It’s funny, whenever I write about monogamy and its efficacy (or otherwise) I get more triggered guys coming back at me than I do angry feminists when I write about how to do sex chat with Dasha who you met in that mall in Moscow.
Of course, monogamy is a sensitive issue since it is at the centre of our most important life decisions.
Your beliefs about monogamy will one way or another shape your life.
The stakes are high, people have vested interests, and no one like some smartass on the internet fucking with their point of view.
All well and good. I get it. But here’s the thing—I am not interested in entering into any sort of debate about whether or not monogamy is ‘natural’, or a ‘good thing’ or whatever.
I’m a libertarian. Which means I don’t care what you do. You can do what the hell you like. Get married at 16 if you want. Go become a mormon. I really don’t care.
I am not here to preach from some ‘anti-marriage’ platform, or to try to convert people. I have no interest in that. Why would I?
All I do is write about my own particular view of life and relationships, as I have observed it—both in my own life and in the lives of others that I know personally or come into contact with socially.
Of course, people will say, ‘Troy hasn’t even been married—he has no idea what he’s talking about,’ or ‘Troy is emotionally damaged’.
(Well, the second one is pretty much on the mark, at least.)
But it’s not like I’m living in a fucking ivory tower here, folks. I have a large circles of friends in the UK, Germany, US and beyond. I also come into contact with a ton of people—men and women—through my involvement with 12-step recovery organisations. Plus I have family—parents, three sisters, etc.
In fact, I’d be willing to bet that from the 12-step groups alone I meet a larger and wider demographic of people than most reading this.
And overall, from that big pool of people, is the message about long-term monogamy a positive one or a negative one?
I’ll leave you to guess the answer to that. But as I say, it’s kind of irrelevant since I’m not here to proselytise. On the contrary—as I’ve said repeatedly—you can do what the hell you like. What do I care? And if you don’t like where I’m coming from then that’s fine too. Don’t read my shit. We can agree to disagree.
What I am interested in is how I can live a good life—and if I help a few folks along the way who have a broadly similar worldview by sharing my thoughts then all the better. And here I will admit that I am somewhat split between the hedonistic and the spiritual.
Let me explain . . .
A Spiritual War
On the one hand, one of my major complaints with monogamy (as pushed by the new coterie of male rightists) is that, well, it all sounds a little bit fucking boring.
I first got into this particular area of the internet because I was (and am) a hedonist.
To put it crudely, I wanted to have sex with as many attractive girls as I possibly could.
Yes, you can say that’s because I’m an addict (true), and a degenerate (true), and emotionally-crippled (probably also true).
But let’s be honest with ourselves here for a moment, gentlemen: who among us doesn’t want sex with more attractive girls?
(Clue: the penis never lies).
So when the sphere morphed from discussing techniques for dating into a place where clean-living and ‘good, Christian values’ were prized above tits and ass, as you can imagine I was somewhat disenfranchised.
It wasn’t what I had signed up for.
At the same time, though, there is an element of the new puritan movement which I am in some agreement with, and it is this: the big problem our generation has is that we are secular (in the West at least). We lack spiritual ballast.
Listen, I was on the floor fucking weeping to afternoon gameshows in some shithole Earl’s Court Bed & Breakfast 16 years ago, sneaking out to the corner shop after dark to stock up on whiskey. I was holed up in that place for a week, maybe more. Didn’t eat a fucking thing. Drank whiskey 20 hours a day, watched those fucking game shows and railed against everyone who had fucked my life up . . .
Except myself, that is.
Wretched, right? And you know how I got out of that? You know how I crawled out of that fucking hole and made a life that today I am pretty damn happy to live?
I went to a 12-step meeting in the basement of a fucking church and I had a spiritual awakening.
I don’t mean I became a Christian, by the way. I’m an agnostic (at best).
But I did recognise that there was a massive black hole in the centre of my soul: a spiritual one. I recognised that filling it full of alcohol and drugs and trips to NYC and shopping and—yes—sex, wasn’t enough. I recognised that, in fact, all of that stuff had been a form of spiritual search.
That I’d been trying to fill the ‘god-shaped hole’ inside of me with stuff that wasn’t doing the job.
I needed the hard stuff. I needed to ‘find god’.
And so began what has now been nearly 17 years (!) of sitting on plastic chairs in draughty church basements drinking instant Nescafe, talking to other people who’ve fucked up their lives too—street drunks, down-and-outs, politicians, bankers and pop stars—and in doing so finding a peace, a serenity (often fleeting), an escape from the fucking madness of my brain, in communion with others.
I pray to a god I don’t understand or even necessarily believe it—and it helps.
It really fucking helps.
My point in bringing up all of this is as follows: for me, monogamy and marriage are kinda beside the point. Yeah, do it if you want (although no-one who defends it has an adequate response to the ridiculously-high divorce rates we see globally, and in particular in conservative countries like Russia and the former Soviet Union).
Or don’t do it. Become a player and sleep with a different girl every week (and buy my books to help you ;))
Do what you like—but realise that neither one of these options is going to save you. Marriage won’t fill the spiritual hole you have inside of you any more than promiscuity will, for the simple reason that if you use other human beings as your higher power it’s not gonna work out well. Why? Because human beings are inherently fallible, and they are not ‘god’.
We all need to get in touch with something higher than ourselves.
Yep, that sounds like hippy bullshit. But my own experience—and that of many, many others that I’ve met on the journey—shows one thing: it works. Because believe me, the only thing that’s stopped me from ending up a suicide case in the Maudsley, biting my nails in a padded room in one of those green overalls, is that someone told me to trust in a higher power rather than a human one.
And so I did—imperfectly, and in my own, usual, shambolic way. So far it’s working very well. And for that I am truly grateful.
If you would like to hear more of my musings of monogamy then go here.
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The ironic thing about this monogamy debacle is that Troy has seemingly amassed a readership that is far more conservative than himself. And how did the renegade playboy, a self-styled sybarite and libertine, manage to do this? I suspect from his longtime presence on Return of Kings, fundamentally a right-wing site at its heart, from which he’s drawn a large bulk of his audience.
I wonder, moreover, how many readers from ROK became interested in game from their own disillusionent with women, and how modern women fall short of the conservative ideals which many men inwardly (and instinctively) espouse. This, as opposed to mere sensual self-interest.
If there be any truth to my conjecture, we might expect Troy’s book on the “swinging scene” to be the least popular, and his (excellent) treatise on “How to Be An Asshole” to be his most smashing success.
The whole scene became markedly more conservative over the last couple of years, and it accelerated in 2016.
In some ways I am a relic of the past, because the hedonistic approach that I’ve espoused in regard to game appears—on the surface at least—to be falling out of favour. However, judging by a lot of the comments and messages I get, I’m not the only one to adopt this stance.
I was always essentially apolitical, but of course everything is politicised now, and so you end up being labelled regardless. But I am not a leftist or rightist – I am essentially a libertarian. Really I just want to be left alone to do my own thing and I afford others the same courtesy.
In the end you can only be what you are. I could probably 100X my books sales if I showed up on Twitter in a MAGA hat banging on about the decline of Western civilisation, but really, who can be assed with that?
Troy.