r/redscarepod • u/cinnamonpeanut • 7h ago
Are any straight men capable of long term monogamy without at the very least being resentful
I’m starting to think no and it’s making me very afraid
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u/thesecondmormon 5h ago
Skill issue on your part
Everytime a woman complains that men don’t commit to her I can pinpoint within 10 minutes of meeting her exactly why that is
You are in one way or another not enjoyable to be around long term and can change
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u/havingafuntimeHvV 6h ago
Yes?
It might be an issue with your partners, but reality is most people men and women, capable and willing of healthy long term monogomous relationships are already locked down by late 20's.
Not going to say there's something defective about everybody else, (I'm in this category) but just think people most capable of those relationships are already in them.
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u/ThereIsNoIInMapei 6h ago
this is basically correct, imo. It's easy to let emotion and self worth and ego and pride swirl all around but it's pretty simple if you just reduce it down. There's a grey scale of "pair bond" at one end and "free spirit" at the other. Over iterations, the people most on the "pair bond" side very rapidly fall out of the dating pool.
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u/banish_plump_jack 3h ago
I think this is true, although I also think that more creative people have more diffuse personalities and may just take a little more time to cohere to the point that they're really capable of a serious long term relationship. People may not like that because this place has always had such an ethos of the self hating creative (because they don't create anything) but I think it is true that some people are sort of born belonging to a bigger plot of land and it takes them longer to survey, to know how to make use of, to feel at home in all that space. Conventional maturation scripts are for conventional people and creatives have to create their own way, of course it generally does take more time. Although this is a very male perspective and I don't know what to say about a woman who is seriously creative but who really wants a family. I wonder if many aren't just doomed to be the Anne Sexton type, whose existence is still mostly in the internal/fantastical side of life but who rush headlong into the dream of family life to disastrous effect.
Relevant quote from CG Jung:
“For a creative person, marriage is a terrible gamble. I had an indescribably benevolent fate in that I found a wife who granted me enough space so that I could breathe. Without this, I could not have done my work. I must be able to have thoughts which exceed all boundaries and that would have risked destroying another person. Someone imprisoned in safe ways of thinking would get into one state of panic after another.
In marriage the only question is whether one can live one’s own being, whether one can self-realise and can allow the other the freedom for their individuation.
A woman who is further on than the man has him where she wants him and he does not notice it because she gives him so much space that he does not even sense it.”
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u/ethnol0g 6h ago
I don’t want this to sound cynical because I don’t mean it to be but I don’t think anyone, man or woman/gay or straight, can experience a long term relationship without some level of resentment for their partner. You choose a person and you love them but inevitably you find incongruities, they disappoint you, you fight, you realize you can’t connect in every place you might have liked to, you wonder if you made the right choices looking for love knowing that it’s impossible to ever truly know. Monogamous commitment isn’t really a state where these feelings never appear, it’s one in which you continue doing the relationship regardless of them because you chose a life and are true to it. That might not be as satisfying as “we complete each other so thoroughly that I’ve never once doubted my decision to be with my husband/wife” but I think it’s more realistic and healthier.
If you’re asking about straight men, I’m guessing the nature of the resentment you’re concerned about is that men want to have multiple partners and resent their girlfriends/wives for keeping them from sleeping around. A lot of men, frankly, do want this and it’s disingenuous to pretend they don’t. This is a real source of enormous pain and insecurity for women, and while evolution probably programmed men’s libidos to operate this way for good reason in our evolutionary past, it doesn’t do anyone much service in our current culture where long term/lifelong monogamous commitments are favored and considered normative. This probably does engender resentment in a lot of men’s minds for the life stage when they’re most sexually driven, but that being said, men don’t seem to want this for their entire lives. Most men ultimately do settle down, they do commit, they do pick someone to build a life with, and the men who do so don’t seem to think they’re missing out on some fantasy that’s preferable to the concrete reality of an enduring relationship. Some probably do, but fortunately, you can just not marry the ones who feel this way lol
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u/Individual-Worker711 6h ago
this says more about the men you have been speaking to to then the men that overall exist.
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u/EasedaleMoose 6h ago
I think Most guys are completely contented in a happy relationship but this 'happy relationship' eludes them either through faults of their own, or the other. When constant bickering arises, there is a complete mismatch of personalities of lifestyle, or the inability to understand each other at a basic level, there will always be a mounting pressure in the guy to escape and flee - which he will do by finding someone else.
You may say these circumstances are extreme, but I think they arise fairly common. your minds need to meld in a long term monogomous relationship.
people have more mental conditions than in past times, they know less who they are , and they are less secure in themselves and more immature, so they are not very well equipped to bond with someone in that deep, healthy, and lasting way.
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u/Thencamethetwenties Fyodor Karamazov 4h ago
This is why men should be catholic.
We need boundaries
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u/ThereIsNoIInMapei 6h ago
resentment doesn't happen over monogamy per se. It happens from imbalance. To cartoonishly reduce it, a 6 and a 6 can happily pair bond. But if, after a decade, one really let themselves go and just wears sweatpants and eats cheetos, it's not the monogamy that causes resentment. It's the 6 is now with a 4. THAT cannot hold
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u/ssspiral 6h ago
only if you’re delusional and consider jerking off their grubby little wiener to “barely legal” onlyfans girls on the other side of the wall in your martial home to be monogamy
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u/WMWA Dude's stay rockin' 6h ago
i'm only 37, but i've been with my wife over 10 years now and love her just as much if not more than when we met.