This is an excerpt chapter of my upcoming book “48 High Value Male Principles”. I’m writing out in the open to gather feedback and find engaged readers who might review my book upon release.
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Never become bitter. No matter what happens to you, in life, with your career, and especially with women, never give in to your pain. Life is pain – learn to live with it and not let yourself be consumed by it.
Dolor hic tibi proderit olim. Someday this pain will be useful to you.
Ovid
If you are a man, it’s extremely likely that you will feel betrayed and hurt by a woman at some point in your life. As much as the pain some women inflict on you doesn’t isn’t fair, it is a necessary part of life. Pain is weaknes leaving the body. Don’t get attached to your pain and become resentful and bitter about the way you are betrayed by women. This sounds noble and relatively easy for anyone who’s never been deeply wounded, but unfrotunately, it is human nature to focus on our negative emotions. And worse, we live in one of the worst times in human history to not live with deep resentment and bitterness.
I was born in November 13 1989 – that makes me a millennial. I’m part of the last generation that still grew up with a “normal” life that wasn’t controlled by a bunch of algorithms that controlled what and especially how we would think. If you are younger than me, the chances are that you can’t even relate to how simple life used to be. We used to focus less on negativity and weren’t tied to our screens all the time. If something bad happened, we would often not know until we would get home to watch the news. Nowadays, not only is anything bad in the world always visible to us near instantenously, it’s consciously amplified.
In fact, I was an early adopter of technology. I was on the internet, building websites, playing with video game clans, and connected with strangers when most people hardly knew how to do so, and anyone who lived online was considered a crazy nerd. I was just at the right time in history to experience the rise of the internet, while not yet being exposed to the constant toxicity that has been born from it in the last decade. Back in 2021, when Frances Haugen, ex-Facebook employee became a notorious whistleblower who revealed that Facebook is purposefully designed to make us angry. Anger brings clicks, engagement, and longer activity in social media apps. It was a big scandal. It is no coincidence that Facebook rebranded to Meta – the neagtive headlines of the social media giant became one too many.
Some of us know the before and after. We remember what life was like before we were consciously exposed to negative impulses. Back in the day, I don’t even think that I would consciously be angry at all on a daily basis – I’d just live my life, meet up with friends occasionally. Life was simple. And look where we are now. The negative effects of social media are evident. Everyone is always angry. Everybody needs an enemy. We don’t just become angry because social media makes us angry, we consciously choose to be outraged.
In study of the X, researchers explored what were to happen if people were to be exposed to brand new social media feed of 12 posts that were considered to be neutral – no outrage or anger present in the feed. Then, with each trial, people were given a choice to respond to a post on the feed either with a neutral response, or via an outrage response that was highlighting a negative aspect of the post. Even when given the choice to reply with a fair and blanched, neutral response, people will very quickly begin and normalize to respond with outrage. Keep in mind, this outcome did not even include a social media feed that consciously pushed anger-inducing content. People will choose to respond angrily all by themselves over time.
Add to these findings the fact that negativity is pushed by social media giants, and we can only conclude that society is currently going through an age of bitterness. There is no escaping the clutches of modern social media giants. Roughly 33% of people across the globe feel that social media has a negative impact on social well-being – the more time we spend online, the more these numbers increase. Likewise, younger generations tend to have higher reportings of bad mental health, and they are also more likely to spend roughly one hour longer per day on social media than older generations. Of course, the relation of anger, outrage and poor mental health related to social media usage is likely multi-varied – but the problem remains the same: Modern society has been primed to seek out the negative. Resentment has become a modern-day norm.
Global opinion impact of social media and wellbeing 2021 | Statista
In the context of dating & relationships, bitterness is a tempting panacea for any man who has been wronged by a woman. The threads of time spin anguish for even the luckiest of men.
- Perhaps many women already have, or will reject you with an ice-cold stare of disappointment or even disgust, making you feel less than a man
- Some women will leave you hanging last minute on a date when you were excited to meet her and invested a lot of energy into what you thougth were great conversations
- Another is going to cheat on you as soon as she feels unhappy because she expects that the only purpose of a relationship is for her to be happy
- And some women leave you out of the blue and take everything with them that you built together for years as a couple
Many of these and more tragedies may or may not happen to you in your life. At the very least, slight rejections and disappointments will challenge your fortitude as you date women. This is the paradox of dating. Dating incurrs bitterness, but only by surviving such risk and not letting yourself be defined by it can you arrive at a fulfilling relationship. The only way to avoid succumbing to these pitfalls, is to remain positive despite the hardships you may endure.
Dating for the long-run is so crucial. If you don’t date a woman for the long-term and eventually marry her, you are susceptible to becoming a victim of modern social media bitterness. Instead of seeing the good that can be right in front of your eyes, you will choose to focus on the bad that may or may not happen to you in the future.
Take our narrative social media bubbles as an example of where this goes wrong – both for men and women. A lot of these types of topics are defined by gender and cause recurring controversies. Modern society has never been more tribal due to social media. Men are part of communities, such as the male red pill, where women are to blame for all the troubles men go through, such as women having extremely high, and often unrealistic dating standards. And women live in their feminist bubbles where men are to blame for all their troubles related to their careers or lack of independence.
