I came across this post on another forum on "How to prevent oneitis":
I thought I would just re-post it here as it is one of the best take on oneitis that I have ever seen.
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How to prevent oneitis
There are a lot of guides on the internet for curing oneitis, but this article takes a different approach: I hope to give you a set of skills to prevent oneitis from ever occurring in the first place. Oneitis is an irrational and unhealthy fixation or obsession with one particular girl. Often the girl likes you less than you like her, and she either completely ignores you or treats you in a manipulative or abusive way because she knows you like her so much. You often think about her and focus on what YOU did wrong to lose her, you have irrational delusions about your future together and/or your relationship, and keep wanting to contact her.
I think most oneitis starts like this: guy meets girl who is too hot for him -> she hangs out with him for whatever reason (doesn’t matter why) -> he feels ****ing awesome -> she starts treating him badly -> those amazing “feel good” emotions in his brain cause him to rationalize or justify her ****ty behavior -> he falls deeper into a vicious cycle of attachment, neediness, and low self-esteem. If you are a committed monogamous relationship with somebody you care about and you both each other well, there is nothing wrong and that's not really oneitis.
Unfortunately, the PUA community often minimizes the difficulty of oneitis. The advice is often superficial and banal: “go bang 10 other girls,” “go to the gym,” etc… But true oneitis (i.e., with a girl that you have been in a long-term relationship with) is very difficult to get over and often ruins people’s lives. Think about the guys that have had their lives ruined by women they “loved”, or the men that lost everything they had in a divorce, or all the men that were tricked into fathering a baby they didn’t want. Sex, love, attachment, loneliness, etc… are literally the strongest emotions a person can feel so its natural that oneitis can drive you nuts. Oneitis is when the brain re-wires itself to think that only woman can make it happy. Re-programming is difficult, so let's just not get oneitis in the first place.
Science is still trying to figure out how oneitis works, but it has some clues. For one, sex and affection activate the dopamine receptors in a person’s brain, which are also activated by things like cocaine and gambling. So basically, being in love is like being on crack and when that drug is taken away you experience withdrawals. But the dopamine problem is not even your worst problem – it is easy to find sex and affection from elsewhere.
A bigger issue is that oneitis is rejection anxiety. One of the most painful emotions that a human can experience is rejection by another person. Evolution programmed us to be nice, timid and conformist so that the tribe doesn’t reject us. When we do get rejected, our body literally goes into panic mode because it thinks that it is been thrown out of the tribe and is now in the jungle alone. You lose your appetite because your body is trying to conserve food because it is by itself and doesn’t have the tribe to help feed it anymore. You can’t sleep because you are in the woods by yourself so you need to be vigilant against predators. And you can’t stop thinking about why you got rejected because evolution has programmed us to keep ruminating and figure out what we did wrong so we stop behaving that way and the tribe will take us back.
All of this is completely irrational in the modern world, of course. Worse yet, our evolutionary emotions are designed for tribal life, but our body can’t tell the difference between the tribe rejecting you and one person rejecting you. If you ever fall into deep oneitis, you will feel incredibly alone, like nobody in the universe loves and that you will never find another girl like the one you lost. This is because your body doesn’t know that ONE GIRL rejected you, but thinks the entire tribe rejected you. Your body also doesn’t understand that there are other tribes in the world, so it basically thinks to itself “I need to get X back or I will literally die alone.” The worst thing is the constant ruminating. It's good to think a little bit about why we got rejected, but at some point it becomes a waste of time and affects our life. And it doesn’t make sense to ruminate on broken relationships because she will never let you know why she dumped you (most people are rarely honest when it comes to why they don’t want to date you) so your brain is trying to figure out a puzzle without enough information. Your brain doesn’t know it doesn’t have enough information (in the famous words of Donald Rumsfeld, you don’t know what you don’t know) so its going to keep trying to figure it out and failing, like a broken computer program.
