Relationships and Work: Are they meant to be work?

[A-Unit]

The belief as it stands is that relationships are work. In my opinion, and a youthful one at that, it isn't the "relationship" that takes work, but the communication that takes work. Women often mistake a man's simplistic ways to mean alot more or less than they truly do. Men, being simple creatures desiring only activity/money, sports/arts/entertainment, the occasional beer, grilling, male bonding, and risky activities, can't always fathom the world of women. Moreover, it tends to frustrate men when women go deeper than Hercule Poroit into his mood, his word, and his unintended meanings.

ARE RELATIONSHIPS MEANT TO BE WORK

No. In my reality, no. A girl to my world is meant to be a "best friend with benefits," as my buddy who's much older put it. And that about sums it up. Whatever type of girl you want to bond with, the best relationships seem to come about when you connect TOGETHER on a very intimate level with similar values, pursuits, hobbies, activities and outlooks, OR, she cares to join you on your pursuits, values, hobbies, activities, and outlooks.

Sadly, I've lost quite a few friends to women, when they only used our friendship as a springboard until they were no longer single. The poker stopped, the sports gatherings stopped, the hangouts, video games; it all ceased, because the times we all hung out were just a stop-gap between his next voyage into PVSSY-LAND.

My biggest "stick points" occur because I ENJOY what I do with or without a woman, and I find the biggest guilt trick on their part is to state what OTHER guys do, or what OTHER boyfriends did, or what siblings bf's did. Whatever the case maybe, is that I enjoy what I do alone, as much as I do with women. But the funny paradox is, if women LEARNED to let men be men, and do what they do, those men would go back to their women MORE often. It might be a hard thing to fathom, but truly freedom with the opposite is more attractive than control and jealousy.

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As I see it, if you don't have friction with family or friends, why would you accept MORE than what is comfortable in a relationship? Why would sacrifice what you like/love for a person, and then sell it under the guise of "this is what you do in a relationship?" Merely, it's just exchanging one set of selfish wants for another. Your woman might think your pot habit is bad and that it's "unclassy," yet who is she to say what's right and wrong for you? Or maybe she thinks your bimonthly guy's night to clubs or sports bars is a blackmark on your relationship, yet, it's the selfish exchange of her wants for your wants.

All in all, it's the freedom we allow people when we're together, IMO [Don't want to be contrued as a dictator here], that bring true attraction to the surface. As I see it, a woman is meant to BUILD your current world up, to support it all the more, no detract from financial goals, current hobbies, family events, and the like, as so many men do throw aside. The men I see do that I question as to what they owe their allegiance to and if they have any sense of identity since they can so easily change what they do like a cameleon.

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A 26 year old friend from college who's near married 2 years is set to divorce. It will be like it never happened. Alot of different events triggered this final decision, but even without the divorce, he's already happy than he was the day he spoke his nuptials. Sadly, the many reasons he cited as being the downfall of their attraction, aside from not having a good base to begin with were...

1. Few interests in common.
2. Rarely supported his hobbies, such as flag football and golf. In the first year of marriage he made it out twice. She wouldn't even attend one event, even after he asked her.
3. Never entertained guests.
4. She would rarely accompany him to social events, like work parties or post-collegiate gatherings.
5. She began scheduling sex but once a week, despite wanting to get pregnant.
6. Her tight financial policies imposed on their relationship limited his weekly fund and forbade any spending of pleasure of any kind.
7. She had no circle of friends, so she constantly wanted to be at his side.
8. When they were alone, their biggest hobby was watching TV.

The list goes on, but who would want to spend life like that? I knew from the start it wasn't strong, but I believed otherwise that there was something I was missing.

It's a constant battle between wanting just sex with many women, and finding one outstanding girl. Few of my friends have found that, and sometimes you lower your standards, but viewed from the cost:to:benefit ratio perspective, eventually you hit a wall of diminishing returns.

Again, this is all my experiences and feelings of what describes work versus what's normal, since much of what women sputter never seems to make coherent sense as a pattern of logic anyways. Many of my longer relationships suffer under the premise of "work" versus "communication" versus "psychosis." I've found more often than not, tensions mounted BECAUSE of miscommunications, finally, if there were still tensions, it's merely because 2 people have different outlooks and values on WHAT constitutes a relationship to each party, and if no reconciliation or compromise is possible, then each person parts ways.

Let me know your thoughts.



A-Unit

 

[Rollo Tomassi]

A-UNIT, thank you for posting something I can finally sink my teeth into instead of playing patsy with guys who ought to know when they're milking a dead cow of a realtionship.

