I’m not an expert. I’m a man who tried everything and kept notes.
Michelle Hardwick, who coaches couples through menopause, said the most useful thing I’ve heard on this subject when she came on Leaders and Their Stories. “She does not want you to be her saviour. She wants to be heard and to feel understood.” Most men are trained to fix things. Listening is harder, and it’s what she asked for.
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 is The Relationship BULLSHIT Men Fall For written for?
Friends of mine who were struggling with relationships and dating.
They didn’t understand why women behave the way they do. They didn’t understand the rules of relationships, or that there were rules. They didn’t understand a good deal of it. These were intelligent people running on assumptions that didn’t 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 a high-volume dating approach 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’s happening there. I didn’t 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 isn’t 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 what you do instead of sitting still long enough to work out what you want. That’s a considerably harder afternoon.
What credentials does relationship advice need?
The one nobody would guess, and it isn’t on the sales page.
I was a shy, introverted computer geek who painted fantasy miniatures and read books.
I spent eight years photographing belly dancers and renaissance festivals. That meant thousands of women in front of my camera. But the photography isn’t 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’s 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’m good at pattern recognition. What emerged from it was a division, and the division is solid.
What’s the division in The Relationship BULLSHIT Men Fall For?
Men and women have different goals, and both sides misread what the other is after. Ask a woman what a man wants and she’ll most likely say sex. That’s partially true and it isn’t the thing. What a man wants is respect. He doesn’t want to be messed with. He typically wants space.
Women tend to be considerably more emotional, and they’re raised differently, toward different goals and different ideals. It doesn’t matter which woman you’re talking about. A committed feminist and a traditional housewife aren’t running the same program as each other in most respects, and they’re running a different one from the men either way. The politics sit on top. The goals underneath don’t move much. Most relationship trouble I’ve 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’s built on antagonism, and antagonism doesn’t produce a relationship. The red pill position is that men are superior and will do what they want. It’s combative by design and it doesn’t 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’re transactions being described as relationships by somebody who wants the description more than the thing.
The men selling that package to lonely young guys are vultures. They take somebody who’s already confused about what he wants, hand him a script that makes sure he never finds out, and get paid for it.
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 isn’t built to be the subordinate partner in the relationship, and arranging himself that way produces a man who’s 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’s a larger version of this argument that I’ve made elsewhere and won’t repeat here. The Emasculation of America looks at what Yuri Bezmenov, a Soviet propagandist who said he worked for the KGB before defecting 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 people, and requiring no agents to keep running once it was underway.
I’m 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 can’t 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 doesn’t answer that. It works at the level of one man deciding how to live, and no other level lets anybody do anything.
What works in dating, according to The Relationship BULLSHIT Men Fall For?
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 isn’t 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.
The book rests on one sentence: a man needs his own life first, and relationships are a layer on top of it.
This is a book for men and it argues from that side. Somebody could write the corresponding book from the other direction and I’m 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 don’t.
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’s the other way around, and I’d keep that part of the book above any other.
What did Richard Lowe learn writing The Relationship BULLSHIT Men Fall For?
That there’s 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 didn’t, and the reason was neither weakness nor confusion. I’d absorbed my parents’ position, Christian and absolute: you don’t 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’s what a man does.
That isn’t what a man does.
A man recognizes when he’s in a no-win situation, and then he either changes the rules or changes the situation. Those are the only two moves available. Enduring isn’t a third option, it’s the absence of one, and calling it strength is how people spend a decade in something they should have left in month three.
This isn’t an argument for leaving. Plenty of difficult situations are worth staying in, and the book spends time on how to tell the difference. The decision has to be a decision, made deliberately, and not a default you inherited from somebody else’s rules. There’s a section in the book about what you’re avoiding by staying busy, and it belongs to this part of the argument instead of to time management. Somebody in a relationship that isn’t working will frequently be extremely busy. Work, projects, hobbies, obligations, anything with a schedule attached. It reads as a full life and it’s frequently a way of reducing the number of hours available for noticing. I did that for years and I didn’t know I was doing it. The tell is what happens in the gaps, and whether you arrange your life so there are none.
| Approach | What it is | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Volume | Pursuing women because Playboy and friends said a man should | An expensive way to avoid dealing with yourself |
| Red pill | Men are superior and will do what they want | Antagonism; transactions described as relationships |
| Blue pill | The man takes the subservient position | He performs agreement instead of holding a position |
| Toughing it out | Enduring a no-win situation because that’s what a man does | Not a third option; the absence of one |
| Being yourself | Your own goals and life, with relationships a layer on top | The balance gets worked out between two people who each have a shape |
When should you rewrite your own earlier book?
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 so because I wrote it, and this pattern has repeated across my library. The first version identifies a real subject and doesn’t go far enough into it, and then years later I come back and write the book properly. The rewrite is a different book from the ground up, and making it longer was never the point.
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’s the harder problem and it’s 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.
My take
No man proves anything by toughing out a bad marriage. I absorbed that idea and should have divorced in month three, and I didn’t. Ask what credential a relationship adviser has before you take the advice. Look for someone who has heard both sides tell it straight. Keep your sense of yourself inside the relationship, and leave when it’s over.
What does The Relationship BULLSHIT Men Fall For leave out?
No dating tactics. No therapy, and it says so, because it isn’t 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 book tells the red pill reader his structure produces hollow relationships. It tells the reader on the other side the differences are real and don’t dissolve under sufficiently good politics.
Zero systems for sale. That’s on the cover for a reason. The entire advice industry around this subject is built on selling a system to men who feel they’re failing, and a system is exactly what I don’t 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.
Thirty years of trying everything taught me what went into The Relationship BULLSHIT Men Fall For. I am no expert and no pickup artist, only a man who kept notes.
