Breaking Up With My Substack Girlfriend
Nuclear Love-Bombing
I wrote a very good autofiction essay about a girl, Trinity, but she asked me to delete it. So I deleted it.
The essay was about where we met and when. It included sexual details, what she looks like, her IQ and personality traits, her history, her friends and family, places we went, things we did, things that humanize her and make her interesting, an object worthy of worship.
But her friends who would never accept this — they would get jealous and verbally assassinate her over it — so she threatened to kill herself. To manipulate me and control me. Which is understandable.
She could have been immoralized as a great Goddess on my blog forever; it was a great post. Now she is a ghost. This is very … sad to me (sad is not the word).
I had this fantasy that we could be a power couple, where I would be this insane writer like Dr. Frankenstein, and she would be my mysterious sidekick, and everyone would be jealous of her and fasinated by her. She would develop an alter-ego, like a superhero, and it would be my first public relationship. We would share our love proudly with the world, like literary swingers, open and unafraid, finally free.
It was not to be.
✨ (cute little misogyny break!)✨
I know how women operate. Every little secret you tell them, they rush to their best friend or sister or random woman on the street to spill all your beans. And then one man, one time, shares superficial details of his relationship problems to try to get help, to get advice, to do the right thing, and she says “I’m going to kill myself because you asked a 30 year old married lesbian for relationship advice.”
If I wanted someone to tell me what I can and cannot publish, I would simply get a job. Women want to destroy the one thing that I value in life, more than money, more than love, more than existence: my freedom.
They don’t love me. They love the idea of conquering, domesticating, and longhousing me. Killing my passion, ripping it out from my heart, and placing her face in the empty bleeding hole.
From the start, I knew this wasn’t going to end well. She already loved me and hated me before we had even met. I imagine how painful it will be when it doesn’t work out. I expect her to ditch me at the last second, sparing herself the embarrassment of trying.
I paid $445 in parking fees to be with this woman. Worth it.
🌟✨ (kawaii misogyny break)✨ 🌟
Since women do not have the ability to threaten men with physical violence, they terrorize men with the threat of physical castration (direct humiliation) or ideological castration (moralism).
All women possess sadism in one of two forms:
Explicit: how “conservative” women express their sadism, with Halloween decorations, gossip, bullying, and horror stories.
Passive-aggressive: how “liberal” (woke) women express their sadism, with pronouns, nagging, body positivity, and protesting.
The most sadisitic women combine both: a love of wokeness with a love of Halloween and horror movies. Yes, I am talking about the dreaded goth chicks. I hate goth chicks.
Finding a woman without sadism is nearly impossible. While male sadism is policed (you can call the cops on a man for raising his voice), female sadism is encouraged. I am part of the problem, since I support toxic feminism. This is my karma for bullying incels.
It’s 3:47am
It’s Tuesday morning, technically, and in 51 hours I need to be up for a doctor’s appointment. Predictably, I fucked up my sleep schedule, again. This is despite not using any technology after midnight, trying to do everything right. It’s a consequence of stress, and the anticipation of failure.
I knew things would end badly, so they did. It could have worked out if I had no emotions.
I want to drive away, but my phone is on 4%, and I don’t know where I parked my car.
I didn’t want to read the book by the Thai author with a tattoo of a banana peel on his arm. I said at least five times I didn’t want to read this book. I am afraid of being driven into a rage by post-ironic demoralization porn sold as “comedy.”
It’s all about a “narrow shouldered man” who is a male feminist, who never ceases to be surprised when his moral superiority fails to guarantee him sex, while all the assholes get whatever they want. I dissociate. I hate this.
I hate the victim-protagonist, the anti-hero, the cruelty of feminine judgment without any positive message, without heroism, without redemption. It’s like watching someone fall down a flight of stairs. I hate any story about incels because I can identify elements of insecurity that I share. What if some of my problems suddenly worsened, leaving me crippled and unable to ever find love?
