Why Being Asshole Alpha Works For About Six Months

One of the biggest frustrations I’ve had over the last five years, is watching the endless parade of guys get all excited about becoming Alpha,  getting about six months of great success from it, then nose diving their relationship into the ground.

If you’ve been deficient in Alpha and failing to attract your wife, adding Alpha is pretty much always going to be a good idea. But just like all the standard “Blue Pill” advice assumes there’s already attraction in place and then advises to be more Beta, all the “Red Pill” advice assumes there’s already enough relationship comfort in place and advises to increase the Alpha. If you go all Alpha and neglect the Beta, eventually you run her Relationship Comfort down far enough to damage the relationship.

Alpha and Beta are two completely different traits. You have to get over this idea that Alpha and Beta are at oppositional to each other or you’ll eventually screw your relationship up. You can do behaviors that are highly Alpha / Attractive / Dopamine stimulating AND highly Beta / Comforting / Oxytocin stimulating. Something like going to a really nice restaurant and having a wonderful conversation with her can be both Alpha and Beta. There are all kinds of ways to Display High Value in your dress, your car, choosing to take her to a new restaurant as a novel experience, and your confident casual frame. That’s all Alpha. But you’re also paying individual attention to her, being emotionally connective, touching her and so on. All Beta. It’s completely possible to do both.

It’s also possible to do things that are so crappy that they drive down both her attraction and relationship comfort at the same time. For example, smelling like you’re unaware of the existence of toilet paper is a great relationship ender.

The trap is that most guys discover the importance of Alpha, after a prolonged period of being Low Alpha and High Beta in their relationships. So they arrive with a stockpile of Relationship Comfort and a shortage of Attraction. Thus those early improvements in being Alpha result in fairly immediate success. She’s relived and excited to be attracted to him again/more, and even if he’s being a little less attentive and Beta, he’s still got a huge stockpile of Beta credit to pay with.

But after about six months of now acting High Alpha, Low Beta… he’s pretty much spent down the stockpile of Beta credit. Then she starts getting really hurt and pissed off at him.

The point of critical failure comes around the six month mark where he misreads a Loyalty Test as a Fitness Test. A Loyalty Test is based on her fears he’s not that into her and a Fitness Test is based on her lack of respect for him. Thus if she acts out a little to see if he actually cares about her (Loyalty Test), and he responds to that like she’s rude, spoiled and demanding, (Fitness Test) the results are going to be quite negative. It’s an easy mistake to make because being more Alpha was successfully passing all the Fitness Tests she was throwing at him before now. Once you have an hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Worse still, these critical points of failure can come when he’s bankrupted himself on the Beta front. Which is why suddenly the wife that was hot to trot just a few weeks ago, is suddenly shutting down sexually. That shutting down could be anything from no sex at all, minimal sex, duty sex, starfishing, drinking in order to have sex, reducing it all to very vanilla sex, no BJ’s yada yada yada.

If you’re in that position, it’s usually fixable, but you’re sure as hell going to have to offer up some apologies and the worse you bankrupted the Beta, the longer it’s going to take to make her feel comfortable being in a relationship with you. If you confuse being Alpha with being a full-time asshole, you’re going to have to eventually change that if you want to stay happily married.

It’s all about the calibration. Be  consistently Alpha to keep attracting her, be consistently Beta to make her feel comfortable she’s attracted to you.