Monkeybranching: Why Do Women Always Want Backup Options?

It’s more or less the ultimate ‘man role’ to be ready to walk away and leave it all behind: to wander off across the horizon, completely self-reliant, needing nothing at all besides your feet to carry you and your head and hands to do what’s needed wherever you end up.

We all intuitively respect a man far more who’s ever-ready to march off on his own, if the situation calls for it, than we do the man who begs, pleads, cries, and scrambles, trying to hang onto a crumbling situation. Men respect powerful, independent men; women are attracted to them. I don’t just tell men they must be ready to replace their women, not chase them for their own peace of mind; having this frame of mind makes you significantly more attractive to others, too.

But women are different from men.

Women don’t care about man-things like ‘respect’. Not for themselves.

Women don’t need to be seen as ‘self-reliant’; in fact, coming across too self-reliant harms women’s attractiveness to most men.

And if there’s one thing women do that a lot of men struggle to understand, it is this constant cultivation of male backup options – and their propensity to ‘monkeybranch’ – that is, to not let go of one branch (man) until the next branch (man) is already in-hand.

Often men will think they’re getting somewhere with a girl, or that she really likes them – only to realize at some point that they were in her friend zone, merely a ‘back pocket man’. A guy who’s there for her just in case of emergency.

Other times guys will be seeing a girl they like, only to realize she’s cultivating all these backup options on the side from them.

But why? Why can’t women just be happy with the guy they’ve got?

Is the grass really THAT green on the other side?

 

Women’s Lives Revolve Around Men

Everything in women’s lives is about men. All their:

• Gossip

• Backstabbing

• The jobs they choose

• The vacations they go on

• Their extracurricular activities

• The ‘passions’ they take up

… it is always all about men.

They always need men’s attention and they always need to know that they are capable of affecting men.

READ MORE: Women Want Your Attention

Everything they do is about men.

All these are true:

• If she works a kind of job, she likes to date guys from that line of work.

• If she signs up for a sport or activity, she’s attracted to men who do that sport/activity.

• If she signs up for a language class, she’s attracted to native speakers of that language.

• If she gossips about people, she’d be interested in dating people from her gossip group.

I have talked to enough women and witnessed enough female behavior to be certain of this. I have never found a girl in a language class (I’ve had classes in French, Spanish, and Chinese) who didn’t admit to being attracted to native speakers of that language. I’ve never met a girl working a job who didn’t want to date guys from that job. I’ve never met a girl participating in an activity or sport who’d decline dates from there.

A lot of this is true for men as well. But men will choose careers for income potential, or status potential, or potential to make an impact. Women choose careers in consideration of what men those careers will give them access to.

Men will choose sports and activities they simply enjoy. Women choose sports and activities either to improve their bodies for men (Pilates, yoga) or to put them into direct contact with men.

(you don’t see a lot of married women hitting the gym, going to Meetup groups, or participating in intramural sports – and the ones who do tend to be the ones looking for a little side action – or even that next monkeybranch we’ll be talking about today)

The only time women stop thinking about men 24/7 is once they have children.

At that point, depending on the number of children and how involved the woman is, the ratio may drop to 20/7 or 16/7 or something closer to that.

Even with children, the woman is constantly checking on and obsessing over her husband, or if she’s a single mom or her relationship’s crumbling, then she is on the prowl searching for the next ‘father to my children’ for her to monkeybranch to.

Men are the center point of women’s existence, in a way it’s often difficult for men to fully understand (made all the harder because women will vehemently deny this, and far too many men are in the really bad habit of taking the things women say at face value).

 

Why Do Women Need Men So Much?

Let’s open up the hood a little on the animal kingdom.

Among animals, we essentially have three kinds of female relationship preference dynamics:

• Wanderer females, who come together with males only briefly, during mating season, then split off and take care of themselves (and their offspring) the rest of the time

• Herd females, who mingle in herds or tribes of males and mate with multiple different males from within the group/tribe/herd

• Monogamous females, who attach themselves to a male and remain with him; if he dies or leaves, they find another male to attach themselves to

Species with wanderer females include animals like orangutans, bears, and deer.

