Notes on My Failed Relationships

An anti-advice column.

‘A charming Brazilian writer found on the Internet.’ February, 2018.

I’m terrible at relationships. You shouldn’t look to me for advice. You should seek out someone who has been married for years and years.

However, I can tell you what not to do. And knowing what not to do is more useful than positive advice. It’s generally the mistakes we avoid that count in life. If you want to be rich, cut your outgoings – so goes the old saying highlighted by Nassim Taleb.

Here is my small contribution to the cause of what not to do.

1. Don’t expect adult behaviour

Women are essentially large children. This a matter of character rather than intelligence.

They will usually do the following to get your attention: ‘accidentally’ knock things over, go for long walks on the wrong side of town (“I was almost raped!”), make pointless noise, deliberately mispronounce words, pretend to forget common knowledge, sigh loudly, faint, fall over, start ridiculous fights with other women, flirt with other men, ask questions that have self-evident answers, and other assorted tiresome attention-seeking behaviour.

They will confuse sexual attraction for good moral character.

“He was so lovely!”

“I notice he has rather muscly arms.”

“He’s sooo kind.”

Yes, I’m sure he’s very kind.

Similarly, they will despise a woman for being ‘unkind’ or ‘mean’. This merely means that the woman in question is more attractive than your woman – or is regarded so by society. The poor beauty probably hasn’t done anything wrong, but she’s going to get it in the neck.

Equally, a girl will be regarded as ‘kind’ or ‘lovely’ if she is less attractive than your woman.

This is why feminism will never work.

The ruses to get your attention are interspersed with transparent attempts to indirectly influence you through quasi-subtle suggestive techniques that women seem to think men cannot see right through.

I suppose that, if you lose attention, these tricks work and before you know it you will have done exactly what she wanted.

Exactly what she wants will change from one moment to the next.

2. Don’t try to have it both ways: marry or split up

An early mistake I made was trying to have it both ways. I made a little division in my mind whereby I would not actually be married – that is to say I would be in a so-called long-term relationship – but I would expect a lot of the behaviours and commitments that come with marriage.

You can’t have it both ways.

If you want the rights, responsibilities, and duties of marriage, you better damn well marry.

The problem with long-term relationships, particularly when living together, is that without marriage the obligations and duties become confused – or subject to constant and tedious negotiations (see: 10).

My major mistake in a relationships of six years or so was to assume that the relationship carried all the responsibilities and privileges of marriage while also carrying on all the privileges of just dating.

Somehow I wanted the protection of a fully approved marriage, but without the inconvenience of actually marrying. I was then surprised when neither of us lived up to the expected obligations. It is all too easy to play such games of deception in the contemporary world where there are few urgent societal demands on couples to marry.

In or out: choose.

There will probably be disaster or heartache anyway, but it makes all the difference to endure these on a consciously charted course rather than drifting and becalmed in the doldrums of the ‘long-term relationship’.

What an anaemic term that is!

3. Don’t earn less money than her

Women are attracted to power. Money is one proxy for power. It is not the only manifestation of power (or even the most potent) – obviously physical power and the ability to command other men are more potent. But money is still a very important indicator of power. A man who earns less than his partner immediately sinks in her esteem, and this is fatal to the relationship.

4. Don’t use pornography

Your mood and self-esteem will improve considerable if you stop.

Whatever the clever social ‘scientists’, sociologists, and sexologists say, pornography damages a relationship. It’s like cheating for people who don’t have any balls. It wrecks intimacy. And it actually ruins sex.

The rejection is unpleasant for your partner, but the problem is that the rejection comes from a position of weakness. And this women cannot stand. They would revel in your ability to conquer other women through a series of affairs. But a picture or a film? That excites no jealous desire, only contempt.

Unlike an affair that at least renews a woman’s competitive spirit and admiration for your vitality, pornography destroys her self-estimation as it corrodes yours. “Am I only good enough to get that man? A man who esteems his ability to create desire in others so little that he relies on images”

Pornography is a stupid and cruel occupation. An honest fuck is strongly recommended over it every time.

