Relationship Limbo

Relationships generally follow the same trajectory, despite men and women having contradictory mating goals. The optimal trajectory for each sex differs as such:

For men:

– Meet
– If alpha, seduce. If beta, butter up.
– Sex
– If nothing in common, date for a few weeks
– If something in common, date for a few months
– If falling in love, date for a year
– If willfully ignorant, marry
– Divorce
– Start over, poorer but happily still in demand

For women:

– Be introduced through social circle
– If man alpha, relinquish. If man beta, puppeteer.
– If nothing in common, one date and done
– If something in common, date for a few weeks
– Sex
– If falling in love, dream of marriage
– If smart, marry
– Divorce
– Start over, richer but regrettably older

For every long term relationship, sometime between the six month to one year mark, the woman will angle to get you to marry her. Dumb women will attempt to accomplish this through the injudicious use of ultimatums. Devious women will apply the more sophisticated tools of a covert operation. But nearly all women will want marriage sooner rather than later, and their men will be left wondering why, if the relationship is going so well, such a superfluous notarization as marriage is necessary. Usually, the women win out, because most men are weak when confronting possible loss of reliable pussy access.

If you are a man who can face the marital abyss and not flinch, then at the one year mark you may be put into relationship limbo. This is what it implies — a relationship in a holding pattern with a woman who is slowly withdrawing her affection. She will go to bed without sexytime, make breakfast for herself instead of the both of you like she used to, start complaining that you hog the bed, happily recite a list of her friends who are getting hitched, ceaselessly mutter about your “incompatibility”, bitch that you don’t take the “initiative” (read: “propose”), and generally become a sourpuss around you. This is because women get very, VERY, pissed and bewildered when their prime directive (to get married) is thwarted.

Now, there is a catch. The problem for men is determining whether relegation to relationship limbo is the result of the girlfriend’s infidelity or her marriage denial blues. Unfortunately, the symptoms of either are remarkably similar. A woman who is cheating on you will withdraw sexually, stop being considerate, and bitch you out a lot. A woman who is worried and anxious that you have no intention of marrying her will lash out likewise. Your job, as a man, is to figure out which succubus has possessed her, for the solution to handling either demoness is quite different. A cheating woman will need more alpha from you. A despondent woman will need more signs of commitment from you.

Deciding which dark path she is on is no easy task. Women are evolutionarily optimized to be fantastic, nearly undetectable, liars of things both great and small. And what is the greatest lie of all than the lie to hide the pedigree of a man’s child from him so that he may raise it as his own? Women who were bad at lying about cuckoldry were quickly weeded from the population, either by violence, avoidance, or expulsion. And so Darwinian selection ensured that those women who successfully duped beta mates into raising alpha progeny would need be liars of an exemplary sort.

Thankfully, Darwinian selection also ensured that a humanitarian saint like me would come along one day to give you the tools to help you discover if your woman is a sneak cheat. Namely, if she’s branded with identifiable markings of sluttitude, she is more likely to be a future faithless whore.

If you have convinced yourself beyond a reasonable doubt that your girlfriend is not cheating on you, then you are left with finding a way out of relationship limbo. You could take the path of least resistance and propose marriage. But that is lopping off one’s left nut to spite one’s cock. For a woman who has proven capable of withdrawing affection from her man is a woman who can — and will — do it again, to get what she wants, wedding band or no.

Relationship limbo is a dangerous place to be for men. It can drive the male mind crazy with thoughts of abandonment, or worse. His mind swirls with the concoction of nightmares, and his confidence betrays him at the moment he needs it most. In order to defeat it, you must know yourself first. Do you eventually want to marry? Then decide if she is the one for you, and take the leap into or out of her arms. The purpose of limbo is to incite resentment in you, thus making it a simpler endeavor for the woman to conclude that you are worth leaving. If she is not the one you want to marry, prolonging your time in limbo will only feed your resentment, no matter how mastered your art of aloofness, until it boils over into a dramatic breakup.

If, like me, you fully grasp that marriage serves none of your interests, but you like the girl you are dating and want out of limbo, you have two choices. Either stoically accept that every relationship has an inborn lifecycle, and that marriage is simply a delay tactic to push the lifecycle beyond its natural limits, and allow her to leave to find the man who would give her what she wants. She has already poisoned the well, so what further benefit from the relationship can you realistically extract? Limbo more often than not delivers you to hell than to paradise.

Or, have her fall so deeply in love with you that she betrays her own female edict. A woman truly in love won’t be able to contemplate leaving you without pain shooting through her sternum. She may be sad at times that you haven’t proposed, but her sadness is short-lived as it surrenders continually to her joy.

A woman who has put you in limbo does not love you with abandon. She instead loves you like most women do; with an eye toward the pragmatic. She is attempting to manipulate you, consciously or not, to reach her own ends. A man has two noble goals in life — the pursuit of sexual pleasure, and the winning of a woman’s heart in toto. A man has not lived until a woman has loved him without proviso.