Species with herd females include animals like cows, horses, most monkeys, and chimpanzees.

Species with monogamous females include animals like beavers, wolves, bats, foxes, lions, marmosets, and gorillas.

What is the difference between the wanderer females, the herd females, and the monogamous females? Do the monogamous females have more difficulty surviving if a male is not present? No. They are as capable of surviving on their own as wanderer and herd females are.

The difference is not in female survival, but in offspring survival: monogamy appears to be a strategy for raising paternal investment, thereby raising the odds offspring survive and thrive.

Among troop-living chimpanzees, it is common for males to kill the young of females in order to induce estrus. When a female is breastfeeding her infant, she is normally unable to get pregnant. But if that infant dies, ta-da! Now Mr. Baby Killer can get laid!

Gorillas and lions – who are polygynous, guarding their harems of females and their broods of offspring – fight off contender males and defend the lives of their young. If a contender is successful, and boots out the previous male, often the new male will go around killing the young of his predecessor. This frees up his new females to mate with the new king. No need to take care of infants = the doors to their wombs are now open.

You might think this behavior has little in common with us civilized humans. Well, I am sorry to tell you, at one point I read a bunch of murder reports (long story), and you’d be shocked how many young children are killed by single mothers’ boyfriends when those women leave the boyfriend alone with the child. It always goes the same way: the little child is doing something, the boyfriend gets extremely aggravated at having to deal with this child that is not his own, and at some point he snaps and starts beating the kid or does something else terrible and the child ends up dead. In our modern societies, these men often go to prison. But in less civilized times, I guarantee you the mother would cry but stay with the man, and the man would make her pregnant – just as happens with every other animal species where male infanticide to induce female estrus appears.

Single mothers, in general, are notorious for looking not for a lover but for a new daddy for my baby. Yes, many of them are horny and just want to get laid. But ALL of them are looking for a man willing to ‘step it up’ and dump his parental investment into the spawn of her prior partnership that did not work out.

The advice to men regarding single mothers is always “don’t get involved unless you’re ready to be a dad.” Everybody knows this (except perhaps the most guileless dupes, I suppose).

It all begins to make sense though once you realize that women don’t need men for themselves – they need men to provide and protect so they can safely reproduce and rear their young.

 

Why Backup Options and Monkeybranching Occur

All right. We’ve just established that human females, like gorilla females, lion females, and other mostly-monogamous female animals, attach themselves to males not for their own sake, but for the sake of their children (or future children).

This is the reason why women’s lives revolve around men: they constantly need to monitor the level of safety and dependability of the men they have around them. Especially the man they’re attached to – but their backup options as well. Misreading a man means being left high and dry – or (as in those horrific murder reports I regrettably will have burned into my brain until the end of my days) having her child killed by an abusive boyfriend.

But to make sure you really get why these things occur, we’re going to drill down further into the psychology of backup options and the phenomenon of monkeybranching.

 

“Why Would a Single Woman Need Backup Options?”

I imagine guys asking this question, which sounds very sweetly naïve and charmingly innocent to my ears.

I can imagine guys thinking this who are steeped in Disney, imagining men and women meeting and falling hopelessly in love with their soul mates then marrying and having a happily ever after, all before the thought of children ever even crossed their minds.

Or, I can imagine men thinking this who are steeped in the modern mainstream world, imagining men and women having continuous, totally sterile sex in pure pleasure/friendship/companionship-based relationships, with nothing more serious to ever discuss than the next work vacation location or what model of IKEA nightstand to install in the guest bedroom, in which the possibility of reproduction is completely excised from either partner’s life and thoughts forever.

