r/marriedredpill

My longest-term "guilty pleasure" read

I’m something of a cross-gender eavesdropper myself, and r/marriedredpill has long been my favorite place to lurk. Basically, this is a subreddit where men with shitty marriages (or at least, the marriages were shitty when they found MRP) go to attempt self-improvement with a red pill angle.¹ I love to go to the weekly Own Your Shit check-in thread, find a comment with a nice high number at the beginning (own your shit #36 or whatever), go into the commenter’s history & follow their journey. It’s most fun for me when it’s a novel-length read covering months of realtime marriage with lots of flashbacks.

This is a guilty pleasure, but not quite because they say a lot of things I disagree with; I feel pretty comfortable reading things I disagree with. It’s a guilty pleasure because I am genuinely not supposed to be there. Backreading MRP is about as ethical as eavesdropping on an AA meeting (another self-improvement institution which has aspects I disagree with even while I respect their members for trying). These men feel comfortable being honest (pretty honest) about their problems because of the locker room vibes; the subreddit is open so men can find it, and the side effect is that women like me end up reading it, which the actual active members are probably better off not remembering. I am going to soothe my scruples about encouraging eavesdropping on them by not linking directly to the subreddit. This is pretty full-of-shit, because you can obviously find them anyway, but nonetheless it’s what I’m doing.

In shameless clickbait fashion, here are some things I’ve noticed reading r/marriedredpill over the years—the things that surprised me, not the truer but less surprising stuff like, “damn, these men care a lot about getting laid, their wives being skinny, etc etc etc.”

Red Pill with less selection bias

The men I know seem to agree that the advice they got growing up about women & dating was less than realistic. Mothers who responded to their teenage angst about dating with “Don’t worry, it will happen for you” & fathers who didn’t say anything about it at all (many such cases). Most of them were dissatisfied enough to find red pill & pickup artist content. Pragmatically, this content was a genuine improvement on what they started out with, because it’s based on contact with reality, men trying/failing/iterating in their approaches to women, rather than on moral ideals. But just because it works (better than standard treatment) for getting laid, doesn’t mean it creates an accurate model of women.

Ignoring any moral issues, purely from a cold-eyed autist perspective, the problem with the redpill worldview is that it suffers heavily from selection bias. Women are overrepresented in the redpill model of women to the degree that they are likely to sleep with someone who uses game on them.²

r/marriedredpill is a much smaller group of men than the general redpill community, like, tautologically, and each man is dealing (mostly—we’ll get into this in the next section) with one woman, but I think it suffers less from selection bias in the model it creates of women than the redpill does in general, because these men did not get their wives by consciously using redpill ideology. It’s the closest possible case to randomly assigning women to have redpill ideas iterated on them. Also, these men are seeing a bigger swathe of their wife’s life, both in a daily-life sense and over the years, than men see of the lives of women they hook up with.

Obviously we’re not totally free from selection bias here—I’m only hearing about these women because they’re in marriages which their husbands are desperate to fix. But I think, based on zero evidence, than “women in miserable marriages” represents a broader swathe of the population than “high sociosexuality women.” And on a purely vibes level, the feel of the MRP model of woman just seems more lifelike than the general redpill model of woman. The MRP woman is, on the one hand, more anxious, less adventurous, more resentful and simply older than the general redpill model of women; on the other hand, she’s more stable and lower time-preference. Also, the MRP woman exists in a visible network of obligations, relationships, and lifestyle habits with effects on her sexuality—although women that pickup artists sleep with obviously have these things too, the pickup artist is literally less likely to be there to see these things, and thus incorporates them into his model less.

If you have a wife and a mistress, you have two problems

The naive moral intuition about affairs is that it’s more okay to cheat on your spouse if you’re miserable in your marriage. It feels more fair. But after reading r/marriedredpill, I’m beginning to think this is not a very pragmatic way of going about things.

