning; she inspires him into the face of danger and death, and also inspires him to return from the fight should he push too deeply, be distracted, or tempted. With her repair: she tends to the wounds he suffered for her, she rejuvenates his courage, and she strengthens his resolve to his Love (discipline, stoicism, fidelity). With her creation, she builds him a family, she builds him a community and social group, and she builds him a home of refuge in his mind. These form the aesthetic of his animus.
And with these obligations, the heartbeat of a relationship forms. As a heart pushes blood out, and pulls blood back in, it can only function in a perpetual rhythm. A relationship must also have a perpetual rhythm. The woman must inspire the man to chose to leave, even if part of her would otherwise protest. Then the woman must inspire his choice to return, and she must restore him from his efforts, and he must adorn her with his glory from the fight. Then, he must leave again, then return, and the cycle continues. Within this cycle, the relationship builds from the knowledge of the man and the woman learning each other: the man learning how best to use his agency, and how best to quell her fears; and the woman learning how best to inspire his agency, and how best to restore him to the fight.
I will not gaslight you by pretending to think that we live in a civilization that knows what Love is. We do not.
But the greatest part of truth, why I am a materialist, and why I studied science, is that the truth exists regardless of every lie, deception, myth, or obfuscation piled on top of it. It simply exists, eternally and perpetually.
If I'm right, and although we live in the valley under the shade of death, then all we have to do is walk down the path, and endure every hardship along the way. (I mean, we already are enduring every hardship, so why not?) It is possible to remoralize society and restore (or build anew) civilization through Love, but you have to know what Love is, and actually commit to your obligations. Once we understand our obligations, we will have to teach others their obligation along the way.
The moment I realized this is when I realized that my fiancé and I seem to know how a relationship works and creates that old standard of love, but we are both Autistic and therefore literally dont think like normal people.
We have been together for almost 11 years now with few fights (and none over anything major or long-term), and have hit that point where we literally can not conceive of life without each other in it. And when people ask me what our secret is that makes this work, I cant tell them because my thought process is so unusual they cant conceive of it. And when I do try to explain or say things that we do with each other, they look at me like I grew a second head.
Yeah, I know one other person who basically married the only woman he had sex with, which was his highschool sweetheart, and they've been married now for what must have been 15-20 years.
This is why I say we live in an utterly degenerated society. This was shit that was nearly intuitive a hundred years ago, and now is an alien concept. The fact that you can't explain it to people is why I'm trying to. It's like I'm a fucking missionary to a foreign land where the churches are run by Christian Heresies that are basically doing a mimicry and an approximation of what they think a moral system should be, because none of them read Latin.
Every single normie presupposition around love is false, that's why they don't get it, and that's why they can't figure it out when you explain it to them. How could they? They aren't even operating off of the right assumptions.
One of those assumptions is that you find love. You don't. Love is that obligation that you give to yourselves, and what they are calling love is the benefits of a love that's already been built for decades.
How do I put it? You don't find an apple tree. You have to plant a seed, grow the tree, wait until it matures, then wait for the right time of year, wait until the apples are ripe, then and only then can you pick an apple and eat it. Nobody just finds an apple tree fully populated with apples. And most likely, if you did, it ain't yours.
I'm trying to explain it to people so that I can help some of them. The most frustrating part is that it's entirely doable, it's just no longer intuitive.
Its also my high school sweetheart, and the exact nature of how we got together is so convoluted and relies on so many coincidences that if you made it into a Hallmark movie, people would say it is cheesy and unrealistic.
For me, the issue is that there is a lot of it that seems so intuitive that I cant explain how it works, because it would be like trying to explain air. They also feel like there needs to be certain things in the relationship that are usually the sort of things that come about from the corruption of the culture.
I have found the usual sticking point is related to sex. Because it has been so forced into the culture and corrupted that, to some people, if you dont get it on at least once a day, it means your relationship is in decay and will collapse. And when I tell them that for us, while sex is nice its not the end all, be all, and we can get plenty of emotional fulfillment by just touching and holding one another, they start treating us like we must have the fortitude of a Buddhist monk. Even though for most of history that was exactly the attitude of most husbands and wives. And then the issues seem to grow out from there, and leads to cascading issues down the line.
And of course, a lot of them do nothing on actually building a relationship, giving and taking with their partner to make both of you happy, and doing what you can to start a family to continue it onward. And so they are shocked when it all comes crashing down in months or a few years at best, because they confused lust with love.
I've heard these terms referred to as "love languages".
Yeah, the normies see this as temptation to sex, because they see sex as the achievement of emotional and physical intimacy... because they don't actually have regular physical intimacy.
It's worse because we know that men effectively don't get any emotional or physical intimacy outside of sex, but what's changed is that even women don't get physical intimacy outside of sex because men are conditioned to steer clear of physical intimacy with women.
So, any normal physical intimacy that you might have is just understood as "teasing" towards normies who are relegating all physical intimacy to sex 2-3 times a week if that's the case. What we're actually seeing is that millennial and Zoomers are the most sexless generations in American history, by really alarming numbers. Let me remind you what the regular, everyday, normal guy has for sexual performance.
The numbers of men who are virgins by 25, by 30, and even 35 are much higher than in recorded history. Millenials and Zoomers are reporting less sex both inside and outside of relationships. They are having less sex, less frequently, and they are in fewer relationships which would allow them to have a sexual outlet. The only good news is that America happens to be less worse off than the rest of the developed world. Japan is facing a demographic nightmare because I think 1/8 men by the age of 30 have never been on a date. In China, the situation is even worse.
It's like we stumbled into a sexual Dark Age. Actually, I'm going to use that from now on. When Rome receded, a lot of the knowledge of Rome was utterly lost, and quality of life dropped. Subjugated tribes basically receded back from the villas and into the hills to live how their ancestors had, and then it took a few hundred years for civilization to re-emerge and for those hill people to build their own kingdoms. People didn't even know what Romans looked like. They didn't know what bathhouses were. They didn't know what the names of abandoned cities were. They were stumbling blindly around the ruins of places they'd always lived near, but no one was left to tell them what they were looking at.
For us, something similar has happened. No one even knows how to build a relationship. The foundational premises aren't even there. They know they want love, but they don't know what that means, they don't know what it looks like, and they don't know how to get it. So it has to be rebuilt from the bottom up.
At least you guys are doing it. That's two down, just a few billion to go.