There is a particular formula most romantic comedies rely on to convey how relations between men and women ought to go. It’s an old formula, as in Shakespearean and Greek antiquity-old. There are plenty of variations on this theme, but it goes something like this:
An avowed Alpha bachelor for life questions the existence and nature of love, the sincerity of women, the illogic of not living just for his pleasures, self-importance, and certainly the institution of marriage. He lives according to his own rules and has a rich, satisfying life. He critically observes the “madness” of love when his friends and fellow men when they fall in and out of it. He mocks their foolishness. He’s clinically analytical in understanding their madnesses. He is an elemental force of one – a captain directing his ship’s course. He’s not wrong in his estimations; they all add up and make deductive, provable sense. In some variations, he feels genuine gratitude for not being afflicted with this madness called love so he can pursue a higher calling.
Everything is going swimmingly in his life. That is until he meets her. The ONE remarkable woman who miraculously, alone amongst billions, has the unique power to bring the facade of all that he thinks he is into stark, insightful self-realization. He’s been bitten by the bug! Smitten by the only woman who could fatefully tame the arrogance of his otherwise cruel rationalism. Tarzan the Savage is brought to heel by Jane. Belle tames the Beast, the only woman in the world who could do so.
It’s akin to a religious conversion. He’s seen the light! He’s in love, and all of his former contemplations are proven falsehoods – it’s the triumph of Twoo Wuvv! The one thing he was missing (the one thing only a woman can possess), the last piece to a puzzle he didn’t know he was putting together, has been added to him. Now he is complete. And they lived happily ever after…
Every writer, from Shakespeare to Bronte, to modern writers, uses some variation of this outline. The locations, periods, and actors change, but the basic story never deviates. This formula is so successful and timeless because it is essentially the fantasy of love and emotionalism, trumping logic and reason. It’s an analogy for the war between emotionalism and empiricism. Naturally, women love this because it puts them into the position of being the unique ‘cure’ to a man’s illness while making him look like a brooding, sulking, bitter child for clinging to his rationalism when all he was pouting about was feeling unloved. “Who hurt you?” is the default presumption we hear from women when they have no counterargument for a man’s rationality. When reason is exhausted, women will default to emotion.
But for all his intense powers of reason, all of his provable facts, all of his monuments of deductive logic mean nothing without the irrational thing a woman can uniquely supply – unknowable, fantastical love. It’s part and parcel of the Myth of the Feminine Mystique that makes women the gatekeepers of the secret of love. Don’t try to understand it with your silly boy logic! Leave well enough alone and be eternally grateful to whichever god you worship that a woman has favored you with the love you need to be perfected.
In this story, the build-up to men realizing this stokes the feminine indignation that sustains women’s interest. The real satisfaction is summed up at the end when he finally concedes to the feminine imperative, drops all his pretense, and submits to the madness of love. Love Wins! It was an inevitable certainty.
The satisfaction doesn’t last long. The build-up, tension, anxiety, and want of a woman to scream at the TV, “SHE LOVES YOU!! JUST GET IT, YOU STUPID MAN!!” made it enjoyable. The Bachelor is an excellent example of the success of this formula. However, once he’s submitted and seen her light, all that fades to predictable, dull comfort. She’s done with that romance novel, puts it in the pile of them at the garage sale, and moves on to the next. And he’s left with all the echoes of his past rationalism, explaining to all those he’s influenced and built his reputation upon how love conquers all and how wrong he was all along.
For that man, it’s the last chapter in the vindication of feminine primacy.
And they lived happily ever after…
For women, the only thing better than experiencing this script vicariously through movies and stories is to see it happen live. More than a few manosphere notable have played the come-full-circle surrender to the Script role. Many more guys play it in a more visual sense in popular media. But no one remembers them, and certainly not in the ‘sphere. Although there’s a sense of vindication for women to have a guy surrender his anti-social (see, anti-feminine) lifestyle and beliefs in favor of feminine-normalized monogamy, his surrender is still surrender. Essentially the strong, vibrant man who posed such a challenge to her becomes mundane.
The guy whose conviction made him a man she was hot for and respected loses his status. Tarzan is tamed, and Superman becomes Clark Kent. Emotionalism wins, but she loses. Sexual arousal and intrigue are proximate goals that are adversarial to the ultimate goals of familiarity, comfort, and domesticity. Belle falls in love with the Beast, not the Prince. Jane gets tingles from Tarzan the Savage, not the civilized man. His irresponsibility is what made him irresistible.
"Men have forgotten this truth,' said the fox. 'But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.'" - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The unfortunate truth of our Gynocentric era is that women have the luxury of not being responsible for what they have tamed. On the contrary, women defer the downsides of having tamed a man back to the man himself. The wild Mustang is made responsible for the failings of his being broken. So again, the deductive logician reappears in him. Only this time, it’s to gaslight himself with rationalizations of how he allowed his own breaking.
He’ll say, hey, you don’t know where I’m at in life. You don’t know the experiences I’ve had. Life has taught me the value of compromise. Women fundamentally lack the capacity to appreciate the sacrifices a man must make to facilitate their reality. But if there’s one thing women outright despise, one thing men foolishly believe women should be able to appreciate. It’s a man willing to compromise the beliefs he’s established his personality, reputation, and integrity upon in order to facilitate her reality.
And that’s the definition of a sell-out.
After the happily ever after comes the living. He can console himself in his new paradigm. He can hole up in a cocoon of domestication. He can simply not answer the phone calls of all his old friends who are also playing into the Script, who are only waiting to commiserate with him. But his new domesticity won’t allow him to. His old life is gone, right? Love conquered him. Love made him a new man. He found God, or made a new one for himself, and now he’s ready to live up to the new – correct – expectations he formerly railed against. But now, he has been enlightened. And what he used to call madness, he now calls his new masculine purpose. He’s been converted — and makes his necessity a virtue.
He looks into that girl’s eyes, the one who changed him for the better, but the memory of the urgency, the desire to tame him, and the visceral lust he inspired all seem like an old song that he can’t remember the lyrics to. He can’t sing it to her again to remind her of what he used to be. Ah, that’s okay. There’s a new season of The Bachelor coming up soon.
Finding a balance between the savage and the responsible man isn’t impossible, but few men ever manage it. Even when they do, it sounds like coping when they try to explain it to others. I would never wish ill on my fellow man, no matter his crimes, no matter his station, so I won’t do so now. I sincerely hope nothing but the best for any man making this surrender. He will need every good fortune that comes along in the face of compromising his reputation and purpose in order to facilitate a woman’s primacy.
However, I’ll add that I also make it my policy never to speak ill of the dead. When men fall away from the truth to appease the emotions of women, only then are they truly lost. Cypher cannot be plugged back into the Matrix. It’s not the Matrix that destroys him. It’s self-deception. It’s the blinders he puts on to avoid acknowledging his change of ego that slowly itches in the back of his head. That’s what ultimately ruins him when he realizes the potential he sacrificed in order to “grow up” and be what she wanted him to be.