If you prefer YouTube or Spotify, then please click those links.
As men we define ourselves in so many ways by our pursuit of women. From the moment we enter puberty to our last days, it seems like everything we do is hooked to the possibility of love, or simply sex. Even our career decisions are influenced by how attractive they’ll make us, whether based on the amount of money we make or how sexy the uniform makes us.
We have narratives in movies that essentially say, “When my eyes found their way to her, it was love at first sight. I knew from that moment onward that I had found my soul mate, and I would be willing to do anything to make sure that my true love would be mine.”
Depending on the context, that statement could be seen as a beautiful expression of Romantic Love, or as the terrifying threat of a potentially violent stalker. Some people have criticized how the deciding factor is how attractive the man is to the woman. If he isn’t attractive enough she’d interpret the same behaviour as incredibly creepy and potentially even publically shame him for the crime of being ugly. I mean…obviously a woman is going to be far more receptive to romantic gestures from men she finds attractive.
However, I do think that these criticisms have emerged because the myth of romance itself has disintegrated. Masculine tribes such as Red Pill, Men Going Their Own Way, and NoFap, have emerged because this myth can no longer guide us. It now seems like an empty promise that goes stale in our mouths, no longer motivating us to keep marching forward looking for the One.
In this essay then, I’m going to talk about the birth of what I call Romantic Idolatry, and how it has been a failed attempt to replace religion after its collapse and I say this as an atheist, just to be clear. You don’t need to read it to understand this essay, but this is an extension of an argument I made in my last essay Psychology of the Zombie. There I talked about how our culture has become liquefied and zombified.1
In other words, the more individualistic and free from religion we’ve become, the more the burden of meaning in life has fallen on our own shoulders. When Nietzsche declared the death of God, what he was really declaring was the loss of a worldview to guide us.2 As you’ll soon find out, romance has been one of the ways we’ve tried to lighten that burden, tried to find meaning.
The Birth of Romantic Love
So, to help you understand how this works, I first need to define what I mean by meaning in life. Our lives feel meaningful to us when we understand the world and our place within it, when we feel like our lives have a purpose, some future-oriented goal, when our lives are intrinsically significant and worthwhile living, and when we matter to those who in turn matter to us.3,4 Already I’m sure you can see how much Romantic Love attempts to fulfill these things. Our goal of marrying our soul mate and living happily ever after organizes our entire lives, but…where exactly does this narrative come from and how did it come to define us as men so profoundly?
Dr. Anthony Giddens and the National Women’s History Museum talk about Romantic Love as a union between Passionate Love, a guiding narrative, and eventually, a woman’s choice in who she’d marry.5,6 Beginning with Passionate Love, this could be considered a universal phenomenon. Dr. Giddens mentions that most civilizations have myths that warn against Passionate Love. This is because it is defined by intense emotions that cause the infatuated couple to abandon their social ties and obligations. Romeo and Juliette are the perfect example for the intensity and risks of Passionate Love.
Dr. Giddens then writes that the narrative of Romantic Love was invented, at least in part, as a consequence of the rise of industrial capitalism in the 18th to 20th century. To be clear, I am glossing over a lot of the history just for the sake of this essay. The key point though, is that as men were taken further and further away from the household for more and more of the day, there was the birth of the modern definition of childhood and motherhood.5
In my essay, Psychology of the Succubus, I talked about how the invention of the plough first divided men and women by public workplace and private household. However, think about what it means to have a household that is now predominantly controlled by a mother’s love and authority, at least while father is away. Father is barely there at all anymore, he’s busy at work and so women are confined even more to the household and to the care for children. Now the home and the child are governed more by “feminine” modes of being, by however women are likely to behave given their biology and the specific expectations placed upon them by their culture.
Again, really think about what that means. We now have a completely new definition of what it means to be a woman. Children have obviously always existed, but think about how childhood changes when it is governed almost completely by a woman’s authority rather than by mother and father. Think about how that in turn changes the expectations we place upon women themselves. If these expectations are now far more defined by this new definition of childhood, then that means that being more feminine means being more of this kind of mother.