The "Relationships are work" mythology is what I call an Operative Social Contrivance. How often do you hear men say these words? Not too many I'd suspect: and of the few who do I'd also speculate that many of them are in relationships where they are "doing the work" for the women who are giving them the 'grade' so to speak. And of the single men who subscribe to this mythology, each had to be conditioned to believe this is the case in LTRs by women. As an aside, I should also add that any unattached guy I've ever heard utter this phrase was doing so to establish himself as "not like other guys" in order to qualify himself to some woman he believed would identify with the idea.

Essentially the notion that relationships require 'work' is a social contrivance with the latent purpose of serving the feminine interest. Think about it - left to his own rationale why would a relationship EVER be considered work to a man? Of course it's not 'work' if he can get laid on a regular basis and share intimacy with a woman who has a mutual respect, attraction and affinity for him. No, this myth is one sided and it serves the feminine.

What would the best method be to get a man to live up to the idealizations a woman has as her perfect mate (however twisted and convoluted this may have been defined for her)? Women love the 'fixer upper'. "He'd be such a great guy if only he would,..." or she'll say "I'm working on him." It's when the conditioning goes from "I'm working on him" to "We're working on our relationship" that he has now internalized her control. This is where the mythology of Relationships-as-Work is derived from. How often is it the woman who needs the 'work' in the relationship? And if it is her, the terminology of the relationship and the associations change. No, 'work' implies a man better conforming his identity to her ideal relationship. And what better way to initiate this than to psychologically condition him to want to embody her ideal - and the earlier the better.

I have heard (and read) 14 y.o. boys repeat this exact phrase, "Relationships take a lot of work." These are adolescent boys who've never been in ANY relationship, much less a mature adult one. Where does this come from? Western popular culture is saturated in mythologies like this; mythologies with the latent purpose of conditioning young men to desire to "live up" to the expectations that are idealized by women and serve to make their seletion process more comfortably in their control. Ergo, the boy that hears this often enough and repeats this often enough is pre-set to expect it into adulthood from the women who've also heard it and repeated it often enough to make it seem like a means for better identifying with a woman who's intimacy they seek.

And here's the truth,..

I'll be married 10 years in July and I'm happy with my marriage, my family and the conditions in my household. In this time I have NEVER heard my wife tell me our relationship needed work, nor have I EVER thought that we did. She respects my identity and I respect hers. I have never asked her to change her personality to accommodate my expectations, nor would I since I know this would never be a genuine change. In turn I have never tried to change my identity to better accommodate her and in fact the surest way I could turn her off would be to do this.

The honest truth to this myth is:
Good relationships are effortless when both partners have a mutual respect for each other's identities.

The tragedy in all of this is that this simple truth doesn't sell self-help books; the "how to change him" feminine psychology is self-prepetuating and self-defeating. The relationships-are-work crowd ultimately push away people who would otherwise be good mates or else change the character of the person so drastically that they cease to be the man they were attracted to in the begining.
It is sooooo much easier to find fault in others than to look within ourselves; to nit pick our insipid pre-packaged expectations that were sold to us when we were 12 y.o.

 

[RedPill]

A-Unit,

I'm apt to believe that you're in the minority group of guys on this forum who are actually on the path toward great success in life. If my assumption is correct, then a few years down the road you'll be (more visibly) a valuable commodity to women, and you'll have the option to be very choosy. If you choose to find one awesome chick to get monogamous with, don't settle for anything less than an A+ woman. As far as I'm concerned, an A+ woman has the trifecta: lasting hotness, the same vision/values/outlook on life as you, and mature femininity. The first two ideals are fairly obvious, but I think mature femininity merits discussion.

Women who exhibit the quality of mature femininity are relaxed and know their role as the submissive, supporting partner who helps her man build his kingdom. They understand the nature of both sexes, which includes the nature (and consequently the needs and communication style) of men. As we constantly work to improve ourselves as men, so do they constantly work to improve themselves as women. All relationships require some level of conscious effort to maintain, but my point is that women who possess mature femininity are the women with whom relationships require relatively little work. These women are relaxed, have their emotions under control, and enjoy and cater to your masculinity. They are not the loud, domineering, b!tchy women we're all too familiar with.

The upside, if one becomes a man of great value, is that he has the ability to attract and keep a woman of great value, or as I've called them here, A+ women. However, if you get into a LTR with a women of any lesser quality, realize that it's going to take more work. If it takes more work than you can handle, that's when the relationship fails. It's personal preference how much work you're willing to put into making a relationship with a chick work, but my line of thinking is that why bother if it's going to be work? Go play the field and don't go monogamous unless you find one that's not going to be much work. I have a lot of gratitude to those both on and off this site who have helped me cultivate that mindset.

