I think Patrice O Neil hit the nail on the head where he said that “the optimal relationship when the woman is in love with the man, but the man is in like with the woman.”

She will always work to get you to fall in love and you provide just enough distance to keep her working for you.  It then becomes a balancing act of not getting too distant without the peril of being  too close.     Otherwise, she loses respect for you and once respect goes, so does attraction.

I had a few conversations as to why do women chase the bad boys, but run from the guys who truly love them.  I had them with women, and despite all of them dealing with lowlifes…or the aftermath of lowlifes, they all denied it.   Even my estranged wife denies it even though the guy she almost left me for is notorious for being a player and having a gang of bastard children.

I think grandmothers are doing their daughters and potential families disservices by telling girls that they should go for the guy who loves them more.   Even though they may say they want that, it’s not.   It can’t be.   Otherwise, you wouldn’t have so many love songs about women talking about their men cheating.

It’s literally a heath risk falling in love with a woman.  These emotions can lead to anxiety, depression, and thoughts of suicide if you overdo it.      I’m not saying to treat them like crap.  I’m just saying that I’m starting to think that it isn’t wrong to say whatever to get laid and string them along so to speak.

I mean, you literally can’t fall in love with them anyway or it ruins the experience for them.  But nothing’s wrong with entertaining their emotions.  They instinctively ‘know’ if you love them for real or not.   But by keeping them guessing, they are sort of entertaining cats with a string.   It’s much easier to pretend like you love them when you don’t than to pretend like you don’t when you do.

Put it this way, they are going to be miserable either way.   The nice guy is going to get boring, she might stay out of obligation, but will fill unfulfilled.    The douche is going to keep hurting her or letting her down despite her giving her best to get him.   Stability is boring but safe, instability leads to thrills and “passion spikes” but insecurity.   Either way she won’t be ‘happy.’

But one thing seems constant is that the good guy will get cheated on and left and the bad guy gets more loyalty.  While the good guy might be respected more by her family and friends, she gives her loyalty to the  bad guy.

There is no point in both of us being miserable when at least one of us has a shot at it. The way I see it, the best way for that to happen is if I stay emotionally distant.     Just saying.   It’s best for both of us.

Emotionally unavailable men are out here winning, big time.

The takeaway from the breakdown of my marriage is that I actually fell in love with her too much.   It got boring for her.  There was no challenge.  While I don’t think I smothered her by calling, texting too much,  or acting too jealous, she knew that she had me.  Things were just too stable around there.

To be fair to her (and most women), I don’t think that they know it themselves.   Most look at me like I have a third limb growing out of my head when I tell them this theory.  Unfortunately, most won’t look back on their history and see their the biggest heartbreaks came from dudes who didn’t really love them like that.  And the guys who’s heart they broke often really loved them.

The punishment of not knowing this little gem has cost me 3 years of nervous energy and insane anxiety.   I would have never guessed it would have taken this long to recover.

Painful lesson indeed.