Love the part on mental illness, that's by far the biggest red flag most men miss because they're so desperate.

---

Hi Cole,

In a couple of days you’ll be twenty-one, and then legally be able to do anything that’s, well, legal. It’s a time, perhaps, to begin to think more seriously about women and marriage, not so much with the idea of getting married anytime soon – a bad idea, in my mind—but rather about what you do and don’t want in a relationship of any kind, marriage of course being the most serious, if only because of the consequences when things go wrong. I don’t have much doubt that you’ll consider such matters from your own unique perspective.

You may in fact not give a hoot about what I or anyone else has to say by way of friendly or fatherly advice. I’m this way on just about everything I do or have done, and all indications are that you’re at least as single-minded and strong willed as I’ve ever been. Still, I can’t resist putting down some of my thoughts for your benefit, things to consider that I would have given much more attention to in the past had I had the benefit of hindsight, all the “wisdom” that I’ve acquired in two marriages and several relationships and through talking to hundreds of men about sex and their marriages in my travels in Southeast Asia. Anyway, herewith some thoughts to think about.

Don’t confuse lust and love, and be suspicious of anything that marches under the banner of love, one of the more ambiguous and abused words in the English language. Probably in every language. A word, indeed, that promises so much in the beginning and yet is destined to—and does—spawn more hurt and sorrow and hate and self-recrimination that one can imagine.

Lust, of course, is that gripping state of mind when you see someone that you’d love to crawl all over with your mouth and hands and then find yourself fortunate enough to have a damn good down home fxxx or two with—or one that lasts all night long and perhaps for several days or weeks. Lust, one comes to understand, is that state of mind that with any given woman can hang on for several months, a period of time that can only be described as perilous in the extreme. It’s a roller coaster ride that cannot be controlled or stopped.

Lust is dangerous, to put it differently, because it really is true that, as the worn phrase goes, your little head is telling your big head what to do, and telling reason to fxxx off when it raises its shaky hand to be heard. When in a state of lust a person makes all kinds of foolish and costly decisions for which there can be a full lifetime of regret. So, when hearing or thinking about that vague and all-encompassing thing called love that, most of the time, and certainly early on in any relationship, is really little more than uncontrollable lust, go slow. Go real slow when it comes to making commitments, or talking about marriage and having kids.

When in this lustful state, and with any woman, never fail—not once—to wear a condom (except of course when getting what every honest man cannot do without—a blowjob). Use one even if the woman is on birth control pills and swears she faithfully takes them, because the one certainty about all women is that they cannot be trusted, and least of all when they think they’re in love, which means they’re also probably thinking about having children. Your children. They will, literally, do almost anything to bag the catch they are sure they want and cannot do without—you. Never forget—as I did at your age—that if you get a woman pregnant it’s going to mean marriage, an abortion if you’re lucky enough to persuade the woman to do it, or a couple of decades of supporting a kid you’ll only see or be with on an occasional basis.

Okay, now to other matters. Let’s assume that you wait another six or eight years to get into a serious relationship, and by this time you’ve accumulated some capital by virtue of having a good job or getting your hands on the assets that I have. Don’t—ever—let on to the woman at any stage in the relationship how much you’re worth, and if you are worth a couple of hundred thousand or more and moving toward a serious relationship, hide the money in a place the woman cannot find or know about, perhaps even consider burying it in an offshore account.

If you do get serious and get seriously talking about marriage, early on let the woman know that there will be no marriage without a prenuptial agreement. I don’t care how sweet and loving and soft and generous the woman is or appears to be, and how many declarations of undying and everlasting love she professes for you, and how much you think she would never, ever try to skin you or clean you out—get one.

Work on the premise, as smart men with experience do, that every woman, and without exception, when faced with divorce will take you for everything her attorney can get out of you. Everything! As the trite but universal truth goes: All is fair in love and war. And one might add, love till death do us part invariably turns out to be little more than words that in a divorce battle come to mean: war by any and all nasty means.

Incidentally, when you go the prenup route, don’t cheap it. Get the best attorney you can possibly afford, one who has worked with the courts and knows just how easily prenup agreements can be busted. As I noted, don’t be fooled or taken in by any woman’s crying and begging line to the effect that if you really love her there is absolutely no need for a prenup. This is the truth of the moment. It will clearly not be—as history so clearly shows for so many men—the truth of time, when a relationship goes south.

Now to a long list of things that I would find undesirable in any woman, any one of which would be reason enough for me to get rid of her sooner than later, by which I mean I’d ask her to be gone within the hour once I clearly saw what I did not like and could not tolerate for any length of time.

