What I often see in Red Pill* forums is a narrative about how getting into relationship with a woman is a bad idea, despite strong evidence all around us that loving relationships bring more meaning and joy than any other endeavour.

I see that they've fallen victim to something that plagued me for much of my life, which is the desperate need to find the easiest way out and avoid responsibility.

When you struggle with something like relationships, and you secretly fear that no one will ever love you or treat you well, your brain will put forward this option of: Hey, if you can convince yourself that it's pointless, then you get out of this effort and hassle, and you can avoid rejection forever!

But in order to convince yourself that no one can succeed at this thing (i.e. thereby proving that it’s not your fault), you must validate the idea by convincing others or at least finding others who already agree with you.

Like you, I yearn for validation that it’s never me with the problem and that I don’t need to change, because fear just wants us to stay the same.

You've got to be very careful. Watch out for this narrative because it's trying to get you to stop adapting and stop trying, and it usually does this way before you've done enough attempts to figure out if you could succeed.

It amazes me how many men give up after a single divorce or even just a few bad dates, and how few of them have ever tried the shameless honesty/integrity approach to building connections.

So rather than, “What's the easiest way out? How can I give up on this?” you’ve got to take responsibility and ask, “What am I doing wrong that I could still correct without compromising my integrity?”

*If you’re unfamiliar with “Red Pill”, it’s a mostly online community that share a certain “men are victims” philosophy about life, masculinity and women, based on the idea of revealing what they think are hard truths (i.e. like taking the red pill in The Matrix movie).

‍