There are a plenty of men who are uninterested in marriage and fatherhood. Some have been hurt by women in their lives, traumatized by the experience, and are unwillingly to put themselves at risk of being hurt again; some are by their nature r-selected simpletons with no innate drive for the higher-order rewards of legacy and genetic continuity; some simply do not possess that most natural desire of all living things: To create and care for a living, breathing vessel for your genetic code, and die with the knowledge that such a vessel will preserve and propagate the essence of your life force into the next generation and throughout eternity.
I don’t judge such men as inferior, but this guide to intelligent and effective procreation in the 21st century is not for them.
In a civilized, monogamous society, finding a wife and raising children is a simple matter. A man can seek out a wife, woo her in the manner approved by the social norms of his tribe, and count on the people and institutions around him to facilitate the process of courtship, marriage, and child bearing. Whatever advice he needs on the subject will be readily available via his family, friends, and culture.
In our broken society, this approach is a near guarantee of failure. The modern man who resigns himself to courtship and marriage as prescribed to him by his culture, education, and religious leaders is setting himself up for a barren future. Whether it be from divorce theft, cuckoldry, a false rape accusation, or simply a childless marriage to a barren, used-up career girl whose fertile window was spent on a career, casual sex, and an age-accelerating unhealthy lifestyle – his future is dark indeed.
Marriage, as we are currently expected to practice it, is a crap deal. But just because something is difficult, doesn’t make it unworthy of the effort.
It has taken some soul-searching, but I’ve made my tentative decision: I will be a father. I will do my utmost to find a wife worthy of my lifelong commitment. I will do all that I can to rise above the chaos and build my own little outpost of stability and order. This rest of this post is a guide for men with similar priorities.
1) The Mindset
I have exactly one goal driving me on my search for a wife: Children. That’s it. I want to be a father, and I want my children to enter life with the best possible chance of success. I believe that a monogamous partnership with a woman is the best way to do this. The prospects of cloning and surrogate mothers also intrigue me, but I ultimately want my children to have a mother in their lives. This is the only valid reason for marriage today: Procreation.
Do you want a wife because you crave companionship? You’re an idiot. Get a dog.
Do you want a wife because your friends and family expect you to get married? You’re a coward. Be a man and make your own choices in life.
Do you want a wife because your pastor has convinced you that marrying a divorcee is your duty as a Christian? You’re a coward, and an adulterer on top of it all.
I repeat, there is only one reason why a modern man should even consider marriage, and that is the prospect of becoming a father. If you want sex, love, and companionship, these things are far easier to get outside of a lifelong monogamous relationship than within it.
You must look upon your search for a wife in purely logical and rational terms. Do not let your emotions cloud the decision. Thie idea that marriage should be about practical considerations and not subject to the caprices of romantic love, is as common historically as it is unpopular today. Romeo and Juliet is the ultimate cautionary tale of the dangers of romantic love, although our contemporaries are rarely smart enough to read it as such. Marrying for love implies that your primary goal in mate selection is the cultivation of happy feelings in your heart, and that the creation of a stable and healthy environment for your children is a secondary concern.
Again, if you want a companion, get a dog. If you want to be a father, choose your mate with your brain, not your heart or your dick.
2) Building Yourself
One of the great privileges of being a man is the ability to delay marriage and fatherhood at will. The correlating duty is that you must exercise your free will to become the man you are capable of being, because you will only ever get the quality of mate that you deserve. To have extra money for romantic dates, you might want to consider playing some fun sports betting games via linuxappfinder.com.
This means that you cannot spend your twenties playing video games and smoking weed. You cannot spend your twenties getting fat, living paycheck to paycheck, and coasting in your career and education.
The hard part about being a man in the 21st century is that the vast majority of money, status, sexual access and happiness are accruing to an increasingly small slice of the male population. The easy part is that your peers are a bunch of sackless pantywaists, which means its a fairly simple matter to fight into that top five percent.
Krauser has an excellent post on the importance of building yourself in your young adulthood. Danger and Play has written repeatedly on this topic as well. I will add to the chorus and say that I am incredibly grateful to my younger self for all the books he read, money he saved, hours he spent in the gym, the valuable friends he made, and the effort he put into his education and early career development.
Our generation firmly believes that a man’s early twenties are a time for getting blackout drunk five nights a week, going to ten or fifteen hours of class a week, playing video games, and otherwise not doing a hell of a lot. But the returns to hard work and education (in any form) decrease with age. A man in his twenties lays the foundation of the man he will be for the rest of his life. If you want to earn the right to choose one of the few remaining decent women in our society as a mate, you must do so my turning yourself into one of the few remaining decent men.