One strange thing about rejection anxiety is that if you are the one doing the rejecting, you feel nothing. That’s why a girl and a boy can date for years, and the girl can dump the boy and never talk to him again, while the boy loses his mind and can’t stop thinking about her and calling her. It’s bizarre that our brains are wired like this, but its all the more reason to be at the top of the tribe and have the ability to reject people rather than at the bottom, where you have to worry about getting rejected. It’s kind of a ****ed up trick, but if you’re ever in a relationship and you think she wants to dump you, just dump her first. It will still suck for you, but you will feel a lot better than if you got dumped. It’s a weird quirk about our biology.
I have thought of some other causes of oneitis. These aren’t confirmed by science yet – they are just my own guesses. I think one of the reasons for oneitis is the “just world” fallacy. The just world fallacy is the “cognitive bias (or assumption) that a person's actions always bring morally fair and fitting consequences to that person, so that all noble actions are eventually rewarded and all evil actions are eventually punished.” As you can imagine, this is a huge reason why religion exists. Studies have shown that when people are shown pictures of victims irrationally suffering, people assume that those people did something to deserve it.
I think the just world fallacy applies to oneitis because oftentimes a person in a manipulative relationship will do many nice things for the object of their affection, and that person will not return the favor. Instead of admitting that the person they like doesn’t back, the just world fallacy will trick them into thinking that ONE DAY the objection of their affection will return the favor and they just need to reunite somehow and make it happen. The thought that you wasted your niceness is too hard to handle for most people. Worse yet, the more nice things you do for the person who doesn’t like you, the more you expect them to be nice to you and the stronger your emotions get.
Another reason for oneitis is that the brain makes generalizations to understand the world better. If a baby accidentally puts its hand on a stove and the stove is hot its brain will make a sub-conscious connection that “stove = hot” so the baby doesn't touch stoves again. This is good because our brain doesn’t have the time to sit and analyze every situation – it needs to rely on generalizations and shortcuts. But now let’s say a moron is driving around and sees a ****ty Asian driver. The moron’s brain might make the connection “Asians=****ty drivers” which is a bad generalization because every Asian is different and you shouldn’t generalize an entire continent because of one person you saw. Well I think when a girl makes us feel really good the brain will make a connection that “Kelly=good feelings” but if you go a while without getting good feelings from anybody else the brain makes another connection that “Kelly=the only person that can give us good feelings” which is false.
I thought I would just re-post it here as it is one of the best take on oneitis that I have ever seen.
__________
How to prevent oneitis
There are a lot of guides on the internet for curing oneitis, but this article takes a different approach: I hope to give you a set of skills to prevent oneitis from ever occurring in the first place. Oneitis is an irrational and unhealthy fixation or obsession with one particular girl. Often the girl likes you less than you like her, and she either completely ignores you or treats you in a manipulative or abusive way because she knows you like her so much. You often think about her and focus on what YOU did wrong to lose her, you have irrational delusions about your future together and/or your relationship, and keep wanting to contact her.
I think most oneitis starts like this: guy meets girl who is too hot for him -> she hangs out with him for whatever reason (doesn’t matter why) -> he feels ****ing awesome -> she starts treating him badly -> those amazing “feel good” emotions in his brain cause him to rationalize or justify her ****ty behavior -> he falls deeper into a vicious cycle of attachment, neediness, and low self-esteem. If you are a committed monogamous relationship with somebody you care about and you both each other well, there is nothing wrong and that's not really oneitis.
Unfortunately, the PUA community often minimizes the difficulty of oneitis. The advice is often superficial and banal: “go bang 10 other girls,” “go to the gym,” etc… But true oneitis (i.e., with a girl that you have been in a long-term relationship with) is very difficult to get over and often ruins people’s lives. Think about the guys that have had their lives ruined by women they “loved”, or the men that lost everything they had in a divorce, or all the men that were tricked into fathering a baby they didn’t want. Sex, love, attachment, loneliness, etc… are literally the strongest emotions a person can feel so its natural that oneitis can drive you nuts. Oneitis is when the brain re-wires itself to think that only woman can make it happy. Re-programming is difficult, so let's just not get oneitis in the first place.
Science is still trying to figure out how oneitis works, but it has some clues. For one, sex and affection activate the dopamine receptors in a person’s brain, which are also activated by things like cocaine and gambling. So basically, being in love is like being on crack and when that drug is taken away you experience withdrawals. But the dopamine problem is not even your worst problem – it is easy to find sex and affection from elsewhere.
