Don't be a bully

I was having a snack in the break room at work this week when my friend, Frank, sat at my table. He had a worried look on his face, so I asked him what was up. He proceeded to tell me a story about a girl he’s known since high school, Yvette. (I should note here that while this is a true story, all identifying information has been changed.) Frank was worried about her because even though she’s been married for more than 20 years, he saw her profile on a dating website. 

“Are you sure it was her?” I asked. He was. He said he had lunch with her a few days ago and she admitted it. She said that she no longer had any feelings for her husband, Jim, and hadn’t for quite some time. But she was determined to stay married to him, in part because of her religious upbringing.  She also thought it was important for her kids to have two parents at home, at least until the youngest graduated from high school, and that was a few years away.

Yvette told Frank that she’d been sleeping on the couch for the last five years. She didn’t want to blow up her marriage but she felt the need to be touched, and was looking for someone with whom she could have a discreet affair. 

Sensing the opportunity for a Red Pill lesson, I asked Frank to tell me about the husband. He took out his phone and pulled up Jim’s Facebook profile. The picture was worse than I expected. I saw a morbidly obese man, wearing a casual short-sleeve shirt and blue jeans. The shirt was a size too small, the buttons obviously straining to hold it closed, and his belly hung several inches over his belt. His hair looked like he had tried to cut it himself.  He had thick brushy hair growing out of his ears. 

My red-pill savvy readers have probably already jumped to the same conclusion that I did. “I bet he’s always trying to please his wife, let’s her run everything, and does whatever she says.” Frank quickly disabused me of that notion. “No, he’s quite the opposite. Everything has to be done exactly his way. When it’s not, he blows up. When they go out, if she makes eye contact with a man he accuses her of wanting to have sex with him. She has a very successful career and makes more money than he does, but he’s always telling her that she’s stupid and can’t do anything right.”

I had to mull this over for a while. The picture looked like an average Beta chump. But he didn’t exhibit the puppy-dog people-pleasing Beta behavior profile. Was this a case of excess Alpha, proving Athol’s point about needing a balance of Alpha and Beta for a successful long-term relationship?

But no, it’s not Alpha to seriously try to tear someone else down.  Jim is, as I had guessed from the picture, low Beta.  But rather than being the meek people-pleaser, Jim had taken the opposite tack: he’s a bully. 

At first glance, a bully may appear to have some Alpha traits. But what he actually has are badly overblown caricatures of Alpha traits. And while a true Alpha comes from a place of supreme inner confidence, the bully is the opposite.  The bully is motivated primarily by fear, and a complete lack of confidence.

Consider Jim’s behavior when he takes Yvette out in public. If she smiles at the waiter and engages in friendly conversation, Jim gets angry. He accuses her of wanting to have sex with the waiter.  This, my friends, is not the behavior of an Alpha male. A real Alpha male would just smile, knowing that the waiter was admiring the beauty of his woman, and confident that the waiter was not an actual threat.

And of course, an Alpha male would not allow himself to become morbidly obese. He’d hit the gym, find a good hair stylist, and get his ears waxed. He would either enjoy the fruits of his high-earning wife’s labor, or he’d improve himself until he could out-earn her. But a real Alpha would never belittle her accomplishments in an attempt to feel better about himself.

I imagine that twenty years ago, Jim might have been more Alpha. He did, after all, manage to marry a woman who bore him children and was apparently faithful for many years. But somewhere along the way, he quit. He let his health and his appearance deteriorate, he gave up on advancing his career. He either lost, or never had, those good Beta traits that build comfort and trust in a long-term relationship. And he certainly lost whatever  Alpha traits attracted his wife in the first place. 

Don’t be that guy. Don’t be a bully.