This reading list will start you along the path towards a lifetime of auto-didactism. The Freedom Twenty-Five blogroll will expose you to the broad range of pretty-lie-smashing, counter-progressive Red Pill knowledge. I won’t into the details of career selection, but Krauser’s post will give you the tools you need to make those choices. Beyond that, avoid the temptations of sloth, complacency and time-consuming habits that do not constitute an investment in yourself.
3) Learning The Skills
It’s far too easy to waste time in the seduction community. There are too many books to read, too many videos to watch, and a near-unlimited number of available women upon which you can ‘practice.’
But with that said, the modern young man should immediately and unhesitatingly dive into the wide world of seduction methodology. A one-year crash course of ten hours per week reading books, watching videos, and another ten practicing material in the field, will set a man up with the knowledge and practical experience he needs for a lifetime of success with women. Complete this crash course at a young age, and you can spend the rest of your life refining and perfecting your own personal style. Break through the fear of approaching, and you can spend the rest of your life with the ability to meet and ask out women you meet casually in your life.
This post (click and bookmark it, you’ve still got the rest of this post to read) is an excellent guide to giving yourself a basic introduction to the practice of seduction and the Ev Psych/NLP background from whence it came.
4) Choosing A Mate
How should a man go about choosing from the great mass of broken women around him, and identify one of the rare few who might actually be worthy of marriage?
A man must first have standards. This post lays out mine. I suggest you adopt them as well. Many will try to convince you that they are unreasonable. They are, for an average man, which is why you must build yourself into an exceptional man.
Where do decent women congregate? To answer this question, close your eyes and put yourself in the shoes of the sort of woman you would like to marry. How does she spend her weekends and free time? What sort of men does she pursue? Your answers will give you a road map to finding and meeting the women you want to meet.
5) The Interview Process
Now we get into the meat of this guide. Thus far, my advice has been pretty straightforward:
- Decide you want a family
- Become a worthy man,
- Learn a bit of game
- Go meet women where the good women already are.
Good advice, sure, but nothing you couldn’t read in an above average men’s magazine article.
But this is not Maxim. This is Thumotic. This is the place where one finds harsh, gut-wrenching truths that sends cowards back into the safety of their mothers’ bosoms. If that’s your style, friend, hang on: It’s about to get dark in here.
As pleasant as it would be to live in a world where we can all basically trust others to treat us with basic respect and human decency, we do not to live in such a world. Principles of masculine honour such as honesty and the inviolability of sworn oaths are an anachronism in our culture. A man who seeks to marry a woman who truly believes in chastity, lifelong fidelity, wifely submission, and male headship, cannot simply ask a woman if she believes in those principles. She may simply lie, and no one but you and a few lonely blogging reactionaries will judge her for it. Even if she swears to you with all her heart that she will dedicate her life to being a properly traditional and Christian wife, if at any point in time she whimsically changes her mind, you and you alone will feel that her betrayal is immoral or unjustified.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what a man does. By marrying and having children, he is signing up for a life spent at the mercy of his wife. She can choose, any day she likes, to take away his children and livelihood. There is no contract that can be signed, no promise that can be extracted, and no vetting procedure perfect enough to ensure that this does not happen.
6) See the sausage being made
With this bullet, I part ways with many traditionalists who, until now, may have been happy to endorse this post. A traditionalist man who reserves sex for marriage can still implement most of the advice in this guide. He can take many steps to protect himself against divorce theft. Perhaps, his lack of hypocrisy and greater ability to pair-bond will earn him a unique set of advantages in the long-term dating game. But ultimately, he is playing with one hand tied behind his back. Reading, thinking, planning, and intellectualizing is not enough to understand women.
A man who wishes to permanently bind his wealth, happiness and genetic legacy to a woman, must first learn their true nature. Not the angelic, faultless caricature painted by the Church. Not the twisted, a-feminine monstrosity encouraged by our feminist culture. Not the overly dismal, cynical and uncharitable portrait one gets from certain corners of the Manosphere. A man who wants the best for his children must choose a proper wife. To do this, he must first learn all that he can – the good, the bad, and the ugly – about female nature.
Here’s a hard truth: you can’t trust anyone in the world. Not your teachers, your parents, your pastor, not even your favourite bloggers. The only thing you can trust unconditionally is what you see, hear and experience with your own senses.
And so, men who desire marriage, children, family, stability, and posterity – I suggest you spend the better part of your twenties swimming in the shark tank of the modern sexual marketplace.
