Hypergamy

Okay, if you're a frequent listener of the Dad Starting Over podcast and you find yourself saying, "Yeah, that sounds like me," well, you don't need another podcast episode. What you need is support. The Help for Men Brotherhood is where men go when they're done pretending that they got it all handled. You know, your dead bedrooms, your divorce, your loneliness, your rebuilding life. We have private forums, frequent live Zoom meetings, one-on-one coaching, courses, all my books at no additional charge. And yes, we get together in person. Real men and real conversations. So stop doing this alone and join the Help for Men Brotherhood today at help4men.com/join. I look forward to seeing you in the next member meeting. There is a subset of the internet that I recognize I intersect with quite a bit. They call themselves, quote, the red pill community. In short, it's a bunch of mostly younger men who have discovered that the world of relationships, girls in particular, is not quite what they thought it was. It turns out that women are kind of fucked up too in a lot of ways. They can be assholes too. While we have always known that men have this quasi-animalistic set of urges and instincts, you know, like see porn, prostitutes, etc., it turns out that women also have an underlying set of such behaviors and instincts. And here comes the shocking part: some of these instinctual behaviors are not very nice. This line of thinking has become so shocking to the average internet Joe that they had to borrow from the movie The Matrix, and they liken this revelation to, quote, taking the red pill, or seeing life for what it really is. Some of these guys are so taken aback by this revelation that they construct their entire online persona around it. They write articles and books on the subject. Endless tips and advice for how to navigate around the female human nature and get into their pants. The red pill is ironically one of the most potent examples of putting women on a pedestal that I've ever seen. Men are literally devoting years of their life to cracking the code just to score chicks. It could be argued that my popular book, The Dead Bedroom Fix, is red pill in nature. I'm always surprised at just how much of a shocker the content is to many men. I mean, I get it in a way, but when I came to the revelations that led to the book, it was done more in the theme of, "Ah, here's all the shit that I always really knew, but I just ignored for a variety of stupid reasons." Well, I've learned that that's not necessarily the case for many of my readers. For many guys, what I outlined is as shocking as if I had announced that the aliens had arrived on Earth. Of all the facts that myself, the red pill community, and scientists who study human behavior have revealed, there is none more shocking and controversial than the concept of hypergamy. To me, hypergamy is one of those, "Yeah, I always knew that, but I didn't quite know how to properly define it" kind of things. But to many men, it's nothing short of pure evil. Well, what exactly is hypergamy? Hypergamy is the name given to the universal observation that women tend to partner up. At the very least, women will marry somebody who is even with them on the social hierarchy, but preferably somebody above them. Not always, of course, but more often than not. The female CEO of Acme Company, for example, is probably not going to marry the janitor that cleans her office. Conversely, it's not uncommon for the male boss of a company to marry his secretary. Again, it's one of those things that we all kind of already knew, but we never thought to put a name to it. Here's one interesting side note before we move on. This does not necessarily relate to short-term sexual partners. The female CEO of Acme Company, she may leave the company Christmas party with some hunky guy who works in the mailroom. But partnering up and marrying the guy is most likely completely off the table. This phenomenon seems like a, well, duh thing to some of us, but to others, it's a real kick in the proverbial crotch. A lot of men have been sold on the Disney/Hollywood story of love and long-term marriage. Then these men lose their jobs, and they discover that in a surprisingly short amount of time, their wife was consulting with an attorney about divorce. While he's in the depths of despair, some of his more honest female family members and friends will say something like, "Well, yeah, women need security, and she's scared. I can understand that." And the man is taken aback thinking, "Security? Scared? What about our vows? What about the family?" Hypergamy is such a touchy subject for a couple of reasons. Number 1, it paints women in a not-so-good light. It makes them out to be, well, human. It shows that for long-term partnering, they require certain conditions. And that sounds animalistic, if not robotic in nature to some of us. And number 2, it makes men feel very uneasy. It paints marriage as some sort of game that has rules and regulations. We as men have to fall within certain parameters or the whole thing collapses. It's kind of like finding out that Santa doesn't exist. Wait, you don't just write a letter and you get the shit that you want? Mom and Dad have to work hard for this, save up money, and buy the stuff for me? If they don't have a job, I may not get the stuff? Yeah, welcome to the real world, kiddo. It can be argued that we men have our own form of hypergamy, but society has done a very good job of keeping it under wraps or shaming it into submission. As men, we know what we prefer in a mate can be summarized as follows: Young, pretty, and fertile. Everything we like on a shallow mating basis points to those 3 things. Ask any 40-something mom walking through the mall with her husband, and she'll tell you about the countless times that she has caught her man staring at those pretty young things prancing around, or the number of times that she saw her husband's internet browser history filled with Pornhub links with words like teen, young, and college coeds. Ask the founders of dating websites like OKCupid. Their data showed that while women mostly looked at male profiles that were close to their own age, men looked mostly at the accounts of 20-something-year-old women, regardless of the man's own age. In many men's eyes, the difference between his secret desires and hers is that he's able to separate his desires from