If she’s got any kind of a history of mental illness, whether or not treated clinically—depression, a bipolar personality, mild or severe mood swings, any of a dozen phobias—get rid of her the moment you hear about or experience any of this. You don’t want to deal with any kind of a mental basket case, even a mild one. Life is too short, and there’s too many fantastic things to experience that can’t be experienced if you’re a caretaker.

There are plenty of men about who want to nurse and care for the sick, and are more than willing to give a big shoulder to women who love to cry about their illnesses—real or imaginary. Let these men take care of the millions, tens of millions of sick women. How long does it take to find out if you’re getting into a relationship with a nut case—mild, severe, in between? Probably no more than a couple of weeks of steady dating—if you’ve got your eyes open. Often it takes no more than one small “crisis” to recognize what will be a recurrent and most unwelcome problem.

The same advice applies to a woman with a physical disability—of any sort. Let it be someone else’s problem, her problem. The minute you become aware of the physical liability, get rid of her: walk and don’t look back.

If you’ve got a lot of energy, as you do, then stay away from women who are low energy. You know, that kind of woman who lacks drive, has little or no curiosity about life, gets easily bored by just about everything, and loves to sit around and read romance novels and watch TV and eat Tom and Jerry ice cream. Get with this kind of woman and you’ll find yourself living a solitary existence.

Likewise, if you’ve got a good sexual appetite and the woman that you find with a lot of positive traits does not, then be careful, real careful, because you’ll find yourself soon looking elsewhere for satisfaction, and you’ll take out your dissatisfaction on the woman you’re with. It’s a guarantee the relationship will suffer.

There’s an ironclad law to remember about anything you encounter in a woman early on, or at any time, and it goes something like this: What you see now is what you’ll get in two weeks and twenty weeks and twenty years; and if anything changes, and it always does, it will change for the worse. Little—and not just with women—rarely changes for the better. Translated, and back to the original point: if the woman’s appetite for sex is not up to what you would like or need, you’d be a perfect fool to think that her appetite will increase with time or familiarity. It will almost certainly diminish, and then disappear.

If you find yourself attracted to a woman who declares herself a feminist at any point, seriously think of finding the door for her as quickly as possible. The only exception here is if you find yourself with what I’d call a soft feminist. She’s interested, as all fair-minded people should be, and as I’m sure you are, in equal pay and equal opportunity and equal treatment on any and all issues.

On the other hand, if there is anything more than this, where, for example, there is a show or expression of “attitude” toward men, then run from the woman, and as fast you can. She’s going to be more fxxxing trouble down the line than you can possibly imagine, and it’s a guarantee that at this point in history it’s not the kind of trouble any man of sound mind wants to deal with. Unfortunately, the West is now full of such women, and they are nothing but serious trouble, huge trouble in fact. Put differently, if you fxxx up, in their eyes, even a little, and even over something trivial, you could be looking at jail time. And I don’t mean this metaphorically.

You are now living in a time in which things like sexual harassment and a woman feeling “uncomfortable” and even her imagining that you physically or mentally abused her at the very moment that you are literally in the wilds of Borneo catching butterflies will get you arrested. If you think I’m exaggerating, then I suggest we talk at length, and I will give you a hundred first-hand stories, and not a one of them will be an exaggeration or one of my fictions. So, women who want to talk about having to live in a “paternalistic society,” and talk of “men the oppressor,” and who peddle horseshit about one in four women in universities being “sexually assaulted”—these kinds of women are literally dangerous to your mental health, your financial health, and your physically health.

My advice to anyone your age, and my age too for that matter, is: Stay the fxxx away from these women. They’re just plain toxic. In the workplace. In grocery stores where once upon a merry time it was a great place to find a pickup fxxx for the night. At parties whether they are only serving tea. And most of all don’t find yourself in any kind of a relationship with women who have been indoctrinated in women’s studies programs by man-hating women, the scum of scum in America today.

Don’t even go near these university indoctrinated women for a dick-satisfying one-night fling; they have the power, literally, to come back to you six months or a year later and formally charge you with rape, for the sole reason that one morning they missed their period and had too much to drink and remembered that the one night they screamed and scratched in ecstasy and wanted more you only gave them one instead of two kisses upon getting out of bed to leave. Anything remotely like the filing of a formal rape charge and you are fxxxed big time.

Don’t get involved with any woman who doesn’t have at least one or two of your real interests. Fishing, sports, being outdoors, whatever. There has to be some intersection of interests or you’ll be living alone, or living with someone who constantly resents your absence when you are enjoying something you have enjoyed since childhood. Why the fxxx should you give up your interests for any woman? Or anyone? And don’t forget to test her.

