Bryan sits across from me, hands steepled under his chin with a reflective look on his face, as though he were scrolling through the decades of his life. His appearance belies his over 40 years in both the military and corporate world. Only his gray hair gives an indicator of the time he as spent on this planet. His dark eyes are serious, but friendly. He exudes an aura of easygoing trustworthiness and competence. He reaches for his coffee cup, takes a sip, and then begins his story.
What has been my experience courting and marrying an American woman? Well, here it is. I was bait-and-switched by an covert radical feminist way back in my teens and early twenties … over forty years ago. I am in my sixties now, thoroughly red-pilled and finally living an amazing life free of Western women and their drama. However, it took me decades of painful and destructive personal experience to find my way here. There was no internet, no men’s spaces, no red pill content, no warnings. Even Rollo Tomassi was still thirty years into the future. There were very few mentors around, and if you were lucky enough to get one, it was usually in business … not relationships. So, have a good laugh all mishaps you will see along the way and remember that each one came with a cost to me, but is free to you younger guys out there … if you will listen. Times may change, but women don’t. Especially Western women.
I grew up during the 60s/70s and graduated high school in 1979. My father was a narcissistic prick who, although present at home, made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with me. He focused on drinking, cheating on my mother and regaling people in bars with his fake, military stolen valor tales. I knew by age 3 that I wanted to be nothing like him. Unfortunately, knowing what you don’t want to be does not give you a clear road map as to what you should be. I tried my own things along the way. Most did not work, as you will see. It took a very long time to arrive at some workable solutions.
I was an average kid in school. Not with the popular kids, but not with the losers either. I did very well academically. I was always the youngest in my class, so I was bully-bait for each new school year until I would fight back early in the year and bloody the bully’s nose. Sometimes I won the fight, sometimes I got my butt kicked, but that would always be the only fight of the year. They would move on to easier targets.
My sophomore year in high school, I was smitten by a dark-haired beauty in my Geometry class. I’ll call her Vanessa. She, of course, would not give me the time of day. We were in the same high school social circles, so I would see her regularly over the next three years at school. She was the typical aloof beauty who was unattainable, but I would discover many years later that she had already given it up to Carlos (Mexican version of Chad) and about a half-dozen other bad boys. Even back then, she was held up as the epitome of the strong, smart, independent young woman. That should have been the first red flag.
Her “smartness” only went so far however, and I was able to worm my way into helping her with her school assignments our senior year. Yeah, I know. Mistake. Actually, two mistakes. One for being used, and the other for being friend-zoned. Nothing physical happened between us, as she was undoubtedly too busy with Carlos and bad boys #2 and #3 at the time.
I graduated high school and was accepted to West Point at age 17, where I spent the next four years in very grueling and difficult physical, academic and leadership training. Home was over 2,000 miles distant, so I only visited during Christmas vacation and a month in the summer before training. During my times back home, I would call up Vanessa and other girls I had known from high school and take them on dates. Being locked inside a military academy for months at a time as a teenager can make a guy desperate. The objective was to go on as many dates as possible during that short period.
The first year, Vanessa never responded to my calls, but then something changed. She actually accepted and we would go on some platonic dates with no physical action. That was fine with me at the time, since I was playing the field and figured I was working my way up to her. In retrospect, she was not worth working up towards. At one point, she had gained a considerable amount of weight. I was shocked but went through with the date. She lost the weight again and would remark later that my not rejecting her when she was fat endeared me too her. That, my young friends out there, is known as old-school simping. I was in peak physical condition, attending an elite institution, and had a very bright future. I did not have to settle for a fat chick. Also, the reason for this fat phase would surface later, and it had to do with Carlos.
The summer between my sophomore and junior years, I arranged to be sent to the military base in my home town for 6 weeks of field training, before heading to paratrooper school in Fort Benning. Vanessa and I dated a lot during those 6 weeks and at one point, things got hot and heavy. After we were disrobed and about to get intimate, she asked me to stop. I did. Another huge red flag. You can be sure she never asked Carlos to stop, as was proven later. This was simply a test to see how controllable I was. I passed in her eyes, but utterly failed as man. This is not to say I should have forced myself on her. That is never acceptable, but I should have walked away and never returned. Either a woman wants you, or she does not. There is no maybe. Don’t waste your time with one who does not. It is better to be alone.