It’s one thing for me to be humiliated by a woman — that I can handle. It’s a familiar attempt; the teasing, prodding, testing, insulting my manhood, questioning my value. I can handle it — I put up my emotional defensive walls, my anger, and I fire back. I can win that fight. But empathy escapes me. All I have is a hammer.
The whole time, I have an impending sense of doom. I can’t get away with this. Karma awaits me. Relationships which form quickly blow up just as quickly. This is going to end badly.
it’s 4:17am.
I have never wanted to have sex with a woman; I have only ever wanted love and attention, and receiving sex is the equivalent of receiving a gold star from my third grade teacher. The sticker itself is useless, but somehow I never advanced emotionally past third grade and these material symbols are the only way I can feel loved.
I don’t desire physical sex. I only value sex as a symbol of trust and intimacy and surrender. I want a woman to give me everything. I don’t really want children all that much (although I would do my best if they appeared); I just want a woman to love me so irrationally and completely that she wants to get pregnant from me, so that she can bring more of me into the world.
I don’t want physical pleasure — that is immaterial. All I want to know is that I am worthy for her; that she trusts me; that she loves me. But there’s always a better guy, a more serious guy, a richer, more emotionally stable, friendlier, more sociable guy. A guy that her friends approve of. A guy her family would like. I should have just stuck around and committed to being monogamous. I don’t know. I don’t know her anymore.
This need for approval was made all the more existential because of the fact that, despite some intermittent sex, I hadn’t had a real emotional connection with an intelligent woman in at least seven months. I was desperate to try anything.
But the incel comedy book scared me. It reminded me of how little control I have; how instant love can turn into instant fear. I had to protect myself; I had to withdraw.
it’s 5:09am.
I spent an hour scrolling Twitter because I’m too exhausted to write this.
Sometimes I’m just cranky and controlling and childish, and when I don’t get my way, I fold my arms and huff and puff. I didn’t want to read the stupid book. So I acted like a bitch, and I destroyed the night. Finally I gave some speech about physical intimacy.
It’s dark and I’m tired and I’m afraid to give up without a fight.
My role as a man is to engage in a performance of strength and persistence. I want to force myself on her, until she finally relents and thanks me for never giving up, for pushing through her barriers, because I proved that I am strong and I love her and I don’t fear anything, not even rejection.
Maybe I smell bad, or I’m bloated, or tired and frazzled from arguing and revealing insecurities. Maybe I have legitimately gone too far. I stare at her. I’m tired of playing the part of the villain, the rapist, the bad guy, to save her from indignity. I don’t want to rape anyone. I just want to be good enough. I just want to be accepted.
I give up, and it’s over, I failed.
I loved Trinity in the most naive way. I loved her because she is all that I had in that moment, because I can really only focus on one thing at a time, and I always go 100% into everything I do, whether it’s an essay or a relationship. I loved her because I was scared to be without her. I played a game of chicken to see who falls deeper in love; that’s the one who loses. The winner keeps their head. I lost.
At first, every time I thought of her name in my head, I accidentally substituted the name of my ex-girlfriend, and I had to correct myself. I’m sorry, I know that’s terrible for everyone involved: we all come out looking bad and embarrassed. It’s not that I need my ex back specifically; that’s impossible, she’s happy without me. I just can’t get over the moral failure, the failure of manhood, how I lost the love, or how it never existed. Everything was jumbled together.
Is it a mark of sociopathy, narcissism, or both that I mix up all the girls I love together into a single meta-entity? Is that a lack of empathy on my part? Objectification, instrumentalization, Machiavellianism, dark triad? Am I human?
But now I know her name: Trinity.
I resolve to escape, to drive six hours on zero sleep, to leave without saying goodbye. That will show her. But I realize two things:
I have no clue where my car is parked
I am being childish and petty
I’m afraid to lose this girl, so I want to control her. That’s why I write about her, because this blog is my seat of power. All of my anger is just transmogrified fear. The fear of loss.
