(I initially just posted this message in two men's subforums in Reddit and I was banned in both for this post, hence I post here)
Well, first of all I’m violating the first rule of being non-needy, which is trying to seek approval or by fetching opinions from others by writing this down, but this question keeps popping in my mind for several weeks now, after reading great books such as “No more Ms Nice Guy” from Robert Glover or “Attract women through honesty” from Mark Manson. Let me be clear, these are great books and I can tell you surely – and I already read many books in my life – that these were the most influential books in my personal life, in the sense that romantic relationships are one of the pillars of a person’s happiness. These books, contrary to others, actually cause me to change, not only to acquire knowledge, because they made me reflect on my own behaviour. As Freud used to say – yes, I also read Freud – the biggest source for happiness and unhappiness on a human being are other human beings. I’m also a big fan of Jordan Peterson’s lessons and podcasts related to romantic life and relationships, though I disregard all the non-sense he broadcasts on all the remaining topics he clearly doesn’t domain (some Hubris here in the sense he seems to have overconfidence on topics he doesn’t domain).
That said, what seems paramount by these great authors in the context of creating attraction in other people, particularly in women, is being non-needy. And that is simply true, and every time I applied this principle, it worked, and I’m a man with a scientific background, and as Richard Dawkins says frequently (not ipsis verbis, but you get the vibe), “Science is Great because it works”. And the reason why it works, it is not because “women are bad or immoral” or any other incel resentful driven narrative, but because by showing non-neediness, you broadcast to your surroundings that your social market value is high, and we evolved through natural selection to be attracted to people with high social value, value here being defined by the intensity and amount of people that are interested in you. Because this value is very hard to assess at first glance, we evolved to estimate that value by other means, such as small signs, words, attitude, posture, competence, and obviously the most notorious: non-neediness.
But yet a magnanimous question arose on me: what about passion? I don’t mean desire, lust or even love, because you need to know someone deeply to love someone. You don’t even have in English a verb to feel passion like in my mother tongue Portuguese (apaixonar-se; reflexive verb etymologically related to passion, not love nor lust), you resort again to the verb love (“fall in love”, though the verb “fall” is quite clear on what to expect). But lust, love and passion are not the same thing, they are three different emotional drivers of attraction.
I really don’t want to make any sort of virtue signalling related to different cultures, because as I mentioned, the great authors that actually improved my emotional and romantic life for the better were all from an Anglo-Saxon background, but all of them seem to ignore the issue of passion, and I think this derives from the fact that perhaps passion, not sex nor love, is still a taboo in Anglo-Saxon culture.
Desire or lust are driven by youth, bodily shapes and fitness, love is driven by really knowing the person and having a strong deep emotional reciprocal respectful connection, but passion is neither of them. Passion is driven by barely knowing the person and triggered by mainly two things: the facial traits and personality. Of course there must have been some sort of evolutionary pressure to make people feel passion towards other people. Schopenhauer in his “Metaphysics of Love” (though if you read the book what he really meant was passion), basically refers (at least was the vibe I got) that passion is not that honourable but just your body unconsciously telling you which mate would create with you the fittest and healthiest offspring. And though Schopenhauer was not fully aware of evolution by natural selection, that is most likely the case. Though passion and lust are different things, rarely we feel passion towards very elderly or disabled people, and another evidence for this hypothesis is that most people feel passion when they are teenagers or young adults, that is, at the peak of their hormone levels.
So, the main question now remains: How to find nowadays the right balance between non-neediness and passion? In the old days (no nostalgia intended here), it was honourable to feel passion, it has driven poets and artists to create the most iconic and beautiful master pieces, and in a society driven and commanded clearly by men, women loved when a man felt passion towards her, because not only merely lust entered in the domain of disrespect in a society wherein sex was still a taboo, but also because passion by creating emotional neediness, it gave power to women. Today passion seems anachronical, times and ideas fortunately changed, and most women are already independent and autonomous.
I’m fit, I go often to gym, I do BJJ frequently, I do powerlifting, I travel, I have a good comfortable life and a good paying job, this to say that I try to increase my value by doing what I like and without depending from validation from others, but once in a while I fall in love by one on another woman I meet and that just brings me pain and misery. Passion in German is Leidenschaft, literally “the creation of pain”. When I was a teenager I never shared my passional emotions by being afraid of rejection, now if I share them, some women get scared.
And if you think that passion seems irrelevant for long term relationships, because it erodes quickly with time, I really think it might be also an addon which contributes to long term healthy relationships. I was married more than a decade and one (obviously not the only one) issue that eroded my marriage, was her to know, that I had felt passion towards certain women in my past before her; but, despite really loving her, respecting her and having lust for her, I never felt passion towards her. I’m really not blaming women nor whining about it, I’m just trying to figure out on how can I tackle these emotions and vulnerabilities.
Shall I be brave and courageous, simply declare openly my passional emotions to a woman and face the risks of being hurt and accept those emotional barbs as a burden of a man that went into battle, or shall I walk with caution, be rational and mindful of which emotions do I share with the women I feel passion to?