Don’t just take her word that she will do things with you, or that she shares one or more of your fascinations or hobbies. Get the evidence, see and feel the interest she has—or send her on her way. The general rule here is: don’t take a woman’s word about anything that really concerns your central sense of self and how you want to live.

Check out her personal habits carefully. Is she fat, or will she get fat, or does she care about her weight? If this is important to you, as it has been to me, then look at this carefully, or you will be more than a little sorry. And you will be damn sorry if you misread your own take on the matter, or where she’s at on this issue, because as the years start to pile up and she puts on weight, and you don’t like it, she will simply tell you to fxxx off and mind your own business. Or go get an attorney, and then you’ll find yourself where no man wants to find himself.

There’s always that issue of beauty, and almost all men when they use this word are thinking of how the woman looks. Does she have a pretty or attractive face, and an attractive (thin) body, and does she take care of herself—spend time but not too much time looking after her appearance? My advice is to stay away from what might be called the nines and tens, the beauty queens who love mirrors more than anything else.

Invariably, they’re going to be stuck on their specialness, and more often than not they’re going to be a less than exciting or adventuresome in an hour-long roll in the sack. (“Don’t mess up my hair, honey, I just got it done at the beauty salon this afternoon and it cost me a hundred and a half.”) More often than not they’re going to be spending your money or getting their nails all pretty and buying pricey Gucci handbags and diamond-studded high heels and hot and tight dresses and blouses meant to get other men looking at them. These kinds of women don’t change with time, or rather they only change in wanting to spend more of your money in an attempt to prevent the inevitable erosion of their faces and bodies. Their minds? It’s never an issue, and usually for the reason that there’s little there.

There is the inevitable question as to whether the pretty girl that everyone wants, and you too want, has anything in her head. Here you’re faced with a dilemma of sorts, because if you do find someone who is intellectually stimulating, someone with whom you can genuinely discuss a range of issues with and feel like you’re not with a half-cocked moron, you may discover—know right away in fact—that in the beauty arena she’s no more than a four or a five. She’s got a crooked face, she’s a bit fat or tending toward being fat, or she dresses and grooms like a Chinese peasant who has never worn shoes and has always been content to wear the same dress five days a week.

Then too you don’t want someone who wants to sit around all the time and dissect the latest liberal pap in the Nation, or loves to quote Shakespeare at breakfast, or insists on going to an opera or a small theater play every week or two, when what you really want to do is go on an over-nighter into Mexican waters when the yellowtail or yellow fin tuna are running. What I’m getting at here is that you most certainly want, as I always have wanted, someone who no one would ever dream of saying is an air head or is as dumb as paint; and yet you also don’t want someone who wants to get into an exegesis of five of Thomas Mann’s novels or the late Hemingway every time you want to drop her panties and get a good down and dirty fxxx on the living room floor while the steak is burning.

But, as I’ve already suggested, there’s the complicating issue of what you have to look at every day—and men are visual to a fault. So, you want someone who’s no worse than a seven or eight, and mostly certainly not a three or four, or maybe even a five. The tradeoffs, and given all the qualifications I’ve already made, are not easy to make, and then too it’s never easy to predict the direction of certain changes and how these will affect one’s mind and thereby the relationship, even assuming you’ll been lucky enough to line up everything to your satisfaction in the beginning.

There’s the issue of jealousy, and it seems to be something you’ve got to deal with in just about all women, and maybe just about all men too. I can’t handle a jealous woman, period. As you know, I don’t often carry a cell phone, and the simple reason is that I don’t want calls from anyone about where I am or what I’m doing. As you also know, for years—many years now—I’ve traveled, and alone, and for extended periods of time, months at a time. What I’m doing on the road is no one’s business, and it matters not whether or not she’s living with me.

For me, and I’m not exactly within the first two standard deviations on this issue, it couldn’t be any other way. Well, it could be in the minds of some women I might have gotten involved with, but not for long, because I would have been long gone once there was any attempt to tell me when I could and could not travel, and when I could and could not take a shit, and when I had to answer questions about where I had been for four hours or four days. A lot of men seem to have no problem at all living in prisons in which their wives are the jailers with the only set of keys.

A point I’ve been making in this note is that wise men (those with experience with women) think long and hard about what they see in the first couple of weeks or months in a relationship, because what you see in these short time frames is what you’re going to get and be dealing with two and twenty and two hundred months on. And to add refinement to the rule, already noted above, if women change, and they do (like everyone) change, they change for the worse. If they don’t like cooking that much when you meet them, they will like it less in five or ten years.

