Shit.
All these years I’ve been doing it wrong.
Responding to the OP
Rejection is as important as acceptance in growing up. People out there exist who have problems with both of those things actually, problems dealing with being accepted, when they secretly despise themselves, and with being rejected, when they are secretly in love with themselves and think they’re God: in fact, “narcissism” includes both of these kinds of people, both kinds of immaturity, (for the narcissist feeds on people loving and accepting a fake image of himself that he has created-- and he created that fake image of himself because he actually hates and rejects his own true self; every time someone accepts the fake image, it makes him reject his own true self even more, which forces him to dump more libidinal investment and energy into cultivating that fake self, and then as more people once again praise and accept that image, he finds himself rejecting all the more potently, his true self, and so on and so forth ad infinitum in this torturous feedback loop that can’t really be stopped once it has become truly psychopathological, that is, fully crystallized into an independent reactive mental complex) though rejection is more often associated with toxic reactions. Every male carries within himself, in the depth of his soul, an image of “woman”,- one partially generated by his actual genetics,- by the genomic imprint left behind in him by the 100,000 women haunting his ancestral soul, the ones paired to his father’s father’s father and so on, all the way back to the primordial Garden and mythical Eve, the All-Mother,- partially invested by his own mother in the process of raising him, as Freud discovered, partially collected from things he sees in movies and books and idealized romances and in music, etc. Point is, this image of what “woman” is, is unconscious. It is his anima, as Jung famously named it. He doesn’t know he’s carrying it around, and one day he sees a woman who just happens to echo this image, to embody it however perfectly or imperfectly. He falls in love with her. But eventually, this image he has projected on her unconsciously, pathologically, will be torn away from her- either by the deflation of his own fantasy, (when she fails to live up to the image) or her rejecting him, whatever. That is necessary. A healthy person will then be able to actually re-absorb this image, now torn away from the real woman, into his own psyche once again- making it conscious for the first time. This also leaves the real woman behind, seen without the film of his projections. Most of the time the two people part ways but sometimes the guy,- now conscious of this re-absorbed anima, this image of ‘woman’ thereby re-united to his own conscious masculinity,- is able to use his new-found consciousness as a guiding symbol in the ‘existential search for the self out of abandonment’, as Lacan called it, that is, as a beacon by whose light he might come to establish a new relationship to the real woman he has gained access to, and out of that light, “actual love” can be created. Love that isn’t just feeling, instinct, coincidence. Conscious love: a kind of victory of spirit over unthinking matter. A guy like Elliot (the supreme gentleman dingus that shot up a bunch of people) was so hopelessly blind, so pathetically unconscious with regard to whatever his own image of woman was, that his inability to endure the presence of real women,- women without the superficial gauze of his projective fantasy,- was so severe that it caused him to essentially, destroy the real women, kill them until only his image, still unconscious to himself, remained. And in that black, unconscious abyss, in a total lack of self-awareness, he was consumed and died. Usually males as unequipped to deal with things as he was just end up destroying themselves in this violent confrontation between the Image and the Real, but sometimes you get what you got with him, or the Minassian dude, (the autistic incel who killed a bunch of people to start, in his own words, a beta uprising) etc. and other people have to pay the price too. There is little that society can do to help this kind of male become more equipped to deal with necessary psychological patterns of individuation and development, like the re-absorption and ‘making conscious’ of the anima, which is a quite painful process for all of us, be it initiated by a woman’s rejection or by our own self-development and introspection. It’s just a permanent liability and will never go away: there will always be a small percentage of emotionally suboptimal males that can’t deal with it. If I or anyone else could have sat down and told Elliot this entire post, if I had the chance to explain to him everything I just explained here, guess what? It wouldn’t make any difference. Zero. What I am talking about are processes of individuation. You can explain it in words until the end of time but a person actually has to experience it himself, and that requires the very emotional paucity that led to Elliot’s total failure of psychological individuation and integration in the first place, which any speech like this would be intended to curb.
or u can scratch all that and just blame hypergamy if you want
I don’t know what’s so mysterious about that anyway: women tend to select partners a little farther up than they are on the social ladder, men tend to compromise and take partners slightly lower than themselves on the social ladder. So you see how it kind of naturally balances itself out, as most things do in Nature.