During my junior year she started expressing a lot more interest in me. She made sure that I knew her father was a retired Army officer and that she knew all the ropes about the Army, including how to be a good officer’s wife and enhance my career. So, what did I do? I asked her to marry me. Huge mistake. There are no words that I can use to excuse or explain the utter stupidity of that action, so I will leave it there. She said yes. I gave her the ring before I returned to West Point for my senior year. Still no intimacy, but I was going to rectify that situation when I came home for Christmas break. It did eventually happen and looking back it was the most uninspiring and passionless intimate encounter I have ever had. I was suffering from a serious lack of female interaction during all my time locked up at West Point, so I was oblivious to it. It was however, another glaring red flag.
When I returned home for spring break, several months later, she was completely different. Passionate and horny, she couldn’t wait to rip my clothes off to be intimate. Then came those words that utterly destroyed my life for decades to come. You don’t need any protection. Cue ominous music. I’m sure almost every one of you out there know exactly where this is leading. A week after I returned to West Point, I got the phone call. I’m pregnant. I had been baby trapped.
We planned to get married a few weeks after I graduated. I was in good company. Literally hundreds of West Point graduates put on their wedding rings shortly after pinning on their lieutenant’s bars. Scores of highly fit, highly intelligent, utterly clueless young men being led away like sheep to slaughter. The elite of the nation, destroying their lives right out of the gate. Once again, no mentorship. Not a single officer on West Point staff ever said, “Now hold on son. Take your time. Let me explain a few things to you about marriage and relationships.” Not one. The closest thing to that I ever heard was one old colonel telling another, “I tell ya’ Paul if you have an ugly daughter and can’t get rid of her, just send her up here. These guys are desperate.”
We drove back home from West Point, a 2,200-mile journey, stopping along the way several times to attend the weddings or be a groomsman for some of my classmates. I enjoyed our intimacy they entire trip, oblivious to the fact that it was all just a façade. Our wedding was planned (by her mother) as the social event of the season. Her daddy poured a ton of money into it, something that was thrown in my face repeatedly afterwards. This was the first glimpse I received about what a harpy her mother was. I dismissed it as female wedding exuberance. I should have trusted my gut.
Vanessa’s pregnancy was revealed a few weeks before the wedding and her mother made a huge deal about it. Fair enough, it was a huge deal. However, she tried to sit us down and tell us exactly how we were to live our lives from that point forward, including my military assignments. I lost my temper and told her where to go, that I run my own career, and for better or worse my own family. I stood up to leave and told Vanessa to come with me. She refused, but I stormed out anyway. Another red flag. Young men, be prepared to call it off even the day of the wedding. Even if she’s pregnant. It matters not how much money has already been sunk into it or how angry everyone will be with you. You will pay anyway; it is just a matter of how much larger the bill will grow over time and how much misery you will endure along the way. Ending the marriage earlier will cut down considerably on both the size of the bill and the misery. What about the kids you say? The courts will take them away from you anyway at the whim of their mother. There is no winning option for you, only a choice between how badly you will lose.
But wait, it gets even better. Vanessa called me later crying. She let slip, “I don’t want them to take this baby away from me too.” Whoa! Wait a minute! What!? What do you mean THIS BABY TOO?!? She confessed to me that she had gotten pregnant in college, at the time she was fat. When I pressed her for details, she said it was some musician who I didn’t know. However, my money was on Carlos. Her good Catholic mother had forced her to have an abortion. Apparently, Carlos was not the marrying type. Yet another red flag. How many more did I need? Apparently at least a dozen more.
The day of the wedding was an over-the-top affair. Military dress uniforms, saber arches, bridal gowns, and a 500-person sit-down dinner with mariachis and open bar afterwards at the reception. This is when dozens of her family members, who I had never seen before, came out of the woodwork. Foremost among them was Uncle Juan, her mom’s younger brother and one of the biggest douchebags I’ve ever met in my entire life. The guy was extremely rude and glared at me like I was stealing his woman. More on that later. A seemingly insignificant detail was that it was almost exclusively her mother’s side of the family who attended the wedding. That was another red flag. One I should have checked for much earlier. I discovered much later that her father’s entire family was excluded from their life, something her mother intended to implement with me as well.
On our wedding night, Vanessa came out of the hotel bathroom dressed in a onesie, covered up from her neck down to her feet. I laughed and said, “Good one, now get undressed.” One hundred percent serious, she replied, “Sex is only for making children and we already have one on the way. I am not a seminal vesicle.” There was no intimacy that night, or the rest of the honeymoon. In retrospect, I should have filed for divorce the very next day. However, being both clueless and mentor-less, I decided to “man” through it and make things work. A very myopic and unrealistic approach. Not only did things never work, they grew progressively worse over time.