Quite unlike these wispy visions of existence, what you will learn as you go through the world is

• It is very, very easy for women to get pregnant when they have sex with a man

• Birth control methods (even if she’s taking them seriously… and many girls don’t) sometimes fail

• Sometimes a guy will deliberately decide to get a girl pregnant

• Sometimes a girl will deliberately decide to get herself pregnant (and baby trap a man)

• Sometimes both partners in the heat of the moment decide to get pregnant (then only one of them changes their mind later)

• Not every girl wants to get an abortion when she gets pregnant

• Not every girl who claims she’d get an abortion will get an abortion once pregnant

• Many women who claim they NEVER want children will later get ‘the baby rabies’ and go crazy trying to get themselves pregnant

• Many women have boyfriends break up with them only to discover post-breakup that they are already pregnant

Pregnancy is basically happening constantly, all around you, and if you are having sex it is going to happen to women you are having sex with sooner or later (whether by you or by other men they have sex with after you). We didn’t reach 8 billion people on Planet Earth by pregnancy being some difficult, challenging act or anything. Stick peepee into vajayjay, thrust until she orgasms, shoot salty white liquid out, make baby. Very simple.

Women are programmed to understand this at an instinctual level and prepare themselves accordingly. The way they prepare for it is to have backup options and to monkeybranch – that way they are never left totally exposed, without any reliable-enough men around for them in a pinch.

To be that way – exposed, unprepared, and completely on their own – might be fine for a wanderer female in a totally safe environment with abundant resources, like orangutans in the jungles of Borneo or bears at the top of the food chain, or to a herd female who can rely on aid from the group in protecting and feeding her and her offspring, like a horse or a chimpanzee.

But there is far less help available, even in our current woman-focused social system, for an unattached human female, left adrift with her offspring, should she fail to prepare her backup options – just in case.

She always needs to have those backup options in mind.

This is true even if she doesn’t have a child yet – or doesn’t know she does (i.e., if she’s already pregnant but hasn’t realized it yet).

 

The Backup Option Dance

Women work hard to keep their backup options. In One Date I covered research that found that women generally work harder to maintain their friendships with men than their male friends work to maintain the friendships with them.

Why would women work harder to maintain friendships with men than men would to maintain friendships with them? Only because it’s more to the woman’s benefit to retain those friendships than the men’s. What is the benefit of male friendships to women? Juicy, savory backup options!

(the benefit to men of these friendships is “potential future lays/girlfriends.” But the value of a man who may potentially ‘step up’ to save her when she’s all alone is worth a lot more to her than the value of a potential lay or maybe a relationship likely is to him… unless he’s really needy or deep in her friend zone, that is)

I understood this back pocket mentality women had to some extent early on. But it took me a while to FULLY get it.

READ MORE: Women’s Back Pocket Mentality

I’d have girls I was ‘working on’ where I was convinced I was ‘getting closer’ to getting with them. We’d meet up occasionally, they’d be somewhat flirtatious, we’d have a nice chat, a nice time, yet it’d never go anywhere.

The first time I talked about a girl like this to the pickup community I got told I had ‘oneitis’. I insisted the guys were wrong (because, after all, I was still talking to other girls, I said!). It turned out they were right though – I was too hung up on this girl who’d just been stringing me along as a backup option, and I wasn’t even the option she tapped when she ended up single (I didn’t even find out about the boyfriend she had until months after I’d met her!).

This became one of my biggest challenges early on in seduction: how do I make sure women view me as the lover, and not as a potential backup option they can slip into their back pocket for a rainy day?

Because as soon as you’re the ‘backup option’, hooking up with you is out of the question. She doesn’t need you for that right now. Right now she just needs to keep you on the hook, investing enough, that she can feel confident you’ll be there if and when she needs you.

And so it goes with men and women, the Backup Option Dance:

• Men try to convince women they’re Mr. Right Now material, and not someone she should gamble on missing out by relegating to a backup role.

• Meanwhile, women try to convince men that yes, indeed, they might BE Mr. Right Now, just not right this very moment, but perhaps sometime soon – that way those men keep hanging around, believing they are “almost there”, remaining snuggly in the backup role.

Pre-sex, women try to buy time with men to keep them around and on the hook without sex, while men push for sex to happen soon/now.

Of course, post-sex, the dynamic flips, as men try to buy time with women to keep them around and on the hook for sex without commitment, while women push for commitment to happen soon/now.

But that is just how the dance goes – the dance between men’s and women’s different, equally self-interested motives prior to commitment in the mating game.

