We might be broken

When "what do you want" is followed by a deviant answer...

Here in the Red Pill community, we talk a lot about women, sex, and relationships. It’s kind of a topic of interest for us. To say the least.

So when an internet manosphere guru asks the community “what do you want from your life”, the implication is that he’s asking about your goals and ideas regarding women, sex, and relationships. Not what you want for dinner. Whether you want to end up married with children, not married but with one (or a few) consistent casual partner(s), a serial monogamist, an accomplished player with a rotating stable of plates, a go-getter entrepreneur or careerist who could take or leave women, a loner hermit who also could take or leave women, or something else.

There’s a lot that went into how each of us came to answer that question besides the fact that we sat down one day, read some internet stuff, then made a decision whether or not we want to risk divorce, or whether or not we think we’re hot enough to have casual sex after logging some gym time.

Much of what goes into this mental calculus has nothing to do with what we’ve read or thought about. A lot of it isn’t even conscious.

All of us alive today were born. Obviously. But think for a minute about what it means for a human to be born.

In order for you to be born, two other humans - your parents - had to meet, pair off, have sex, birth you, and raise you. If not your parents, maybe some other humans raised you. But some combination of people that came before you brought you to this day.

Maybe you grew up in a nuclear family. A Mom and Dad who are married, raising you, maybe one or more siblings. Maybe Mom and Dad had a great marriage. Maybe they had a terrible marriage. Maybe it was super-terrible and one or both parents were abusive alcoholics, cheaters, neglectful narcissists, mean jerks, whatever. But whether it was a great marriage and family setting for you, or a terrible one, those humans paired off, had sex, birthed one or more children, and they or someone else raised you.

Maybe you grew up in a single parent household - a child of divorce, or a parent died. Maybe you grew up in a non-standard foster setting, were adopted, or any number of other non-standard situations I’m not thinking of because I’m a non-inclusive bigot. But somewhere in your history, two humans met, paired off, had sex, birthed you, and one or both of those humans, or in some cases different humans, raised you.

So for your entire childhood - the most formative years of your life - from age zero until you became an adult, your experience was that adults have and raise children.

This means that as an emerging adult just starting out on his own, your default understanding - the sum total of your lifetime of experiences to date, through the entirety of your formative years - was that the role of adults is to have and raise children. Which makes a lot of sense because adults having and raising children is how the species continues. Plus, this aligns with your biological instincts. We’re all biologically hardwired to want to procreate. When you see a hot girl and want to have sex with her, that’s your biological urge to procreate kicking in.

But in addition to your biology, all of your childhood programming has been a gigantic continuous experience where you, your siblings if you had any, your friends if you had any — every child you know — was a product of two humans meeting, paring off, having sex, birthing them, and them being raised by adults. Adults have and raise children. This is our programming from day one of our lives until our first day on our own as adults.

If you are sitting here today as a Red Pill man thinking to yourself that you definitely don’t want to get married and have kids, or that you’re not sure if you want to, or that you think maybe you might have wanted to but women just don’t seem worth it or good enough to take the risk, or any of the other manosphere rhetoric we see tossed around, this is actually very significant.

A man coming to a “definitely no” or “maybe not” or “I’m not sure” position when it comes to marriage and children is more than just a smart guy reading about feminism, gynocentrism, how bad divorce is, or other “women suck” internet content, then making a logical decision about risk because he’s an evil misogynist. This is a guy overpowering all of his biological urges and hardwiring, plus nearly two decades of childhood programming where his entire experience of life during his formative years is that adults have and raise children.

That doesn’t just happen because some random kid wandered on to the internet and saw a video on YouTube that told him women suck. This happens when one big experience or multiple smaller ones break a guy hard enough to damage his programming.

This is a big deal. The damage to a man’s psyche required for this to happen cannot be understated. Netflix alarmists would love for us to believe that random boys who see internet misogyny once or twice become killers, but it’s just not that simple.

To overpower our biological urge to pair off and have kids, and to overpower two decades of formative life where the entirety of our experience as a child is that adults have and raise children, shit has to go seriously wrong. Brokenly wrong. Not just an an internet video or two.