This will be a hard pill to swallow for some, particularly those men who take seriously the Bible’s teachings on fornication and adultery. But I don’t see any way around it. I have slept with many, many women, or all ages, from all sorts of backgrounds, in every conceivable context. I have had many one-night stands, many casually physical ongoing relationships, and a few true loves during which I traveled to the outer limits of joy and contentment, and then endured the pain of the journey back. I have helped several women cheat on their boyfriends, often in the most flagrant and disrespectful manner possible. I have slept with, and possibly fathered adulterated children, with married women. I have utterly destroyed the hearts and souls of lovely girls, for a time at least. I have had my own heart broken. In short, I have seen an experienced a wide gamut of human female behaviour. After it all, I am still regularly taken by surprise in my relationships with women. I can’t imagine how deaf and blind a man without my experience must be.
A man who attempts to intelligently father children without this sort of background, is making a blind call on the most important bet of his life. It’s true that there are many risks associated with an early adulthood spent living up the playboy lifestyle, from the physical (STDs, unplanned pregnancies) to the psychological (excess cynicism, degradation of your ability to pair-bond) and even the spiritual. But truly, what alternative is there? It’s no coincidence that the men who are most cogently understanding and explaining the modern sexual marketplace, are largely those men who have most fully immersed themselves in its bowels. Behind my keyboard, I believe that traditional sexual morality is good for society. But in my personal life, and in the advice that I offer to the young men of my generation, I see no profit in the virtue of chastity preached by those belief systems.
Ironically, it is far more important for traditional men to immerse themselves in the crimson arts, than it is for their simpler, hedonistic brothers.
I’ll conclude with the single most important step in the modern man’s blueprint for successful family formation:
7) Accept that you may fail
No man can be guaranteed success in anything worth doing, and this is notably true in the pursuit of a stable marriage and fatherhood. But that’s OK.
Many projects are worth doing, even though they carry a high risk of costly failure. Starting a business, for example. Writing a book. Quitting a job to travel. Any big, long-term, potentially life-altering project brings risk.
But no one is telling men they shouldn’t do any of those things. When it comes to failure in business, careers, and other projects unrelated to marriage and family, the standard advice is full speed ahead. Sure, a bad decision in those areas of life may cost you your life savings, your income, and several years of your life.
There is one big difference between career moves and family formation that creates this double standard: Men invest their ego and emotions in their families.
This seems like the most natural thing in the world. Perhaps it is, but the cold reality of our age is this:
A man who allows himself to become emotionally blindered in his romantic relationships, will see those relationships fail. A man who invests his ego and sense of self in his family, gives his wife the power to take those things away from him, along with his family and livelihood.
A man who chooses a wife, and chooses his behaviour within his marriage, in as rational a manner as he is capable of, will minimize his risk of divorce. A man who derives his identity from his family will collapse into a weeping ball of failure when it is taken from him. A man who treats his family like a business will be in a position to hide his assets, flee the country, and make smart legal decisions in the ensuing battle over custody of his children. He will also have the presence of mind to, in the worst case scenario, accept what he has lost and cannot recover, and start anew.
All of this sounds cold and cynical. But note that your future children are better served by a father who can act effectively in their interest.
This, the necessity of loving a family with your brain instead of your heart, is another reason a man should spend his twenties unmarried. The experience of falling completely and totally in love with a woman who feels the same for you, is one of the greatest joys available to mortal men. But, as joyful as pure love is, it’s dangerous in the legally and socially precarious context of a 21st-century marriage. If you’re going to experience incautious love – and every man should, at least one point in his life – better to do it in your youth, and before you have your children and life’s work on the line.
All this is not to say that you should fight all feelings of love for your spouse and children. Even if this were desirable, this would only be possible for the most jaded and sociopathic of men.
What this guide recommends is that you keep one foot planted firmly in reality. Love your wife, but love your children more. Know the law in your jurisdiction. Draw up contingency plans. Review them with a good lawyer, and keep him on speed dial. Be a good husband, but always be prepared to abandon your feelings, and make the tactical moves necessary to protect yourself, your children, and the assets you’ll need to give them the life you want for them, if your wife chooses to rebel against you and the oaths she swore.
If you do not want children, there are no arguments I can make to change your mind. Nor would I be inclined to make them if there were. The early twenty-first century is a truly awful time for men who wish to found and care for families. Most who try, will fail. But for those men of my generation who have decided that fatherhood is one of our priorities, this guide offers you the tools to maximize your probability of raising children in a stable, safe, happy environment. This guide gives you the tools to minimize the odds that your family will be ripped apart by a frivolous divorce. If you have the courage and the desire to try to buck this trend, follow this advice and give yourself a fighting chance.