So, I had this drop-dead gorgeous wife … who was cold as ice. She was the hottest officer’s wife in the entire battalion. Hands down. That just added insult to injury when people would tell me how lucky I was to have such a beautiful wife. I would have settled for plain, if the woman was affectionate and intimate.
I endured a year with no sex and then began having affairs. Let me be crystal clear. This is absolutely the WRONG thing to do. It shows a lack of integrity and opens you up to a host of other problems. It is a classic, knee-jerk reaction from a young man who watched his father cheat and had zero mentorship from an older man. The right thing to have done would have been to file for divorce the day after the wedding or soon thereafter. Yeah, I would have been on the hook for 18 years of child support, but I had no assets or retirement built up yet that she could have taken from me. Also, it would have saved me six years of misery and drama from her and her mother, plus a constant financial drain. I could have been on my grind those six years without distraction. There was no way marriage with her would have ended well, so I should have ended it right then instead of pouring even more time and money into it.
What about the perfect officer’s wife? Was she at least good for my career? Quite the contrary. The only “ropes” she knew about the Army was how to shop at the PX and how to game the medical system. She was so nasty and unsociable that it had a negative effect upon my career. She picked the only other radical feminist wife in the entire officers’ wives’ group and became friends with her. Mind you, at this point, I still could not even identify a radical feminist. Over the next few years, I would receive a doctorate level education in the subject.
It slowly became clear to me that I had been Vanessa’s last choice in men, after Carlos and all the other guys had pumped and dumped her. What a kick to the balls, but it was reality. That’s what being a nice guy gets you. We spent a 3-year tour overseas, during which she frequently flew home with our son on daddy’s dime. Anytime she got bored or upset with me, she’d call him and he would fly her home for a few weeks. I became passive-aggressive towards her, cold, ignoring her, making sarcastic comments. Once again, this was NOT the way to deal things. Just something else I tried, not having an accurate roadmap of how to proceed.
When my overseas tour ended, I arranged to be stationed back at the military base in our hometown. I delusionally thought maybe that would make her happy, but it only gave her more allies. Most notably her harpy mother. However, it did accelerate things towards our inevitable divorce. Her mother, who had been all smiles and smarmy charm before our marriage (with the notable exception of the pregnancy incident), made no effort to conceal her contempt for me, even referring to me as “the trash.” At every family gathering, she would regale people with stories about all the other better men Vanessa could have had instead of getting stuck with me. When she visited our home on the military base, the first thing she would do is remove all my military awards from the wall and carry them into one of the back rooms. I kid you not. Then there was Uncle A-hole … I mean Uncle Juan. He would a enter my home at will, help himself to whatever was in the fridge, and not even acknowledge my existence. That was the final straw for me and I threw him out of the house one day. This boiled over into the next phase of Vanessa’s bitchery.
She produced a long list of demands and threatened me with divorce if I would not agree to them all. Yeah, I know. HUGE red flag. I was a captain by then and had been honor graduate at my officer advanced course the preceding year. Fearing that a divorce would derail my career, I caved in and agreed to her demands. Wrong. I should have either called her bluff or ended it right there. The most glaring red flag up to that point. Let me be clear however, the time to have either set these boundaries was long before marriage. If you are married already, trying to do it then is a losing battle with a near certainty of eventual divorce. The only real option I had at this point was to end the marriage.
One of her demands consisted of attending Catholic church every Sunday with her parents, plus Uncle A-hole and his family. Afterwards, we would all go to a local restaurant for lunch, with her daddy paying one week and me paying the next. Uncle A-hole never paid. In fact, Uncle A-hole’s entire relationship with Vanessa was weird. He would hang all over her while his wife pretended to ignore it. Pictures in the family photo album showed him doing the same when he, in his 20s, lived with Vanessa’s family when she was in junior high. It didn’t take a master psychologist to see something very twisted was going on here. I cannot prove it, but I am 95% sure that Uncle A-hole was banging Vanessa in junior high, and perhaps even while we were married.
So, I simped along for a year until I couldn’t stand it anymore, and then I went off the skids. I totally ignored her and went out drinking with my Army buddies every night. She spent most of her time at her mother’s house with our son and I spent most of it alone at our house on base when I wasn’t out drinking. “A” for intent, but “F” for execution. Not the way to go about it. Once again, a sign of how a young man who never had a mentor will act. He knows in his gut that he was a fool to give up his man card, but hasn’t a clue how to fix the situation, so he sprays testosterone all over the place.
