I am not an expert. I am a man who tried everything and kept notes.
Not a therapist. Not a pickup artist. Not a guru with a system to sell. Somebody who spent thirty-odd years trying every available approach and eventually worked out which parts were real and which were nonsense.
The book claims nothing beyond that, and the smallness is deliberate.
Who did you write it for?
Friends of mine, specifically, who were struggling with relationships and dating.
They did not understand why women behave the way they do. They did not understand the rules of relationships, or that there were rules. They did not understand a good deal of it, and they were not stupid men. They were intelligent people running on assumptions that did not match the situation in front of them.
I had thirty years of getting it wrong and a set of notes, and I thought my older self could offer them something.
Why does volume fail?
In my twenties I believed the answer was volume. Consider who was believing it.
I was a shy, introverted computer geek who painted fantasy miniatures and read books. Not smooth. Not naturally equipped for any of it. And I worked out the mechanics anyway and went all in, because that was what Playboy and my friends said a man was supposed to want.
Note what is happening there. I did not want it. I had been told what a man wants, I checked my own wanting against the description, found a mismatch, and concluded the mismatch was a fault in me to be corrected.
What it taught me is the single most useful thing in the book: what most men think they want is not what they want.
It made me neither happier nor more confident. It was an expensive and time-consuming way to avoid dealing with myself, and avoiding yourself is what most of this behavior is for. The pursuit is not the point. The pursuit is what you do instead of sitting still long enough to work out what you want. That is a considerably harder afternoon.
What is the credential behind the book?
The one nobody would guess, and it is not on the sales page.
I spent eight years photographing belly dancers and renaissance festivals, which meant thousands of women in front of my camera. But the photography is not the useful part. The useful part is everything around it.
I talked with them. While they put makeup on. While they waited for a set. Sitting around in the back room between performances, and that is most of what a performance day consists of. Hours and hours of unguarded conversation with women who had no reason to perform anything for the photographer, because I was staff.
And there were male friends at those same events, and I talked with them too.
So I ended up with a large sample from both sides, collected in the same rooms over the same years, and I am good at pattern recognition. What emerged from it was a division, and the division is solid.
What is the division?
Men and women have different goals, and both sides misread what the other is after.
Ask a woman what a man wants and she will most likely say sex. That is partially true and it is not the thing. What a man wants is respect. He does not want to be messed with. He typically wants space.
Women tend to be considerably more emotional, and they are raised differently, toward different goals and different ideals.
It does not matter which woman you are talking about. A committed feminist and a traditional housewife are not running the same program as each other in most respects, and they are running a different one from the men either way. The politics sit on top. The goals underneath do not move much.
Most relationship trouble I have watched, in my own life and in other people’s, comes from one side reading the other’s behavior through their own goal set and concluding the other person is being difficult.
Why does the red pill approach fail?
Because it is built on antagonism, and antagonism does not produce a relationship.
The red pill position is that men are superior and will do what they want. It is combative by design and it does not work well now, whatever it may have done before.
It might get a man laid occasionally. Past that, the relationships it produces are deeply unfulfilling, because they are not relationships. They are transactions being described as relationships by somebody who wants the description more than the thing.
Why does the opposite approach fail too?
Same problem, reversed.
The blue pill version puts the man in the subservient position, and the fit is wrong for how a man’s mind generally works. He is not built to be the subordinate partner in the relationship, and arranging himself that way produces a man who is performing agreement instead of holding a position.
Both approaches fail for one reason. Both are a costume. One is aggression as a costume and the other is deference as a costume, and neither has a person underneath it.
There is a larger version of this argument that I have made elsewhere and will not repeat here. The Emasculation of America looks at what Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB defector who had run Soviet active measures before leaving in 1970, described on camera in 1984: a strategy for defeating the United States without firing a shot, working through demoralization as a slow process instead of an event, aimed at institutions instead of individuals, and requiring no agents to keep running once it was underway.
