Introduction:
Winning At Love
This book is primarily for alpha males, or “top dogs.” We’ll talk more about that later; but let’s just say that if you are a man and successful in the world of trade, business, or profession, most likely you are an alpha, or you have been trained to act like an alpha. You may be wondering how you can be so successful at your work but have failed in relationships.
It usually takes one or more significant failures before we become humble enough to think, “Maybe the failure had something to do with me.” Only when we reach that place, and are lonely and hungering for relationship, do we become ready to examine our own behavior and attitudes and become willing, albeit reluctantly, to learn some new attitudes and skills that will prepare us for a more rewarding and lasting partnership. If you haven’t failed in one or more significant relationships, this book probably isn’t for you.
Occasionally, but not often, an alpha will be fortunate enough to experience this epiphany before having burned the last board in the bridge of his current relationship. Don’t light that last fire! Rebuilding guidance is here.
The current divorce rate is 50%. For a second marriage, the divorce rate is about 66%, and it is even worse for third marriages. If you have failed in at least one marriage or significant relationship, it is important for you to know that you may have learned 70-80% of what you needed to know to make a relationship work, but that’s not enough. While the 80% you do know is right and will be useful in a partnership, you are probably as passionately invested in the 20% that doesn’t work as you are in the 80% that works. We know about this from our own former experiences. And a passionate investment in that 20% is enough to blow up a relationship.
You need a system that works, and that is not mystical or airy-fairy but a practical guidebook. If you are an alpha and living a life focused on achievement, making your way, surviving, you have three problems if you want love in your life on a continuing basis. In their book Alpha Male Syndrome, about alpha males in the business setting, Kate Ludeman and Eddie Erlandson note that many alpha males have left a litter of failed marriages. As an alpha male you may not know where love is. Second, even if you know where love is, you don’t know how to get there. Third and worse yet, if you know where it is and if you get there, you are going to mess it up, especially under stress, because your natural instincts will lead you to turn away from love. This guidebook will help you solve those three problems. If you are interested, read on.
An Invitation to Alpha Females, Betas, and Those Interested in Improving Their Coupled Relationships
This book outlines the particular problems that alpha males encounter in personal relationships. We provide information on how to identify these problems and provide specific skills to work through them to create and deepen relationships that work and feel good to be in. The skills can provide an effective framework with real staying power. The advantages of being in a good relationship outweigh the advantages of not being in a relationship or of being in a dysfunctional relationship. Research has shown that couples in good marriages are in general healthier and live longer. The next healthiest group is single women; the next is couples in dysfunctional marriages, and at the bottom of the health totem pole is the group of single men. So guys, single women have a lot more to lose by pairing up with you, especially since most of them are, in this era, financially self-sufficient. And you have a lot to gain by learning to be in a healthy partnership, including better health and longer life.
We wrote the book for men. Except for Terrence Real, no one has written books for men about being in relationship in a language they can understand. Terrence does this in his book about depression in men, I Don’t Want to Talk About It. And because people with alpha qualities typically have more trouble in relationships than people with beta qualities, we wrote specifically for alpha males. We deliberately chose the structure, tone, voice, imagery, and examples with alpha males in mind.
We don’t want to leave out alpha females and betas, however, and thus we have an invitation for you. About forty percent of females are alpha. The fastest and easiest way to identify alpha females is that they have higher than average testosterone levels and, in the absence of other mitigating circumstances (sexual abuse, trauma, etc.), easy and often quicker orgasms. They are also competitive, though will not as admit it as readily as their male counterparts; sometimes they will even deny it. We will discuss alpha traits in the next chapter. Alpha females display many of the same traits as alpha males. However, in Ludeman and Erlandson’s research (Alpha Male Syndrome, 2006, pp. 22-26), female alphas tend to utilize their alpha traits in the business world less destructively than do alpha males. Females also respond to stress by “tending and befriending,” whereas the male response to stress is “fight or flight,” (“UCLA Researchers Identify Key Biobehavioral Pattern Used by Women to Manage Stress,” May 22, 2000, www.sciencedaily.com). In Ludeman and Erlandson’s words, “…a great deal of wreckage is caused by boys behaving badly” (p.4). In our experience, the same is true in couples’ relationships. As we discuss in Chapter Four, women have a genetic advantage in their neurological wiring and developmental fostering of relationships in early life training. They have an advantage in expressing emotions and being more sensitive to and empathetic with others. However, alpha females can also be unskilled in intimate partnerships and can cause relationship problems. If you are an alpha or beta male who is involved with an alpha female, you should both read this book.
