The Opposite of Resentment

The place where no relationship can blossom, and the slow, green, way out.

What’s the opposite of love? Obviously, it’s hate. Obviously, it’s not hate but indifference. Obviously, if both are obvious, then both are wrong.

Love isn’t a passive emotion like nostalgia or serenity. It’s a motivation, alongside rage, excitement, and — of course — hate. Love is focused activation with positive intention. Hate flips the second bit: focused activation with negative intention. Indifference flips the activation bit, although for symmetry with hate we want a positively-flavored passivity in that quadrant: acceptance, yin, ease, receptivity.

The opposite of love is negative passivity — it’s resentment. The resentful are further away from love than both the indifferent and the passionately hating.

Dating discourse is fueled by resentment. Specifically — resentment of the opposite sex. The last post offered ways to escape the sex-grievance discourse through awareness: awareness of the symmetry of complaints, of the law of supply and demand, of bubbles and ratios and selection effects. But maybe you don’t care for intellectualized arguments about why you don’t actually have it worse. You feel that you have it bad enough in dating; you just want some dating advice.

Here’s my advice: if you harbor significant resentment towards the opposite sex, dating will bring you nothing but misery whether you end up single or in a relationship. You have to find a way out.

The Road to Inceldom

So far, the posts in this chapter have been bisexual, but today will focus more on male resentment of women. Either one is a big enough topic for several posts, but they’re also meaningfully different. Resentful misandry has a strong social component, a way for women to show solidarity with other women. It’s a status signal in many communities, including ones where every woman is monogamously married to a man.

On the other hand, resentful misogyny is almost always low status and the provenance of romantically unsuccessful men. It’s expressed as often in defiance of other men as in solidarity with them.

The woman in the second tweet is Ashley Matthews, aka Riley Reid. Reid’s rise from humble beginnings to become a top pornstar and producer took years of careful thought and hard work, not “abject hedonism”. But it’s not about “hedonism”: Reid represents everyone who was having sex while the OP wasn’t. Being a woman should mean that sex work makes her the lowest, least-reputable of sex-havers. Yet, being a woman, she is rewarded with more sex and love and respect over him, the most virtuous of sex non-havers.

I’ll have much more to write about incels in future posts, specifically looking at inceldom through the lens of identity-verification and intra-male status negotiation. But as a quick aside, “incel” is a funny moniker for a group whose core belief is that sex carries a moral taint and it would be better if no one did it. Monastic orders of men preaching total abstinence have been around for centuries, but I don’t think Tibetan bhikkhus call their celibacy “involuntary”.

In the incel tweets, we see the difference between resentment and mere envy. These guys don’t talk about wishing they had had a promiscuous phase. They don’t even argue that a man should be able to sleep around in his 40s if he marries a former “hedonist”, to balance the fucking ledger. Their desire is to deprive the woman, whether of her past enjoyment or of a future relationship.

“Ledger-balancing” is generally a bad mindset with which to approach dating. It invites a transactional frame that doesn’t leave room for the “unconditional love” part which people dearly desire. But, as Regan Arntz-Gray points out, it can be hard to draw the line between transactional/conditional relationships and ones that aren’t. A couple that starts “transactional” can grow to love and share in each other’s happiness. At a minimum, each partner can feel that they are getting a good deal.

Resentment doesn’t allow for that. If you resent a woman for some fundamental female privilege or the immutable fact of her sexy past, the ledger can never be balanced. No matter what she does for you, she fucked all those guys in college while you were jerking off and this injustice can never be rectified. It’s zero sum, and you’re starting from a negative million points.

Transactional relationships rely on both people feeling that they’re getting a good deal. Resentment says that if she’s getting a good deal, it’s because you’re getting screwed over. Instead, she must be deprived.

The most toxic mood in a relationship is contempt. Mocking and eye-rolling don’t help you feel better, they make the target feel worse. Contempt is resentment focused on a single person and is often born of a more general resentment.

It’s not surprising that the mood animating inceldom, resentment over sexual access, is the one most antithetical to forming relationships. This extends to all other protections or allowances that men begrudge women. I knew a former mathematician who always went on about the women promoted in academia for meritless work. An acquaintance with a permanent don’t-try-me-bro glare who complained that only women are allowed physical touch and affection among friends. My old blog attracted endless comments about everything from divorce law to lifeboats on the Titanic.

You can’t date women if any woman is a symbol of what you feel that life cheated you out of. All resentment-based discourse is just different flavors of inceldom.

Resentment of women usually travels with general misanthropy, bitterness, and regret. You can’t fake magnanimity. Letting go of resentment isn’t a special gambit in dating, it’s table stakes.

Breaking the Loop

Batman and Catwoman

Transitioning to romance through rivalry is too big a trope fit in a single TVTropes page. It works particularly well if you’re an extremely wealthy aristocratic orphan burdened by a sense of responsibility for a society you feel alienated from. If you aren’t…

The other path out of the resentment quadrant, doesn’t lend itself well to the screen. It is uneventful, consisting of a thousand small changes. It’s about letting go of judgment and relaxing into the flow of things, not about acquiring new powers. It consists of becoming more a part of all humanity and less the main character. It would make for a terribly boring movie…

Groundhog Day, 1993

I called this quadrant “receptivity”, but it’s hard to capture with a single word. It’s humble, but not self-abnegating. It’s curious, but not obsessed with finding out. It’s respectful, but in the way we respect an old tree or Jupiter. It’s non-judgmental, but not disinterested. It’s an internal shift, but it’s the opposite of solipsism. Its color is the green of nature, adaptation, harmony, and aliens.

One of the ironies of the manosphere is that it conceives of itself as the total rejection of feminism. Yet, it can’t shake off feminism’s central conceit: that men and women are fundamentally the same. They notice that women aren’t actually as good at sports as feminism proclaimed, or that more women prefer to be veterinarians than sysadmins, and congratulate themselves on “taking the red pill”.

But on a deep level, they think of women as men with tits. They imagine that women have the same goals and desires, the same frustrations. They judge men and women by the same standards.

A hot girl on campus can sleep with any guy she wants and at least 30-40% of the girls. Why isn’t she grateful? Why does she say this makes her feel conflicted, insecure, anxious? If she doesn’t indulge it must be because society rewards restraint. But look, Riley Reid is holding a baby and her husband is leaning in…

If a horny young man projects his own mind onto a woman, her behavior can only be explained by some sort of sociopathic conspiracy to punish men. They’re lining up to grant her every wish and she still says it makes her feel bad! It’s not just lack of empathy, but empathy’s opposite.

If a man mired in resentment asked me, “why isn’t the hot girl happy?”, I wouldn’t try to elicit empathy for the girl. The gap is too large, it’s easier for him to flip the sign on empathy than to cross that bridge. I would take him to the bottom of the ravine. I would say “the hot girl’s unhappiness is a total mystery, even to herself. every woman is unique and inscrutable. let us observe carefully to see if any hint might reveal itself.”

The attitude of green is appropriate for what is entirely different from yourself, what is beyond your ken and outside your control. To be cured of resentment one should learn to see women as other, as alien, not as unfairly privileged and morally-suspect men. Do you resent an octopus its fluid grace, its vibrant colors, its carefree life?

Coconut octopus

Men who spend time around octopuses in a mood of respectful curiosity learn to love them. They learn how different each octopus is, how to meet it on its own terms. The same may be true of spending time around women.

When you’re not blinded by resentment, you start seeing all the ways in which women struggle. You may notice the symmetry of suckitude, the things left out of the discourse. You may notice how many of each woman’s specific struggles could be solved by a very specific good man.

You learn the opposite of resentment.