How to Break Free from Your White Knight Mindset | Girls Chase

How to Break Free from Your White Knight Mindset

Chase Amante

Hey! Chase Amante here.

You've read all the free articles I can offer you for this month.

If you'd like to read more, I've got to ask for your help keeping the lights on at Girls Chase.

Click a plan below to sign up now and get right back to reading. It's only 99¢ the first month.

Already a GirlsChase.com subscriber? Log in here.

Cody Lyans's picture

white knightThe guys that eventually start to “get” women all have one thing in common: they ALL realize that being consistent with women is just not as simple as they thought it was going to be... and they step up to the challenge.

In this article, I’m going to tell you why the white knight attitude has to go, and I’m going to give you some clues as to what you should do instead.

First off, what is a white knight and why does it have anything to do with not stepping up to the challenge with women?

A white knight is the name given to a certain type of blind optimism, and it is a mindset that is very common amongst guys who are yet to take the demands of being good with women seriously.

White knight behaviours include things like:

  • Putting women on pedestals

  • Making the girl your only focus

  • Speaking overly intelligently (faking)

  • Taking everything at face value

  • Rushing to judgement in order to peripherally impress women or “hold your ground”

  • Pretending you are asexual (no sexual motives)

  • Posturing, or running an “impress the damsel” routine

  • Putting up strong barriers in an attempt to appear like you have good traits like honesty, faithfulness, infatuation, cleanliness, agreeableness, etc.

  • Roping girls into romantic relationships because they gave you some signals

Have you ever congratulated yourself for something you thought you did really well, only to later discover you actually overlooked huge details and what you were doing wasn’t even half as good as you imagined it was?

White knighting is a result of the same phenomenon. We think we are clever, until the penny drops later that we are actually messing up very important details that are crucial to long-term viability of our behaviour.

Comments

Anonymous's picture

This is one of the best I've seen on GC. It dresses us down a bit, counter to most good advice.

If you are going down the serious relationship road, it is an important but ?not alpha? self-reflection that ought to happen with regularity.

I would reaaallly like to see a Chase reflection on this content!

Author
Cody Lyans's picture

Thanks,

You are absolutely right about regularly checking yourself on this kind of behaviour IF you are in iffy territory.
You don't have to check it as much as you get better as you get adept at just moving right past it.
But even then, there are things that relate to white knighting that keep reoccuring even as your skill progresses, especially in relationships that border on exclusivity.

Its not always a good thing to dress guys down, but with white knighting it is important, because guys are really up on a high horse about it :P initially and there is no really good rational way to get them to cut it out and get focused.

Its a massive cornerstone to get down. I tried to push the understanding of "white knight" away from gimmicky portrails, and make it more relateable.
Hopefully with this view some guys can deal a hefty blow to their white knight and get some initiative back on their side.

bishop's picture

I was about to comment the same...

Martin Ch.'s picture

Hi,
you have always interesting title so I get a little excited but then I read that it is you who wrote about that. And the reason is your style is just weird. I am always like, ok, lets see if he improved and it is readable. And before I click on it, that couple of paragraphs tell me it is not worth it, but I go in anyways.

You start with laying down what white knighting is, fairly ok things there but some are weird. Like holding barriers to seem like you are honest. I have some personal things I dont discuss with people and holding my ground at this area shows I am a white knight? I will tell the girl that I dont want to discuss that and we are done with that, I give her a reason like we dont know each other well, maybe once we get to know each other. I am not gonna tell her what my father kept doing to me, what my childhood looked like. I tell her honestly that it was not that nice.. it had some bright moments, but if she asks about why it was bad, I will just tell her I dont want to discuss bad things and move on. But according to you, it makes me a white knight.