Pornography merely decreases your own potency and lowers you in your partner’s eyes. Quit for long enough and it starts to disgust you.

Contrary to popular opinion, it’s an acquired taste. And a foul one at that.

5.Don’t move in together before you get married

The idea of trial periods sounds rational, enlightened, and modern but it is actually a way to avoid making a solid commitment. My basic observation is that relationships are always going to get rough, and that relationships are irrational commitments. The moving in ‘trial period’ is lame. It is unadventurous.

Ultimately, it kills the relationship by turning it into a contractual and utilitarian affair. You are roommates who have sex. Admittedly, many marriages end up like that. But usually they don’t start like that. Moving in together is the quickest way to make your life boring. It pulls a weird mental trick in your mind whereby you think that you are married but you are not. Forget this modern nonsense and flimflammery. Leap wildly.

6. Don’t be a push over

Women have some difficulty thinking about the long term. If you make small concessions, she will simply run on as far as she wants without any regard for the long-term consequences. Your role is to constrain the endless chain of female speculation – or else you’ll end up in trouble.

You’ll both end up in trouble.

Women like a firm ‘no’ – even if they say they don’t

7. Don’t have ‘friends’ of the opposite sex

Unless we are talking about men with women who are substantially older than them by an order of decades, there is always an element of sexual attraction between men and women. It’s more acute between older men and younger women.

Forget any pretence about being friends.

At some – often very, very subconscious – level the old ape brain is working away at sexual attraction. Your mind will make you flirt, even if you tell it not to do so. You will even deny that you are doing so. There are rather tortured people who remain ‘friends’ with women for years at a time hoping to change the relationship into romance. This is sad. And it was something I did as a teenager and young adult. Don’t do that. Don’t be romantic. And don’t pretend it’s not about sex. It is about sex.

Men and women are basically all the same. You shouldn’t get hung up on one person. That’s true. Of course, men and women are all different. And that’s also true. We tend to get caught on the paradox. If you can, act as if only the first proposition is true.

I have trouble with that. People get stuck in me, and I can never scratch them out. “I can’t listen to certain songs, it’s just too much emotion,” a girl tells me. Ah, she is another one like me. Us sentimentalists are the ones you should really avoid. We are quite cruel in our obsession with individuality.

There’s a lot of kindness in cold disregard.

Returning to friendship, it is also possible to simply socialise without realising that the more basic instinct is at play. But the instinct is always in play, even if you are quite convinced that everything is innocent. It has happened to me (it has happened to you) that, at the conscious level, I genuinely thought that I was simply a ‘friend’ with a woman – right up until the moment we ended up in bed. This is how the mind works to protect us from reality and our intentions.

Sometimes it seems to me that my consciousness is just along for the ride. I wonder where I’ll end up?

Final notes: If your partner has a male friend that she spends any substantial amount of time with, she is cheating on you.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with flirting with another woman in front of your partner.

That makes life more interesting.

8. Don’t pay too much attention when a girl cries

Women cry more easily than men. They generally know how to use this to exploit men. I don’t mean to suggest that women never need to be comforted and don’t become genuinely distressed. But they do put it on quite often to get their way.

These tears can vanish remarkably quickly.

Beware.

9. Don’t be overly domestic

Life is too short to learn how to cook. I tried. Girls are better at this, except for professional kitchens and occasional Sunday roasts. I suspect women hate a man who cooks or cleans, anyway. They want to make themselves useful domestically. Give them the opportunity to live up to what they really desire.

10. Don’t lower you standards

Women need to be kept occupied with clear objectives and standards. They enjoy being told what to do and what to aim for. Don’t let her off too lightly. If you don’t have any standards, she will be disappointed in you. Give her a chance to be a ‘good girl’. Girls excel at school and exams because they want to do everything ‘right’. There’s no right way to do anything, as we know. But, since the girls insist, we should give them a mark to aim for.

