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There’s a common narrative going around, especially within Red Pill type circles, that marriage is a trap that is harmful to men. This is commonly describe through a story whereby a man gets married and works hard and is a good person, only to get cheated on by his ungrateful wife and lose everything in the divorce (usually blamed on “hypergamy” – the idea that women always leave men for a better guy when they can).

In this video, I address the narrative that long term relationship committments are “bad” for men, and explain what’s really happening when marriages hit the rocks.

CITATIONS:

• Reasons for divorce: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4012696/
• Women more likely than men to initiate divorces, but not non-marital breakups: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150822154900.htm
• Study on long-term happiness: https://www.adultdevelopmentstudy.org/

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Full transcript (unedited)

Hey, what’s up. So there’s a kind of myth narrative that goes around all the time about marriage. And this is a narrative that comes from all say, the red pill type side of things. The narrative there woman are basically these callous, money grubbing holes. And their marriage is a scam designed to ruin men. Want to give you an example of what it looks like I found a great cartoon that kind of encapsulates this narrative. We’re going to have a look at that. And now I’m going to try and kind of pull apart the truth behind it. So this is how it starts. We’ve got lol stick figures, and the woman saying I want marriage and the man says, Okay, I’m gonna plant a seed in your head. This particular page we coming back to to talk further about this next scene. She’s now married as I want kids, he says okay. Here they are kids all happy family so far isn’t it? Looks like she’s nagging him for playing on the computer. So he heads out to the yard to start doing some work. And notice how his postures changed. He’s a bit of browbeaten now isn’t the hill a little bit worn down already as he does all the man work and all the hard tasks. Now he’s off to work. It’s clocking in he’s making money for the family. Doing a hard office job that he probably doesn’t enjoy right. Comes back after all their hard work. She’s still nagging him right what she’d been up to nothing, of course, right. And so he feels guilty and Alfie goes to play with the kids and you know, do his part as a dad is. She’s giving him shit about not doing enough. And then she goes to her friend and she says the romance is gone. It doesn’t give me enough attention. Of course, your friend says Yeah, girl, you deserve better. She encourages her to leave and oh, we’ve got suave black, dude, he’s in the scene now. You’re so beautiful girl. I can’t stop thinking about you. Stop you know I’m married. He just wanted to play a bit of golf with his friends after all their hard work but even that’s not good enough for nag nag nag. He’s back. He’s looking at suave as either he’s inviting her over for coffee or he’s running himself over for coffee. She’s of course being very safe and saying oh, but just coffee and boom. Sitting up doggy style straight out of the gate. I’m assuming this is happening in her marital bed. How can you do this to me says the poor broken hard working didn’t do anything wrong guy. He made me feel special says the callous whore. Well, somehow that leads to her winning the divorce settlement. Yay. She got bags of cash. Apparently they don’t use a bank account. Oh, now he’s living in what appears to be a shed. Or she continues to get banged in an even bigger shed and keeps the dog Oh no, she worries the kids are gonna hate me for causing the relationship to break up because these little tiny adults saying we must daddy. So she makes up some stuff about Daddy because she’s a nasty bit right? Oh, dad, he’s going downhill a little bit, isn’t he? He’s really got that slope fascia. Now he’s drinking on one leg. He’s gonna work. He’s watching his big screen TV. At least he kept that through the divorce. Oh, she’s making up more lies about daddy now, isn’t she? I can’t believe this psychopath. Now she’s going on Facebook and saying that she’s the victim and all the Oh, we got some white dudes coming in now. Handsome white dudes with their model profile shots. sympathizing weather and I’m more lies to the kids. He’s really feeding them some bullshit. Now. He’s out with his new girlfriend. He’s at home and all he’s got is his massive flat screen. The dogs massive. It’s bigger than the kids. Oh, white guys come around for a bang as well. He says on depressed and lonely. He goes to his mates. They say hey, try some online dating mate. Now he meets the first girl. There’s clearly plenty of catfish. And he’s disheartened by that and gives up on that pretty quick. Finally he gets to see his kids. I don’t know how many years it’s been now. He tells him that he loves them and they say we don’t believe you go fuck yourself or was that effect? He takes the girl. She says Baba blah, threatens to take them away forever. Again, she goes on Facebook and does the same old thing. He loses his crap destroys his own laptop and we’re back to the beginning. Okay, I want you to just hold On this page right here, I want marriage. Okay. All right. Let me put out a caveat first, this narrative absolutely has occurred in real life to some people. Okay? It goes down pretty much exactly like that for some people, or there’s slight variations, but the general arc of the story of the hard working good guy doing everything right, getting absolutely everything taken away from him as kids turned against him, so on so forth. I’ve literally personally known guys who have gone through this