- Joined
- Oct 9, 2012
- Messages
- 6,064
Hey there,
My name's Chase Amante, and I'm 31 years old. I've kind of been in and out of marriage throughout my twenties but that's complicated and I won't go there. Suffice it to say I do pretty well with my dream girls but I have a hard time actually settling down... it's never the girls' faults, it's always mine.
I've been involved with the pickup artist community since late 2005, when I was 22 years old, and I've seen a wide variety of different points of views and perspectives here. One of the most common PUA view points that you will come across is "monogamy doesn't work."
Before I touch on this subject, a bit of background. I grew up in a moderately conservative Christian household. My mother took my sister and me to church every Sunday, I went to Catholic grade and high schools, and I was an altar boy from I think second or third grade through junior high. My father was agnostic who'd been arrested for smoking weed as a youth though, and my mother wasn't super strict, and had even had a period in her twenties when she'd "lost her faith" but came back to it later. So it wasn't like I was living with priests and nuns.
Anyway, my family started out lower middle class and by the time I was in high school had moved into upper middle class thanks to some inherited money and my father doing a good job at work and getting promoted. In my high school of 1,000+ students, most of the other students had similar families to mine: mother and father still married, family goes to church, that's about it. A few of them had divorced parents, and at least for me, this always seemed like some really weird, bizarre, unusual thing.
When I started rolling with guys from the ghetto and the trailer park after high school, I became a lot more exposed to people from broken homes, although once I was in university I was sort of insulated from this again. It wasn't until I started participating in the pickup community that I became re-exposed to this all over.
People in the pickup community have strong views. This is mostly because they're young. Nearly all of the guys you see espousing loud, firm views of "Do NOT do this!" and "ALL women are THAT!" are under the age of 30. This was something I recognized very early on into participating in PUA, and it always made me take PUA advice - especially PUA relationship advice - with a giant grain of salt.
As I spent more time in the community, I noticed a really amusing trend as well: guys vehemently swearing off monogamy all pairing off and getting married or settling into monogamous relationships. I can't tell you HOW many guys I saw do this... over, and over, and over again. All the guys who used to lecture me on how monogamy was impossible and didn't work and women were inveterate cheats and they themselves would never settle down... BOOM! Now they're in committed, exclusive, monogamous relationships. The one part that annoyed me about this though was that whenever I tried telling them, "Told you so," they'd never give me any satisfaction... they'd always come back with some grumbling excuse about how this girl was the exception or they weren't REALLY monogamous, just trying it out for a while, or something along those lines.
Many of my anti-monogamy friends are married now or have children.
But I'm not especially interested in talking about PUA here; what I'm more interested in is monogamy itself. The institution is going through a serious bumpy patch in the West; I don't know the stats for everywhere, but at least in the United States, something between 50% and 60% of marriages entered into today are destined to end in divorce. Of course, that also means 40% to 50% of those marriages will never end, until death does the couple part.
There's also the risk of cheating - which it's impossible to get reliable numbers on; I've seen numbers on anywhere from 4% to 40% of women having affairs, and anywhere from 7% to 60% of men do. I'd guess it's somewhere around 30% for each sex having an affair at SOME point in their lives; heck, my mother started sleeping with my father when she was still sleeping with her ex too (I was pretty surprised to learn this - Mom?). As for what the percentage of affairs occurring in marriage is... 15%? Lower? Assuming you don't include those marriages that are in their death spirals and months before divorce, that is. If you include THOSE marriages, well, sure, the rate's going to go up. But good, happy, healthy marriages? MUCH less. Much.
I don't know how many of you men out there have tried to pick up women who were not even ecstatic about their partners, but just content. I have (just out of curiosity; didn't close any of these gals); and I have friends who have. Know how easy it is? It's tough. Sure, you'll find a few freaks - the girls with high sex drives; the ones with high enough partner counts that sex is no big deal to them and their marriage vows are irrelevant; the really weak-willed emotionally needy girl who's a complete pushover around anyone who can push just the right buttons with her - but these women are outliers. Thing that happens in PUA though, is this: one guy meets an outlier. Shags her. Writes a report about it. Another guy meets another outlier. Shags her. Writes a report. A third guy does it. Pretty soon, you've got DOZENS of reports of guys sleeping with married women!