 

Backup Options in a Relationship

It’s one thing for her to keep backup options when she’s single.

I mean, who knows what might happen. It’s good to have other men available to her, right?

But what about once she’s in a relationship? What the heck is the reason for wanting backup options then?

Here is the rule for understanding the in-relationship backup option phenomenon:

The less committed and/or less stable the woman’s relationship feels to her, the harder she will work to find, cultivate, and maintain her male backup options.

That is to say:

• If she has only a friend with benefits, she’ll work very hard to have good backup options

• If she’s in a new monogamous relationship but the guy seems unstable (travels a lot, refuses to promise that it is going anywhere, won’t tell her he loves her, etc.), she’ll work less hard than the FWB girl but still fairly hard to have good backups

• If she’s in a somewhat older monogamous relationship where things are pretty stable and the guy suggests he is open to potential marriage/children someday, and they haven’t passed the 2-year drop yet where she starts losing faith in him, she’ll generally have gotten fairly lazy about maintaining her backup options and may have let many of them drift off and not bothered to replace them

• If she’s married to a man and things feel very stable and they have children together and she thinks this is really likely to be a ‘forever’ relationship, she’ll let her backup options fall off the map altogether and generally won’t be motivated to find replacement ones at all

However, I must also say:

• If she is in an older monogamous relationship, but the 2-year drop passed and the man has kept deflecting her requests to move in together, get married, and/or start a family, she’ll begin reactivating old backup options and cultivating some new ones

• If she is married to a man but the relationship has grown unstable, or she’s grown deeply unhappy, or unfulfilled in some way, she’ll begin reactivating old backup options and cultivating some new ones

As commitment and stability go up, women get lazier and lazier about maintaining backup options.

But as commitment falls (or stays low), or as instability rises, women suddenly ‘wake up’ again and start working overtime to get those backup options in full swing.

 

Why Women Monkeybranch

Monkeybranching is what we call it when a woman doesn’t let go of one man (or branch) until she has the next man (or branch) in-hand – just like how monkeys move through treetops.

Should a monkey let go of the branch he’s swinging from before he has his next branch in-hand, there’s a risk he falls out of the canopy down to his death. While a woman isn’t going to go splat on the forest floor like a careless monkey might, the woman who moves on without her next man in-hand exposes herself to avoidable frustration and risk.

By lining up a man before letting go of another man, a woman is able to do all these:

• Make relatively certain the next man she swings to is as safe or safer than the man she lets go of

• Avoid any chance of ending up totally single and adrift, at which point she may possibly pick a (bad choice) man more out of desperation than careful consideration and evaluation

• If no good “next branches” appear for her to swing to, she can choose to remain hanging from her current branch (i.e., stick with the guy she’s got now). Maybe he’ll patch things up with her – or perhaps another branch (new man) she can swing to will come along sooner or later

As you might expect, the most jittery, fearful-of-being-alone women are the most likely to monkeybranch. The very independent types often never do. So to some extent the inclination to monkeybranch is dispositional.

I’m a strong dude; I’m confident and ambitious. I can’t really stand overly soft women around me. So I’m always with women who are at least independent, and usually who have pretty strong personalities. It’s pretty rare for girls I date to monkeybranch. There’s nearly always a clean break then some period of them being single (albeit sometimes it is not long) before I or the next guy after me steps into the picture.

That said, I have spent plenty of time in social circles, and I have seen a lot of other people’s relationships, and monkeybranching is pretty common. The most incorrigible monkeybranchers are women with borderline personality disorder, so if you date girls like that it’s good to just expect it; she monkeybranched when she started dating you and she’ll monkeybranch on her way out. She’s just too terrified of being alone to accept letting herself end up that way. (worse still, if she is BPD, she’ll probably try to parade it around in front of you to rub your nose in it. BPD chicks; whatareyougonnado!)

Oftentimes, amongst the most irredeemable monkeybranchers, you will witness swinging from a long-term relationship to a rebound FWB, then perhaps another one or two, then onto their next long-term relationship; they are basically at no point ever fully ‘single’

 

Backups Upon Backups

Get used to girls having backup men early on into your relationship. It’s only natural.