A bigger issue is that oneitis is rejection anxiety. One of the most painful emotions that a human can experience is rejection by another person. Evolution programmed us to be nice, timid and conformist so that the tribe doesn’t reject us. When we do get rejected, our body literally goes into panic mode because it thinks that it is been thrown out of the tribe and is now in the jungle alone. You lose your appetite because your body is trying to conserve food because it is by itself and doesn’t have the tribe to help feed it anymore. You can’t sleep because you are in the woods by yourself so you need to be vigilant against predators. And you can’t stop thinking about why you got rejected because evolution has programmed us to keep ruminating and figure out what we did wrong so we stop behaving that way and the tribe will take us back.
All of this is completely irrational in the modern world, of course. Worse yet, our evolutionary emotions are designed for tribal life, but our body can’t tell the difference between the tribe rejecting you and one person rejecting you. If you ever fall into deep oneitis, you will feel incredibly alone, like nobody in the universe loves and that you will never find another girl like the one you lost. This is because your body doesn’t know that ONE GIRL rejected you, but thinks the entire tribe rejected you. Your body also doesn’t understand that there are other tribes in the world, so it basically thinks to itself “I need to get X back or I will literally die alone.” The worst thing is the constant ruminating. It's good to think a little bit about why we got rejected, but at some point it becomes a waste of time and affects our life. And it doesn’t make sense to ruminate on broken relationships because she will never let you know why she dumped you (most people are rarely honest when it comes to why they don’t want to date you) so your brain is trying to figure out a puzzle without enough information. Your brain doesn’t know it doesn’t have enough information (in the famous words of Donald Rumsfeld, you don’t know what you don’t know) so its going to keep trying to figure it out and failing, like a broken computer program.
One strange thing about rejection anxiety is that if you are the one doing the rejecting, you feel nothing. That’s why a girl and a boy can date for years, and the girl can dump the boy and never talk to him again, while the boy loses his mind and can’t stop thinking about her and calling her. It’s bizarre that our brains are wired like this, but its all the more reason to be at the top of the tribe and have the ability to reject people rather than at the bottom, where you have to worry about getting rejected. It’s kind of a ****ed up trick, but if you’re ever in a relationship and you think she wants to dump you, just dump her first. It will still suck for you, but you will feel a lot better than if you got dumped. It’s a weird quirk about our biology.
I have thought of some other causes of oneitis. These aren’t confirmed by science yet – they are just my own guesses. I think one of the reasons for oneitis is the “just world” fallacy. The just world fallacy is the “cognitive bias (or assumption) that a person's actions always bring morally fair and fitting consequences to that person, so that all noble actions are eventually rewarded and all evil actions are eventually punished.” As you can imagine, this is a huge reason why religion exists. Studies have shown that when people are shown pictures of victims irrationally suffering, people assume that those people did something to deserve it.
I think the just world fallacy applies to oneitis because oftentimes a person in a manipulative relationship will do many nice things for the object of their affection, and that person will not return the favor. Instead of admitting that the person they like doesn’t back, the just world fallacy will trick them into thinking that ONE DAY the objection of their affection will return the favor and they just need to reunite somehow and make it happen. The thought that you wasted your niceness is too hard to handle for most people. Worse yet, the more nice things you do for the person who doesn’t like you, the more you expect them to be nice to you and the stronger your emotions get.
Another reason for oneitis is that the brain makes generalizations to understand the world better. If a baby accidentally puts its hand on a stove and the stove is hot its brain will make a sub-conscious connection that “stove = hot” so the baby doesn't touch stoves again. This is good because our brain doesn’t have the time to sit and analyze every situation – it needs to rely on generalizations and shortcuts. But now let’s say a moron is driving around and sees a ****ty Asian driver. The moron’s brain might make the connection “Asians=****ty drivers” which is a bad generalization because every Asian is different and you shouldn’t generalize an entire continent because of one person you saw. Well I think when a girl makes us feel really good the brain will make a connection that “Kelly=good feelings” but if you go a while without getting good feelings from anybody else the brain makes another connection that “Kelly=the only person that can give us good feelings” which is false.