I know how weird it seems to say that there is a new association here between women and motherhood. This is something that has existed since before the human species existed. Again though, we take for granted how the “traditional” definitions of motherhood and woman were really only established at this time, and around this same time, was the birth of the romance novel. It provided the perfect idealization of the often grim reality that women were already experiencing. Giddens writes that there was:5
“the creation of a mutual narrative biography. The heroine tames, softens and alters the seemingly intractable masculinity of her love object, making it possible for mutual affection to become the main guiding-line of their lives together […] When marriage […] was for ever”
In other words, romance novels gave women who were forced into the home as mothers a guiding narrative to make sense of themselves and their place in the world, it gave them a purpose to their lives in the form of finding true Passionate Love with a man who would love them in a way that their absent husbands simply couldn’t because of the demands of the workforce and the cultural expectations of patriarchy. It also gave their lives intrinsic significance because true love as a cosmic force would find them and guide them and give their lives value. Finally, they would obviously matter deeply to a man who would matter to them. Through the idealization of Romantic Love, women as merely mothers were given new meaning in life.
Dr. Giddens then discusses research from the 1980s that demonstrated how this narrative was alive and well, at least up to that point. The researcher, Sharon Thompson, interviewed 150 American teenagers about their values and sexual behaviour. The primary theme she found in the girl’s stories was what she referred to as a quest-romance. This created a relationship with the future where every romantic action they took was to find a passionate romance. Interestingly, sex was now often viewed as the beginning of a potential romantic journey with this specific partner.
This is likely very different from the quest-romance during the 18th century when young people were only just beginning to choose their own romantic partner. Until this time these partnerships were usually selected by parents.5 I’ll be picking that specific thread up in the final section of this essay, but that completes the story about how Romantic Love was invented.
Women, as both writers and the primary readers of the romance novel, were now freer than they have ever been to choose the man they wanted, and this often meant choosing the man they felt the greatest Passionate Love for.5 Here you can begin to see the pressures this places upon men themselves. And yet, even though these women selected their partner, they were still expected to be a certain type of woman, and this often meant one who was chaste.
Repressed Woman, Chivalrous Man
Given everything I’ve said, think now about the expectations that are being placed upon women. Dr. Giddens states explicitly:5
“The distinctively novel element here was the association of motherhood with femininity as qualities of [her] personality.”
The kind of person that a woman aspired to be was now defined by the greater and greater proportion of her life spent being a stay-at-home mother with a stay-at-work father. Women were expected to be pure, chaste virgins who had never been touched by another man, and who would never even desire to be touched. This specific narrative is also alive in well in the writings of the Godfather of Red Pill, Rollo Tomassi, who fetishizes women with a low body count and uses a shoddy understanding of evolutionary psychology as a justification for this.7,8
This idea that women are biologically predisposed to want less sex than men is very common and it might be true.9 However, the common counter to this is that women primarily want less sex because they’re judged so severely.10 Here’s a very telling quote from Dr. Giddens’ book:5
“One woman, born in 1918 in London, […] recalls that her mother whispered to her every night as she went to sleep that she must not have sex before marriage or she would go insane. She didn't question why unmarried mothers were put in asylums; she just thought, 'Oh well, they deserved it; they'd had sex and they'd gone mad.”
Regardless of whether or not women are innately less promiscuous than men, I think this puts it into harsh perspective. Imagine your mother whispering into your ear every night that you will go insane if you have sex. Personally, my mom sang nursery rhymes. Even though this may be an extreme case, the fact still stands that women were viciously repressed. Again, quoting Dr. Giddens book:5
“Sexuality emerged as a source of worry, needing solutions; women who crave sexual pleasure are specifically unnatural.”
The point is that women’s sexuality has long been something that has been in need of control. Again though, this is something that women have “traditionally” aspired to because of the expectations placed upon them by a patriarchal culture. This simultaneously created the chaste woman and a man who sought to marry women who were chaste, even as they had sex with prostitutes and other impure women. Giddens writes that, historically, adultery was expected from men, whereas a single case of adultery from a woman was a horrible sin.
