What's the alternative though? Marriage counselling?
There are lots of alternatives... changing the way he thinks about his wife and his situation is one. Right now, he's looking at her and asking something that probably sounds like, "Did I miss out? Am I settling with her? Can I do better?"
He could change those questions to something like, "How can I better recognize the blessing that my family is to my life? How can I create a more fulfilling life through my family? How can I honor and appreciate my family more?" That would probably radically change everything.
As long as he's sitting around asking questions that come up with answers that make him doubt his decisions earlier in life, he'll keep going further down the path he's on. If he changes those questions, he'll get different answers. Whatever questions your mind asks yourself, you come up with answers for (This is an NLP perspective, one I'm familiar with).
He could look at the emotional needs that aren't being fulfilled through his wife and family right now. My guess would be that those are significance and variety... and then figure out how to get those needs met through his family (this is an emotional needs perspective).
He could separate from his wife for awhile and go and do whatever sleeping around he wants to and try to figure out if it's just something in his system that he needs to get out or if this is a legitimate long-term problem that he has. This would devastate his wife and probably his kids as well though.
He could get a divorce so that he's not cheating on his wife... this and the previous one will definitely hurt your wife and kids but at least you'll maintain your integrity. Although, if he doesn't care about integrity, I guess it doesn't really matter.
If you do care about not hurting your wife, cheating on her probably isn't the way to go. Men are much worse at cheating and hiding it than women are. This will likely come out over time... the kids might see it... your wife might see it... and then you'll probably be hated by both your wife and kids. Unless they have no morals, they'll probably think you're a horrible man after that.
Even suggesting an open marriage is likely to hurt her if she isn't interested to begin with... which she probably isn't or it would have been brought up by now. He could always fish the idea out and see what she says but it's likely she'll catch on and still get hurt.
The problem is that he doesn't want to hurt his wife and kids but he wants to do something that could completely emotionally devastate them both.
He doesn't need marriage counseling... marriage counseling is only needed if you're having problems in the marriage and you're looking to save the marriage. The problem that he's having is in his questioning of who he picked as a wife and getting married in the first place. He either needs to change that or act on it. Marriage counseling won't help that.
I think what would make the most sense for this guy would be to list out all the different options he has, figure out what the upsides and downsides are to each, and then make a decision from there based on his values.
But honestly, he probably doesn't NEED to do that. He probably just needs to make a decision, really. Does he give up his family to chase pussy or does he value them more highly and get his needs met through them?
My guess is that he already knows what the right decision is but he's scared to make it. And he's coming here because he's hoping that we will give him some kind of answer that makes it so that he doesn't need to make the hard decision that he needs to make.
We're unlikely to give him some answer that lets him do both of the things he wants to do. And we don't have enough information about his morals, ethics, and values to really tell him what the decision he needs to make is.
It is a valid point you make, we're all focused on taking higher quality women to bed. And we will all be biased in that direction, for sure.
But part and parcel of this perspective is also being way more accepting of what we desire as men. Where else is there really a place that doesn't have a very strong negative bias? I imagine 99% of places you could go for advice nobody would have even opened their mouth to accept the reality of the situation, let alone a specific course of action. And that includes family and friends (in fact, especially so).
Other places will have other perspectives.
If he goes to other men's groups (non-manosphere/non-red pill groups), many of them will understand him and what's going on with him as well and have other types of perspectives for him.
I think you'd be surprised at the advice that he'd probably get from a lot of other groups. Things aren't as black and white as a lot of people try to make them out to be.
Plus, marriage is less popular than ever before right now. Divorce rates are way up. Lots of people understand men's desires... you're more likely to get raw and real advice in a men's group of some sort about it, since there aren't women involved.
But I think you'd be very surprised at what people might tell him to do. The world isn't as bluepilled as a lot of red pilled people want to make it out to be... things aren't quite as black and white.
I believe it's absolutely normal for men to desire multiple women, for example, and also I think a relationship that includes the man having at least multiple sexual options, if not multiple marriage options (and the woman having none of these) is perfectly healthy when the right set of circumstances exist.
You don't think it's normal for women to desire multiple men?
Or is it that you just think men should have multiple sexual options and women shouldn't, regardless of desires?
I've had enough sex (and know enough other men who have had sex) with women who are married or have long-term boyfriends to know that it's normal for both men and women to both have multiple sexual options. And I'm pretty sure that's a natural and healthy thing for both men and women to do.
But we're adding on top of it marriage... which has a moral dilemma, assuming you care about the vows that you made during marriage.
We don't know if he does or not so we'll have to wait until his reply to hear anything more about this.
But the real problem is that nowhere in the reality of men as a whole (in western society at least) do these values have any anchoring point - and perhaps more importantly, neither do they have any anchoring point in his wife's reality, what she has seen, experienced and learned to expect.
I don't know what the reality of men as a whole looks like... I do know some "mainstream" blue pilled guys and their perspectives are very sad to me.
Most people I know are somewhere in the middle but I don't know if I know enough men to say what is what in terms of the reality of men as a whole in Western Society. Most of the men I know and spend time with are somewhere between blue and red pill... both of those sides seem a bit extreme to me.