Both sides may often highlight fair points, that in isolation on a non-generalized case are correct. The issue arises when the issues become repetitive talking points where nothing else but the repeated rumination about a negative outcome becomes the key focus.
Anything can be spun in one direction and seem like the undeniable truth when you find one or two statistics that support your narrative. That’s not to say that statistics by themselves are false, I quote tons of statistics in this book. The point is that one statistic in isolation does not tell the whole story. Relationships, life, politics, society, and so on. Anything related to humans is complex.
Are some women going to rip your hearts out without any remorse while your heart is still pumping strongly for them with love? Absolutely. Some women will play with a man and they just won’t care. For example, a narcissistic woman is always going to place all the blame on you, and no matter how much she contributed to the failure of the relationship, she’s going to make you suffer for it.
Likewise, some women will leave you hanging and there will be no definitive person to blame for the downfall of the relationship, yet it will still be painful, riddled with drama, resentment and mistakes that should have been avoided. In retrospective, relationships can sometimes be perceived as hardly worth it when looking back at the pain they sometimes can cause us.
But in the end, all is fair in the game of love. You have to take responsibility for your failures with relationships. Whether neither one is truly to blame, or you dated a woman who could be described as nothing other than a monster – in the end, you are the one who choose to be with that woman.
Becoming bitter and blaming someone else for your own poor decisions is an act of self-delusion. You create the outcomes of your life through your own actions.
You can either be a whimpy bitch (find another way to write this), complain about all the misfortunes that happened to you and blame a woman for the pain you had to deal with in life, or you can take the lessons larned and move forward with more wisdom, and apply yourself to make better choices in the future. If you take accountability for how you ended up in a dark place, you will get out of that spot. Otherwise, you’ll get soaked up by bitterness and you’ll be swallowed by an endless stream of darkness. This mindset of believing that anything is inherently messed up and outside of your own control is called black pill for a reason. It’s a dark outlook on life.
Despite the fact that women will at times be your greatest source of pain, you don’t have to succumb to bitterness. You can rightfully identify the flaws in your relationships, society and the social dynamics between men and women, yet be the architect of your own fortune. Some women will mess you up, sometimes with deliberate intent, but there is always the option to choose a brighter outlook on life – the white pill.
All of that, of course, is not to say that just because you shouldn’t become bitter about your dating struggles doesn’t mean you should be oblivious to the truth. For example, when the Facebook whistleblower revealed that social media is designed for hate speech, to engage people to become angry for more engagements, one could reasonably question “What is defined as hate speech?”
Just because a person is discontent with something doesn’t mean that it isn’t justified in feeling that way. When an ex-wife has divorced a man, has effectively near-ruined him financially with recurring alimony payments, while not even allowing him reasonable visitation rights for his children – then he’s justifiably angry. And social media exposing such flaws in our society is fair game. In such, the modern life does offer benefits to society by making information more widely available.
The problem of bitterness isn’t exposure to uncomfortable truths. As a man, you’d best be served the harsh truth than being delusional. The number of times that I was frustrated with AI tools while working on this book is enormous. I hope that you find this book fair and balanced, although I won’t deny my positive bias. However, as I used AI to help me with researching and refining this book, I must have been stopped 1000s of times by the powers that be that do not wish to show statistics that are unfavorable for a specific group of individuals. In the case of this book, it’s generally speaking, women.
Whenever my AI assistant would tell me “no” and try to force me what, and especially how to think, as I would research statistics and studies, I asked myself what the benefit to any man could possibly be to hide statistics from them. I don’t see any pros in hiding data from you. As the reader, I would rather present on e. g. the dangers of dating a single mother, and then, if ever you end up meeting a single mother and developing feelings for her, you’ll b ble to make an informed decision whether you choose to date her despite the evidence that this is likely to end in a bad relationship outcome.
It’s better for you to be exposed to positive and negative truth, and then make decisions that lead to positive outcomes. The problem isn’t the exposure to a negative truth, it’s the continuous exposure of such a truth. Not everything is sunshine and roses, but while life may be pain, it’s more pleasure as long as we don’t focus too much on the bad.
Excessively focusing on the negative experiences that you have, had, or could have with women is going to be accompanied with mystery and bad mental and physical health. I myself am no stranger to the dance of despair with my old friend, resesentment.
Bitterness may also be described as resentment. Resentment is derived from the latin word resentīre.
- re (again),
- sentire (to feel)
Resentment is the act of feeling the same emotion over and over again. It’s when we feel powerless or violated against our will, that we become resentful towards acts that caused us unjustified suffering. Nietzsche’s work talks a lot about man’s struggle with feelings of abuse, and how we are drawn to frustration, contempt, outrage and animosity when we are deprived of the things that we believe are rightfulls ours. When we see ourselves as oppressed, or worse off, than another group, we internalize those feelings over and over and when we don’t pay attention, we become trapped in an endless cycle of anger.