Again this is something we still see today with the Red Pill notion of the one-sided open relationship, where men can sleep with whoever they want, whereas women are expected to stay at home and tend to their man and children.11
Both Red Pill and evolutionary psychology claim that this is because of paternal uncertainty.7,9 This is the idea that because every woman knows for sure that she is the mother, and no man will ever know for sure if he is the father, that means men are going to be far more concerned about a woman’s chastity. Red Pill specifically says that this isn’t because of a repressive patriarchy, but because men are hard-wired biologically to desire chaste women.
In analyzing research on sexual double standards, Alexander of Date Psychology reports that most people don’t actually care that much about their partner’s sexual past, up to a certain point.10 The key difference however is that men show only a small preference for women with a lower body count. This difference was also relative, meaning that both sexes preferred partners with low body counts when they also had a low body count.9 In another article, Alexander writes that men who have lower sexual success are more likely to have negative opinions on casual sex. Here’s a key quote from Alexander:10
“The sexually frustrated may seek to gain power over those they are frustrated with. A desire to restrict the sexual behaviors of others may be one way some individuals choose to seek revenge and impose power”.
My point is that the desire for chaste women is not necessarily a purely biological reality, but also reflects environmental conditions such as cultural expectations. If men are taught to value chaste women, then that is who they will desire in marriage. This will put greater pressures on women to be chaste, and then in a culture of patriarchal capitalism this will create further pressures for women to fantasize about the idealism of Romantic Love.
As culture advances forward these pressures escalate until about the 1950s where the idea of the “traditional” family is really set in stone. Even though only 60% of households had the father as the breadwinner and the stay-at-home mother, this was the ideal that people were given to aspire to.12 That is, until the birth control pill liberated women sexually and professionally.13 Now women were not only free to have the careers they wanted, but they also had far greater freedom to exercise their choice outside marriage. Dr. Giddens says about this change:5
“It is only over the past generation that striking out on one's own, for women, has meant leaving the parental home. In previous periods […] leaving home meant getting married.”
Despite this greater freedom, I think it’s clear given everything I’ve said, that freedom of choice has been shaped by hundreds of years of indoctrination into a specific ideal. This ideal is what I call Romantic Idolatry.
As the ideal femininity for women to aspire to evolved and changed to reflect greater sexual freedom and professional success, the pressures on men to be a certain type of man also changed because these were the type of men that women wanted to choose. Women were now free, but only to find Passionate Love guided by the narrative of the quest for Romantic Love. In other words, Passionate Love in the context of marriage and children, and now also a career.
With these changes came the project of the self as a romantic being.
The Identity Given By Romantic Idolatry
In my last essay on the Zombie, I spoke about the liquefaction of our culture. This is basically the idea that our society has prioritized the freedom of the individual so much that we’ve significantly reduced the obligation of social roles and responsibilities. It’s not quite as simple as that obviously and it certainly isn’t a bad thing necessarily, but the key point is that our freedom of choice in defining who we are is far higher than it may have ever been. In fact, defining your own individuality has itself become a social obligation.
Like I said at the beginning of this essay though, this has placed the entire weight of meaning in life on the back of individuals, at a time when the world is more complex than it has ever been. We tend to think of more freedom as being a good thing, but often what freedom really means in practice is having more options to choose from. We don’t take into account how our freedom to choose among those options is defined by the options themselves, by the total number of options, by the degree of variety between options, or by way the options are presented to us – whether that means through different social media, through magazines, books, or in the form of certain aesthetics.
Then, connect this with what Dr. Giddens says about how romance and sexuality have become a part of our identity, of how we express ourselves as individuals.5 Zygmunt Bauman also discusses the life project, or the project of building your own life and own identity.1 Again, in a culture of individualism, who we are as a person becomes a life-long project. We aim to build ourselves by choosing our romantic partners, by experimenting with our sexuality, by choosing our taste in music, the books we read, the videos we watch, etc. All of these things are ways in which we build our identity as an individual…but how exactly do we find out about all of these options?
