As a woman I’ve digested years of strict, ridiculous and outright bad dating advice. Most of it didn’t work. I took all that dating advice and sort of practiced with it, thinking I would need to train myself to be the perfect dater for the man of my dreams. But by the time he came along, I didn’t need the rules anymore. I had learned something much more valuable.
People surrender to love—they do it reluctantly and with trepidation, but when they give in it is sweet surrender as well as sweet victory.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Hypergamy Failed Me
Frantically consuming hypergamous dating advice didn’t work. It kept me playing the game, and the game is awesome for some people, but I hated it. I wanted to instead play for life; love, marriage, intimacy, passion. Real commitment with a real partner and real love. Not cat and mousery. Lots of female dating advice paints women who play for love as weak, failures, naive, stupid, losers. Seriously. They paint successful women as those who don’t date for love but rather carefully select a man based on his willingness to provide financially, even if he cheats every now and then or looks like Smeagle’s grandfather. All men are trash, they say, so why not just live for the benefits and accept the harsh reality?
To that I say, wow. Of course a man should provide, but choosing someone to tether your life to involves more than just dollar signs. These are the most wounded women of all. They didn’t heal from their hurts with men in the past. They catalyzed their wounds and became villains. They’re playing the game right back, and as a woman, even if you win the game, you lose somehow. You have to quit the game to win. Why? You can’t win relationships without genuine love. Money is not love.
Hypergamy vs. Love
Love is a giant bulldozer destroying the pathetic garden of your hypergamous dating playbook to reveal a gorgeous landscape underneath. Love is real. It’s much easier and more natural to maintain because as long as you stay in it, it is self-sustaining. Hypergamy is conditioned. Love is unconditioned. Love is the fire that stays burning as long as you douse it every now and then. It takes a little longer to find the right match, but when you do, it lasts longer and it was so worth the wait.
Love is not manipulation and abuse and cheating, as many people who are drawn to the hypergamous dating model think. Love is so far from that. Love is not love bombing, and I know why you’re afraid that it is. Take a chance on real love. Send your heart’s guards on their lunch break and see for yourself; love trumps all your dating guru’s rules.
The key to ending up with the right man, I’ve come to believe, is to teach yourself love before he shows up. Expecting one person to be your complete source of love is unrealistic and toxic. Love is you in your most openhearted state. Love is a stranger smiling at you or you smiling at a stranger. Love is in your passions and hobbies and interests and friendships and flirtations. Love is in your approach to life. It is not in one man somewhere waiting to be found by you. Welcome love now, and a loving man will be drawn to you.
Love fulfills most of the requirements of hypergamy anyways. A man in love will provide. A man in love will take care of you. A man in love with adore you. And, the feminist dating model can benefit from love too. A man in love will support you and anything you want to achieve or become.
The key is to not see the man as the provider of love. You are the provider of love, as is the entire world around you. You are the vessel that love flows through, no matter which channel it flows from.
what’d you think?