Unfortunately, so many men settle for difficult or ultimately impossible relationships because they live in the Matrix and have a scarcity mentality... and they're pvssies. Sucks to be them.

 

[A-Unit]

Re:

You reiterated my underlying feelings, Rollo.

Work appeals to men. Men do like work. They like to work smarter, not harder, but there's nothing like "a good project to get a man's juices flowing," and like the good little marketers that women or feminists are, they found trigger and/or buzzwords that appeal to a man's psyche.

A relationship is entered because it does not require work. Initially anyways. I wouldn't date a flake longer than the phonecall to dump her. I wouldn't date a girl who disrespected my hobbies or personal interests or abhored my family. I wouldn't hang out with a friend with whom I have nothing in common.

Guys I've heard who are happy in relationships say they're "excited" to see their mate, and doesn't take work, at least not the work they think it takes. I've certainly felt it more from younger, more immature women. I dig my current girl very much, but she has a HUGE problem with me not being as "planning-oriented", as "on-time," as "future-based," and not putting her first. She's very "strutured, in that, if she visits her family, it's well planned out, it's a family event, etc. True to form, I'm like the Chinese Horoscope I was born under, the Monkey. I like to come and go. I like to pop in on family. I don't like making super solid plans unless the plans require it, such as sporting events, vacations, birthdays, etc; I plan, but I plan goals, I don't plan dates, I like the free feel of life in some respects. I abhor control, restraint, predictability.

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The psycho babble books and programs are getting outrageous. Too much thought, not enough doing. Even my buddy who's divorcing at the TENDER age of 27 into freedom was asked to go to counseling. For what? At 27, you're going to patch something up that has no inherent financial or emotional value? There's no kids on the line, no home equity, no major assets, and they both had careers, so she won't get a red dime cent of his hard earned dough.

Understanding a partner's needs/wants/desire and their perception of what a relationship is. IME, it hails from a woman's family/home life, and also their attach/detachment from it. I've had girls from "broken" homes, and most times their decisions are very poor. Either they're promiscuous, they date guys who deliver danger or excitement in ways that are foolish and risky, or they're just immature. One such girl "didn't want a solid relationship because she didn't want to be tied down so young." This girl was 17/18 at the time, and is no 20, AND, Knocked Up by her X boyfriend. So long to that nice figure and being anything BUT whitetrash.

This is why over the years, I've taken the track of, IT's my reality and she's visiting for the time being. This is more so true if she EXPECTS you to make decisions, and that someday you'll want to be the sole provider. If you're the provider and not in control, it's like you're along for the ride, and with women who constantly change their minds based on their feelings, letting anyone lead but the man in this case is sheer suicide.

But, alas, I'm reiterating what all guys who've been here know. Thanks for providing the "mature Psychological" stand point, Rollo.



A-Unit

 

[Desdinova]

Fantastic post, A-unit!

How often is it the woman who needs the 'work' in the relationship?

This is a really big question that most men will never ask themselves. Men are the ones to blame because their woman and society says that's the way it is. When the neighbours called the police on my best friend and his wife who were arguing, who do you think they hauled away? Him of course, although she probably should've been the one to be hauled off. He's told me tons of tales on how bad her temper is, but he's the one taking anger management courses. Their relationship is crap, and I'm surpised they've almost made it two years. They split up for a good five months or so last year.

All relationships require some level of conscious effort to maintain, but my point is that women who possess mature femininity are the women with whom relationships require relatively little work.

Exactly. A relationship should be like a house. It should be in relatively good shape, and it will require a bit of maintenance. Nobody should buy a demolished house and say "It's work owning a house". Also, a house should be maintained to prevent bigger problems from developing. If the small things aren't taken care of, the house will develop more problems, and will eventually turn into "a lot of work".

Relationships are the same way. They should be low maintenance, and overall in good shape. The problem is today's relationship handyman (and handywoman) doesn't know how to maintain one. They also don't know how to choose an ideal person to develop a relationship with. A good looking woman with a wicked temper is not a good woman.

The only relationships that require "a lot of work" are the ones that are already destroyed. The man who keeps developing relationships with damaged women are going to develope the "work" opinion because they don't know what to look for in a woman.

As I've said before, a woman should add happiness to a man's life, not take it away.

 

[SoCalMike]

Good posts, it can go both ways too - the girl can be the "fixer upper" too. i was in a 2 year relationship with a girl who was "perfect except for <huge list of serious issues>" and I was under the delusion that I could "help" her and "change" her. And believe me, that was a herculean task which required tons of (wasted) work and of course failed in the end.

 

[Sean O]

This is the best topic I've yet seen on these forums.