Michel Foucault referred to a sort of similar process as psychologizing and medicalizing.14,15 In this process, we are given a bunch of categories such as mental illness, personality typologies, or sexualities. So, let’s use personality as an example. You’re given a test, such as the MBTI, that asks you to think about how you behave and then depending on your answers, it’ll tell you if you’re extraverted or introverted. You then research introverts and learn about how you should be, what lifestyle you should have, what jobs you should pick, or what kind of person you’d be attracted to. You allow all of this to be defined for you because some really shit test told you that you were an introvert.16
In this same way, through romance novels, romantic comedies, romance subplots in action movies, or any other specific form of media, you are taught that romance looks a certain way, expects a certain personality from you, expects a certain personality from the person you/re looking for, and expects a certain ritual of conduct for how you go from strangers to soul mates. Even the idea of “soul mates” is some weird metaphysical fabrication created by people selling you novels and movies to turn a profit off of your fantasies. Really think about. Somewhere out there exists your one true love that was born specifically to complete you, and the world will bend itself so that you and her will cross paths one day, and fall madly in love, to live happily ever after. Atheists believe this shit.
I’ve already talked a lot about how the idea of romance emerged largely from women who were sold a fantasy that was close enough to real life for them to idealize, but was still magical. Where did this idea come from, that there was some cosmic force conspiring to defy the laws of physics all for your love?
Dr. John Vervaeke says that Romantic Love emerges from Romanticism, the philosophy, because of how this philosophy relates to rationality and irrationality. To the Romantic philosopher, rationality and logic remove and separate us from reality, whereas we can get closer to reality through emotion, and especially love.17 Just take a look at how you believe and how you think about the world, is this true for you? Do you feel like you are more connected to the world because you’re having a certain emotional experience? Do you feel more disconnected from the world because you’re being more logical? Is that because that’s how they actually work, or you’ve been taught over a lifetime that’s how they are supposed to work?
Either way, through this idea, Romanticism was one of the first major attempts to replace the function of religion in Western culture. Even though the philosophy of Romanticism has mostly been left behind, it has lived on in the form of Romantic Idolatry. We find meaning in life through the pursuit of romance, through the pursuit of something that promises to bring us into closer contact with reality through the freedom to create Passionate Love with another person, so that we can then embed ourselves within a narrative that guides us together through life. And yet, as I said at the beginning of this essay, these promises of Romantic Idolatry now taste stale in our mouths.
Dr. Vervaeke says this has happened because another human being could never hope to carry the entire weight of meaning in life.17 I’ve said this multiple times already, but just think it through. Do you really think we could ever hope to answer all of life’s big questions by putting everything into this one person, trying to define ourselves and our lives based on making a relationship work with this one person? Relationships are one of the most meaningful aspects of life, they are, but it seems so obvious that they can’t work in the way romance tells us they should, and yet why have so many of us made this mistake?
Dr. Erich Fromm has written about why you escape from the burden of freedom.16 Firstly, the difficulty is that you can’t admit to yourself that you are escaping from freedom because of how much you’re taught to value freedom of the individual. Instead, you put all of that weight onto the shoulders of what he calls the magic helper, a person who is:18
“[O]bserved frequently in what is called ‘falling in love.’ […] For some reason or other – often supported by sexual desires – a certain other person assumes for him those magic qualities, and he makes that person into the being to whom and on whom his whole life becomes related and dependent. The fact that the other person frequently does the same with the first one does not alter the picture. It only helps to strengthen the impression that this relationship is one of ‘real love.’ […] The intensity of the [obsession to] the magic helper is in reverse proportion to the ability to express spontaneously one’s own intellectual, emotional, and sensuous potentialities. In other words, one hopes to get everything one expects from life, from the magic helper, instead of by one’s own actions.”
