Spot The Beta Male Tell

A “relationship advice” guy who writes for Yahoo/Match/Tyrell Corporation published letters from readers who described the crazy things they did for love. Now, there is an alpha way to do crazy-in-love, and there is a beta way. Read this first letter and see if you can identify the tells that mark the writer of this letter as a beta male.

I went to bat for her engagement ring 
“My girlfriend and I had been together for about three years, and I was sure she was the one I wanted to marry. Problem was, I didn’t exactly have enough money to get her a good engagement ring. So, in order to raise funds, I put my collection of baseball trading cards on eBay. We’re talking a collection that spanned, like, 20 years, thanks to some cards handed down by my dad. I was totally bummed to part with them because they were so important to me, but I really, really loved this girl. I ended up making more than enough money to pay for a ring. Problem was, when I got down on one knee, she told me that she couldn’t see spending the rest of her life with me. I should’ve stuck with Shoeless Joe Jackson.”
— Owen, 26, Chagrin Falls, OH

Chagrin Falls is appropriate. Often, when reading these sad sack stories, one has the nagging feeling that a better grasp of the market value of the players would clarify why this or that venality visited the protagonist. Discerning the sexual market value of a woman online, when no photo is available, is tricky; women will aggressively lead the reader to believe, absent hard visual evidence, that they are desired by most men. The sexual market value of men is a bit easier to root out in written, online mediums because I find that men are a little more careless about revealing their beta cores. Reading between the lines for male and female beta tells is a fun pastime that I heartily recommend.

Back to the letter: you might be tempted to think that getting a girl an engagement ring is pure beta male, but because so many men fall into the diamond industrial complex trap, it’s not quite the tell that it should be. Instead, the big tells are the writer’s baseball card collection, his willingness to trade one of his most valuable possessions for a rock to slip on a girl’s finger (betraying his father’s love in the process), and, worst of all, his bended knee proposal.

Collections of the sort that are particularly unappealing to women are leading indicators of betaness, because a man who is good with women and able to get sex will not have the patience or motivation to amass piles of mostly useless junk that don’t add to his attractiveness to women. Baseball cards are the province of little boys and grown betas.

But it’s a forgivable tell. Alpha males have the systematizing instinct as well, and collections that can be categorized and subcategorized are addictive to all kinds of men. The bigger beta tell was this guy’s willingness to sever a holy bond, via baseball card, with his father to enrich his girlfriend. The man who sells off a bequeathed treasure from his dad to please his woman is an unprincipled cipher of beta provisioning. No woman with the least bit of character would, if known to her, allow her boyfriend to hock his pop’s heirloom for a blood diamond. Most American women don’t have the least bit of character.

Finally, the cringe-worthiest beta male tell was the bended knee beggary. If anything, since men give up more to get married, it’s women who should drop on bended knee thanking their boyfriends for making honest whores out of them. I don’t care how super alpha you are or how much self-handicapping you can endure without penalty, dropping to one knee is exquisitely, insufferably BETA. Ignore my advice to skip the nuptials for loving LTRs, but for the memory of millions of ancestors who harnessed the power of testicular fortitude to usher you into this world, don’t get down on your knees before a woman. You’re just asking to be treated like the dog who waits dutifully at the door with the leash in its mouth.

Three beta male tells, each worse than the last. The coda to this miserable letter should surprise no one, but I bet it surprised the letter writer. No woman wants to share her life with a man she has to look down at to see.

For shits and giggles, here’s another letter that represents the exact opposite of the one above.

I found out the hard way that our love wasn’t going to go the distance
“My boyfriend of a year and four months had to move for his job. It wasn’t dramatically far away, but it was still three states over. I was living in Ohio then, and he had to move to Maryland. We talked on the phone, wrote letters and all that, and I could tell that he was getting increasingly homesick. I decided to surprise him by ducking out of work early one Friday, driving over to see him — it’s about five or six hours by car — and cheering him up. Turns out I didn’t need to, though, because when I showed up at his apartment that night, I found him having dinner with a woman he met at work. At least I didn’t need to worry about staying awake on the long drive home — I was too upset to fall asleep.”
— Jackie, 27, Manhasset, NY

Spot the alpha male tell. Lessee… was it when he got himself a new woman who would be locally available for poundage sessions, so he wouldn’t have to spend months of his valuable life celibately pining for faraway pussy? Could be!

“Manhasset”, indeed.