(3) Journeyman

I used to think the old phrasing was a fairly straightforward affair. Moths, and flames... one remains in place, bright and beckoning, while the other flutters toward it with abandon, desperate to bask in the light of its warmth and radiance.

“Be the flame, not the moth,” advised Casanova... and it would seem to be simple enough advice.

Yet, one of the things that you learn you must be as you drive ever deeper into seduction is nuanced, not straightforward.

Complex, not simple.

A woman does not fancy a man who is too easily understood. Nor is being that man quite nearly as interesting.

And I realized, while thinking some things over one night working in a room, watching a number of large brown moths fluttering frantically and futilely at my window screen to enter the room and reach the light, and a number of smaller insects that had dropped, burned and singed onto my bed cover, after having attained the object that called to them so alluringly from the ceiling above, that this turn of the phrase was one that, like the men and women it describes, has a bit more nuance to it than it seems at first.

Meeting a woman who will follow your lead, take care of you, and maybe even cook a delicious meal every once in a while is the dream for most men.

However, with the direction that social dynamics are heading in the West, this is a dream that is slipping away from the hands of most men. So how do you find submissive women? What’s it like to date a woman who will go out of her way to please you? And why is it so satisfying to have this kind of woman for most men?

These are the questions that I will be tackling today.

In a previous article (“Do You Lead Conversations… Or Leave Others Hanging?”) I explained some different styles of conversation.

In this article I’m going to go into each type of conversation a little more in-depth, showing you examples and otherwise generally walking you through them so you can get a better picture of what the different types of conversation look like:

• Friends
• Casual Sex
• Spontaneous
• Finding Out More
  

Which one you pick for any given situation all depends on what you’re looking for.

In a recent article of mine I discussed “sexual freedom”, and there we covered not only what sexual freedom was but also discussed different argument for and against it. However, it is very obvious that my post was very pro sexual liberalism.

To recap quickly, in that post we described sexual liberalism as a position that allows individuals to engage in, without any judgement from others, their desired sexual practices. Most Western countries for instance do not legally restrict all that many sexual practices between two consenting adults.

Yet we agreed that sexual freedom should have some limits. For example, we would all agree here that we should not be allowed to rape anyone (I really hope you all agree!) nor cause any severe long-lasting harm to our sexual partners – like most of us would find it noxious that someone went around spreading HIV on purpose.

In other words, we want consensual sex and to minimize the possible harms of certain sexual practices. But pretty much these limitations of sexual freedom serve one and only one purpose: maximize and protect the sexual freedom of each individual. Think about it: how much sexual freedom does a rape victim have when she is being raped?

But what about other restrictions? What about sleeping with other people’s partners? What about women “slutting around” or men “perving around”? And finally, what about monogamy and the conservative family?

If you’ve ever been tricked or convinced to do something against your original intentions, you’ve been on the receiving end of a failure to get buy in before an action.

When I was a teenager, my parents would always try and convince me and my brothers to get jobs. It’s quite funny that having them tell us to do this actually made us less likely to get jobs, because they were constantly on our backs about it.

They made it seem like it was something that we needed to do against our will. Thus, it was us against them; we had to give excuses as to why we couldn’t get the job, and skillfully dodge being told what to do.

Convincing people to do things isn’t as simple as telling them what to do.

If I could walk up to a woman and make the first thing out of my mouth be, “Come home with me,” and she immediately acquiesced and did, I wouldn’t be spending time with her creating an emotional connection, comfort, and sexual attraction. In fact, if I made this the first thing out of my mouth she would likely very heavily resist any intention of coming home with me, even if I was the sexiest man on the planet.

She would resist because I failed to get her to buy in to the idea of coming home with me. She had no say in the matter, and thus felt like she was being coerced into doing what I wanted, rather than doing something that was mutually beneficial.

Sleeping with each other requires the collective conscious of both parties involved. She’s not your slave, which makes it absolutely necessary that she is thought of as an equal in the mating game.

I was doing some reading the other day when I came across the term “trivializing.”

It gets thrown about in popular media, and often is something you learn to somewhat ignore, just because of how often people lament others “trivializing” some XYZ “really big deal” to them, that seems trite or overblown to others.

And yet...

Examine the classic debate between two opposites. Say someone who is pro-renewable energy because he wants to save the planet, and someone else who is pro-fossil fuels because he doesn’t want to be forced to pay top dollar for new, less effective technologies when cheaper alternatives are available.

The first guy accuses the second guy of killing the planet. The second guy feels like the first guy is trivializing his need to not burn a hole in his wallet, and becomes offended, and tells him off. The first guy then feels like the second guy is trivializing his desire to save the planet as an ignoble cause, and fiercely retorts.

This is a case of crossed wires communication-wise of the sort we discussed in “Dale Carnegie’s Most Life-Changing Piece of Advice”, but it goes broader than this, because trivializing comes in many shapes and forms, and it’s hard to detect and harder to combat in nearly all of them.

Who’s fault is it when a relationship fails?

Two words for you: the man’s.

Usually.

Note: a relationship failure is something different than letting a relationship decline and die, or just breaking up with a girl, because you’ve lost interest or other things in your life have taken precedence or she’s let herself go and is no longer meeting your requirements for someone you’ll keep around in a relationship capacity.

In that case, while a female observer would still consider it a “failed relationship”, from the standpoint of the male it probably isn’t (unless it’s a case of her letting herself go... then, maybe it is, if she was what you wanted before that but stopped being it after it). In that case, it’s just a relationship that didn’t work out.

When I say “failed relationship” here, what I’m talking about is a relationship that you really wanted to work out... but it went belly up anyway.

Is it ever the woman’s fault?

Yes, sometimes. Rarely. In the case where the relationship is a female dominated one because the man has yielded to her the role of captain aboard the good ship Relation... in that case, he is following her lead, and the direction the relationship goes is up to her.

Even then though, I’m torn... because most women who lead don’t want to do it, and resent men who make them do it as weak. If I’m the officer of a military unit and I hand over my command to one of my subordinates, who then goes on to lead us right smack into a disaster, am I absolved of all blame, or do I still take some too?

The large majority of the time, across most kinds of relationships, it’s the fault of you, the man – and nearly always, it’s a failure of leadership that causes the relationship to fold.