I really love her, or at least I am strongly attached to her, to produce this anger. I am unreasonable, irrational, lashing out so that she will prove her love to me. If I treat her badly, and she sticks by me, then that proves I can trust her. It all comes down to my inability to trust.
It’s 6:25am, and I relent. I apologize for my rudeness. I tried to leave on good terms. I lost her anyway. She didn’t want to be with a moody, insecure control-freak — no one does. I embrace this fear rather than running from it. I want to stop lashing out at the people I love.
7:35pm
People accuse me of being derivative of WBE, but that’s an understatement. I pay him money; I am his fan; I edit his stuff for free.1 He inspired me to sext and then have sex with an Asian girl for the first time, and to write about it, as an homage. I even wrote about my worst catfishing secrets, because I wanted to achieve the same perfect honesty that he practices on a daily basis. To live without any secrets… that seems like the truly liberated life. Whether you’re a Buddhist or a Christian or something else, I can’t see how you can go wrong with a good public confession.
The only risk is that it is boring, or self-indulgent, or embarrassing. We are all sick of it, by now. I get it — no one wants to hear about my penis. Duly noted.
I respect the WBE lifestyle of hedonism, although I don’t have the effort or stamina for all that. But WBE is the reason I am typing this essay.
If it wasn’t for him, I would not have persisted in double-texting an anonymous faceless substack account, not just once, or twice, but three times.
Society says that insisting yourself on women is rape, and no means no, and the worst thing you can ever do is to put a woman in an uncomfortable situation. WBE tells the opposite story: that this is all women really want — to be desired strongly, without the stigma of being a slut who is too “easy.”
My intention here isn’t to brag, or rag on myself, or inspire women to reach out and make themselves sexually available to me. The closest word I can think of to describe my motivation is punishment. I want to expose myself to actually learn my lesson from my mistakes.
It’s a trait that runs in the family, this control-freakery. The closer I am to someone, the more I fear I will lose them, the more tightly I cling, the more harshly I test them, the more rudely I demand. It’s unsustainable, and makes long-term romance impossible.
Women aren’t the problem here. Sex isn’t the problem. It’s my inability to accept limitations, boundaries, and fear.
I have no chill. I don’t want to cheat — I don’t want to have sex with other women, but I don’t know how to stop the incessant demand for control other than to split my time between different women. That’s the only way I know how to stop myself from becoming a hair-trigger grenade, ready to explode in argument over the slightest disagreement. I don’t want to cheat because it’s physically pleasureable; I just want to stop caring so pathologically and obsessing over a single person to the point of pushing them away.
On the flip side, I don’t really want to be a cuck either, but the same advantages apply. If she’s an unfaithful slut, then I can’t really invest in her emotionally, and the control-monster never comes out. I can remain normal and “chill.” It has nothing to do with the sexual fetish — I certainly don’t want to be humiliated or risk losing a lover. My experience tells me that most women would rather be cheated on than cuck their man. The former can be excused as a lecherous mistake; a symptom of too much testosterone. The latter is a conscious betrayal and inversion of everything masculine, an abandonment of the role of the man, and an insult to the dignity of the woman.
Save Point
I’m negotiating, manipulatively, because I know this is all going to crash and burn, and I want something good to be left in the wreckage, like a new healthy habit. You cannot love-nuke and have any hope for the future. It feels like a death kiss.
It’s my fault. I don’t know what happened — it was a mistake. Somehow, the word love came up. I brought it up, it was me, I said something like “everything is love,” or “people are too afraid of the word love,” or “it’s ok to love people in different kinds of ways,” and that knocked down one of the last lindy Anglo-Saxon taboos that is still held in respect in our gender-war ravaged era.
The eight step plan is supposed to go something like:
Hugging
Hand holding
Kissing
Making out
“Not sex”
Sex
“I love you”
Moving in together
Ideally, the first four steps take a few days, the next two take a few weeks, and the last two take a few months.