Some of us have horrible family experiences growing up. We’re abused. We witness abuse. We witness a terrible marriage that involves fighting, cheating, neglect, combinations of these things, even worse things. Some of us, even after having that upbringing, STILL desperately want to be married and have kids. We want to experience the good family life we never had and missed out on and tell ourselves we want to do things right, doing everything in our power to be different and better than our parents. But that kind of upbringing does break some men, who decide that maybe the default programming isn’t for him, so they don’t want to pair off and have and raise kids.

Some of us are broken by people we trust. We fall in love with the perfect woman, marry her, start a family with her, buy a lovely home and make it our own, turn a blind eye to the canary in the coal mine as she grows cooler, less sexual, less affectionate, much less respectful. And we are blindsided as the life we planned for ourselves is whisked away due to divorce, cheating, maybe both. Not only are we financially decimated, but we lose that beautiful home, and our children, who end up screwed up and hating us. And we mourn.

Divorce ranks in the top five most stressful events that can happen in a person’s life, right up there with death of a loved one and major illness or injury. The stress associated with the financial loss from divorce is readily apparent. The loss of a spouse and companion is also a traumatic change, as is pivoting from the hopes, dreams, and vision a person had for his life, not to mention losing full-time access to his children. Frequently, losing one’s home is also a consequence of divorce. All of a man’s friends and extended family have opinions about the divorce, or simply don’t know how to or do not want to be close to such a dramatic situation. So the man often ends up losing a decent number of relationships with friends and family members as well. Simply put, divorce is one giant pile of very significant losses, that all strike a man at one time, usually initiated by his wife, that he often never saw coming.

The trauma divorce causes in men cannot be understated. Divorced men have a suicide rate 2.4 times greater than that of other men. Additionally, divorce very frequently goes worse for men than for women. Nine times as many divorced men commit suicide than divorced women.

Some of us aren’t broken by a single event, but simply worn down by a life too heavy to carry. We know we aren’t entitled to sex and love, but at the very least, can’t people (women included) at least treat us like human beings? Humans are weirdly cruel to each other, often for things that can’t be helped and are not their fault. Women especially, being the weaker sex, tend to be terrible bullies when they find someone weaker than themselves in some way that they can feel powerful against.

When a girl rejects a guy or is mean to him, this is nothing. But when dozens upon dozens of girls reject a guy, and some of them are even terrible to the guy, for years upon years, eventually he breaks and quits trying. That makes the rejection stop, but doesn’t always stop the terrible girls in his life from being terrible. It makes the rejection stop, but doesn’t stop the feelings of inadequacy as everyone else moves on to have normal lives that include sex, romance, even pairing off and having and raising kids.

Meanwhile, we spend the majority of our life blasted with additional programming that demonizes masculinity and tells us that not only is feeling terrible about this wrong - but that wanting what we wanted in the first place is also wrong. As is nearly every trait, characteristic, or thought we have. Just being male is wrong. Then we go on to underachieve and struggle while being told we’re unfairly advantaged and have great privilege. (Ironically, not wanting what we’re supposed to want is also wrong and misogyny.)

I’m just scratching the surface with a few common scenarios, but there are many other ways — really no limit to the number of ways — a man can be broken, suddenly or gradually.

It takes more than an internet video telling you “women suck” to undo twenty years of childhood programming that adults have and raise children, plus all of your biological hardwiring. It darn-near takes a superhero origin story. Or a supervillain origin story? Or maybe just a sad sack loser story.

But take heart. Women are broken too. In far worse ways. Far worse ways.

Embrace being a little bit broken. Most people are. Just because you’re broken doesn’t mean there’s anything “wrong” with you.

Denying that we’re broken? Maybe even pretending we’re superior or enlightened rather than broken? That’s no good. That gets in the way of looking at life honestly and figuring out what parts of our life - both normal parts and broken ones - are actually working for us and what parts we can use. And which parts - both normal and broken ones - are not working for us.

Have fun out there, broken men.