Mate guarding tactics, in descending order of alphaness:
- She mate guards you
- You flash a frown and she promptly self-corrects
- You mindfuck her (see: Dread Game)
- You let most insults slide, but explode once in a while to keep her on edge and in line
- You kick the other guy’s ass
- You lavish excessive PDA on her whenever another man is talking to her (or just in the general vicinity of her)
- You buy her stuff
- You beg her to love you
- You marry her*
- You accept her terms of polyamory
- You mate guard yourself (the undescended testicles soyboy option)
*”Marriage is beta?”, sneers the tradcon. No. Marriage is beta when it’s relied on by a man as a solution to prevent a woman from straying (it never works). If you think the legalistic imprimatur of marriage will finally convince that thot to take her mind off other men and love you unto the end of time, you’ll be disappointed. You’re an even bigger tool if you believe a huge rock and expensive wedding guarantees a woman’s fidelity. (Just the opposite — if you have to spend a lot to convince a woman to accept your monogamous submission, she’s more likely to divorce you.)
As I’ve argued in these pages, and as ¡SCIENCE! has confirmed, frequent mate guarding, as it is typically practiced by Western men, is beta.
Established alpha males don’t typically mate guard — at least not obviously — because they don’t fear their women cheating on them or falling under the spell of other men, and, less benignly, they redirect some of their relationship energy that would normally be spent on mate guarding toward hooking up with side lovers.
Beta males, whether consciously or not, sense more keenly the sexual interloper threat posed by other men and the wandering eyes of their own women. This heightened threat detection system is likely an evolved instinct that serves the useful purpose of keeping the lover of a beta male faithful, (or constrained in her ability to cheat).
Here’s where it gets interesting for philosophers and warriors of Game alike: While mate guarding may offer some temporary or discrete relationship security, multiple acts of mate guarding will paradoxically increase longer term relationship fragility. The mechanism by which this LTR instability is generated is a status feedback loop; if a man mate guards, his woman will subconsciously evaluate his romantic worth downward because (her sensitive idware will reason) only a beta male would feel the need to mate guard. An alpha male would not; his aloofness would be perceived as proof of his impenetrable high status.
Research has even found a positive association between a man’s jizz quality and his indifference to mate guarding.
In another blow against mate guarding as a viable minx management tool, research has shown that “aloof and indifferent” men who create feelings of uncertainty in women are more attractive than clingy men:
When women think of assholes they don’t want to date, they’re thinking of caring assholes. The kind of men who are clingy, mate guarding buffoons. The assholes who are loved by women are the men whose jerkitude is implied through emotional distance, cocksureness, outcome independence, and inscrutability.
The Alpha Apex for a man is reached when a woman is so smitten with him that the thought of cheating never even crosses her mind and in fact she spends most of her idle cognition devising ploys to keep other women away from him (and his attention focused solely on her *daily bjs wink wink*).
The Nancyboy Nadir for a male-thing is hit when his woman is given free rein to indulge her slutty cheating heart while he puts limits on his own behavior, fearful of her wrath and rejection should he hold her to the same faithfulness standards he holds himself.
Mate guarding is a behavior associated with men who fall in-between those two extreme states of manhood. It isn’t always self-defeating, but it quickly can be if it becomes the primary means to manage a wanton woman. As a general rule:
Alpha men never or rarely mate guard (they don’t have to because their women love them too much to risk losing them, but when they do mate guard, obedience is immediate and unquestioned).
Beta males sometimes or frequently mate guard (and when they do, their women are often driven further away by the weak display of desperate possessiveness, but can sometimes be convinced to stay in the relationship with promises of trinkets and marriage).
Omega dregs never or rarely mate guard (it’s futile for them as they are in no position to make demands, and the rare times they do mate guard it usually emerges in a clumsy spectacle of inchoate rage that further lowers their already low SMV).
Soyboys (psychologically lower than omegas) actually reverse mate guard — they mate liberate, preferring to avoid any conflict that might threaten their relationships (or beta orbiter status) via the warped solution of permitting total sexual freedom for their women while restraining their own sexuality.
