Summary

You are motivated to pursue women, but why exactly? What is driving your desire to be more attractive to women? Certainly there is the physical component driving you to fuck, but there's also very likely an emotional component that you may not be aware of. Unless you properly address the emotional reasons that drive your interaction with women, you may simply be chasing a symptom of the problem and not actually be working to satisfy the real reason why you pursue women.

Body

"Don't Rekindle Old Flames" was a post submitted yesterday by /u/OmLaLa where he discussed the topic of pursuing women from your past. As indicated by the title, the post directs you to not waste your time and provides the reasons why despite your recent improvements, your efforts to display yourself to your ex will not be fruitful, the answer being primarily because of how your ex perceives you.

My post flips that analysis by focusing on what may be driving your motivation to display yourself in front of your ex in the first place and, more importantly, what may be driving your behavior to pursue women in general. You may be driven to pursue women as a symptom of some other unsatisfied, unconscious need.

Consider this: (1) you are driven to pursue women because you lack a mission in your life; and / or (2) you are driven to pursue women because you seek to feel belonging, appreciation, and other forms of external validation.

Lack of Life-Mission

Most of us are searching for something. By virtue of the fact that you sought out TRP, you likely did not feel fulfilled with your life as it was. As humans are social creatures, we require a healthy amount of social belonging and group identity. Without that group identity, we are men without a country, individuals without a tribe. Social belonging can provide purpose for our lives, and purpose provides a sense of inherent value for our existence because we are contributing value to a cause.

If you don't have that sense of purpose, you may not have a strong identity with a social group. As a man, our instincts are to create our own social group, a family. So if you do not have a mission in life, if you do not feel a sense of belonging to a strong social group, then your motivation to pursue women may be more than just a man's physical desire for sex; you may be driven by an instinct to fill an emotional void by creating a social group on the most basic level: a man and a woman.

Many of you have started lifting, improving your careers, and sharpening your social skills; but is all this only for the purpose of better attracting women? Rhetorically, I ask you, if all women were to suddenly disappear, would that affect your life's mission? Unless the answer is "no," then you may be pursuing women directly as a means of indirectly satisfying a larger problem: your lack of social belonging and / or life mission.

Need for External Validation

Again, we are all social creatures. A function of that social being is the need for healthy emotional support, especially when growing up as a child. With the divorce rate being so high, there's a good chance that you are the product of divorced parents; and there's a damn good chance that you were raised by your mother.

Some of you grew up in environments without a positive male role model and with a mother who was a clinical narcissist, incapable of providing the emotional support all humans require during their developmental years. As a consequence, many men will perpetually hunger for the feeling of being loved and appreciated because they're human and they never experienced it in healthy amounts growing up.

Having grown up under a controlling parent who would swiftly punish nonconformity and would reward subservience only scarcely, these boys grow into men who are trained to be on their best behavior with women in order to receive their love and affection.

For many men, this is the foundation of much of their "beta" behavior when dealing with women. It was developed as a survival trait while growing up in emotionally abusive, single-mother households. Fast forward a decade or two, and these men are largely just repeating what they've been taught when they interact with another woman. The problem is that while their appeasement approach is a survival skill under authoritarian conditions, appeasement does not work as a sexual strategy.

Narcissistic parents are compelled to make themselves feel good by being "better" than those around them. One way of doing this is to maintain dominion and control over those around you, keep them dependent on you because you will always have a superior position over others when they need you to provide for them.

This permanently locks the roles of the people involved: children of narcissistic parents will never be taught by their parents how to be leaders or how to be self-sufficient or how to be independent because those skills will inherently weaken the narcissistic parent's position and control over the child. As such, boys who are raised by narcissistic women never see what it means to be a male in charge of a relationship and never are trained to be confident leaders. These boys only know what it means to be a peasant and are never what it means to be a king.

So legions of men, raised primarily by narcissistic women, are using the only techniques they were taught growing up to interact with other women. Naturally, those techniques don't work because the dynamic of a sexual relationship is different. Women seek leadership in a mate, but these men only know how to be accommodating and pleasing.

These men, devoid of a healthy amount of emotional support growing up, are desperate to feel loved by women because their parent, the only source of support growing up, failed to give them the adequate nurturing they required to grow into emotionally healthy adults.

These men spend so much of their time trying to prove their worth to women in order to recieve their love, affection, and appreciation. What these men don't realize is that women love men who, in fact, do not need their love.

Rhetorically, I ask you, when that instinct to rekindle an old flame surfaces, is it possible you're doing it in an attempt to prove to her that she was wrong to leave you? to demonstrate your value to her? to get her to recognize how awesome you are? ...do you even like her as a person?

Conclusion

It's possible that you chase her because you have an unsatisfied human need for feeling affection, a feeling that was not adequately provided to you growing up. It's because of this need that you are driven to pursue women in order for them to gift you that feeling of external validation. This feeling will be compounded if you do not have a strong sense of social belonging or life mission. You'll fall back on instinctually wanting to do what comes naturally to most men, creating a social bond with women; only your upbringing has made you terrible at achieving that.

I was brought to TRP after the collapse of a 5-year LTR, a relationship that ended on her terms. The information I gathered here taught me a whole new perspective, one that I had never been exposed to before. Gains were made, and like /u/OmLaLa addressed, I was motivated to display my improved self to my ex. But why? Why was that the instinct? It took a lot of time for me to realize that the reason I wanted to pursue my ex was because I wanted to feel appreciated. I wanted to be recognized for my strengths. I wanted someone to be proud of me. And her rejection of me was just another in a history of feeling valueless by other women.

This realization has changed my entire perspective on how and why I pursue women. I realize that I have been pursuing women, not because I appreciate them, but because I want them to appreciate me. With the clarity of what was driving my behavior, I then realized that there wasn't much I appreciated by about ex. Actually, I didn't even really like her as a person. So I stopped even thinking about rekindling that old flame.

The purpose of this post is to highlight the cause of the problem, not a symptom of the problem. While I wanted to have more success with women, my desire to engage with women was a symptom of my real problem: my need to belong and feel valuable.

This has changed everything for me. First, my focus has shifted toward self-fulfillment and discovering what it is I need to feel good about myself, which for me involves finding a mission or a purpose to devote myself to. Second, since I'm aware of the fact that I've been primarily pursuing women for the purpose of liking me, I'm now taking the time to consider what characteristics or qualities would I want to see in a women in order for her to contribute to my life.

Lessons

• Women should not be your focus. If your focus is directly on obtaining women, it may be a symptom of another problem, a problem that will not be resolved by chasing women.

• Focus on developing your life mission. Find a goal you wish to achieve. By focusing on developing a purpose for your life, you may directly fill an emotional void that pursuing women alone will not satisfy.

• Be aware of what motivates your behavior. You may be motivated to pursue women because you want to feel loved and appreciated. The true problem may be that you need to develop a stronger sense of self-worth. Lifting can help build a sense of self-worth, but working toward a life mission, especially a life mission within a social group, will help advance you toward that sense of validation. Realize that women can never give you what you seek until you no longer need it.