Each step is meant to have a video-game checkpoint, where you can save your game, go play outside for a while, and then come back to it.
This process of advancing through the steps, then pausing, gives time and distance to reflect. Is this person right for me? What do my friends think? Am I truly happy, or just desperately flailing around, grasping on to anyone who will give me the time of day?
Is this going to work out in the long-term? Do we share the same beliefs and values? Some of these things can be figured out with a 135 question quiz, which, in fact, I even wrote myself.
But this kind of autistic questionaire is never sufficient, because it reduces compatibility to an intellectual exercise, a detective’s investigation, and ignores all the subtle, intuitive, instinctual, inexplicable aspects of compatibility.
Which is worse: eating a sandwich that’s been sitting in the fridge for 10 days, or taking a vegetable that fell out of the frying pan onto the floor and putting it back in the pan? Is that an important question? I don’t know, but it’s something you will only discover by spending time together. It’s not a conflict that you can predict.
Beyond all this, a good reason to take things slow is that people cheat.
If you’ve only been on a few dates with someone, and they end up kissing someone else, it’s not the end of the world. Sad, perhaps, but not soul crushing. You were still in the experimental phase, just getting to know one another, and you weren’t exclusive, and you didn’t use AI to discover what your kids would look like, and you didn’t talk about how you would raise them together, and you certainly didn’t discuss using human growth hormone to looksmax them…
When women immediately have sex with men, it makes the whole thing too easy; it gives men too much confidence. If men aren’t forced to fight for sex, tooth and nail, they’ll take women for granted.
But this dynamic is not exclusive to sex. It is also applicable to love.
I’m driving away, and I get a call.
Pussy from a Woman Who is Evil
All of a sudden, I get a call from Aryanna, the German-Persian girl with massive knockers, who, up until this point, has been ignoring me.
Usually, while driving, I like to raw-dog it, meaning no music or podcasts. Instead, I scroll through my contacts list in my flip phone and call everyone I know. I start to feel bad about calling the slutty women in my Pokedex.
I haven’t had sex in like five months. How hard could it be to go another few weeks?
Then Aryanna, with the Teutonic-Zagrosian double GGs, returns my call after weeks of ignoring me. I tell her I’m involved with someone: but it’s kind of crazy and very sudden, and I’m not sure how it’s going to go…
Without even pausing to think, Aryanna cuts through my bullshit:
You know, that is even worse than if you just fucked.
What? I mean, we, uh…. Look, we love one another, and it’s about… mutual respect… and…
Yeah, you’re sick. Anyway, back to me…
Aryanna tells me about how she’s seeing her 39 year old boy-toy, who is 20 years older than her, this Saturday. He has a 12 year old daughter. And she has the gall to say that my innocent and chaste relationship is sick! The nerve! And then, to top it all off, she says we should cheat.
He’s coming over my place Saturday, but maybe you can come over Sunday?
When it rains, it pours.
There’s something about this “law of attraction” stuff. Women seem to have a sixth sense about social desirability. If a man is alone and desperate, they can smell that, and they stay far away. But as soon as he starts to get a little attention, they start swarming.
This is my fault for reaching out in the first place, although I didn’t think Aryanna would respond, and I definitely didn’t think that after I explained my emotional investment that she would invite me over to her place.
Aryanna appears sweet and feminine on the outside, but is one of the most man-hating, cynical, sociopathic people I know. Unfortunately, this makes her more attractive.
I jinxed myself. I thought, surely, after not getting any action for months, nothing bad will happen after I leave. I will remain a boring, chaste, fuckless Substacker who can start catching up on the 408 essays in my inbox. Specifically, I really want to read best of #econtwitter: paper summaries.
I specifically don’t want to have a long-distance relationship. I can’t handle the jealousy. It’s not even the idea that Trinity is fucking people, just the idea that she’s having fun.
I remember back in college, watching this dynamic play out:
The younger girlfriend was planning to go out, putting on her pushup bra, doing her makeup, getting ready to go drink. The older boyfriend, visiting from grad school, said, “have fun honey,” gave her a peck on the cheek, and went back to studying Latin conjugations.