The final straw for me came when I returned home after a 6-week deployment overseas. I walked amidst the sea of hundreds of soldiers exiting the 747 onto the tarmac. Wives, girlfriends and children rushed up embracing them all. All but me. I rode the bus back to the base alone in silence. When I walked out in the dark to my car, I found my father leaning up against it. My narcissistic, prick of a father had even managed to come greet me when my wife wouldn’t.
“She didn’t show up,” he stated, deadpan.
“No, she didn’t.”
“She’s on vacation with her mother. We told her when you were returning, but I’m pretty sure she already knew. All she said was, ‘He knows where to find me.’ You know, I think you made a big mistake marrying her. It’s your own fault though. You never should have put up with all of it for this long.”
That was the only glimmer of mentorship I ever got from my father, long after the fact. But even for a narcissistic prick, he was 100% right. I filed for divorce that week, the start of my up-close and personal education with the misandrist American family legal system. In a nutshell, they bent me over and boned me dry, without even a kiss afterwards. She got everything. Well over 75% of the assets, plus child support. Fortunately, it was not an alimony state. The judge denied my request for joint custody, stating that it was not possible for a soldier to perform the duties of a father. When I asked him if that also applied to all the single mothers in the Army, he threatened to jail me for contempt if I opened my mouth again.
Vanessa put on a bizarre performance, demanding that I pay for all her college (which took her over 10 years to complete), plus cost of living, and that she receive half of my military retirement, despite the fact that she had all but torpedoed my career. For all that, she was generously willing to knock $100 a month off the child support. During the weeks leading up to the court hearing, she had visited my commanding officer and others on the base to slander and malign me. At the hearing, she produced “data” about my life expectancy and how much money I owed her over time based upon that. This was too much even for the liberal judge. He disregarded it, except for giving her mandated child support and a chunk of my retirement that was less than half. At the very end, the judge asked me if there was anything in the property that I would like to keep. I responded that I would like to keep the camera. Vanessa’s lawyer shouted, “Objection!” The judge quashed him with, “Oh shut up. She’s already getting everything else.”
The next very long chapter was my education with the misandrist, post-divorce family legal system. Vanessa would withhold my son from me during court ordered visitation, demanding additional money. When I called the police, they would claim it was a civil matter and have nothing to do with it. However, if I dropped my son off even 5 minutes late from the visitation I did get sometimes, they declared it a criminal matter and threatened me with jail. Taking Vanessa to court simply resulted in the judge extracting “promises” from her never to do it again. Promises she never kept. After a few years I saw which way the wind was blowing and stopped pouring a ton of money into a legal system that exclusively supported the mother. I saw my son when I was able, but I was his father only in terms of financial responsibility.
On one occasion, my son was visiting me for a short period during the summer, as stipulated by the divorce decree. My ex called the authorities in my county and told them I had abducted him. The sheriff arrived at my home, but became reasonable when I showed him a certified copy of the decree proving my visitation right and several forms of identification. It could have gone a lot worse if he had been a feminist ally, or a female cop. What happened to my ex for filing a false police report? As you probably suspected, nothing at all happened to her. She just turned on the water works and was absolved from all accountability. Try that as a man.
Speaking with a psychologist friend years later, I mentioned that Vanessa and I had both been broken and misguided people at the time. He responded, “Dude, what are you talking about? Broken people cling to each other. She used you like a tool. A much as you hate to hear this, you were set up big time. She knew exactly what she was doing.” Looking back, it all appears to have been a gambit by her and her mother to acquire me as a financial support simp and then bend me to their will the way her mother had done with her father. The other guys had not taken the bait, so that left me. When that plan eventually failed, they implemented Plan B to extract as much money out of me, over as long a period of time, as possible. The lesson here young men, is that if you ever find yourself in such a position, it is better to end it sooner rather than later. The longer you wait, the more you will pay, both before and after.
Vanessa and I sniped back and forth for years until I deployed to go fight in the gulf. There, I wrote her a letter before I crossed the Iraqi border into combat, unilaterally ending our feud. A lot of the soldiers did stuff like that, tying up loose ends because they didn’t know if they would live to see the next day. Our relationship calmed after that to an icy chill, and we stopped trying to make each other’s lives miserable. She lived with her parents the entire 13 years I paid child support, while my son lived in an alcove off their garage where they had kept the washer and dryer. She used the money to buy herself a house a few months before my son graduated high school and he moved across the state to live in the same city I did. I guess both she and him had been expecting me to foot all his bills after child support ended, while he spent 10 years pursuing a semi-worthless bachelor’s degree (just like his mother), but I refused. That caused some friction, but legally I wasn’t on the hook anymore. However, they found another way to make me pay.