I am not going to argue that book’s case in this one, and the two are separate projects with separate burdens of proof. What connects them is a question to keep in mind while reading either. A generation of men who cannot say what a man is supposed to be, offered two ready-made answers that both fail, arguing with each other about it online: is that a thing that happened to us, or a thing that was done to us?
This book does not answer that. It works at the level of one man deciding how to live, and no other level lets anybody do anything.
What works?
A man needs to be himself, whatever that is, with his own goals and his own life.
And women are a layer on top of that. Relationships are a layer on top.
The book rests on that sentence, and it carries more than it appears to. It says the life comes first and it is not built around the relationship. It says a man arriving with nothing but the wanting is arriving with nothing. And it means the balance in a relationship gets worked out between two people who each already have a shape, instead of one person forming around the other.
This is a book for men and it argues from that side. Somebody could write the corresponding book from the other direction and I am not the person to write it.
How much of The Harder Cases is your marriage?
One hundred percent.
Narcissism recognized instead of diagnosed. Being trapped, and what that does to a person over years. Illness, caregiving and the end of it. What you owe somebody and what you do not.
Twelve and a half years, eight of them with a chronically ill wife. The marriage ended when she died.
None of that section is general advice dressed up as experience. It is the other way around, and I would keep that part of the book above any other.
What did you learn from it?
That there is a point at which you have to recognize a no-win situation and get out.
I was in one. The only way out was to leave.
I should have gotten divorced in the third month.
I did not, and the reason was neither weakness nor confusion. I had absorbed my parents’ position, Christian and absolute: you do not get divorced, full stop, end of discussion. On top of that sat the other rule, the one nobody has to teach you because the culture supplies it free: you tough it through, because that is what a man does.
That is not what a man does.
A man recognizes when he is in a no-win situation, and then he either changes the rules or changes the situation. Those are the only two moves available. Enduring is not a third option, it is the absence of one, and calling it strength is how people spend a decade in something they should have left in month three.
I am not saying leave. Plenty of difficult situations are worth staying in, and the book spends time on how to tell the difference. I am saying that the decision has to be a decision, made deliberately, and not a default you inherited from somebody else’s rules.
There is a section in the book about what you are avoiding by staying busy, and it belongs to this part of the argument instead of to time management.
Somebody in a relationship that is not working will frequently be extremely busy. Work, projects, hobbies, obligations, anything with a schedule attached. It reads as a full life and it is frequently a way of reducing the number of hours available for noticing.
I did that for years and I did not know I was doing it. The tell is not the busyness. The tell is what happens in the gaps, and whether you arrange your life so there are none.
What is this book a rewrite of?
An earlier one called How to Be Friends With Women, subtitled something about surrounding yourself with beautiful women without being sleazy.
That book was shallow. I can say that plainly because I wrote it, and this pattern has repeated across my library. The first version identifies a real subject and does not go far enough into it, and then years later I come back and write the book properly.
The rewrite is a different book, not a longer one.
The original was about friendship. How to have women in your life as friends without being the kind of man who makes that unpleasant for them. Real subject, and a narrow one.
This one is about how to have a relationship and maintain a relationship, and how to keep your masculinity intact while doing it. That is the harder problem and it is the one my friends were facing. Nobody was asking me how to have a female friend. They were asking why the relationship they were in felt like a slow negotiation over how much of themselves they had to hand over.
What is deliberately not in it?
No dating tactics. No therapy, and it says so, because it is not that and pretending otherwise would be dangerous.
And no confirmation for either side of the online gender argument, so both camps will find things to object to. The red pill reader gets told his framework produces hollow relationships. The reader on the other side gets told the differences are real and do not dissolve under sufficiently good politics.
Zero systems for sale. That is on the cover for a reason. The entire advice industry around this subject is built on selling a system to men who feel they are failing, and a system is exactly what I do not have.
What I have is thirty-odd years of getting it wrong in most of the available ways, a marriage that taught me the expensive version of the lesson, and several thousand hours of conversation in back rooms with people who had no reason to perform for me.
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