definitely does happen. Well, the problem is, for a start, this is peddled as some sort of representative of marriage norms. Okay, when this kind of thing is posted around the internet, as basically like, Yep, this is what all guys are signing up for, why would you bother? It’s a horrible experience, rather than the far more likely, it’s somewhere in the under 10% range, that this kind of thing happens probably even far less than that. And when you consider the way the narrative is portrayed, which is that the man is this decent guy, and this woman is just cold blooded, pure psychopath, who doesn’t mind destroying him on a whim, that percentage is much, much, much lower. Okay? True, psychopaths only make up about one to 3% of the population. Very few of them actually go through with getting married, most of them are just very promiscuous, and married for for the most part, but not always. So a female psychopath to this level of kind of callousness. And grandiosity is very, very rare, though, she might have multiple husbands, so she might do this more than once in a lifetime. This is the kind of story we see in red pill, and MiG tau and all these kind of like, woman are the enemy type groups that try to sell a story that marriage is bad for me. And I’m not actually here to argue that it’s good for me, for me to say is that the story is misleading. Comes back to their first frame. Let’s just have another look at their first frame, actually, the first two. So have a look. Let’s just share that again. I want marriage. Okay. I want kids, okay. And this part is actually kind of accurate. I quite like the way they’re portrayed there. You notice that it’s not the guy leading, it’s not him saying what he wants, you’ll notice that he just seems to be placating the woman just giving her whatever she asks for. And that he’s not overly enthusiastic about the ideas or anything. He’s just kind of doing his bit. And then as of course, as the story goes on, he keeps up that theme, doesn’t he? She berates him. And he does, bowels, his poor little posture and goes off and works hard and does everything, doesn’t he? And yet the story of soldiers that the woman’s the bad guy, the woman is the perpetrator, and the man is the victim. How was that the case? Now I’m going to be quite harsh to you. And especially, I’m trying to do so with compassion for any guys who have been through this. But the simple fact is, if you want to recover from this, prevent it from happening or prevent it from happening again, if you want to become the kind of man that this thing doesn’t happen to. It’s not about running away from women or commitment. It’s about recognizing the lack of responsibility in the very beginning. So there’s actually frames that happen before the marriage one, you know, they haven’t drawn this up, they just went straight to the power it starts a marriage because I guess they’re trying to debunk marriage is a good idea. But what about the dating part, which always happens before marriage, and often for quite a few years? What was the main like there? Was he still just Okay dear to everything? When he originally chose the woman, how did he choose? Was he like, I am going to boldly go and confidently approach my favorite woman and I won’t settle for anything but the best I’d rather be single than be with somebody who doesn’t respect me. Did he go into it like that? knew he did not. He went into like, oh my god, anybody who loves me, I’ll take it. Alright, I’m just gonna prove to my father and to myself and to the world. I am worthy of a woman I’ll do anything to keep her I’ll take any shit I need to take so on so forth. So by the time we get to that first rain, I want marriage, okay, it’s already too late. This guy is already in deep in a very bad toxic relationship. And it’s not even necessarily true that the woman’s the bad guy. Now the way they portrayed it. That was kind of extreme example, but what they didn’t quite portray is his emotional unavailability. They didn’t portray his spineless people pleasing and constant aggravation. They didn’t betray his porn addiction. They didn’t betray his unwillingness to initiate sex or lead anything of value. If they didn’t portray his unwillingness to stand up for himself or stand up for the family, they don’t portray any enthusiasm to play with the children and be a good father. This guy wasn’t doing any of that stuff. He was just meekly following his wife’s orders. You think that’s going to make her the best of her come out? Do you think that’s going to elicit the most valuable, compassionate, wonderful behavior? Is it possible that she’s actually got a case here a case for being emotionally neglected? Now, nothing, justifies cheating. Nothing justifies lying to kids and turning them against the father, all that stuff is just pure psychopath, right? It’s just absolute evil. But the build up to the marriages that are like that, you know, they fall apart. And usually what really happens as well, the wife will probably win all the legal stuff, especially in the United States and United Kingdom, where it’s all stacked against men, but isn’t globally representative. You know, there probably be some acrimony, but for the most part that we shared custody, and the wife will actually want the children to have contact with their father and so on, that’s more likely than the you know, abusive, psycho tries to like turn the kids against the father while she’s off cheating promiscuously. With many men, that’s very rare. It happens, but it’s rare, you hear about it, because it’s so dramatic. But it’s nowhere near as normal, as a kind of slightly acrimonious divorce. What you don’t see in those frames either is the many, many years of frustrating, hard work that the wife put in to try and change the husband to