Having a child with a radical feminist is the gift that keeps on giving. She had turned our son into a soy-boy, radical feminist ally who married an even bigger feminist bitch than his mother. A real intellectual activist with two masters and a PhD in women’s studies, plus student debt in excess of 100K and no job. One day, the two of them decided it would be a great idea to falsely accuse me of a crime against a woman … since I was, you know, old, white and male … so I deserved to be in prison anyway. It didn’t work. The charges were eventually dismissed, but I was held by the police for a while, had to pay a ton of money for a lawyer, and had my name smeared pretty badly. The authorities made no effort to correct any of this after the fact, nor was the woman who made the false accusations held accountable. Just business as usual for the privileged white male. Lesson learned? Don’t ever be alone with a woman anywhere. Her word is all that is needed to have you arrested and jailed. Moreover, be especially suspicious of a woman who makes the first moves to try to get you to see her someplace alone, for whatever reason. You don’t believe people could stoop that low, or get away with it, until it happens to you.
How can you ever trust a person again who has done something like this to you, even if he is your own son? As big of a prick as my father was, I never entertained the idea of trying to have him falsely imprisoned. I cut all ties with my son and his wife. They have been out of my life for years. Now, I even wonder if he is my son at all, or if his father is some guy Vanessa was banging while I was away at West Point and then covered her tracks with the “you don’t need protection” ploy. Yeah, I know, most of you have probably thought that same thing this entire story. It’s irrelevant now. The child support is all paid and cannot be recouped. A judge probably would have made me pay it anyway, even for a child that wasn’t mine. My “son” is out of my life, DNA test or not.
From what I have seen, there are feminists today who still fly under the radar to get what they want from men. However, they are pretty easy to expose. Just make comments that run contrary to their ideology and they cannot help but open their mouths to tell you how wrong you are. Phrases like, “women’s reproductive rights is nothing but a fancy term for murdering unborn babies,” or “both men and women have clearly defined and different gender roles.” When you say something like this, a feminist will have no choice but to expose her fangs or implode. I wish I had known this simple tactic earlier in life.
Other red flags? One was her telling me while we were dating that, “There is nothing more exhilarating than a bus full of girls shouting, ‘I am woman, hear me roar.’” That should have been my exit prompt, right there. Also, get to know her family. I mean really get to know them. Present yourself as you truly are with no apologies, excuses or filters. Throw out statements about your personal values and see how they react. If they are presenting a phony façade, it will crack and expose them. This is as much about you vetting them, as it is about them vetting you.
Another big lesson here is that a man can overcome. No matter how badly you messed up by the numbers when you were younger, or how much damage others have done to you, you can overcome. Multiple times if necessary. It’s not over until you’re in the grave.
I stuck with it in the Army, first on active duty and later in the reserves, retiring as a colonel after 27 years. Vanessa died a year before she was able to collect her court-awarded portion of my retirement. I take no joy in that. While she was my enemy, I feel sad that her life was cut short. However, the irony does not escape me either, given how aggressively she fought for my retirement money during the divorce. Something she never even remotely earned.
I have a daughter from a second marriage, who I raise alone after her mother abandoned us when she was still a baby. Yeah, I know. Another mistake, but that was my final one with respect to women. Haven’t gotten near a woman since. I had learned enough to raise my daughter to be strong and capable, but with conservative and godly values instead of being a nasty, bitter feminist. I have given her a lot of love, but not put up with any disrespect. She has turned out a lot better than my son with Vanessa.
I live minimalist on a few rural acres with a well and solar power. I discovered that a man can live comfortably alone on less than 20% of what it takes when there is a woman in his life. That enabled me to cut my ties with corporate world earlier than anticipated. I raise vegetables, do carpentry work, am taking up welding, ride an ATV in the boonies with my daughter, and do a lot of writing for fun in my spare time. I drive a big 4×4 diesel truck once a week 15 miles to the nearest town for supplies and to pick up mail. I work out regularly and look at least 10 years younger than I am. My biggest expense is my internet service. My daughter is still with me, but is a big help rather than being entitled and making unreasonable demands.
So, there you have it. The ignorant phoenix can rise again from the ashes as a somewhat wise creature. Trust in God and soldier on. It can be done.