If the pursuit of Romantic Love has come to function like this, has come to replace the religion-sized hole in our culture, what better name for it than Romantic Idolatry. The word idolatry means, “excessive or blind adoration, reverence, devotion.”19 The issue with Romantic Idolatry is that your soul mate doesn’t exist. One of the few things I think Red Pill gets right is the very real dangers that the soul mate myth has for people.5
When we place all of our individuality, freedom, and personhood, our personalities, and our career choices on maintaining a relationship with another person simply because we believe that cosmic love has bound us together, we will do anything, sacrifice anything, to keep them in our lives. We bend ourselves to fit what the media has taught us we must be. We demand our partners bend themselves to fit what the media has taught us they must be. We bend each other into a shape that the media has taught us our relationship must take for it to be passionate, loving, and happy. Is that real freedom? Is that even real love?
In my last essay on the Zombie I said that to be zombified means that we’ve lost real contact with one another. Even as we’re together, we’re separated from one another. Romantic Idolatry, for all its attempt to bring us together through love, actually works to separate us from each other and ourselves. Romantic Idolatry is merely another symptom of the liquefaction and zombification of our culture.
However, as I’ve said, we have already begun to see in many ways the false promise of Romantic Idolatry. I’m going to try to connect the dots from my last few essays. Again, you don’t need to read them to understand what I’m about to say, but they will obviously help.
Firstly though, remember that meaning in life means having a coherent picture of the world and your place in it, having a purpose in life that orients you into the future, and mattering to others who matter to you. Secondly, when men experience a collapse of economic stability and agency, this is often related to the fear of witchcraft. Dr. Silvia Federici discusses this connection in her book Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women.20 To add another component, in their book Zombies in Western Culture, Dr. Vervaeke and colleagues discuss the connection between political instability and a loss of economic agency.21
The key factor when it comes to Red Pill and men, is how they tie a loss of economic agency to social integration. The idea is that if people lose economic agency, the belief that they have power over their finances, and this is related to the feeling that they’ve lost their place in society, then we see an increase in mental health problems such as unaliving oneself. Research conducted on ex-Red Pill men has found that they joined Red Pill because they felt vulnerable, they were bullied, they had dating issues, etc.22
I hope you’re seeing how all of this is tied with Red Pill and the new meaning that it offers men, especially in the context of the conspiratorial misogyny that it uses to sow distrust between men and women. Red Pill offers a witchcraft-fearing ideology, attempting to empower men through wrestling the feminist witches for control over women, partly because Romantic Idolatry has collapsed with men’s loss of economic agency and social integration.
One of the most common things I hear is how feminism has destroyed relationships because women have become entitled and career-obsessed. It isn’t actually that this has destroyed relationships necessarily, Alex of DatePsych has reported that most couples are actually doing quite well.23 The issue is that as women have become increasingly liberated from stay-at-home standards, they no longer have the same desires they once did. Remember, the only reason the romance novel was so popular among women is because it gave them an idealization that was close enough to the reality they were actually living. Romantic Idolatry is itself a patriarchal fiction that doesn’t fit with how society has evolved.
Dr. Giddens wrote all the way back in 1992 that men were lagging behind women in their adaptation to the new romantic reality.5 As Alex of DatePsych says however, many relationships now seem to be doing well and most sex seems to happen in committed relationships.23 I’m speculating here, but it may be that with a lower and lower percentage of men who don’t keep up with the changes going on in society, the more reactionary they will become. For those of you who’ve read my series The Psychospiritual Prison, you can see this as another instantiation of the conflict between Kathekon’s traditional masculinity and Akedia’s progressive masculinity.
My point is that with the collapse of Romantic Idolatry, these men have lost meaning in life and haven’t had a suitable replacement. The meaning crisis we are all experiencing is defined in part as a lack of a narrative that can guide people through life.
Despite its many flaws, Red Pill offers these men a narrative that makes them feel powerful even as their world seems to collapse around them. It gives them a coherent-enough worldview to make sense of themselves and the suffering they’re experiencing. Feminism has destroyed the relationship and the only way to find love is by becoming rich! As such, it also gives them a sense of purpose in the form of conformity to a hyper-patriarchal masculinity, no matter how impossible that might be, and also tells them that these pursuits will make them matter to someone.