try and break him out of this and to try and make him step up and be the man that he insinuated. He was when they were dating, that kind of false promises he made in the first three months that he has not lived up to the guy he pretended to be in order to get her and hasn’t eventuated he didn’t consistently maintain that, you know, I worked with many kind of broken couples, and it’s always the woman who comes to me on behalf of the cup, or the guy has usually resistant or very reluctant to get involved with any kind of coaching or therapy. And the story, which is always validated by the guys. Basically, she’s been busting her ass trying to turn the marriage around. And he’s been doing sweet fuck all, he just will not make lots of promises, but he never lives up to them. You know, and then by the time she cheats, or does some other bad behavior on her part, it looks like she’s a bad person. Right? When she was essentially driven away, like I see, I’m not condoning cheating, I think cheating things. If you’re a cowardly piece of behavior, that if you want to cheat, you should just break up with your partner and then find someone else. But it’s, it’s not something that’s dropped out of the fucking sky. It’s not just some evil act, or an impulse or a whim, is a build up to it. And a satisfied woman who has real man, you know, as a husband, who is a good father, stands up for himself portrays the sort of necessary masculine strength that’s required to make her feel safe. And for her to respect them. She’s very, very unlikely to cheat very, very unlikely, in my opinion, what usually get accompanying this kind of narrative is statistics, like nine out of 10 divorces are initiated by a woman, and even like tacked on to the side. And it’s because the woman found a better man, you know, hypergamy is the rebills would say, it simply is not true. There is statistics easily readily available to look up and I’ll include a link below this video for the science behind this. And while women are generally the initiators in divorce, think what you’ll find is that they were actually the initiators and everything in their relationship, including the end. And that’s actually one of the reasons they are ending it, because the man just would never lead. And so often I work with a lot of nice guys who I reckon reckon probably a majority niche of the whole male population. Rather than end a bad fit relationship, what they do is sabotage it until the woman ends it because they’re too cowardly to end things on their own as a very, very common occurrence. And I’d say that that probably more so than anything else, is the reason that women are more likely to initiate divorce than men if that isn’t the true because the man has basically engineered the divorce without actually pushing the papers through himself. He won’t even often realize that he’s done this it will be as avoidant attachment style, sabotaging things at a subconscious level. But if you were to put his behavior long term are on paper and say they go wants the marriage to end, you know, who behaves like that. If they want to keep their wife, you’d say he doesn’t see it that way. He says, I’ve been trying really hard. You know what To find as he abandoned and neglected her emotionally, he refused to engage things physically. He wouldn’t stand up for himself, you know, he kept herself busy with work, he was neglectful towards children, whatever, you’ll see a pattern of a guy who’s trying to get out. He just doesn’t see it their way. And what you see is the top 510 reasons for divorce. One of them is that the person was promiscuous and cheating. But often that’s the person isn’t initiating the divorce, okay? Usually the person initiating the divorce, it’s because their partner was unfaithful. Alright, so if mostly women are initiating divorce, that means mostly men are doing the cheating when it leads to a divorce. And then the other reasons have nothing to do with hypergamy. The other reasons about they can’t reconcile their finances, they can’t communicate properly, they fight all the time. They don’t get along with the inlaws. There’s always reasons got nothing to do with another man coming into the relationship. Alright, they usually, and this is why I do the work that I do. Where you can see when you read between the lines, it’s all about the man not stepping up and doing his bit. It’s not to say that the woman always is I’ve never seen a relationship where one person’s healthy and the other person’s unhealthy. Okay, there’s always two to tango. So the woman is certainly doing her part and she’s not making it any better or not helping it along. Even often when they’re trying their best to fix the relationship they just do. So in a naggy critical way they use gameplay and punishments to try and manipulate the husband into changing so they’re as bad as he is. But they wouldn’t be doing their stuff if they weren’t trying to get satisfaction from someone who was unsatisfactory. So it’s back and forth. It’s 5050. In my opinion, I guess everything I’m saying today is in my opinion. But the reason I portray this and it’s not even really about marriage, but of our long term commitments, there’s a story being sold, that it’s bad for me and again to long term commitments with women that women are somehow untrustworthy, callous, impossible to please. And that is just a death trap, be in a marriage or just long term de facto relationship. This is bullshit, you’ll never see a confident guy, truly confident guy complain that this has happened to him. Suppose that any guy who’s been through this experience had this experience, or is avoiding relationships because he’s afraid of this experience, is a deeply insecure men. All right, a guy who’s got his shit together, who takes good care of himself is