Mate guarding is largely the province of sub-alpha men, because men lower on the sexual market hierarchy have to deal with 1. more threats from male competitors and 2. an urge to unfaithfulness from their women. As a preventative against gf or wife cheating or abandonment, these men show signs of loyalty (generously defined) or possessiveness (more realistically defined) as enticement to their women to stick with them. Since women love dem beta bux, these displays of commitment can be persuasive on those women peering at the Wall cresting over the horizon and eager to settle down in post-cock carousel expedience.
Mate guarding can take numerous forms, one of which is the elaborate proposal. If you notice an increase in certain mate guarding behaviors, you are seeing an increase in beta males (as perceived by women) who feel the need to hammer home the message that they’ll give everything plus their dignity to assure a woman’s fidelity.
The corollary to the mate guarding = alpha LARPing observation is that men can raise their perceived SMV by avoiding conspicuous displays of mate guarding when a woman is likely to expect them. Undermining her expectation of a jealous reaction will create cogdis that encourages subtle but powerful micro-reassessments of her beta boyfriend/hubby, that over the long run raise his value relative to her value.
***
This topic re-arrested me because a study just released seems, at least on the surface, to contradict CH teachings and previous studies examining the relation between mate guarding and men’s attractiveness to women.
Men with higher testosterone levels report being more protective of their romantic relationships
Whoa, hold the phone. Alpha males tend to be higher T, and higher T is associated with more mate guarding. What gives? Delving into the study’s details reveals that there is no contradiction.
“…very little research has examined whether testosterone relates to other forms of mating-relevant competition, such as effort aimed at retaining a mating partner. This includes benefit provisioning (e.g., doing nice things for your partner to highlight your commitment to her such as buying gifts, proposing marriage) and cost inflicting (e.g., threatening other men to stay away) acts meant to hold on to exclusive access to one’s mate.” […]
The researchers collected saliva samples from 108 male undergraduates to measure their testosterone levels and had them complete surveys on mate retention and intrasexual competition. They found there was an indirect relationship between testosterone and mate retention behaviors.
“Our results suggested that there is a modest relationship between testosterone and mate-retention, but that this relationship is not direct in nature. Rather, testosterone predicts holding a more competitive attitude toward members of the same sex (intrasexual competition), and it is this characteristic of intrasexual competitiveness that in turn predicts mate retention,” Arnocky told PsyPost.
“Moreover, this relationship seems to be strongest for cost inflicting, rather than benefit provisioning, acts of mate retention.”
Examples of cost-inflicting mate retention behavior include things such as limiting a partner’s social life by monopolizing her time and insulting her to make her feel undeserving of the current relationship.
Teasing and negs are a valuable component of a healthy, committed, and uncucked relationship!
I was right in my suspicions about what this study was really saying. Higher testosterone was associated with “cost-inflicting” mate retention behaviors, i.e., threats against interloper men or psy ops against girlfriends. Psy ops on girls and maneuvering for dominance over other men are alpha male pastimes. Showering women with reassuring PDA, being a shoulder to cry on, expressing devotion, and “benefit provisioning” as mate retention strategies are the lower T beta male options, and in the Darwinian calculus these beta strategies aren’t nearly as effective as the “cost-inflicting” alpha strategies for keeping women in love and reproductively loyal.
“Our study was correlational in its design, and so one cannot make any causal assumptions about whether testosterone influences levels of intrasexual competitiveness or mate retention,” Arnocky noted.
Correlation does not equal penetration.
Ted Colt adds,
if you want to prevent a woman from straying, impregnate her, limit her employment prospects, & surround her with family
it worked for thousands of years
Realtalk. But suffrage happened, and now we live in Vagina World. For modren times (ie the age of careerist shrikes and mass contraception), the best prophylactic against a woman cheating on you is
- choose wisely and
- have her fall in love with you
A love of sufficient infatuation is indistinguishable from worship. And no woman will cheat on her god.
***
Women mate guard too. They use sex as their preferred means of mate control.
Chapter 5, “Green-Eyed Desire: From Guarding a Mate to Trading Up,” deals with other economic constraints relating to the human mating market. Women appear to use sex to help guard male mates by keeping them satisfied, reminding men what they stand to lose should they defect—or as many women in the study put it, “keep[ing] his mind off other women.”
More sex from women? Sounds great! To gain access to that parallel pooniverse, you have to keep women in a steady state of uncertainty and anxiety.