If in the beginning the woman only wants to go fishing with you every third time you go out, in five years she’ll only want to go out with you every tenth time, or not at all. If you only got a blowjob every other time you were with her prior to marriage, the chances are damn good that by year three or four you’ll be lucky to get a blowjob at all, or only after you buy her a new gold bracelet or upgrade the new car you bought her two years ago.

The best single indicator for knowing what a woman is going to be like is her mother. Study her mother like you are studying for the most important exam of your life, because the chances are damn good that all the good and all the bad and all the small things you don’t like or will come to not like in your girlfriend or wife are baldly evident in her mother. Daughters tend to imitate their mothers like they had spent the whole of their youth locked in a Pavlovian experimental chamber.

Kids. Two is more than enough, and not because it’s what might be called ecologically responsible to keep the number at two. Even with two you will have all kinds of freedoms abridged. Your hobbies, your time with friends, whatever. With two it’s a guarantee you’ll not spend anything like the kind of time with your wife that you spent with her before the first one, to say nothing of what happens when the second one comes.

She not only will have less time for you, but the odds are quite good—very good—that however important you were in her life before the kid or kids came, you are now no better than number two or her list of important people. Or quite likely number three if there are two kids. It’s the “mother shit.” It’s the “genetic relatedness shit.” It’s the…I don’t what the fxxx it is, but it’s very real, and every man I’ve talked to who has kids will say exactly what I’ve written in this short paragraph.

As for having more than two kids, forget it. You’re going to lose a minimum of twenty-five years of the best years of your life. Your bank account will be drained, your emotional bank account will go into Chapter 11 bankruptcy before you can figure out what’s happened, and your sex life will go into a prolonged drought. Then too your wife in all likelihood will begin to look like she’s been beaten and battered and fattened for the Rotary Club pig barbecue, and you’ll wake up in the morning and say: Where the fxxx am I, and how can I get out of here?

If the woman who seems utterly irresistible smokes, and you don’t, definitely get rid of her the first time you learn that she can’t do without one or more cigarettes after each meal and each time you give her a singing orgasm. You’ll smell smoke everywhere in your house, and the smell of her breath will make you wonder if it wouldn’t be more desirable kissing a dog.

If the woman that seems irresistible drinks to excess, or can’t hold what little she does drink without going nuts, don’t even consider her for a relationship. This is a guaranteed recipe for disaster, and quite irrespective of how many cans of beer you throw down the hatch on a long Saturday or Sunday watching five hours of sporting events. Alcohol is an addiction few men or women can beat, and it’s an addiction that some people can handle and many clearly cannot. Addictions only get worse over time.

If you get a woman who loves to nag, about anything, big or small, get rid of her. Tell her that there are plenty of men who love to be beaten up verbally and are masochists at heart. Get rid of her as soon as you see that she insists on telling you how to drive, or what to wear, or what to look at on TV, or how to economize in putting toothpaste on the toothbrush. These kinds of women—and the world is full of them—are just a nagging pain in the ass.

If you meet a woman who says she doesn’t want to work, that she only wants to raise kids and pursue her artistic career—write novels and do better than Picasso with pen and oils, tell her you’ll only stay with her if she gives you a notarized statement to the effect that upon the death of either her rich mother or father you’ll receive, in your name and your name only, a certified check in the amount of at least five million dollars. If she blinks at this, tell her to get lost and not come through the door again.

Women want equality—great; I’m all for it. But I want a woman I live with to bring in a decent share of the household income, ideally half, so that in divorce court—a fifty percent probability for everyone in the West—she’s not going to be taking away more than what’s more or less rightfully hers. There’ll no doubt be plenty of tenderized and warm bullshit about having to stay home to take care of the kids, but like I suggested or implied, if there are only two they can be farmed out during the day and you can share in bringing them up the rest of the time; and the wife can fulfill her soft feminist dream of getting equality in the marketplace of money and getting all the kudos that her ego demands for whatever she does to help pay the bills.

Enough. I haven’t been positive, but then it’s hard to be positive about relationships with women when the track record everywhere in the West is so dismal. For many men, and I’m one of them, the ideal marriage is one that lasts no more than one year, and is a renewable contract, if both parties agree. If this sounds terribly cynical, I doubt that it will by the time you’re into the middle years of your life—unless you have been very careful in how you have picked a mate, and are lucky to boot.

In closing, it’s fair to wonder what’s left out there in the female population, given all the negative signposts and roadblocks I’ve identified. I guess the only answer I have is this: if you get through a check list of the sort I’ve put together here and the woman doesn’t come up negative on anything (and no doubt a few I’ve missed or forgotten) then you’ve probably got what every man is after: a real winner. Grab her and don’t let go. There aren’t many genuinely good ones out there that any sane man would want to spend a lifetime with.

Dad