psychologically strong and healthy. He’s got no fear of commitment, and he’s not going to end up with a woman that he should be afraid of. All right, healthy people and unhealthy people do not end up together narcissists. And psychopaths do not prey on confident people. They prey on victims apparent prey on people already victims, the stick figure woman in this portrayal. If she is really a son of psychopathic and evil as she is portrayed to be, she would have picked him because he was already a loser. All right, she could already see their bow and his posture, she could already see an easy win for her manipulative tendencies, right? So she’s not going for the guy who’s gonna stand up for himself, a guy is not going to take any shit. You know, the guy who’s gonna set respectful boundaries, the guy who demands that she always grows and works alongside him and gets everything out in the open and is completely honest, she’s not going to go for that guy. She’s gonna go for the meek, nice guy, who will bend over backwards to keep her because he’s so desperately afraid of being alone, and so pathetically obsessed with getting laid and so on. I’m not here to rag on the guys who have been through this, it might sound like that, and I absolutely sympathize with you. I am very lucky. There. None of these kinds of woman ever sneered me up when I was at my worst because I would have gone down their path came close a couple of times, a couple of she devils almost got their talent and to me, and I was just lucky that by the time I figured out what was wrong with me and started working on it, nobody had really fucked me over here. It was just luck. I’m not better than anybody. And those of you who have been through such a horrible experience as was portrayed in those cartoons, you were unlucky. You, a girl like that. got ahold of you before you’ve done the work. We’ve done the work on becoming a responsible man, an honest man, a courageous man, a man who in things that aren’t going well a man who has strong boundaries and forces them assertively man who has high self acceptance, a man who’s willing to be alone, rather than be in a less than satisfactory relationship and so on. You weren’t that man yet. Because if you were that man, you have not had this experience. You have not been fucked over in this way. Now If you’ve been through that experience, maybe it’s irreconcilable, you know, like, I will give the red pill guys they do in certain countries, the law is absolutely stacked against the men and there’s not a fuck of a lot that they can do about it. You know, a woman can be really an unfit mother and a terrible provider and still get custody in some countries, but not all countries. Okay, this isn’t a global thing. So you might not be able to repair the situation that’s already happened. You might have to wait to your children and adults before you can get them aside and go, Look, here’s what really happened. And you might have to have some patience and some stoic philosophical endurance there are in terms of moving forward, you don’t have to be jumping on plenty of fish and drinking and desperately crying in your tiny shed. That’s not the way forward here you don’t have to run away from woman and become misogynistic and bitter and hateful, either. That’s not the best available option for someone who’s only got one life, your best available option is to ask yourself, How do I become such a psychologically powerful, strong, respectful man? An honest courageous man of values and integrity, a man that this would never happen to a man who can safely get into committed relationships, because this will just never happen to us. So how do I become that guy? Because a good relationship. It’s literally the best thing in the world. Okay, there’s a longitudinal study, a very popular, famous longitudinal study on happiness spans over 70 years of huge sample size that come back pretty clear. The happiest people, the ones that are in great relationships, hands down, that’s the best thing you can do with your life, statistically speaking. So it is a worthy pursuit. But next best, just to be a confident guy on your own, okay? To be in a shitty relationship is nowhere near the top of happiness, it’s actually quite far down the bottom. By being in a shoe relationship is worse than being lonely. It really is. And if you’ve been on one, you know that what I’m saying is true. So understand, Okay, I’m willing to be lonely, for as long as it takes for me to grow into the man that this kind of damage could never happen to. And then you won’t be afraid of woman and you won’t be afraid of commitment in marriage could be something you could do, if you feel like it. It’s just preference. But the commitment, the loyalty, the longevity of a relationship that is and can be very safe if you’re with a healthy confident woman who’s focused on around self development, takes 5050 responsibility in the relationship wants you to be your best wants to be the best yourself. It’s a wonderful relationship to be on someone like that can happen. It does happen all the time. You always hear the statistics 50% of marriages end in divorce your 50% don’t. All right, some people are fucking very happily married. Right? They stay in for a good reason. Not all, but some. And given that most people are insecure out expect a low percentage of healthy long term relationships. All right, very few people have the tools and the psychological strength to maintain a long term commitment that is healthy. But everyone has the ability to become that person if they do the work. If you want to help during the work, get in touch dan@brojo.org We can point you in the direction of some good resources or I can coach you to become their way yourself. And I will see you all next time. Thanks for watching.