"Talking overly intelligently? (faking)" - I dont know if you ever noticed but you are doing this every second paragraph.
You use all these abstract and intangible things that content of my final exam about developing artificial systems and databases are much more enjoyable to read. I dont know if you can see this but your wording is just.. it keeps confusing me, it looks like you are trying to look different or I dont know. Maybe you are talking this way with girls and it works but not with writing articles. Now I dont mean following: "you will think that perfectly fixable things are to be accepted as immutable truth that can never be challenged." where it is just weird for me because I am not a native speaker. It just takes me to read it 3 times to realize what you mean but I understand its fairly normal way to talk. Yet I would still appreciate something like "you will think that things you can easily fix are unfixable (or set in stone if you want your metaphores), and you cant change them at all."

Then you write some weird thing as what you are communicating to a woman. We are all different, we have different motives. You dont consider that, you just generalize every woman out there and what she thinks. It depends on situation, it depends on how you perform it. If she gets hit on in front of you by some sleezy dude or some friend you two met is rude to her. It depends on how you perform your white knighting act, if you fully go like "Hey, you are rude, dont do that, she is a nice girl" or you let her try and deal with it and at some point you just say one sentence or like "we need to be somewhere" and go. It even looks like you dont know what white knighting means. Some people go over board and think that you just take her side in some argument because you share the same opinion, you are white knighting.

"When it comes to understanding women you can’t just assume you know where to start without some sense of needing to improve or it will come back and bite you, because men who don’t develop the skills they need to develop get stuck in a loop.

That loop should scare the living hell out of you! Because it is betraying women you like at the level of their souls."

Loop of what? What skills? Its just one philosofical paragraph. Mostly the first sentence "start without some sense of needing to improve" ...

Facepalm! yea I almost had to facepalm too but for different reasons.
The subsection is called "The white knights mind" and then you go with "Most men assume that being good with women ..." Are most men white knights? I dont think so. So why is it there? What is the correlation to white knights that "most men assume what it needs to be done with women - and you add some charm, flirting and smile and some level of compatibility. Yes, that is what most men assume, that is what probably most people assume. That in order to be with someone you "should" have similar interests or view on the world, "complete" each other and that kind of stuff. "if he persists in a valiant way, the world should reward him with a smooth ride towards where he thought he was going to go". Before I discovered this site, I did exactly this, I kept asking out girls I thought I was similar to, that I had something in common, some said yes, some said no but then I learned that it is up to me to just move forward the interaction, that the girl will not do it. That has nothing to do with "what I assume" or how I view dating in general.

"surmount the challenge of men" again, your abstract "clever" talk. Problem with it is that you use it in like every second sentence. And all your compound sentences... Headache.

Other writors keep saying how girls get approached a lot, how they get over it sooner. They test and shit like that, yet according to you, they will get depressed because one guy is white knighting, that he wants to save her in harmful situations. If they are SO PUT OFF by this behaviour as you said in your 8 lines long "what do you communicate to her" comment - why in the hell would she get depressed? She will be more like, "uh that guy? rather not see him ever again and keep my distance. Ah here is Mark, so handsome, I wish all men were like Mark" No, all men are white nights, so she assumes that is true so she gets depressed that there are no real men. She will get hung up on some WK and not fantasize about her ideal Mark. Legit. The "alone" part is like the only one that seems to be right.

Oh here we go again: "Become an experienced guy!" The part after that, you just dont describe it well. I mean. You could have just wrote "if you are a white night, you will have to change. A lot of things you are currently doing are most likely coming from wrong place. But you may be confused because in fairy-tales, prince always climbed the mountain or slayed dragon to save the girl. She does not need saving, she needs a man. And here is how you can start changing from white night to a strong man" - then your list of points.
Past those again your weird style of "Man who does this knows that ..." or "To trully appreciate the power of women one must..." - no words, I cant describe that, its just... it contains nothing, its just some poetic weird thing that jumps to a completely different side of seduction.

