“I just don’t get it,” said someone I’ll call Jack, a former client. “I met her at church. She checked every box I could think of. Beautiful, kind and graceful in every way. She was an agreeable person, easy to get along with. She came from what I thought was a good, Christian family. From the first moment I met her, I thought, wow, she’s the one! Such an amazing woman! And she was great through our courtship period and engagement. But as soon as we got married, she began to change. She became increasingly demanding, bossy, and critical of me all the time.”
“You mean abusive,” I said.
Jack hesitated, then nodded his head, “Yeah, I guess that’s true,” he said, and continued, “Things got worse from there. She quit her job shortly after we got married, and her spending went wild. She squandered our money like there was no tomorrow, then turned around berated me for not making more. She took pleasure in shaming me in front of family and friends. If I said anything about it she went ballistic with more shame and name calling and actually accused me of being the abusive one. I finally insisted that we get marriage counseling, and we did through the church. That turned out to be the biggest mistake of my life. Our pastor took her side in everything. He helped her justify the terrible things she did and told me in so many words that it was all my fault. I needed to be a better husband. He said several times that I needed to, “man up,” and “turn the other cheek,” just as Jesus would have done.
“Needless to say,” he continued, “the marriage counseling failed. She cleaned out our bank accounts and filed for divorce. She told everyone at our church that I was an abusive husband and they all bought it. Nobody even asked for my side of the story. The people whose fellowship I’ve enjoyed and counted on for 10 years have all turned on me. Even a couple of members of my own family took her side. Now my life is a total train wreck. I am struggling not to drown.”
After a pause, he went on. “I just don’t understand how I could have misread things so badly with her. I thought for sure she was this amazing, perfect woman. She turned out to be nothing like that. Not to be too dramatic, but she is truly evil. A genuinely bad person with malicious intent. How could I have missed that? How could I have been so wrong?”
I have paraphrased most of this tragic conversation, but the essence of it comes directly and accurately from what Jack related to me. He represents a significant percentage of the married men I’ve worked with, including non-Christian men, in that the woman they “fell for” turned out not to be real. I can’t begin to recall the number of men who have told me that when their marriage went downhill, the woman they thought to be loving and loyal spread lies in the form of threat narratives into every corner of their lives. The woman they trusted put a shiv in their back and twisted. The betrayal was as devastating as it was unexpected.
Let’s take a closer look at this, not from the alleged incipient behavioral change in the woman, but to what was happening in the man from the very start.
“From the first moment I met her, I thought, wow, she’s the one!”
Indeed. This is the moment Jack now looks back on and scratches his head about, wondering how he ever thought such a thing about this woman. And it begs the question, just what the heck is going on in a man’s mind when meeting a woman to which he is strongly attracted?
Obviously, a big part of the picture here is infatuation, a matter we seldom talk about in any meaningful way. It’s that exhilarating time in a human being’s life when a cocktail of feelgood neurochemicals saturates the brain, causing euphoria and intense, passionate attraction toward the object of his or her desire. Also, among other things it causes impaired cognitive function and poor decision-making.
That’s worth saying again. When we become infatuated with a woman, our ability to reason goes bye-bye. We become impaired. Mentally and emotionally compromised. And we’re prone to running our ship against the rocks with the decisions we make. Now, that may not seem to matter much right after you and Cupcake have kissed for the first time and you’re anticipating more. But trust me, Cupcake will take on a very different look in a family court. So will your irrational behavior when viewed through the more reasonable lens of lived experience.
All solutions start with understanding the problem. So, we need a keen awareness of what’s going on in brain and body during periods of intense attraction. We are served well to understand as much as possible, including the triggers (if you’ll pardon the use of that word) for infatuation. The point isn’t necessarily to prevent you from becoming infatuated. Rather it’s to hopefully allow you to hang on to some semblance of your sanity, even when bathing in a flood of dopamine. To remain just sane enough to not do anything stupid.
A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her novel of fiction. ~Oscar Wilde.
It behooves us to start with the simple stuff. Take makeup, for instance. Over thousands of years, humans have perfected the art of visual deception in women.
Painting on makeup doesn’t just adorn and hide imperfections. Skillfully applied, it adds drastically to a woman’s perceived sexual value. And that’s actually the least of it. Neoteny, literally defined, is the retention of juvenile characteristics in an adult animal. Makeup is neoteny on steroids. It is the artificial, exaggerated faking of the naturally occurring stimulus. And it has an exaggerated effect. Those manufactured characteristics also trigger (there’s that word again) what’s called the parental brain. That’s an actual thing. It’s expressed in the neurological changes and adaptations that occur in the brains of individuals when they become parents.
Studies have shown that areas of the brain involved in empathy, social cognition, and emotional regulation become more active in response to stimuli related to infants and children. These are not subtle changes. They are profound and have a significant impact on cognition and decision making.
For more on this, see The Parental Brain: Mechanisms, Development, and Evolution by Michael Numan.
