
Originally Posted by
MGTOWLife
Paul Elam wrote about "why most men can't live without women" in his book "Men. Women. Relationships. Surviving the plague of modern masculinity." I know that Elam is MRA and not MGTOW. But the book has some good insights. Here's kind of a long excerpt. I've boiled down about 5 pages into a couple long paragraphs:
"That fear is the fear of losing a woman's love and approval. It is a fear so deep and so pernicious that men will go to insane lengths to preserve the illusion of love, even when being bitch-slapped with the fact that the love isn't there and never was. [...] It's been trained into us over the course of countless generations, all lessons hinging on the Romantic Chivalry narrative, one that demands men serve women mindlessly. [...] How did this level of irrational, destructive fear ever become the default setting for men? [...] The critical, formative years of existence is dominated by the female presence and the female will, which is often self-serving, unhealthy, and for boys, emotionally incestuous. Fathers, whether absent or present, contribute to the problem. Where there is no male influence, the mother often runs amok. [...] Where the father is still present, he is often the enforcer of the same sick agenda. The term, “you just wait till your father gets home,” is the young male child's first experience with proxy violence. [...] At some point, he enters the female-dominated primary education system, where his coercion into satisfying the will of women is institutionalized. [...] And there is yet another key factor that puts the icing on this misandric cake: Romantic Chivalry. For every man's entire life, he is inundated with the message of providing sacrificial, unconditional love and dedication in exchange for the appearance of approval." (p. 38-42)
Elam says that the culmination is the threat of leaving, rejection, and abandonment by a wife or girlfriend. "Her rejection was his mother's rejection, his teacher's disapproval and somewhere in his mind there unconsciously lurked a proxy agent to punish him for his failure at Romantic Chivalry. [...] When she left, she was taking his manhood with him. [...] And that is the lesson; the moral if you will. Romantic Chivalry isn't love. It's just glorified begging. It makes narcissists and children of women, and hapless pawns of men, who on close inspection do not resemble anything we've ever honored about men. It robs them of true bravery. It weakens their spines. It makes them less of everything men are supposed to be." (p. 43)