You will never ‘make’ your wife happy

Written by Rollo Tomassi on February 21, 2024. Posted in Current News

Maybe there’s a biological thing going on here that impedes me from understanding, but I can’t imagine being happy to sit by yourself night after night in your 50s and upward. A woman would not like this at all! She’d likely lose her mind!!!!!

Like all women (yes, I said all women), she doesn’t understand that happiness is a proximate outcome, not an ultimate outcome.

Women have been sold the lie that contentment should be a maintainable goal-state. It’s why so many women gulp down antidepressants like M&Ms these days.

The human condition is defined by discontent. Read this again. Discontent.

It’s essential to make a distinction from the boneheaded, Neo-Buddhist Petersonian baffle-garble that life is just an effort in managing suffering. Life is not suffering, and discontent is a good thing. Discontent is a feature, not a bug, of being human.

As the vulnerable sex, women are easily sold on the fantasy of long-term happiness and contentment as a state of being. They believe they’re entitled to “having their needs met” and deserve to “be” happy as a condition of a rewarding life.

This concept of deserved contentment forms the basis of many pleasant fictions sold to women by a Gynocentric social order. “Live your truth” and “Don’t judge me” are just a couple, but the want for sustainable security in a dangerous and chaotic world is hardcoded into women’s evolutionary firmware.

However, in a society by women, for women, the innate need for contentment is exaggerated to become a right or an entitlement to having her needs met.

FOMO (fear of missing out) and YOLO (you only live once) are extensions of this entitlement. I read these articles once or twice a year outlining the steep decline in women’s happiness.

TradCons see this as evidence of women’s feminist rejection of motherhood and irresponsible men not living up to women’s expectations. Black Pillers think women deserve their unhappiness as some comeuppance for their hubris.

But the honest answer is the misguided ideal that happiness is a state of being.

But happiness is in the doing. You cannot ‘be’ happy.

Evolutionarily, women are the vulnerable sex. As such, the fantasy of sustainable, long-term security, contentment, and happiness is so believable it becomes something all women are entitled to.

The problem is women think “happiness” is an operative state. Men instinctively understand this premise is false, even if we never articulate it. Men must become more than we are if we hope to survive and reproduce.

In the process of doing what that requires, we find the things and behaviors that cause us to feel happiness.

This is why the 50-year-old guy described above is so offensive to women. The idea (to men at least) is that he feels happiness in doing what he does while women agonize over a goal-state contentment they’ll never achieve but know it is possible if men would only cooperate.

Men’s cooperation in sustaining a happiness that can never be realized in women is the foundation of both feminism and social conservatism. Feminists and TradCons alike both agree that men owe women a better life.

And that better life means meeting her needs and sustaining the fantasy of a sustainable contentment. Because if Momma ain’t happy, God ain’t happy.

Men aren’t “simple creatures.” Most are quite complex. But simplicity is the only rationale women can muster to explain men’s happiness while they languish in their unhappiness. “Men must be dullards. Look what entertains them!”

But men find happiness in doing things. We need purpose. Problem-solving makes us feel happy. We need frontiers to explore. When women complain about the laziness and indolence of modern men, it’s primarily due to men rejecting the duty of delivering the unsustainable happiness they can’t seem to find on their own.

Solution? Men ain’t shit! They must be idiot simpletons because what makes them happy isn’t what it takes for women to be happy.

The Gift of Discontent

Discontent is a good thing. It’s what made us the apex species on the planet. You will never be content, but how you deal with it defines your character. You can be creatively discontent or destructively discontent.

Women’s psyches have trouble grasping this because they want the proximate outcome of the emotion of happiness to be the ultimate outcome.

Happiness Is Only a Proximate Goal

From an evolutionary perspective, human emotions evolved because they generally confer evolutionary benefits to us, helping to ultimately increase the likelihood of survival or reproductive capacities (see Guitar, Glass, Geher, & Suvak, 2018). Just as anxiety evolved to help motivate adaptive behaviors, happiness has also evolved to help motivate adaptive behaviors.

Look at the things that make people happy. They generally map onto outcomes that would have, on average, led to increased probabilities of survival or reproduction for our ancestors. 

Here is a short list:

• • Food
• • Sex
• • Engaging in fun times with friends
• • Success in social contexts
• • Task completion

In broad strokes, we can easily see how these kinds of outcomes not only have the capacity to lead to happiness but also have clear benefits from an evolutionary perspective. The evolutionary take on happiness, then, is essentially this: Happiness is an affective state that motivates us to engage in actions that are likely to lead to outcomes that would, on average, lead to increases in the likelihood of survival or reproduction (see Guitar et al., 2018).

In evolutionary parlance, happiness is a proximate outcome. It matters and is nice, but it is not an ultimate evolutionary outcome.

From an evolutionary perspective, ultimate outcomes pertain to outcomes that bear on increases in the likelihood of survival and reproduction. Thus, we may be thrilled to have a piece of chocolate cake on the table in front of us at a birthday party, but that momentary happiness is not an end goal in itself.

We evolved to be happy when presented with rich food offerings because our ancestors, who were motivated to find rich foods, were more likely to eat and, thus, to survive and reproduce.

Like anxiety, happiness is an affective state with the primary evolved function of motivating us to engage in behaviors that would have led to evolutionarily adaptive outcomes under ancestral conditions. Happiness is not an end goal; it is a means to an end.

— Positive Evolutionary Psychology: Darwin’s Guide to Living a Richer Life, 2019, by Glenn Geher & Nicole Wedberg

Whenever you see the latest study on happiness indexes or hear some pundit mindlessly pop off about loneliness or happiness, remember, these people are operating from the outdated presumption that happiness and contentment are sustainable, ultimate outcomes.

They are so steeped in Gynocentric thinking that questioning the dead meme of happiness-as-endgame is never an afterthought. Many widely recommended strategies for increasing happiness do not pass the best methodological acid test.

The commonly held belief of sustainable happiness is old-order 20th-century thinking. Any study or survey that uses sustainable happiness of a population as a metric is not only meaningless, but it perpetuates one of the most damning myths of the 20th century into the present.

Women aren’t rewarded with sex for solving problems for men. Men must become. Men’s burden of performance teaches us the nature and means of ‘feeling’ happiness in the doing. Women just are.

This is why ‘being’ happy and meeting their needs are entitlements. And the entitlement to happiness only amplifies women’s disappointment in men in an age of social media ego aggrandizement for women.

The idea that women deserve to be happy is funnel marketing for moralists and feminists alike. But men cannot possibly make a woman be in the sense that she believes she is entitled to and he should be bound to by masculine duty.

This disconnect is why women gaslight themselves with lies like “You are enough, girl” or “Live your truth.” Alcohol and antidepressants are the chemical solution to “being” happy. If the state of happiness is too elusive for women, booze, SSRIs, and the reaffirming commiseration of Instagram are the artificial joy ready to mask the symptoms but never cure the disease.

Women’s collective hubris simply won’t allow for the kind of insight needed to realize the fundamental nature of happiness and how chasing security and contentment slowly kills them. No man can ever meet a woman’s needs or make her ‘be’ happy.

Happy wife, happy life, is an ultimatum, not some cutesy shit you tell the groom at his wedding.

How many self-righteous TradCon marriage influencers do you see preaching shame for men who don’t make their purpose in life the sustainable happiness of their wives?

But you will never “make” your wife happy because happiness is a proximate outcome, not an ultimate outcome.

These hacks are destroying men’s lives by perpetuating the lie that a wife’s happiness should be his life’s mission.

Failing this means failing as a man, a husband, and a father.

See more here substack.com

Header image: PairedLife

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