One of the foundational pieces of MRP advice is to flirt with women you’re not married to. Since these women neither feel obligation to sleep with you—quite the contrary!—nor do they bear you resentment for years of marital misery, practicing game on them can let you improve without all that contextual weight of practicing flirting with your wife. Also, a general MRP principle is that you’ll only ever be happy with your wife if you believe you’d be happy without her, which especially means believing that you could sleep with other women if you chose to, which can only be tested by gaming them.³

The problem arises when men get better at flirting with other women faster than they get better at improving their marriage. Then they often sleep with other women. But they were already the kind of man who would end up at r/marriedredpill, & they’re sleeping with another woman because they’re still unhappy with their marriage, so they’re still the kind of dudes who pick women who make them miserable and/or engage in relationship patterns that make them miserable. Tragicomedy results.

The conventional, hilariously prudish part of me (which is to say, most of me) wishes that I could say that “If you have a wife and a mistress, you have two problems” was generally true, but I think it’s more true for men on r/marriedredpill than it is in general. I think it’s probably pretty rare for a man to both be browbeaten by his wife and able to seduce a mistress, so MRP is, while improving many marriages, also creating an unsusual amount of this unnatural/exotic situation. Ironically I still come away from MRP thinking it’s more pragmatic to have an affair if you’re not miserable, if you’re pretty good at offloading any marital misery to your spouse. Then at least the wife and the mistress will be splitting the misery between them instead of doubling it on you.

“The mental load of invisible household labor” vs Captaincy

The vibe at r/marriedredpill is pure locker room talk: slurs, general crudity, tough love. There is not a lot of feminism here. Which makes the instances where MRP ideas overlap with feminist ideas (in, of course, different language) all the more surprising. Their stance on the relationship-destroying misery of determining how to split housework is a prime example.

One way that women tend to talk about the problem here is the “mental load” thing. The thing that I find interesting about this is that, under the HR-y phrasing, what women are saying they want their men to do when they talk like this, isn’t specifically to spend more time doing housework, it’s to be responsible for the housework. They are asking their men to be more in charge. This doesn’t tend to work, for two reasons: it doesn’t sound on a surface level like asking the man to be more in charge, and also it’s just inherently weird and difficult to ask someone to be responsible for soething you’re responsible for.

The related MRP frames on the housework issue (although each of them covers a lot more than just housework) are “You’re the captain of your ship” (=what happens in your household is ultimately always your responsibility) & “Act like you’re single” (which includes getting the housework done that you would be doing if single).

One of the reasons that these frames might work better than the “invisible labor” frame is, for better or for worse, that the men aren’t hearing it from their wife, so they don’t feel delegated or deputized. They’re making a decision on their own, which is just basically more responsible than agreeing to the current responsible party’s pleading.

The other reason I think these frames work better is that they feel gendered. The feminist discourse about splitting housework tends to focus on eliminating gender roles. I think this is very unlikely to help. I think gender roles are somewhat flexible and socially constructed, but a given individual’s desire to embody a specific gender role is inflexible and unlikely to change. Responding to the changing economic and social environment with new gender roles and stereotypes that are both genuinely fair and still feel gendered, is probably always going to work better than gender abolition.

1. Initially this sentence read “Basically, this is a subreddit where men attempt to improve their shitty marriages,” but that’s not quite right. Although it’s often true in practice, especially for beginners, the MRP ideal is something like “save the man, not the marriage.”

2. This is true especially if game works better on, ahem, high sociosexuality women, but it’s true even in the imo unlikely case that game works equally well on women regardless of sociosexuality. In a model where unrestricted women and restricted women want different things, you can imagine that a “first generation of game” of just totally random moves will work better on unrestricted women than restricted, then moves that work better on unrestricted women than restricted women will take up more & more space in every successive generation of game, if that makes sense. But even in a model where restricted and unrestricted women want the same things and restricted women are just harder to meet or less appealing to sleep with or have a higher difficulty setting or something, pickup artists will spend more time with unrestricted women and thus those women will still be overrepresented in the redpill model of women.

3. Obviously I’m taking the cold-eyed autist perspective in this essay, but for honesty’s sake: the stuff I’m describing in this paragraph feels far more scary and threatening to me than general redpill misogyny.