People with beta characteristics have a natural affinity for connection and for being more constructive in relationships than do alphas. But that doesn’t mean that they always have the skills or confidence necessary to create or to maintain healthy relationships. This may be especially true if they were parented by or have had adult relationships with unskilled alphas. Therefore, reading this book will be useful to them also.
If you are a reader not yet in your mid-forties, you may well be in a phase of your life cycle where career and ambition are still first priority. Or you may not yet have found a suitable partner with whom to practice these skills, either because you are single or because you are married to someone with whom it doesn’t work to practice these skills. We suggest that you practice the material presented in the book in any relationship when at all possible. This might include relationships with close friends, family members, and your partner, when useful and appropriate.
Finally, some of our early readers have been in long-term (forty-plus years) successful marriages. They saw parts of themselves in the problem descriptions and found some of the tools and skills outlined in this book helpful. So, if you are one of these and looking for ways to polish up your marriage, we invite you to read the book also.
About Exercises, Foul Language, Pronouns, and Other Problems With Reading This Book
Some of our readers love the exercises that we have included. Some of our readers think they are at best not useful and at worst stupid. If you fall into the latter category, ignore them. If you like them, use them.
We use some foul language in the book. Some of our readers believe that this is unnecessary and offensive. They suggest that we substitute something like xx!!!!!/! and leave to the imagination the specific expletive. We chose to keep the language because this book is written for alpha men and women. Especially when alpha males have strong emotions, foul language ensues. So we chose not to clean up the language as some readers requested. We invite the squeamish not to read what they see on the page, instead see xx!!!!/! and allow your imagination to fill in the blanks. Likewise, in all the places in the book where it seems as if some tough guy is talking to you on a street corner in a bad neighborhood in New York, that’s Marty’s style. Just remember that he’s an alpha brother and that you’re getting friendly advice, just dressed in street talk.
Choosing when to use the pronouns “we” and “you” has been a tricky matter. One of our readers asked whether we were writing the book from the position of combination coach and schoolmarm (as when we use “you”) or as one of the alphas who is speaking about his or her own TFA (Total Fucking Asshole) which is what we sometimes can be in relationships (as when we use “we”). The answer to the question is, yes. Sometimes we speak from our own experience and use “we.” When we find ourselves speaking (from the position of our expertise in learning to address some of our TFA behavior) to our readers who might not yet know some of these things, we use “you.” We ask you to bear with our choices.
Similarly, while the book is useful for alpha females, we have mostly used the pronoun “he” when referring to alphas. If you are an alpha female reading the book, and the material fits, please excuse our not using the awkward “he/she” pronouns.
Our species metaphors and relationship stories only cover some of the human potential. If the story or metaphor doesn’t work for you, move on. One of the later stories will.
Our working assumption is that most male and female readers of this book have reached a place where sex is a pleasure and/or comfort and that they suffer neither sexual addictions nor any sexual behavior likely to cause personal, moral, professional, legal or relationship damage. We do not focus on the usual marriage breakers such as alcohol, infidelity, or violence. We address the issue of malice, and these marriage breakers are included under our definition of malice. We define malice as the intention and/or willingness to cause a partner harm. If you suffer from problems involving these afflictions, you will need to clean them up before this book will be helpful. Terrence Real addresses these in The New Rules of Marriage (2007, pp. 103-110).
The first part of this book is not easy to read because we talk about the problems of being an alpha male. The second part, in which we tell you how to fix relationship problems, is easier reading. We have to define the problem before we can talk about fixing it. It takes courage for any of us, especially alphas, to hear about liabilities that we bring to the relationship table. So, if you just can’t read the first part, you can jump to the solutions and come back later, perhaps with some interest in understanding the basics. Or you can throw the book across the room, and go back to living your life in pain until you are ready to read it and take it in.