And what happens? Guys on PUA boards point at marriage and go, "Holy diamond wedding ring, look at how often married women hook up with dudes! NO ONE IS SAFE!"
This is a trend we see somewhere else, too. Know where? The media.
What's the media do? It shows you all kinds of ridiculous stories that make you terrified of crazy ass crap.
I'll be honest: when I go swimming in the ocean, I'm half scared to death a shark is going to bite my leg off. I think the odds are vastly higher that I'll end up in a car accident that shears my leg off first, but I have little fear of dismembering car accidents compared to the fear I have of sharks. Why? Two reasons:
1.) The media loves to tell me about sharks biting people's legs off, but never tells me about car accidents doing this, even though they happen a lot more, because car accidents are boring and no one cares, and
2.) In a car, I have some illusion of control, whereas in the water, I know if some curious shark wants to bite my leg off to see if it's as good as seal meat, I'm screwed
You get this same confirmation bias on PUA boards that you do in the media... a bunch of guys sharing their story about sleeping with a married chick, and pretty soon you start thinking every woman who's married is cruising for cock. Likewise, getting cheated on feels SCARY because you feel like you have no control... how do you prevent it? Chances are, if it happens, you'll probably never even know.
Or so you think.
One of the statistics that gets thrown around a lot about paternity is that "1 in 10 children born inside of a marriage is fathered by someone other than the woman's husband." Pretty scary stat, ain't it? Well, I took this at face value for a long time, but then I had to do some research on it, and guess what? It's a made up stat. Here're the real statistics, right from Wikipedia:
The median rate of misattributed paternity is 3.7%. If you're getting a DNA test to check on paternity because you think it may not be your kid, the chance is about one out of four it isn't. HOWEVER... among the population of men who are NOT getting DNA tests to check whether their children are theirs or not, the chance a kid isn't yours is sub-2%. You know what that says?
That says if your gal is getting boinked, you can probably tell it. If a kid isn't yours, you probably suspect this is the case. In my experience, you absolutely can tell - you may choose to go into denial rather than face the music, but there's always some part of you that knows, unless you're completely socially oblivious, which nobody here is.
Back to marriage.
Even though I've done my best to keep my head clear, I've STILL routinely had to deprogram myself from mindsets I've picked up either from being around too many men cynical about women (mostly online; my real life friends aren't that way) or just from picking up on my own. The thing with pickup is, you're going to pick up a lot of girls who are girls you're going to pick up; you're not going to pick up those girls you won't pick up. The brain has trouble building this into its mental models though; if you sleep with some married women, it's pretty easy for the brain to say, "Well, look, see that - how many married women have we gone on dates with? And we slept with ALL of them! Marriage obviously doesn't work."
Only, most married women don't go on dates. Most married women don't cruise the club scene. Most married women don't get blacked out drunk at hookup parties. Most married women don't have profiles on online dating sites.
If you let confirmation bias blind you - as it can when you're meeting lots of women and talking to other men who do - you can come to some pretty extreme views that are very far from representative of the general population. If you're not careful of what's happening in your head, you can start to believe you've got it right, too.
One thing I've learned though, is that the more absolutely certain someone is about something, the more wrong he probably is. We live in a very hazy world, and you have to have a SERIOUS set of blinders on to think anything is crystal clear. You'll see people running the gamut from totally inexperienced to extremely experienced with absolutist viewpoints - absolutism is most commonly adopted as a defensive mantle by individuals used to engaging in hard-fought philosophical debates with others. Absolutism is a bludgeon used to smack others into submission, rather than a discussion about the merits of any one thing versus any other.
Anyway, back to the main point: does monogamy work? Or does it not work?
The truth is, it works some of the time, for some people.
Does it work for everybody? No.
Does it not work for ANYbody? No there too.
In the West, settled, committed monogamy works for about half the people who try it every time. All things being equal, you've got a 50-50 chance of making it work.
But, again, not all things ARE equal. Because YOU are not just anyone... you are learning the ins and outs of women, dating, relationships, and social dynamics here. I have a great deal of faith in you... I would not be wasting my time here otherwise.
