You live in a fake world where you have to game theory, leverage, and contingency plot with rationed trust and suppressed emotions, because trusting the wrong people is lethal so you're forced to play this fake and gay game even though you just want beauty, truth and to be real.
If hurting her feelings doesn’t hurt you, you’re not in love with her.
If her silence after a fight doesn’t make your stomach drop, you’re not in love with her.
If seeing her cry doesn’t make your chest feel tight, you’re not in love with her.
If her happiness doesn’t feel like your own, you’re not in love with her.
If her pain doesn’t shake you to your core, you’re not in love with her.
Love is more than just wanting her—it’s feeling her joy and her sorrow like they’re your own.
Don’t destroy a good woman because you don’t know how to love.
There is a point in a man's life when he needs to reject immature behavior from the women he loves, and to become totally intolerant of it. Some of these women will respond as though they have been betrayed. They'll become enraged, vengeful and falsely accuse him of all manner of horrible things: Sexism, misogyny, often much worse. Many guys don't have the stomach for this, and therefore never mature past this point. They fail to see that this hysteria is also immaturity that they need to reject.
Men that successfully navigate these shoals find that, in the space left by the immature women who abandon him, mature women soon appear. Women who admire his backbone, with the courage to be accountable and hold him to account. Women who understand that they can bring out the best in the men they love, and that men can bring out the best in them. Women who prefer growth to comfort, and being real to being ideal.
At no point in history has the development of masculinity required misogyny, or a rejection of femininity, or hatred toward women. Masculinity is the rejection of immaturity and movement toward what is actual, what is real. In a man, this produces certain archetypal symbols and dynamics that we call "masculinity" and confuse for the thing itself. But the thing itself is nothing more than a dogged preference for reality.
Don't argue nuance with someone who just wants to be right. They believe they're correct, because what they think is the limit of their capacity to understand a thing, their bias, or their preference. They are not interested in the truth. Only in feeling cleverer than you.
Your heart is not a state secret. You are meant to declare allegiances. You are meant to have favourites. Write the letter. Miss the train. Stay up until dawn talking. You should be caught red-handed loving something, someone.
The more a woman values freedom, the less she wants to listen to a man.
And the more a man values freedom, the less he wants to commit to a woman.
She must desire to be his more than she wishes to be free.
And he must desire to take care of her more than he wishes to be free.
People with ADHD have what’s called “interest-based nervous systems.” We literally cannot force ourselves to care about things that bore us.
It’s not a choice. It’s not willpower. Your brain physically won’t produce the neurochemicals needed to engage unless something triggers interest, urgency, novelty, or challenge.
the "how people talk about others is how they talk about you" rule is probably the most useful thing I learned as a child and has easily been the most efficient networking tool
When you encounter a highly conscious person, one of two things tends to happen:
1) You allow them to initiate you into a higher version of yourself by revealing the parts of yourself you're unconscious of.
2) They trigger your ego so deeply that you reject the mirror entirely, withdraw from the connection, and project your shadows onto them.