The end is weird too, there is something about what effect it has on girls, and then some pseudo wanna-be motivational speech. But truth is you had a solution there. You had like 5 points of fairly ok and tangible but you could have added something like: "dont think other men dont have same value as you - that you are superior to them, you dont know them, you may know some facts but not whio they really are, what drives them, their reasoning behind their actions and other stuff." The value term is weird on its own and you dont help people understand it. You dont seem to navigate the reader properly. In many other posts you often did not deliver your solution. Or you did but it was so abstract that even an intelligent person like I (I dont mean to brag but I have got 144 on my last IQ test) cant really apply it.

I tried to point out some things, maybe there is someone who enjoys your reads, I dont know. But I am usually disappointed because you pick fairly interesting topic and it is undereadable. Yet we. readers. have to plow through oceans of metaphores and climbo over abstract concepts of intagible relations inclining to other social behavioural phenomena people unfamiliar with can easily get lost in.

Veer's picture

Hi Martin, I'm not going to talk about everything you bring up in your comment, but here's a couple things I noticed:

1) If you reread the article I think you'd probably agree with me that Colt is not saying that holding stuff back makes you a white knight. He's saying that white knights often are posers:

"Putting up strong barriers in an attempt to appear like you have good traits like honesty, faithfulness, infatuation, cleanliness, agreeableness, etc."

I think the key word here is "appear". It's about seeming this way, all the while not actually being so. Tricking girls to think you are these things when you really aren't.

2) Interesting point about getting framed by a PUA as a white knight when you agree with a girl. I think the key distinction would be what your motive for expressing that agreement is and how you go about doing it. But yeah, I've encountered similar things before -- where you are talking to a guy who sees himself as "the shit", and he just is out "frame-raping" everyone because of egotism (but only really for himself -- few in reality buy into it). I think Girls Chase, and most of all Chase, does a good job of avoiding that kind of stuff, but yeah, I know that's not uncommon when you get into the more egotistical-based pick-up that many practitioners use these days.

3) Writing style -- Frankly, I agree that the writing style here could be tightened a few notches for clarity, and the conclusion could have had a greater impact, but I think a long and hard to follow diatribe like this might not be the most effective way of helping fix those things, as it has just as high a chance as incurring disdain.

Veer

Author
Cody Lyans's picture

Hey Martin,

From what I'm reading, you would like a more digestable line of thought because english isn't your native language and you find it hard to distinguish between different concepts. And you would like it to be easier to nail down what to do.

I can respect that.

I agree with most of your points to be honest and see the errors myself, but a few things I don't agree are "errors" on my part like you do.

I treat girlschase like it is an island. I try not to concern myself with anything that you might find outside the site (puas or what your lair buddies might say etc). So keep in mind that I avoid connecting points to those things.
I also assume that people are relatively new to terminology etc, so am struggling most of the time to give an introduction to points, whilst at the same time trying to not get too stuck on one point.

You made a point about intellect, that I think is important.
Congrats btw on your recent IQ test score. Unfortunately, understanding what to do with women is more about overcoming our temper and our proneness to doing stupid things without thinking first, rather than our intellect.
If I write a step by step, you will never confront your emotions and never confront what you need to, to improve.

This article is meant to achieve one thing; "absolutely crush white knighting so someone can move on".
Crush, your white knight.

We all have creative avoidance regarding this and want perfect "neat" answers. I'm trying with my scattergun approach to stop you from running away, and get you asking some hard questions.

I design some articles, like this one, for scanning.
I do want people to read it, but more importantly to absorb a general idea and then to look at the lists and quotes and challenge themselves on the points.

Now, I'm not a magician so I can't tailor the points to each possible variation, so I rely on readers taking a little initiative.

I try to make articles compelling so you can enjoy (don't think too hard, and skip past if a point is giving you a headache) and then I make sure there is some depth in what was discussed so you can get into it deeper, if you want.

Having said that, I do understand what you are hinting at, it is just a catch 22, if I start focusing on what you suggest, you'll lose out on something.

Getting good with girls is tough, so really my approach is "get them in the fight" before anything else, which is usually what I am thinking when choosing what to represent.