Making monogamy work over the long-term is about you and the partner. It's also about the cultural climate. Why are more people married in the suburbs than the city? Because cities are more conducive to being single: there are more options, more places to hide, more temptation. And there are more people married in rural environments than suburbs for exactly the same reason. Not to mention the fact that if you WANT a little temptation around, you're almost certainly going to prefer city to suburb, and suburb to country.
Why is a wild party girl who sleeps with bushels of men more likely to cheat on you and leave you for a guy with six-pack abs than a country church girl who's only been with a couple of men before? That's elementary, and it's all about screening. If you want a monogamous relationship, make sure you pick a girl who's suited for that role. Duh, right?
I'll conclude this post by saying the same thing I've been saying on PUA forums for 8+ years: if you think all women cheat and monogamy doesn't work, you've let your confirmation bias get the better of you.
Sure, lots of gals cheat. More at the tail end of relationships / marriages, but there's a small minority that do it throughout with abandon. Not many, but enough that you run into them from time to time and they can taint your view of monogamy if you're not careful. But lots of people commit murder, or do heroin, or have parrots as pets, too, but that doesn't mean everybody does. However, if you hang out around a bunch of junkies, killers, or parrot-owners, it can sure start to seem like everybody else in the world does it and this stuff is way more common than others realize.
Let's face it: 97.568% of men out there want to settle into monogamy at SOME point. It's simple biology... you just WANT it. And guess what? 98.1423% of women want this too. (I made those numbers up, but should be roughly around there) Sometimes it doesn't work out, but most of the men out there are doofuses, and 50% of them still somehow pull it off, and no, their wives aren't cheating on most of them.
Can you figure out how to pull off monogamy with the tools at your disposal here? Hells yeah you can. It's not that hard... people've been doing it for millennia, and they show no signs of stopping now.
There's nothing wrong with not wanting monogamy. Nothing wrong with being aware of the fact that cheating happens, and breakups / divorces happen, and these happen now more than they did in our grandparents' days. But to anyone who thinks a man is a fool for wanting monogamy, going for it, and getting it, I'd say... chill out. Most of the world wants it, and for pretty good reason. It has its perks. And it DOES work.
Chase
My name's Chase Amante, and I'm 31 years old. I've kind of been in and out of marriage throughout my twenties but that's complicated and I won't go there. Suffice it to say I do pretty well with my dream girls but I have a hard time actually settling down... it's never the girls' faults, it's always mine.
I've been involved with the pickup artist community since late 2005, when I was 22 years old, and I've seen a wide variety of different points of views and perspectives here. One of the most common PUA view points that you will come across is "monogamy doesn't work."
Before I touch on this subject, a bit of background. I grew up in a moderately conservative Christian household. My mother took my sister and me to church every Sunday, I went to Catholic grade and high schools, and I was an altar boy from I think second or third grade through junior high. My father was agnostic who'd been arrested for smoking weed as a youth though, and my mother wasn't super strict, and had even had a period in her twenties when she'd "lost her faith" but came back to it later. So it wasn't like I was living with priests and nuns.
Anyway, my family started out lower middle class and by the time I was in high school had moved into upper middle class thanks to some inherited money and my father doing a good job at work and getting promoted. In my high school of 1,000+ students, most of the other students had similar families to mine: mother and father still married, family goes to church, that's about it. A few of them had divorced parents, and at least for me, this always seemed like some really weird, bizarre, unusual thing.
When I started rolling with guys from the ghetto and the trailer park after high school, I became a lot more exposed to people from broken homes, although once I was in university I was sort of insulated from this again. It wasn't until I started participating in the pickup community that I became re-exposed to this all over.
People in the pickup community have strong views. This is mostly because they're young. Nearly all of the guys you see espousing loud, firm views of "Do NOT do this!" and "ALL women are THAT!" are under the age of 30. This was something I recognized very early on into participating in PUA, and it always made me take PUA advice - especially PUA relationship advice - with a giant grain of salt.
