QUOTE: "When one considers that one must "game" a woman, even your wife, in order to keep her around, then it also means that you must always be operating at a "higher level" than her. It totally negates the whole notion of having a "soul-mate" and means that on many levels, a man will always be alone."
That is probably the most important lesson a man can ever learn.
Intimacy with a woman is impossible if you have any interest in being her lover. If you are fine with being one of her grrrlfriends, and don't mind the stupid messed up games women run on them, then you can share to your heart's content - and will always be on the LJBF ladder.
The fundamental problem with today's concept of marriage is that it seems both men and women expect their spouse to be all things to them - lover, confidante, helpmate, "soulmate", co-housekeeper, and co-wage-earner. With so many role demands, it is inevitable that everyone will fail at some of them. That is why the old division of roles worked fairly well for most people - each could concentrate on a few things they were good at, and leave the rest to the other person.
The fundamental dilemma for men is that as they age they slow down. They get tired and sometimes need someone to lean on. Marriage 1.0 worked fairly well in this regard, as it also worked for women who had lost all their physical attractiveness. If they had managed to become friends and partners in the early years, that would often carry them through the aging years when neither of them had what it took to find and snare a new partner.
Under the new rules of marriage 2.0 a man has a choice - being alone in an expensive manner, or a not-so-expensive manner. The loneliest men I know are married men trapped in a loveless marriage to a perpetually complaining slug who they nevertheless have to enslave themselves to support. I look at their lives and they are as good a definition of hell as I need. Alone = freedom.
The tiny crumbs of affection that WW dole out today are priced way way over what they are worth.
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Further Reading:
Zenpriest #20 – There Is Nothing More Lonely Than Being With Someone You Cannot Talk To
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"The average woman is not strategically capable of bringing
down the most tempting game within her purview, and must thus content
herself with a second, third, or nth choice.... A few women, true
enough, are so pertinacious that they prefer defeat to compromise. That
is to say, they prefer to put off marriage indefinitely rather than to marry beneath the highest leap of their fancy. But such women may be quickly dismissed as abnormal, and perhaps as downright diseased in mind; the average woman is well-aware that marriage
is far better for her than celibacy, even when it falls a good deal
short of her primary hopes, and she is also well aware that the
differences between man and man, once mere money
is put aside, are so slight as to be practically almost negligible.
Thus the average woman is under none of the common masculine illusions
about elective affinities, soul mates, love at first sight, and such phantasms. She is quite ready to fall in love, as the phrase is, with any man who is plainly eligible, and she usually knows a good many more such men than one...
Here we have a sufficient explanation of the general
superiority of bachelors, so often noted by students of mankind—a
superiority so marked that it is difficult, in all history, to find six
first-rate philosophers who were married men. The bachelor's very capacity to avoid marriage is no more than a proof of his relative freedom
from the ordinary sentimentalism of his sex—in other words, of his
greater approximation to the clear headedness of the enemy sex." -- H.L. Mencken