real life and carry on as a, quote, faithful husband. While the wife's hypergamous urges can quickly break down the family unit. In other words, his wife gains 50 pounds after marriage and the husband just shrugs his shoulders and just spends more time on porn. On the other hand, he loses his job and the wife immediately starts texting an ex-boyfriend. But let's be honest here. This is a very myopic view of the situation. And one in which guys fall into the victim trap and try to paint themselves as angels. Guys, we're no angels. Men cheat a lot, and we all know this. I often talk about how I used to work for a big Fortune 50 company years ago, and like with most companies of that size, I had a lot of bosses. And most of the bosses in my little group were male, of course, and most of them had a history of screwing around with women outside of their marriage. A couple of them got divorced over it. I remember being flabbergasted when I watched the boss of my division sitting in a meeting, and he was asking about a pretty female consultant that we all knew he was secretly banging on the side. He didn't know that we knew. He sounded like some lovestruck teen girl who wasn't getting enough attention from her crush. Have you guys heard from Mary lately? Is she off on a trip right now? When's the last time you guys heard from her? Did she say something about her last meeting? The guy had the picture-perfect family at home. He had a beautiful wife and beautiful children. And here he was acting like a horny buffoon over some pretty blonde consultant. It's said by many sex researchers that male infidelity is determined by opportunity. The more options a man has, the more apt he is to screw around. Your former player dude who developed the skills to easily score women is more likely to have options, in other words, girls hitting on him, and therefore is more likely to cheat on his wife. Pretty simple stuff. Another common finding is that men are way better at compartmentalizing the affair as just sex and not an earth-shattering event that calls into question the meaning of their existence. For women, infidelity more often than not leads to the detachment from the spouse as they pair bond with the new partner and attempt to form a relationship. So if your barometer for evil is who is in fact more apt to leave marriage after an affair, well, then it seems that women win that contest. I think we as men have come to terms with our sexual urges. We know what we like in a dreammate, and we know that we probably won't get all of that within the confines of marriage. We've resigned ourselves to our urges and found other avenues to fulfill them. The market recognizes this unmet urge and provides numerous products to scratch that itch. Go to the wrong part of town, park on a corner, and just wait for the prostitutes to come up to your window and ask if you want a date. Now, have your wife go to the same part of town and do the same thing. How many male prostitutes will come up offering her oral sex for $20? Exactly. If anything, some poor desperate guy will pay her for the privilege of spending 5 minutes in her backseat. We're not living in the same sexual world, not at all. When we recognize this discrepancy, society as a whole has done a pretty damn good job of shaming those natural male urges and pushing them further underground. If you're caught buying services from a prostitute, they may put your face on the news for the whole world to see. And thanks to the internet, nobody will ever forget that you were that guy, a degenerate. Our wives yell at us for looking at girls, for looking at porn, and making lewd comments at inappropriate times. Our schools pull our boys aside and tell them that you need to cool it with the sexual innuendo and all that flirting with the girls. It makes them feel uneasy. Message received. All that sexual stuff that you're feeling, really, really bad stuff. So cool it, mister. Therefore, If we are so inherently bad, then our counterpart, the woman, well, she must be put on this earth to balance us out, right? She is the kinder and softer yin to our yang. We are this vile thing that needs to be tamed, and she's this timid, more pure thing that needs to be nurtured. But then we find out the truth. Timid? Pure? Eh, not quite. She's human. Just like you. If needs aren't met, then alternatives must be procured. You sneak off to the basement with your laptop and a bottle of Jergens lotion while she's texting her newly divorced friend, listening to stories about just how amazing single life is. Both of you have needs not being met within the relationship, along with a fine collection of personal emotional baggage, and both are finding ways to get the dopamine hit that you need to feel normal again. Hypergamy hurts so much because we have an innate sense of scarcity when it comes to relationships. If this one fails, I'm doomed. Of course, this is not at all true. We sometimes elevate women to mother-like status, and nothing hurts worse than when our mothers reject us. This is a level of worship our partner should have never attained. It's very unhealthy. And lastly, the concept of a hierarchy within the world of relationships It's understood and accepted, but we feel that marriage throws out all of those silly games, and it doesn't. If anything, it amplifies them. Hypergamy is real, and it's not going anywhere. Even in more egalitarian societies where women naturally rise in the professional ranks, we still see hypergamy fully on display. The marriage rates plummet, childbirths plummet, We're seeing it happen right in front of our faces. Women hold out for somebody higher up on the food chain. If no such men are available, then the institution of marriage does not exist. For many who study and observe the human mating game, the solution seems obvious. It's time for men to step up their game. You want to jump into the world of marriage? It's going to take more work than ever before. But for many guys, stepping up to the plate is just not worth it. The idea of more work is ludicrous. The juice, as far as they are concerned, just ain't worth the squeeze. The Pareto principle, aka the 80/20 rule, once again shows its ugly face. It seems that nothing within nature is immune to this universal law. If you want to join the elusive 20 group, then you have to work very, very hard to get there. And that's precisely what hypergamy is telling us.