I am a sucker for love and determination to build a strong, peaceful, and lasting relationship and treat its pursuit like how I built successful startup companies. One at a time and fully dedicated.
Ambiguity
In today’s dating environment, where the instability of ambiguity reigns supreme, my dedication appears to be an anomaly many women take for granted. As psychologist Sadia Khan explains in the riveting interview embedded here, women attempting to be as independent as possible and dating men who do the same leads to widespread relationship failure and epidemic loneliness and depression.
In my view, the art of a successful relationship is maintaining a delicate balance of dependence, the opposite of the all-to-easy flight of independence–the latter stance promoting the mistaken identity of equality.
He who seeks equality amongst unequals seeks absurdity.
–– Spinoza
Women are not like men, thankfully, and nor should they attempt to become equal. Respect and evolutionary principles value our differences, not our commonalities.
Plight
An excellent way to test a relationship is to throw dirt at it and see what happens. I did so recently when I moved to another state for a sweet woman proclaiming to love me, in her words, more than I’ll ever know. I reciprocated by showing my determination by moving from idyllic Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, to not-so-happening Hot Springs, Arkansas. I put my faith in the words of psychologist Esther Perel.
The quality of your life depends on the quality of your relationship.
–– Esther Perel
And so, I went all in.
Three months in, I noticed her respect for my plight of reinventing the operating systems of humanity starting to wear off. Without asking me what the term meant, she began to ridicule the evolutionary meritocracy I described publicly as the replacement for the deadbeat democracies we deploy today. Her contempt for my ten-year self-funded work, more than twice Malcolm Gladwell’s ten thousand hours, had already set in. Its undercurrent slowly seeped into other aspects of our relationship, eating it from the inside out.
Contempt
Knowing full well how contempt kills all relationships, I began to revisit my decision to move to Arkansas mentally. I lost access to the beach and was disenfranchised from people from all walks of life to exercise my debate style. I also lost access to diverse food options, including a few essential bakeries. A problem for a former European who loves good food.
People who are crazy enough to change the world are the ones who do.
–– Steve Jobs
I became frustrated with the person who initially proclaimed wanting to be with someone intent on changing the world she could learn from, yet in short order, lost respect for the much-needed patience, investment, and determination such endeavor required. Her contempt for my life’s work demonstrated she had mentally reneged on who I was and what I stood for.
So, I did the same. I reneged on the financial agreement we had. My anticipation of her rejection, followed by my proposal to leave, ignited her borderline personality disorder to start yelling and screaming at me, as she often did, and everything blew up. She told me to get out, and I left with my car packed for survival one week before I was supposed to travel with her to meet her parents and her ninety-year-old grandmother in Hungary.
Psyche
What happened next is precisely what the psychologist above pointed out.
With her in Hungary texting me multiple times a day, probably hoping I was down on my luck and indeed homeless, I devoted myself to writing my book from a sailboat in Rock Hall, Maryland, offered to me by a brother from another mother. Subsequently, I moved to a cabin in the Catskills offered to me by a new friend keen to support the need for a new operating system for humanity.
During my absence from her, the only real question this woman asked me was not how I was doing or if I was okay, but how many women I had slept with since. Again, her question revealed she never knew who she was with, making clear how a person who does not dare to trust anyone cannot be trusted. I could never emotionally detach myself that quickly to have sex with someone else. Call me old-fashioned.
Destiny
Two weeks after her return from Hungary, I bet she already had sex with people from the gym she alluded to previously, with the swipe-right irreverence so prevalent in society today. My suspicion, corroborated by empirical evidence, past and current, demonstrated the kind of character I was dealing with. As the video above explains, her irreverence will define her lonely future. So much for the expression above of love for me. That was a lie.
The best litmus test to the essence of someone’s character is to throw conflict, controversy, and the dedication of a worthy struggle around. Only then will you see what a prospective teammate is made of. Good people will try to solve problems collectively to benefit the team rather than outright discredit the merit of one team member by elevating the importance of their agenda to crush another. Never again will I share my upside with people unwilling to stand by my downside.
Pity
People who attack, disrespect, or discredit their team members are not necessarily bad. They are mere serfs soaking in a societal soup lacking the proximal development needed to change the flawed constitution they blissfully bow down to. If they cannot independently develop themselves, solve problems collectively, and instead prefer to ruminate in the consensus of their uninformed peers, you must leave them where you found them.
Conflict reveals the essence of character, determining whether life with that person is worth building and living. A process of detecting false positives I whittled down from twenty years to six years and now to four months—progress of a kind.
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
–– Helen Keller
P.S.: I do not plan to divulge the progress of all my relationships, only those that inherit the systemic dysfunction from societal norms gone awry.