As I spent more time in the community, I noticed a really amusing trend as well: guys vehemently swearing off monogamy all pairing off and getting married or settling into monogamous relationships. I can't tell you HOW many guys I saw do this... over, and over, and over again. All the guys who used to lecture me on how monogamy was impossible and didn't work and women were inveterate cheats and they themselves would never settle down... BOOM! Now they're in committed, exclusive, monogamous relationships. The one part that annoyed me about this though was that whenever I tried telling them, "Told you so," they'd never give me any satisfaction... they'd always come back with some grumbling excuse about how this girl was the exception or they weren't REALLY monogamous, just trying it out for a while, or something along those lines.
Many of my anti-monogamy friends are married now or have children.
But I'm not especially interested in talking about PUA here; what I'm more interested in is monogamy itself. The institution is going through a serious bumpy patch in the West; I don't know the stats for everywhere, but at least in the United States, something between 50% and 60% of marriages entered into today are destined to end in divorce. Of course, that also means 40% to 50% of those marriages will never end, until death does the couple part.
There's also the risk of cheating - which it's impossible to get reliable numbers on; I've seen numbers on anywhere from 4% to 40% of women having affairs, and anywhere from 7% to 60% of men do. I'd guess it's somewhere around 30% for each sex having an affair at SOME point in their lives; heck, my mother started sleeping with my father when she was still sleeping with her ex too (I was pretty surprised to learn this - Mom?). As for what the percentage of affairs occurring in marriage is... 15%? Lower? Assuming you don't include those marriages that are in their death spirals and months before divorce, that is. If you include THOSE marriages, well, sure, the rate's going to go up. But good, happy, healthy marriages? MUCH less. Much.
I don't know how many of you men out there have tried to pick up women who were not even ecstatic about their partners, but just content. I have (just out of curiosity; didn't close any of these gals); and I have friends who have. Know how easy it is? It's tough. Sure, you'll find a few freaks - the girls with high sex drives; the ones with high enough partner counts that sex is no big deal to them and their marriage vows are irrelevant; the really weak-willed emotionally needy girl who's a complete pushover around anyone who can push just the right buttons with her - but these women are outliers. Thing that happens in PUA though, is this: one guy meets an outlier. Shags her. Writes a report about it. Another guy meets another outlier. Shags her. Writes a report. A third guy does it. Pretty soon, you've got DOZENS of reports of guys sleeping with married women!
And what happens? Guys on PUA boards point at marriage and go, "Holy diamond wedding ring, look at how often married women hook up with dudes! NO ONE IS SAFE!"
This is a trend we see somewhere else, too. Know where? The media.
What's the media do? It shows you all kinds of ridiculous stories that make you terrified of crazy ass crap.
I'll be honest: when I go swimming in the ocean, I'm half scared to death a shark is going to bite my leg off. I think the odds are vastly higher that I'll end up in a car accident that shears my leg off first, but I have little fear of dismembering car accidents compared to the fear I have of sharks. Why? Two reasons:
1.) The media loves to tell me about sharks biting people's legs off, but never tells me about car accidents doing this, even though they happen a lot more, because car accidents are boring and no one cares, and
2.) In a car, I have some illusion of control, whereas in the water, I know if some curious shark wants to bite my leg off to see if it's as good as seal meat, I'm screwed
You get this same confirmation bias on PUA boards that you do in the media... a bunch of guys sharing their story about sleeping with a married chick, and pretty soon you start thinking every woman who's married is cruising for cock. Likewise, getting cheated on feels SCARY because you feel like you have no control... how do you prevent it? Chances are, if it happens, you'll probably never even know.
Or so you think.
One of the statistics that gets thrown around a lot about paternity is that "1 in 10 children born inside of a marriage is fathered by someone other than the woman's husband." Pretty scary stat, ain't it? Well, I took this at face value for a long time, but then I had to do some research on it, and guess what? It's a made up stat. Here're the real statistics, right from Wikipedia:
The median rate of misattributed paternity is 3.7%. If you're getting a DNA test to check on paternity because you think it may not be your kid, the chance is about one out of four it isn't. HOWEVER... among the population of men who are NOT getting DNA tests to check whether their children are theirs or not, the chance a kid isn't yours is sub-2%. You know what that says?
That says if your gal is getting boinked, you can probably tell it. If a kid isn't yours, you probably suspect this is the case. In my experience, you absolutely can tell - you may choose to go into denial rather than face the music, but there's always some part of you that knows, unless you're completely socially oblivious, which nobody here is.