The tools society uses to keep people under control basically amount to nothing more than psychological repression, enforced through collective pressure. Even if it were highly functional at the collective level (which I don't believe is true) it's not healthy at all at the individual level. And probably more than anything, the fact that it's basically impossible for anyone to discuss the concept of not being attracted to their wife anymore, or whether this means it's natural for them to go out and want to find another or an additional one, in anything but the most subversive circles is just very, very bad.
I didn't know that it is impossible to discuss such a thing in society... but again, most of the people I hang out with, I probably wouldn't classify as "normal" men.
But all the men I do spend time around, you could certainly discuss this without any problems. I also know of lots of men's groups where this would be a subject that they would love to discuss with you. Most of these men's groups, I would consider some kind of "conscious" men's group though... and most of the men I know and spend time around are either veterans, PUAs, "conscious" people, rebels or some kind of combination of these things.
That's why more communities like this are absolutely necessary. But you are right, this is a seduction community, focused around seducing more and better women. Yet, I have to say that I've never seen anywhere, online or otherwise, a community of men built around a general perspective on women even close to as realistic and balanced as this.
Right but that's your perspective saying that it's realistic and balanced. I'm sure there are lots of guys in lots of men's groups who say the same thing about their men's groups.
And that's why you're here and those guys are in those groups... because your beliefs dictate that this is realistic and balanced and their beliefs dictate that their groups are realistic and balanced.
Further going into this would make us question the nature of reality and what balanced means but I think that would probably derail this thread a bit more than we already have here. We can talk about it somewhere if you want to though.
It's very unfortunate that a pickup community is the only place to get a realistic perspective on women and the male experience in short and long term relationships.
Maybe... a realistic perspective on the experiences men and women have in long and short term relationships?
I think short term, probably. Long term? I don't know about that.
I haven't looked through everything on here but I haven't really seen a whole lot of long-term relationship advice on here. I know Chase has a relationship section on his site.
But I think most guys leave this community once they're in a real relationship, assuming it's not an open relationship of some kind or a fuck buddy relationship of some kind... or they're not cheating on their wives/gf.
I could be wrong about that but I haven't seen any evidence to suggest otherwise. And I haven't seen a lot of posts in the forum about real relationships. So I don't really know about all that.
I was just in another thread a couple of days ago where guys were trying to convince someone that this forum is only about seduction and pickup and were basically discouraging him from being in a relationship at all.
Even the red pill community, which one would expect to be comprised of men more focused on long term success and relationships, and less so on pickup, is swimming in quips and truisms regarding women that verge on being more dismissive and superficial than the most sociopathic pickup artist out there, which not surprisingly creates a group of men so disfunctional that their only real relationships, for better or worse, are with their own points of view or their comrades in arms.
The only knowledge I have about Red Pill groups is... "ANYTHING YOU SAY THAT I DISAGREE WITH MEANS YOU'RE BLUE PILLED PUSSY WHIPPED BITCH"... "SHE'S NOT YOURS, IT'S JUST YOUR TURN!"
That's usually when I leave those groups. I would never go to those people for relationship advice but, to be fair, I'm a bit biased against them.
I understand some of their perspectives and have certainly been there. But holy shit... it's too far... too extreme... too painful... too cultish.
We do need more communities like this, but even more than that we need entire societies built around the right perspectives. Because in the end, regardless of how apparently successful a man is at controlling his frame, I don't think a woman will accept anything but what she sees in the society around her, I've seen it time and again. So much so that I not only regard competition as nature's arena, but women as nature's barometer of competitive success - and to do her job she relies primarily on comparisons.
Sure, if he does not veer too far away from the status quo, and learns the right skills, he can probably manage his relationship toward an outcome that is somewhat better than average. But his development, her development, and the development of every member of society around him who is reflecting to both of them what the expectations are and should be, has been so stunted and pressured and manipulated by collective propaganda, and her perspective so reliant on this, that the chances of them navigating together through a successful relationship at all is no more than 50/50, let alone one that involves a perspective that is clearly at odds with the status quo (such as taking on multiple wives, or being able to have fun on the side).
I'm sure we have some agreement here. And probably some disagreements.
Our society is definitely dysfunctional, especially around relationships. And I don't see it getting better, at least from my perspective.
That's probably another conversation for another thread.
But to end I will say that a man must fully take responsibility for the results of his own choices within the circumstances that they were made, and should first evaluate how he can make what he has already created work best for his future, rather than operating on impulses that drive him to make questionable choices and then want to change them later. And the right perspective for that may not come from guys focused on seducing women and more from guys with a lot of experience maneuvering through tough long-term life choices and creating the best outcome from sub-optimal beginnings. Certainly if you can find these guys they are worth listening to.
I think that perspective of responsibility is part of the glue that keeps a lot of things together in the pickup community.
I don't know if the seduction mindset is the right one or not but I do think there are probably a lot of other places that he'd want to get a perspective from if he really wants to see what some other options are for what possibilities he might have that he hasn't thought of yet.
To know which ones might be good for him, I'd probably want to know more about his values and beliefs about life and the world.