No joke: the same dude came out as transgender a few years later.
Again, I don’t think that there was any fucking going on. I just find the whole idea of the woman having fun without the man to be humiliating, enraging, and emasculating. Call me a toxic narcissist, fine, whatever, I’m just not capable of having a healthy relationship.
I call up my highschool ex-girlfriend, Juliana, who is basically my sister at this point, because she is my oldest and only true female friend. It’s really hard for me to be friends with someone without having some kind of mutual conflict or suffering, and it’s hard for me to experience that with women.
Juliana and I didn’t talk for the better part of a decade, and then I re-initiated contact two years ago. I spill out the story of Aryanna, and Juliana tells me to stop worrying about it:
What you have here is women trying to manipulate you in very different ways, with very different needs. Aryanna is directly appealing to your penis, because that is how she gets validation. She knows that she is hot, and she enjoys being praised for her best asset. Getting you to cheat, and then disposing of you, fuels her power…
I can see both perspectives, because I’ve occupied both positions. ...
The solution is to stop taking these women so seriously. It’s a silly situation. Seriously, you’re going to fall in love with someone you just met? Are you crazy?
I’m not saying you should abandon Trinity. Be nice to her. Of course, it will all blow up in the end. She will find something annoying about you, it will be dumb, and it will all suddenly come crashing down. But that’s ok. That’s life.
Yes, you are using her, but she’s also using you. Maybe you need this to get over your ex; maybe she needs you to get over herself. In the end, you will both be wiser, and maybe even wise enough to actually get in a healthy relationship.
Juliana is right, because she is always right, but I also wonder if she is subconsciously engaging in intra-sexual competition and sabotaging my perfect romance. And then I wonder if I’m imagining this secret intra-sexual competition that doesn’t exist because it allows me to dismiss perfectly good advice.
In any case, I’ve got an Airbnb to go to, and an appointment early tomorrow morning, so I need to take a sleeping pill, and it’s a really good thing I don’t have wifi, or else I would be up all night curating pictures of Trinity from the Matrix to insert into this article, and…
Oh, I guess I have access to a public wifi from this house. That’s weird. Well, I am feeling pretty emotional, and maybe writing more about this will bring some catharsis. I won’t stay up too late.
CRASH OUT
Of course I did not sleep at all last night, not for a single minute, although by the time it was 7am I definitely closed my eyes for five minutes at a time and began to dissociate pleasantly. One of the most euphoric parts of insomnia is leaning your head back in a particular position on the pillow where you begin to have an out-of-body experience… Absolutely divine… this is what drugs must feel like…
Dutifully I make my appointment on time, but for some reason I sit in the parking lot for 3 minutes too long, and the nurse chides me for being late. I then have to explain every little annoying thing about my hypermobile IBS, knowing full well that this is going nowhere, but my friend keeps telling me to see a doctor, so this is for you, MR. VALENTINE.
Anyway, it’s 9am now, and I have absolutely nothing to do today except visit some people in the area, who I promised to see, one of whom is flying out only for two days. I realize now that this hellish experience gave me a runny, congested nose after four years of avoiding all illnesses, and I haven’t slept, and I always do this. Every time I need sleep the most, because I have appointments and people to meet, I just stay up all night and destroy myself.
I resolve to drive up anyway to meet my new female friend, Chris, who is a married lesbian.
Lesbian Salvation
Every time I write about lesbians, Chris gets annoyed. She tells me to not use her full name and address when I write about her, and I tell her I probably won’t write about her.
Now before you make any assumptions about these lesbians being frumpy, Chris and her wife are both classically attractive from a standard heterosexual perspective. Of course I can’t say that while they’re around, because that would be creepy, but I understand how important this sort of thing is to my male audience.