Captain Space's picture

Important article. Being who we are, as men, is more important than pretending to be asexual or to please women at all costs. Acting like a White Knight is a strategy we guys come up with to be able to have success with women, the problem is it doesn't work.

I was able to charm a couple of girls with it, really interesting ladies, but when the time of action came, I could not act. It was like what enabled me to attract them, turned out to be a problem.

Any comments?

Author
Cody Lyans's picture

Yes. Women are initially attracted to white knighting in some contexts, but it drops off when it comes to the crunch.
I had a girl recently say "I like how it kind of condescends me, but I soon stop liking it because it is a lie".

Women aren't totally conscious of why it turns them off, but as you get better at this stuff it gets pretty clear that you have no follow through, no next step and the drop in tension leaves a girl very underwhelmed and in a panic state where she is trying to figure out why she suddenly is unnerved.

In a way, white knighting (or my version of the term) is really just a lack of strong foundations for moving forwards.
If you know how to move forwards without promises and other knightly behaviours, the girl won't feel the drop in her emotions as hard and won't punish you as hard on it.

Anonymous's picture

I did have a little trouble with the writing style, but - it was like a good complex movie that you have to watch (read) a few times to pull out the key messages. Like the movie The Matrix, which spawned 'red pill' metaphors for us all.

I don't consider myself a major Alpha, and my White Knighting has mostly been to do fun active things for myself also... but I see the Attraction Expiring and gotta hold it back. A girl who is framed and likes to do less - you can always add gradually activities. I got a great gal pal now started that way, but I've seen 'slowness' as too many activities occurred.

I am also divorced after decades of marriage. I did see "the quote" part above happen and it DOES scare the hell out of me! Most of you ultimately will reach 2year drop or go forward with companionate relationships.

[Hey Chase: No One online deals with this to prevent divorces! I know you were divorced too. It sucked. Course corrections when the Successful Relationship White Knighting fades would save a lot of good relationships. Another evolution of GC... teaching married guys to snap out of it and keep SMV up for all around better lives.]

These are the Key Messages for avoiding this happening from my reading:

- Plan a major adventure together no more than every 6 months, it can just be a special long weekend

- Don't anticipate their needs and fill them more than a couple items per week. Let them ask, and negotiate the task/timing

- Tell them the bullshit in your life and head too, but not more than 5 minutes twice a week

- Get a Dirty Jokes app on your smartphone, have em ready - it dents the Knight armor in a great way

Alexandre 's picture

IMO, most guys who adapt to the white knight mindset are mostly victims of the mainstream - the "prince charming/gentlemen" attitudes that the mainstream teach us guys is what girls really want - the self sacrificing, nice guy who will provide everything for the girl.

Of course this sounds great on paper, even woman say they logically want this type of man - the problem is that they LOGICALLY think this because it makes sense on paper - but the problem is woman act and make decisions by EMOTION and not logic! Attraction is therefore more biological, primitive in nature and is emotional - the logic part comes in with social conditioning.

Of course this type of behavior will always lose to the "asshole" type guy, who really isn't an asshole but who just understands that woman respond to a man on his own path, who will not make her his world and who displays characteristics of an alpha male (ie: asshole type behaviour (according to critics) but not exacly, its more of a unapologetic, emotional inducing type of behaviour that displays to woman that you are a man of high value who has choices). This is more attractive to woman than the "ill give you whatever you want" type of white knight behaviour - since this essentially displays that you are not a man of high value, but rather of scarcity, that tries really hard - this is actually really unattractive.

Why do all guys who LEARNED to be good with woman hate white knighting? Because, instead of learning what woman find attractive and trying to modify their behaviour to that - white knights assume that they KNOW what woman want and label all desirable men "assholes" that "woman shouldn't hang out with".