It’s still early with you. She doesn’t know where it will go. She doesn’t know if you’ll leave her high and dry. Perhaps you really are as great as you say you are – but she needs time to find out if that’s really true or not.

That doesn’t mean you need to accept women hooking up with other men when you expect monogamy from them (you should not accept it; that’s black and white). It doesn’t mean you have to accept women meeting other men for dinner when you expect monogamy from them (this one’s slightly more of a gray area, but still mostly unacceptable).

I had a live-in girlfriend I’d been with for a while but it looked like I might leave town permanently and she would not have been able to follow. As you might expect, that injected a whole lot of uncertainty/instability. She all of a sudden had a new guy texting her, who had struck up a conversation with her in an elevator, and was sending her messages about how he had seen her and I together and I wasn’t handsome enough for her and she deserved to be with a good-looking and successful guy like him, telling her he’d take really good care of her (she showed me the messages and asked me how to respond). Then, too, her old workmate who’d been courting her before we met reappeared and wanted to take her out to dinner. I told her to go ahead; I figured considering the circumstances, no harm in her having some backup options in case I leave. He drove her back to our building and got upset when she wouldn’t allow him to walk her to our door (she thought perhaps he wanted to kiss her).

These backups both served a few different functions for that girlfriend of mine. One, they gave her some potential branches to swing to in the event I left and she and I had to split. Two, they gave her an opportunity to both try to drive some jealousy in me (“Quality men are lining up to date me!”) while simultaneously exhibiting what a good and loyal girlfriend she was (“I’m letting you in on all of this just so you know I’m hiding nothing!”).

Of course, depending on the circumstances of a split/impending split, a woman will go about cultivating/reactivating backup options differently. In my case, there was the potential for me to be a “one who got away” who’d leave town and not return – so there was motivation there for her to try to convince me “not to get away” even as she set up those next branches.

However, in cases where the woman is totally over the relationship, she’ll be a lot sneakier about how she sets up those next branches. She’ll hit the gym more, start going out more, become a lot more outgoing, all while assuring her man that of course nothing is going on, she simply wants to get more active, she’s missed socializing, etc. But when you see this, the writing is on the wall – she’s rebuilding her backups.

What do you do when you see a woman building backups, preparing her monkeybranches?

Depends what you want with her.

However, if what you want with her is something long-term and committed, you should take it as a warning sign that she feels like she can’t have that with you, or doesn’t want that with you, for whatever reason.

So, diagnose the problem, and get it fixed – unless you want one of those backup options to become the next branch she swings to, as she swings away from you!

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At the end of the day, these behaviors (cultivating backup options and monkeybranching from one man to the next) are normal behaviors you’d expect in a ‘monogamous females amidst a crowd of potential mates’ situation like ours as humans is.

Sure, she hopes her guy will stick around and be The Guy for her. But what if he’s not? What if he fucks around, ditches her, leaves? She doesn’t want to be left in dire straits. What if he makes her pregnant then runs off? What if she’s left vulnerable and alone? She needs backup options to make sure the worst case scenario is never her scenario.

So too with monkeybranching; by waiting to change men until she has her next man lined up, she’s able to minimize risks of ending up fully single and making a rash choice. She can take her time to vet other men from the relative safety of an established relationship, and like a job seeker not leaving his cushy job until the ink is wet on his contract for his newer and better job, she doesn’t swing away until the next branch is in-hand.

Women aren’t men.

They don’t look powerful walking off alone over the horizon, head held high, dress fluttering in the breeze.

They just look foolish.

A woman doing that is liable to run into a gang of ruffians and get raped, or a pack of wolves and get eaten. Silliness.

The savvy woman is one who attracts quality men to her, and has a cadre of guys willing to help her out and step up for her when and if she needs it, because after all she is just so great.

To do that, she requires backup options; and, oftentimes, she can skip the lonely nights of being a bachelorette altogether by simply monkeybranching from her old man to one of her new, carefully vetted backup options, when the time is right.

Always,
Chase Amante