You don’t have to believe that being unhappy makes you against yourself (unhappy)

There’s a recurring theme in at least three different dating advice-adjacent books I’ve read that it helps with romance to have something going on in your life that isn’t about your current or potential partner. Something you care about enough to prioritize over her.

Zan Perrion is where I get the phasing of “an adventure that isn’t her” — from The Alabaster Girl:

How’s this for an idea, my love? Imagine a man who is all the things a woman says she wants. He is funny and charming and attentive. He loves her mind. He loves her body. He wants her in his life forever. Yet he still has the untamable spirit of adventure in his heart. He speaks his truth. He compromises never. There is no discrepancy between his immense passion for her and his immense passion for life.

This is the “real man” that women seek, a combination of all the desirable qualities of the nice guy and all the desirable qualities of the bad boy. The nice guy is attentive but boring. He is focused only on her. He gives and gives. The bad boy is inattentive but exciting. He is focused only on himself. He takes and takes. The real man is attentive and exciting. He is focused on the great adventure that is his life and can’t wait to include her. He shares and shares.

A woman doesn’t want to be the adventure, she wants to be taken on an adventure. She wants to be caught up in something greater than herself. She wants a man who has a purpose in his life, a purpose that isn’t her.

Mark Manson alludes to this in the opening stories of Models. As he summarizes the moral of the first story:

Ryan’s relationship with Jane failed because after he graduated from college, he lost and never regained the great aspects of his identity that made him so attractive to Jane in the first place — his social network, his joy and spontaneity, the cool group activities he planned. As he got cornered into a job he hated and lost his social circle, he began leaning on her more and more to define his identity for himself. He invested less in himself and more and more in her.

Meanwhile, Jane flourished after graduation, quickly falling into a job she was passionate about and good at. She made new friends and began traveling and having new experiences on her own. As Jane became less invested in Ryan for her identity, Ryan became more invested in Jane, growing needier and needier. Eventually, the dynamic of investment shifted and the relationship toppled over.

In the fifth chapter of Entering the Heart of the Sun and Moon ("Reflections of the Sun and Moon," on page 163 in the second print edition), Ngak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Dechen write that:

The primary focus of the Nyi-da Mélong is those who are free to experience romance as a dramatic dialogue with daring and delight. It is necessary therefore, to delineate factors which predicate against the open dimension of romance.

Romance arises most powerfully in a spatial context. Firstly, an individual needs to be content to live alone — free of the neediness which would drive relationship to be sought out on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis. There needs to be the capacity to enjoy life – just as it is, outside relationship. Ther needs to be openness to other human beings with regard to the enormous potential diversity which presents itself. If there is too narrow a view of compatibility, individuals will limit themselves in a more peculiar way than they might imagine.

(Bolding mine.)

I sense a few different points to unpick here, but the one I really care about today is neediness.

Models defines a guy as needy if, roughly speaking, he “invests” more in a girl than she “invests” in him. “Investing” means “sacrificing/altering one’s own thoughts, feelings, and motivations for someone else.”

I find this definition tedious and frustrating to the point of uselessness. It’s tedious and frustrating because look, we live in a society, right? None of us has thoughts that are objectively and authentically "our own." None of us invented the language we speak. None of us invented the society and culture and customs we live by. It’s obvious how clearly those things structure our thoughts — one could even say they alter our thoughts, except it’s clear that it makes no goddamn sense to imagine "what 'I' would think if I weren't shaped by those things," because there is no solid permanent separable continuous and defined "I" separate from the context in which "I" arise. Am "I" altering my "thoughts, feelings, and motivations" for other people by writing and speaking in English? Am I doing so more than they are? It seems like a meaningless question.

Okay, so that question’s meaningless, but what about everyday variations? If I see a girl I think is cute and I want to talk to her but decide against it — does that mean I’m “investing” in her more than she “invests” in me? I’m sacrificing my wanting for her. Is it “more” than she is sacrificing her wanting for me?

The more interesting question is, how am I sacrificing or altering my thoughts, feelings, and motivations in this moment? For this girl, this guy, or that group or context.

Fuck Mark's stupid bad definition. I don’t like it. It hurts my feelings. It’s got heavy metals in it. Probably some Platonism, too. Platonism is bad for you, in case you didn’t get the memo.

Instead, let me put on my Option Method hat for a minute here. An Option view might be: If a guy wants to find his girl, that’s perfectly fine. There’s never anything wrong with wanting. Your wanting is perfectly good for you. You are not and cannot be against yourself; you can only believe you’re against yourself, which is believing in unhappiness. Unhappiness doesn’t exist but can be experienced inasmuch as we believe in it. That’s the Option view, anyway.

In Option terms, needing is about being unhappy if I don’t get it (see here). It’s about believing I’d have to be unhappy if I don’t get what I want. There’s nothing morally wrong with needing. It just happens to be poor motivation. Many of us use unhappiness to motivate ourselves. Unhappiness doesn’t work very well as motivation, but we’re used to it, and we return to it.

The complication here is that there’s an extra layer to what this dating advice is saying. It’s not saying that neediness is ineffective at motivating you to go after what you want. They could say that, because it is ineffective, but I don’t recall them doing so either in the referenced parts or at any other point in their length. Zan and NCR might agree. I’m less sure about Mark. But it’s beside the point, because what they are saying is that needing to find or be in a relationship makes you against yourself.

This is stupid. It seems true that unhappiness is unattractive. It also seems true that there are a bunch of behaviors that come out of believing that there is something that could make you unhappy which are unattractive. And yet, it's unhelpful to believe this.

Bruce DI Marsico offers a lot of definitions of unhappiness and related terms. He says that unhappiness is believing you could be against yourself. So if the common wisdom truly says that “needing to be in a relationship makes you against yourself,” we can rewrite that as:

Being unhappy if you don’t get a relationship makes you against yourself.

In other words, this is the statement that:

Something can make you unhappy, namely, being unhappy if you don’t get a relationship.

Or even more succinctly:

If I were unhappy, it would mean I was against myself.

If I feel unhappy, this sounds exactly the same as saying, "because you're unhappy you're against yourself, so you should be unhappy." You’ll never get better. You’re against yourself and therefore everything you do in the future will also be against yourself. You’ll never get what you want. You’re fucked.

I’m sure this is not what they think they are saying when they write such things. I think this might be effectively the only message they are sending. It might be the only message they are sending in the sense that if you’re happy you don’t need the message and I wouldn’t expect it to affect you — but if you’re unhappy then this is the message you will hear, and you might take it as a reason to keep being unhappy.

It does not seem like a happy or useful thing to believe that being unhappy means I’m against myself, so for today I won’t. Maybe I’ll change my mind later.

If there is anything to the original idea of neediness and not making her the adventure, I think it's this: To be happy (first) and do what you want (knowing your perfect happiness) is the best basis for finding love. If you're happy then you've already got love and you don't need to find it, but you might be even happier if you did.

This doesn't mean that being unhappy makes you against yourself. Nothing can mean that you are against yourself.