Now, the thing is, you don’t have to be an actual parent to have your parental brain stimulated into action by viewing juvenile characteristics on an adult woman’s face. On some level, it impacts all of us, regardless of whether we’d like to think we’re immune.
This doesn’t just explain Jack’s insanity when falling for his future wife, though you can easily see that he went into caretaking mode just about the minute he laid eyes on her. But so did everyone else involved when she turned and spun her forlorn damsel’s tale. The pastor who took her side and admonished Jack to be a better husband was in caretaking mode. So was the rest of the congregation that circled the wagons around her protectively, forsaking Jack without hesitation. Even some members of Jack’s family took her side against their own flesh and blood.
As I’ve said, there’s a number of other factors at play here. Cultural gynocentrism, beta masculinity, the “man bad, woman good” narrative. All of these things combine and collude to contribute to Jack’s story. But we mustn’t forget that this particular story started with Jack and one look at a woman’s face.
It’s a story nearly as old as humanity itself. Even King Solomon knew of this reality and the pitfalls associated with it.
For the commandment is a lamp and the teaching is light;
And reproofs for discipline are the way of life
To keep you from the evil woman,
From the smooth tongue of the adulteress.
Do not desire her beauty in your heart,
Nor let her capture you with her eyelids.
For on account of a harlot one is reduced to a loaf of bread,
And an adulteress hunts for the precious life.
Can a man take fire in his bosom
And his clothes not be burned?
Or can a man walk on hot coals
And his feet not be scorched?~Proverbs 6:23-28 (NASB 1995) [Bold print mine].
Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, warned us all through the inspired word of God, and yet he, too, fell under the neotenic sway of woman.
The takeaway here, like it or not, is that our infatuated view of women is more than just lust. It’s more than any conscious human desire. It involves forces we seldom consider or recognize. The conscious man, however, considers what most men can’t or won’t, and uses it to his advantage. I pray that you’ll consider this the next time you’re captured by a pair of eyes. Just remember that time your clothes were burned and your feet were scorched. You remember that, don’t you?
Next up. If you want to have boundaries, you must be willing to inflict pain.
Excellent Paul! The most troubling thing about relaying this common scenario to guys is that they just don't get it until it's happened to them. Men don't believe it will happen to them anymore than they expect to be struck by falling space debris.
I rarely get triggered but I was reading a post by Stella O'Malley (psychotherapist, Genspect founder) a couple of days ago and at one point I felt like someone had trodden on my brain.
Quote: "Women’s sexuality is seldom a danger to others and so we can be pretty easy-going about their choice of attire. Male sexual expression, however, can be very dangerous and so we need to be a good deal more wary in this context."
Here's the full post for context:
https://stellaomalley.substack.com/p/the-intricacies-of-sex-and-clothing
I would have left a lengthy comment but only paying subscribers are allowed to comment. I used to find Stella interesting enough to listen to whenever she was interviewed by Benjamin Boyce, but I started to notice these gynocentric biases creep in and eventually found the conversations frustrating to listen to as a result. (Boyce is also a hopelessly chivalrous - although he seems quite honest about it, so it's not so annoying).
For a whole afternoon I was trying to formulate what I would have written if the comments had been switched on. It is a difficult topic to pin down into a concise argument. The threat men's sexuality (or just men's physicality) poses to women is so obvious it hardly needs pointing out. But the threat women's sexuality poses to men is more like a 'snakes and ladders' board. It encompasses not only the threat posed by women but also the threat posed by other men who are taken in by a woman's facade of innocence, vulnerability and any affectations of victimhood.
Your story (above) illustrates this perfectly.
It is precisely because a neotenous, sexually vulnerable woman in attractive clothing appears to pose no threat to men that men are so at risk. I was staggered that Stella would not (choose to?) understand this concept given that she is perfectly capable of picking apart dogma when she wants to.
This breakup story illustrates how women's sexuality can destroy a man at any moment, whenever she is done with the relationship and especially if she also decides to destroy his life by making HIM out to be the bad one.
A man's sexuality poses a threat in the moment, on a date, in a dark street, in an unlicensed cab...... but a woman's sexuality can only ever be said to be harmless once a man has reached the end of his life unharmed! Until then all bets are off.
I think that's the difference I could not pin down, this story helped me clarify it.
At the risk of veering off topic.... what makes Stella's goof even more frustrating is that in her work with ROGD kids she is well aware that a huge motivation for a trans identity among teenage girls is the feeling that being a woman is all about being the passive, victimised, powerless object and that only men have power, potency and agency. So many de-transitioners have expressed how they wanted to feel that power and agency which only belongs to men, rather than be cursed with being a helpless, objectified woman.
Stella's nonsense about women having no sexual power and posing no threat to men is precisely the kind of feminist crap that makes young women feel inferior to men, and envious of men's dominance. If we could once again acknowledge the immense power of women's sexuality - and the very real threat it poses to men (and to women themselves) - then maybe those girls would not have felt the need to wreck their bodies with testosterone (feminism hurts women too).