David Riley's picture

Hey Alexandre,

I believe it's not so much hate for white knights it's more of a frustration that a lot of guys feel because they themselves one point use to be that guy. There's a lot of frustration stemming from a sense of "I see everything wrong that guy is doing but, he won't listen." A lot of times we can become aggravated with a person who does something that we ourselves know won't wield results. I would guys don't personally hate white knights, they just hate what they do. Many guys find it annoying that a white knight bad mouths you to their girl, and she just thinks its cute. It's a very annoying situation that is tag with simping (sucking up to girls in hopes that she will see you as a lover).

Guys can get more annoyed with the behavior of white knights because they know their intentions. Guys get frustrated and annoyed with their girlfriends at times because she doesn't believe that guy really wants her pussy. It can be mind blowing to say the least, haha. Eventually, the girlfriend will get frustrated with the white knights behavior and brush him off. This is when he shows his true colors, and then the girlfriend will see what her boyfriend was saying was right. In the end some guys may have a strong dislike for white knights because they see the previous mistakes they once made.

Take care,

Just Dave

Author
Cody Lyans's picture

White knight is just really stubborn, I don't think people hate white knights, it is in some senses better than desperate lashout guy, they just hate how a cool guy's potential is being crushed because of his insistence on being one. I just feel that it is a self deciet and you need an example in your life that tells you "lets not do it this way, lets open our mind".
The hardest part about being white knight is you think you are awesome, so aren't open to anything else, and thats what frustrates people.

I'm kind of neutral about it/understand white knighting but it is really a pretty bad place to be, so it is important that guys recognise it themselves so they can do what they can to get out of that sticky behavioural pattern before it steals away all their potential and that of girls.

You gotta remember that these guys are huge pain in the ass anchors to any girl. So its not harmless, hence the urgency to shift out of it. It is pretty detrimental.

Anonymous's picture

what a bunch of bullshit
I'm a true white knight who believes in truth and honor and justice!
I'm perfect and I know I'm perfect.
All women should flock to me because perfection is what everyone should aim for.
I'm god yo.
seriously, there's nothing wrong with me. it's everyone else who's fucked up and crazy.
I'm the savior. I save people. I'm the guy who's gonna save the world.
I have money and everything else to give.
it's not my fault that women are too fucked up in the head to see how perfect I am and how I will save them from their own dumb stupid idiotic mistakes.
truth and honor and justice. ladies, if you really want to be happy, then choose me.
I'm a god. I can give you EVERYTHING, and I will.
peace out the rest ya'll beta males :)
I'm perfect.

SirTruthAlot's picture

The White Knight syndrome has been way over-analyzed as it simply comes down to guys trying to defend women just to get some action. That's it. Most WKs don't really put women on a pedestal at least in any genuine way - they just employ the behavior to curry favor. Yea there are what I call the "Renaissance Fair types" who like to role play and call women "M' Lady" and crap like that but that's just - well I don't know what it is but it's weird and no one likes it - not even people who work at Renaissance Fairs.

Anyway if you are a WK you need to understand that your behavior drives women AWAY. Obsequious, servile, sychophantic communication and behavior is a huge turn off for anyone so just stop it. Understand that you aren't even in the "friend zone" you are in the "creep zone" when you do these things. Here are some simple things you can also do to hasten your rehabilitation: getting a decent haircut, start dressing a little better (food stained vintage t-shirts might impress your buds but women hate that crap), exercise some more, and stop playing so many god***n video games. Just apply this advice for even one month and your life will change.

And above all NEVER EVER EVER offer your company to console a woman who has just broken up with someone with the pathetic belief that she will transfer her affections to you just because you "were there for her" ! And once you slay the dragons of white knighting and enjoy the intimate company of a fair maiden we shall raise a tankard of ale in celebration of your return to manhood !

Leave a Comment

One Date girl next to the number one

Get The Girl In Just One Date

It only takes one date to get the girl you want. Best of all, the date's easy to get… and girls love it.

Inside One Date, You'll Learn

  • How to build instant chemistry
  • Ways to easily create arousal
  • How to get girls to do what you want
  • The secret to a devoted girlfriend

…and more great Girls Chase Tech