11. Don’t negotiate

Who negotiates all the time? The Israelis and the Palestinians. And don’t they love each other!

Negotiations occur when everything has gone wrong. Negotiations are what lawyers do. Nobody likes lawyers, not even lawyers.

I’ve made this mistake lots of times. A relationship is not a rational proposition. That doesn’t mean it can’t have a strong rational element.

You still need to plan for the future, children, and so on. That involves some negotiation, usually sugar coated in emotion.

But, at the base level, the whole idea of spending years and years with the same person – often in very cramped conditions – is completely irrational, if not actually mad. Madness is not interested in negotiations.

It’s probably better to have a large number of small fights and crazy arguments than to ‘keep the peace’ and negotiate a stable relationship that will hit a major crisis and collapse. The couple who fights all the time is somehow renewing the relationship. This is what Nassim Taleb would call anti-fragility, a relationship that gains from disorder. And it conforms to the stereotype of the old married couple who have been together forever but bicker all the time. Stereotypes contain a strong measure of truth.

That old couple are anti-fragile.

Learn to bicker.

Don’t store it all up for one disastrous falling out.

12. Don’t expect forgiveness for a major error

Petty affairs and mistakes are forgivable. But crossing a woman over a major matter is often fatal. You must be cautious to recognise that, though she may superficially forgive you, the knife is being sharpened for revenge – if the offence is substantial.

Men can have a huge fight and make up. They can even throw punches at each other and make up. Actually, it’s that possibility of physical violence that makes forgiveness possible between men. Complete clearing of the air. That doesn’t exist between a man and a woman. It doesn’t exist between women either, hence their tendency towards bitchiness.

If you cross her in a major way, don’t expect forgiveness. I don’t mean that you should live in terror of crossing a woman, quite the opposite.

Just remember: a woman scorned…

Now you know why God is a man. Once, during my pathetic stage of adolescent communism, I completed a Religious Studies essay with ‘He/She’ for God all the way through. Terribly subversive, eh? The teacher, quite rightly, struck out my ‘he/she’ nonsense.

Only God forgives. And that is why God is most definitely a He.

13. Don’t set a bad example

“Women are considered deep – why? Because one can never discover any bottom to them. Women are not even shallow,” said Nietzsche. Women essentially reflect their environment, and this includes the man they are with. They may not exactly agree, but they will go along with the majority position much more easily than men. Women are natural conformists in this regard.

This means that they will reflect what you are back to you. And that can be very revealing as to your own character, if you don’t know much about your own character. But if you set a bad example, you will only see yourself in your woman. And you will not like what you see.

14. Don’t expect them to like other women

Women don’t like other women. They like their children and their partner – if he’s powerful enough for their expectations. When women get together, expect trouble.

Men are often oblivious to how women will establish and set the rules of social situations. This is their immense and occult power. And it is immense.

Whether it’s setting up two men to fight over them or making sure that certain people are excluded from social circles and power, the manoeuvrings between women in a busy social context can be quite subtle. Many unsuspecting men are dragged into disasters thanks to the machinations of women.

If you are not on guard, you will have been sucked into some tiresome family quarrel that mainly centres on whether or not your partner’s hair is a finer shade of auburn than her cousin’s – or something like that.

This is how women start wars, you know.

Cherchez la femme. In politics. In war. In art. Cherchez la femme. It started with Helen of Troy and Eve.

The trouble is not ended yet.

We are not even at the beginning of the end.

Still, it keeps life interesting, eh?

Summing up

These are probably all blindingly obvious conclusions, and – until I’ve sustained a marriage for a good thirty years and raised five or so bonny children – I should probably shut up.

But these represent my main mistakes so far. Perhaps you can avoid them, or perhaps you’ll just do what your character determines.

We may all be doomed to do what we are destined to do. But at least we can know how we are doomed and laugh a little at the spectacle.

by Tom X Hart