The tragic irony of Red Pill is that even as it emerges out of the collapse of Romantic Idolatry, it is a paradigm intimately bound to the very definitions of the good life that Romantic Idolatry created. They assume they are calling for a return to traditional values justified by evolutionary psychology. And yet, as we’ve seen, there is nothing traditional about Romantic Idolatry, regardless of how justified it might be by their bastardized evolutionary psychology.
However, this is only scratching the surface of the collapse of Romantic Idolatry and this essay has gotten long enough. In the next essay I’m going to go deeper into this phenomenon, and then in the essay after that, I’m going to do a deep dive into the philosophical paradigm of Red Pill itself.
Until then, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on masculinity, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.
If you like this essay, please find the recommended order here. Scroll to the bottom.
References:
1 – Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid Modernity. Polity.
2 – “God is dead”: What Nietzsche really meant. (2022, January 29). Big Think. https://bigthink.com/thinking/what-nietzsche-really-meant-by-god-is-dead/
3 – Martela, F., & Steger, M. F. (2016). The three meanings of meaning in life: Distinguishing coherence, purpose, and significance. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 11(5), 531–545. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2015.1137623
4 – Wolf, S., Koethe, J., Adams, R. M., Arpaly, N., Haidt, J., & Macedo, S. (2012). Meaning in Life and Why It Matters. Princeton University Press.
5 – Giddens, A. (1993). The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies (1st edition). Stanford University Press.
6 – The History of Romance. (2017, February 13). National Women’s History Museum. https://www.womenshistory.org/articles/history-romance
7 – Tomassi, R. (2013). The Rational Male. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
8 – Alexander. (2024a, July 23). Rollo Tomassi vs Evolutionary Psychology—Date Psychology. https://datepsychology.com/rollo-tomassi-vs-evolutionary-psychology/
9 – Alexander. (2023b, May 27). “Body Count” And Sexual Double Standards—Date Psychology. https://datepsychology.com/body-count-and-sexual-double-standards/
10 – Alexander. (2024b, November 30). Frustrated Mating, Fear of Extrapair Defection, and Low Sexual Risk-Taking Predict Negative Attitudes Toward Female Promiscuity—Date Psychology. https://datepsychology.com/frustrated-mating-fear-of-extrapair-defection-and-low-sexual-risk-taking-predict-negative-attitudes-toward-female-promiscuity/
11 – Destiny (Director). (2022, September 4). Destiny Gets HEATED w/ Girls And Guests On Fresh N Fit ft. SNEAKO [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=xO5AB1gCnRw
12 – CSP Global. (2020, July 10). The Evolution of American Family Structure. CSP Global. https://online.csp.edu/resources/article/the-evolution-of-american-family-structure/
13 - Goldin, C., & Katz, L. F. (2000). The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women’s Career and Marriage Decisions (Working Paper 7527). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w7527
14 – Foucault, M. (1990). The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Reissue edition). Vintage.
15 – Michel, F. (2020). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. PENGUIN.
16 – Stein, R., & Swan, A. B. (2019). Evaluating the validity of Myers-Briggs Type Indicator theory: A teaching tool and window into intuitive psychology. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 13(2), e12434. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12434
17 – Ep. 23—Awakening from the Meaning Crisis—Romanticism—Meaning Crisis Collection. (n.d.). Retrieved December 15, 2024, from https://www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-23-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-romanticism/
18 – Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from Freedom. Farrar & Rinehart, inc.
19 – Dictionary.com | Meanings & Definitions of English Words. (2024, December 13). Dictionary.com. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/idolatry
20 – Federici, S. (2018). Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (1st edition). Between the Lines.
21 – Vervaeke, J., Mastropietro, C., & Miscevic, F. (2017). Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis (Hardback ed. edition). Open Book Publishers.
22 – Botto, M., & Gottzén, L. (2024). Swallowing and spitting out the red pill: Young men, vulnerability, and radicalization pathways in the manosphere. Journal of Gender Studies, 33(5), 596–608. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2023.2260318
23 – Alexander. (2023a, March 16). The Emotional Epistemology of the Red Pill—Date Psychology. https://datepsychology.com/the-emotional-epistemology-of-the-red-pill/