It’s essential to become mindful of your heightened emotional states and the things that trigger you and catch yourself to not re-live the bad emotions that made you angry in the first place. I vividly remember when I was having snacks and drinks with friends in Hua Hin – the group was a bunch of free-thinking, nearly hippie-type boomers. One of them, clearly one of the “freeest” thinkers and I were engaged in a conversation about lifestyle, family and relationships and eventually, we talked about my prior life on Siargao island.
I shared my story of a woman who deeply betrayed me by constantly partying, flirting with men, and most likely cheating on repeat. The free thinker said “she just wasn’t ready for a relationship yet, she still had to find herself”, which back then immediately triggered me, despite not having thought about this pain or that woman for a long time. I immediately felt angry and expressed angrily that she was simply irresponsible and acted without dignity – to express it politely for the sake of this book. Read between the lines. When this conversation happened, I could feel my resentment towards this woman bursting back up and as I felt my heart pumping wildly, I quickly tried to swtich the conversation – not because I didn’t have more negative things to say, but because I knew that focusing on that pain would not bring me anything but frustration when I was having a great time, in a great place, with great friends.
Resentment gets our hearts pumping – quite literally. A body that’s running on continuous anger has elevated blood pressure, increased risk for hypertension, and increased risk for cardiovascular disease. Men are twice as likely to suffer from heart attack than women – you don’t want to consciously make your health worse. Michael Linden, head of the psychiatric clinic at Free University of Berlin in 2003, even argues that bitterness should be classified as a medical disorder, namely as post-traumatic embitterment disorder (PTED). That may be a far stretch, but the conclusion is the same:
The more you focus on your anger and resentment, the more likely you are to suffer mentally and physically. To be precise, men who are chronicly hostile are 1.6 more likely to die due to cardiovascular disease.
Carsten Wrosch and Jesse Renaud of concordia University, studied the affect of intrusive frequent negative thoughts and life regrets, and to no surprise, discovered that a focus on the negative is more strongly associated with depressive symptoms, health problems, and with compromised life satisfaction. Bitterness and resentment will take you to dark places if you don’t empower yourself to find the good side of relationships despite possible or past hurts.
So, it begs the question: What is the solution to bitterness? How do we stop ourselves from giving into our demons? It’s human nature to want to see the negative in the things that happen to us. The unique, sometimes one-off life events that happen to us are things that we often want to make out as patterns – and to tell ourselves that what happened once will happen again, when in reality, it likely won’t.
The only choice to overcome resentment towards women is to let go. In Wrosch’s & Renaud’s study, they surprisingly found that wanting to resolve and undo life regrets only amplified the intensity of life regrets, and even more surprisingly, individuals who had many future goals to pursue did still have intense regrets.
Their hypothesis for why an individual would feel more regret while actively attempting to address their regret was that individuals may blame themselves rather than coming to terms with what happened during the regretful event. Likewise, young individuals who have many goals to pursue, may not find enough time to adequately address and overcome their regrets.
The way I see it, although my personal hypothesis not backed by a scientific study, is that in order to let go properly, we need to take a hint from the playbook of forgiveness. Resentment, or the re-feeling of negative emotions towards a transgressor, implies that we need to get rid of the negative emotions or we are going to live through them over and over again. Forgiveness, as such, is the replacement of negative emotions toward a transgressor with positive emotions (i.e., empathy, sympathy, compassion, or love), as defined by emotional replacement hypothesis. Instead of re-living the negative, we let go of the negative and replace it with positive emotions to at the very least, neutralize the negative feelings. according to emotional replacement hypothesis.
I’m not encouraging to not feel your anger, frustration, and disappointment. I’ll always carry a part of the pain of the woman who hurt me with me. That experience effectively shifted my life’s story and career towards the study of relationships. Clearly, it had a big impact on me. But nowadays, I feel more sympathy and pity for the wrongdoings of that woman, rather than anger.
Some hurts inflicted by women can stay with you for a lifetime, but you can choose to not let them define you. And maybe some of the hurts mentioned in this chapter will never happen to you and framing everything negatively to begin with only makes you bitter and will create a warped reality that only exists when you choose it unwisely..
Most women are decent, kind, and extremely loving. As soon as they fall in love with you, don’t care about your average height, your less-than perfect body, or your occasional communication issues. Some women rejected you or will reject you, but that does not mean that every woman has unrealistic expectations – some women just want a companion who makes them feel loved and beautiful. Some marriages end in disastrous failure and leave men with less than when they started – but for the majority of men, marriage is the lesser of two evils compared to being lonely or being in vaguely committed relationshiops. Life becomes lonelier the older you get unless you take chances on finding a suitable lifetime companion.
Do yourself a favor and don’t become bitter, whether you are being shown a lot of bad aspects of relationships on the internet, or whether you have experienced one of them yourself. Every relationship is defined by your actions and the actions of the woman that you choose to date. When you don’t get the result you want, don’t resent, don’t repeat the negative feelings. Identify what lead you to those negative feelings and craft a strategy to build something new and improved that’ll lead to positive feelings.
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Footnotes & Resources
Charts of external sources may have been modified for visual consistency and improved readability and if necessary have been translated. See footnotes below for detailed, original references: