Privilege, Entitlement and Dating

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How Entitlement Ruins Your Dating Life

The attitude that one is owed anything in a dating context is a potentially toxic one, and it ends up poisoning every aspect of your life. Believing you’re entitled to women is lovely as a fantasy, but when it meets the hobnailed boot of reality, it tends to leave men bitter and resentful. They direct their anger towards women because this is what we tend to do when we’re upset and angry: we lash out at the thing we think hurt us.

These fantasies of persecution are just that – fantasies. They’re ways of justifying failure without accepting responsibility or even involvement; you’re not getting rejected because women don’t like a guy who thinks that they should immediately fall in lust with him just because he deigned to show up, you’re getting rejected because OMG WOMMMINZ ARE CRAZY BITCHEZ who graduated from playing with Barbies to playing with real people. You’re not avoiding approaching women because you are dealing with approach anxiety – something that everybody feels – you’re striking a blow against the unjust system that allows women to be lazy and requires men to do all the work!

After a while, holding on to this belief leaves you unable to talk to women like a goddamned person. Instead, every interaction with women is seen as de facto adversarial; you’re resentful of the fact that these women are refusing to give you what you deserve and keep putting up barriers that you have to overcome. You’re no longer interacting with them on a personal level, you’re treating every conversation and meeting as a struggle for social value and frame control, trying to dominate every moment and demanding compliance.

Or you may go the other way and end up as The Nice Guy, trying to get your way by appealing to a woman’s sense of obligation; instead of looking for easy answers and trying to reduce human interaction to a flow-chart of social pressure and mind games, you try the passive-aggressive approach. You attempt to back-door your way into a woman’s heart and panties by lying to her and  pretending to be her friend, all the while trying to buy her affection, collecting “good guy” tokens by doing favors and buying her gifts in the hope that you can eventually trade them in for the hot, hot sexing that you really want.

The end result is the same: you cripple yourself emotionally. You make it next to impossible to have a “real” relationship with a woman as your equal and partner. You may achieve a certain amount of success with one-night stands and short, shallow relationships but in the end, you’re letting your belief that you are somehow owed a woman to cut yourself off from them.

Entitlement Vs. Deservedness

I’ve talked about the difference between entitlement and deservedness before, but it’s worth bringing up again: there’s a difference between believing that you deserve love, happiness, a satisfying sex life and a relationship that fulfills you emotionally and believing that you’re entitled to it.

Deservedness is a matter of self-esteem; many men of the nerdy and geeky persuasion convince themselves that they are undeserving of love because they don’t measure up in some way. They’re not as outgoing as other guys. They’re not as popular or as socially gifted. They aren’t into all the “cool” hobbies or sports. They are – in their estimation – pathetic; no woman could possibly love them because they just aren’t good enough the way other guys are. The reality of their situation doesn’t matter – despite the fact that a lot of women love geeky guys, these men can’t see it because they have built up in their heads that they are unworthy of affection. They can’t get past the idea that they have nothing to offer and there’s no way that someone could find them attractive.

It can take a lot of work to build yourself up to a place where you can actually believe that yes, you aren’t worthless and you have the same right to seek out a happy, healthy relationship as everybody else is.

But you aren’t owed one.

There’s a reason why the Declaration of Independence says that the pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right. You can and should pursue a relationship.

But you have to earn it.

You need to put the time in to get yourself to the point where you can attract the woman you want. This means putting aside the idea that you are somehow entitled to her and taking responsibility for your own actions and your own mistakes. It means that, as tempting as the “Call Me, Maybe” scenario is, you need to be willing to accept that you can’t just wait for opportunities to come to you because you’re afraid of rejection. You need to be willing to accept that getting good with women takes time and practice. You need to accept that you’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to blow approaches. You’re going to say the wrong things. You’re going to get frustrated and wonder why the fuck you’re doing this.

It can and will be rough, especially when you’re trying to overcome habits and beliefs that have been ingrained in you over a lifetime.

But when you can honestly relate to women as people rather than an antagonistic Other, when you realize that you’ve surpassed what you thought were your limitations and you can achieve so much more than you ever believed you could…

… well, it’s fucking worth it.

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