A retired and repentant Master of Game provides a list of what he believes Christian men should know about women:
Assume that you will never change her
Who can find a virtuous wife? For her worth is far above rubies. The heart of her husband safely trusts her; So he will have no lack of gain. She does him good and not evil all the days of her life. —Proverbs 31:10-12
It’s a fatal temptation for a man to look at a woman, especially a young one, as a tabula rasa, a blank slate for him to mold into his perfect, traditional wife who bakes cookies and croissants all day. Such a man sees all her flaws and thinks that, with time, he can eradicate them one by one as if using a laser beam. Or he sees her annoying personality traits and thinks that he can dampen them with a sort of punishment-reward stratagem. This is delusion. Who she is is who she is, and if she does change, it will be entirely dependent on her own will and its cooperation with God to serve the good. Any immediate change you do see in her, without much in the way of effort, should be viewed with suspicion.
Do you know how hard it is to change a single behavior, personality trait, or quirk? For example, I have the bad habit of taking the Lord’s name in vain by saying the word “Jeez” as an exclamation. For a couple of months, I have tried mightily to stop using this term, but I have not yet been successful. I have a bad habit of eating past 8pm. I’m grumpy in the mornings. I’m overly sensitive to noise and odors. I prefer socializing only in the evening. I have innumerable preferences that a potential wife may not like and will try to change, but chances are she will fail until I’m enlightened by God to work harder at correction not for my sake but for the sake of the marriage.
Through God’s grace, I’ve been able to step away from sinful behaviors, but the little things that are entrenched into my personality, and which do not pose an immediate risk to my salvation, have remained. This is also the case with women. Do not assume you will change her. Do not assume you can even get her to grow her hair an inch longer than it already is. Do not assume she will change at all. Of course a woman will do many things to please her man, such as to lose a few pounds or dress differently, and she may be motivated to improve for you in a way that she didn’t while single, but don’t expect immediate, permanent change.
Women are capable of deceiving men
An excellent wife is the crown of her husband, But she who causes shame is like rottenness in his bones.
—Proverbs 12:4The more secular a woman is, the more likely she will set out to deceive a man without ever believing she is being deceptive. How this plays out is that everything will seem to be going well with her while in a romantic relationship, and then one day you are blindsided by her shocking behavior. I wrote books on women, thought I knew them better than myself, but was still badly deceived by them, because as a man, we are not given natural tools to spot every female deception under the sun. There are thousands—perhaps millions of men—who came home one day and stumbled upon a horrible discovery that changed their lives forever. In heartache, they concluded that they never really knew their significant other at all.
It’s possible for a woman to pretend to be someone she is not, sometimes for many years and certainly for the short amount of time needed to put forth a favorable impression and cement a man’s affections during courtship. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Depending on how skilled she is, the lie may be something as minor as a political opinion she’s hiding to not displease you or as serious as living an entirely different lifestyle behind your back. The man who is lusting after a woman will not be able to see through the deception, but a chaste man whose eyes and ears are not tainted by lust should be able to see through any false façade by picking up on inconsistencies in behavior while continually self-checking whether she is “too good to be true.”
At the risk of getting philosophical, I believe that women themselves don’t know when they’re being deceptive or not. Their behavior is subconsciously driven to maximize the rewards received from a man with whom they want to be in a relationship. On the other hand, it is unlikely that a woman is consciously deceiving you if she is open about confessing all her flaws and problems.
Read the whole thing. Roosh definitely knows what he’s talking about, and it well behooves the less experienced man to listen to what he has to say on the subject. Ironically, it’s often the men who are least experienced and least successful with women who are most certain that they understand everything they need to know about the opposite sex.
This is not, in fact, true. The truth is that women are every bit as fallen, every bit as inclined toward evil, as men. It’s only that the way in which their fallen nature expresses itself is different in many ways than the way the fallen nature of man does that oftentimes leads men – even good Christian men – to believe that women are morally superior to men.
Number (9), in particular, is useful.