Back to marriage.
Even though I've done my best to keep my head clear, I've STILL routinely had to deprogram myself from mindsets I've picked up either from being around too many men cynical about women (mostly online; my real life friends aren't that way) or just from picking up on my own. The thing with pickup is, you're going to pick up a lot of girls who are girls you're going to pick up; you're not going to pick up those girls you won't pick up. The brain has trouble building this into its mental models though; if you sleep with some married women, it's pretty easy for the brain to say, "Well, look, see that - how many married women have we gone on dates with? And we slept with ALL of them! Marriage obviously doesn't work."
Only, most married women don't go on dates. Most married women don't cruise the club scene. Most married women don't get blacked out drunk at hookup parties. Most married women don't have profiles on online dating sites.
If you let confirmation bias blind you - as it can when you're meeting lots of women and talking to other men who do - you can come to some pretty extreme views that are very far from representative of the general population. If you're not careful of what's happening in your head, you can start to believe you've got it right, too.
One thing I've learned though, is that the more absolutely certain someone is about something, the more wrong he probably is. We live in a very hazy world, and you have to have a SERIOUS set of blinders on to think anything is crystal clear. You'll see people running the gamut from totally inexperienced to extremely experienced with absolutist viewpoints - absolutism is most commonly adopted as a defensive mantle by individuals used to engaging in hard-fought philosophical debates with others. Absolutism is a bludgeon used to smack others into submission, rather than a discussion about the merits of any one thing versus any other.
Anyway, back to the main point: does monogamy work? Or does it not work?
The truth is, it works some of the time, for some people.
Does it work for everybody? No.
Does it not work for ANYbody? No there too.
In the West, settled, committed monogamy works for about half the people who try it every time. All things being equal, you've got a 50-50 chance of making it work.
But, again, not all things ARE equal. Because YOU are not just anyone... you are learning the ins and outs of women, dating, relationships, and social dynamics here. I have a great deal of faith in you... I would not be wasting my time here otherwise.
Making monogamy work over the long-term is about you and the partner. It's also about the cultural climate. Why are more people married in the suburbs than the city? Because cities are more conducive to being single: there are more options, more places to hide, more temptation. And there are more people married in rural environments than suburbs for exactly the same reason. Not to mention the fact that if you WANT a little temptation around, you're almost certainly going to prefer city to suburb, and suburb to country.
Why is a wild party girl who sleeps with bushels of men more likely to cheat on you and leave you for a guy with six-pack abs than a country church girl who's only been with a couple of men before? That's elementary, and it's all about screening. If you want a monogamous relationship, make sure you pick a girl who's suited for that role. Duh, right?
I'll conclude this post by saying the same thing I've been saying on PUA forums for 8+ years: if you think all women cheat and monogamy doesn't work, you've let your confirmation bias get the better of you.
Sure, lots of gals cheat. More at the tail end of relationships / marriages, but there's a small minority that do it throughout with abandon. Not many, but enough that you run into them from time to time and they can taint your view of monogamy if you're not careful. But lots of people commit murder, or do heroin, or have parrots as pets, too, but that doesn't mean everybody does. However, if you hang out around a bunch of junkies, killers, or parrot-owners, it can sure start to seem like everybody else in the world does it and this stuff is way more common than others realize.
Let's face it: 97.568% of men out there want to settle into monogamy at SOME point. It's simple biology... you just WANT it. And guess what? 98.1423% of women want this too. (I made those numbers up, but should be roughly around there) Sometimes it doesn't work out, but most of the men out there are doofuses, and 50% of them still somehow pull it off, and no, their wives aren't cheating on most of them.
Can you figure out how to pull off monogamy with the tools at your disposal here? Hells yeah you can. It's not that hard... people've been doing it for millennia, and they show no signs of stopping now.
There's nothing wrong with not wanting monogamy. Nothing wrong with being aware of the fact that cheating happens, and breakups / divorces happen, and these happen now more than they did in our grandparents' days. But to anyone who thinks a man is a fool for wanting monogamy, going for it, and getting it, I'd say... chill out. Most of the world wants it, and for pretty good reason. It has its perks. And it DOES work.
Chase
.