We’re sitting out on the porch, and Chris is explaining her fake job as a game designer, and I describe her game as Rick and Morty mixed with crypto e-girl party, which she finds depressing, but both of those things seem to have had a good run so maybe combining them together will appeal to people. It’s a bit too self-referential for me, but I am not most people.
I feel safe with Chris because she is a lesbian who does not hate men, somehow. This is like discovering a new gender. Maybe the 48 genders are real and I am an idiot for ever doubting Tumblr. Forgive me, Gods of woke!
When I explain my situation, there is no threat of intra-sexual competition this time, but Chris says that Juliana was right about everything. Despite being ill, and tired, and sleep deprived, this insight gives me the strength to go on, to keep this story going, which is now departing from the nuclear-action and descending into a series of second-hand reports about how I’m asking girls for advice and never coming to a conclusion.
I have been gone for less than 24 hours and Trinity is already drinking and mingling with guys who want to fuck her, and I’m in the cuck chair 1,000 miles away, and I’m supposed to just… take it? Kill him? Kill her? Kill myself? Kill my desire to possess her and allow her to fly free like a butterfly? This is why social conventions are useful. I can’t make these decisions.
Instead of making a decision, I write about her, instead of to her. What am I supposed to say? If I say “cool,” then Trinity will think we’re cool, and I will simmer and stew and seethe over this perceived power imbalance, that she’s out with men who want to fuck her, and I’m not, and maybe the only way I can equalize this is to meet Aryanna…
I have a pathological desire for honesty. And Juliana says:
Yes, I know you have a pathological desire for honesty, this is what you do to every girl, because you are very passive-aggressive. First, they tick you off in some way, but you can’t say that, because then you look like an asshole for criticizing every little thing they do. So instead you just smolder over your rage, until you turn it inward, and you start to act naughtily, like thinking about cheating.
You won’t cheat, but you’ll imagine this as a great moral dilemma, and you’ll beat your breast and tear out your hair and say, “I’M A CHEATER.” You’ll confess to your love how you’ve betrayed her in your heart, how you’re a bad man, and how she deserves better. And she will be forced to listen to this self-indulgent melodrama, and she will say, predictably, “well, I appreciate that you’re being honest with me,” but the truth is that you haven’t said anything true at all. You’ve manufactured a crisis out of thin air.
Do you think you are the only man in the world who has ever thought about extramarital boob-touching? No — you are just the only one who takes that thought, and runs to his girlfriend, and says, “LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME, I’M EVIL, I’M THE WORST, I SUCK, FORGIVE ME, PITY ME, ME ME ME!” It’s a transparent attempt at sucking up all the oxygen and getting attention. And if she calls you out on this (which she can’t), she would merely be playing into your 4D chess hands.
You would say, “yes, of course, you’re right, I’m even worse than I had imagined… I’m not just a cheater, but a NARCISSIST, an incurable disease… Here, watch this video on narcissism by Richard Grannon where he recommends strongly that you cut off all contact with narcissists and never talk to them again…”
Juliana is right. I’ve done this exact thing twice now, and it has a predictable result. The girl in question blocks me and never talks to me again. This seems like a circumlocuitous path to achieve that objective. Why not just break up with her directly?
Juliana: Well, breaking up with her would make you the bad guy. She wanted you, she was loyal to you, and you pushed her away for no good reason except to escape the paranoia of your own deranged insecurity. But by engaging in this weird ritual of self-degradation, you can get her to break up with you, freeing you from the guilt of initiation. And you can pity yourself in the aftermath, wondering where you went wrong, nursing your wounds, etc etc.
Damn. She knows me too good.
Ok Juliana, what do I do? how do I escape this eternal cycle of torment and finally become a healthy, loving, confident, beautiful soul?
Juliana: Hey I have to jump on a work call I’ll talk to you later ok?
…
STAY TUNED for the next episode:
Not sure if he’s ever used my suggestions, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s the thought that counts.
Cut down by a lot, and don’t venerate WBE (u r smarter)
this is off-putting and seems to be in poor taste :/