Ep. #36 Personal Boundaries Part 1: Attracting Women and Healthier Relationships with Mark Manson

[Mark Manson]: I’m actually in Brazil at the moment.

[Angel Donovan]: Wow, that's good. Is that a place you hang out often or is it just for a little while?

[Mark Manson]: I’ve actually been living here for about eight months now, and I’ll be here probably till the end of summer, and then I will head out of here because my visa will expire.

[Angel Donovan]: Uh-huh, the old visa problem. I know that well. So basically your lifestyle these days is traveling a lot. Do you sort of travel permanently or is this something you do part of the year?

[Mark Manson]: Yeah, I’ve been living the mobile lifestyle, some people call it the digital nomad lifestyle, for almost four years now. So I haven’t had a permanent home, but I have been slowing down a bit more and spending six to 12 months in each place the last two years or so.

[Angel Donovan]: What’s the reason for that? Why do you think you’re slowing down and spending more time in different places?

[Mark Manson]: Because mainly, I mean when you start this lifestyle, it’s very exciting. Just the prospect of being able to go anywhere in the world you want at the drop of a hat is really exciting and it’s very thrilling. There's a rush to it. As time goes on though, there’s kind of a diminishing returns on it, so each new country you go to or each new like tourist site you see or whatever, when you’ve already seen 20 or 30 of them, the 31st is kind of less spectacular.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Mark Manson]: And so some of the drawbacks start to kick in, which is if you’re bouncing around every month or every three weeks, you kind of have a lack of ties and relationships and community to keep you emotionally in a good place and happy. So a couple of years ago I decided, I was like… because I looked back and I realized that some of my best memories and experiences came in places that I spent more time in, and they usually had to do with people I met wherever I went, so I decided that I was going to slow down and start investing a little bit more time in building relationships with locals and getting kind of more enmeshed in the culture. And I’ve been really happy with it, so I think I’ve found the perfect balance in terms of new and exciting places, and then also like creating a nice social foundation.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, I kind of agree with everything you said there. I’ve been wandering around for a long time as well and I’ve spent more time these days in one place for… And I wanted to touch, I mean it’s friendships and everything, but it’s also dating lifestyle. Obviously, it affects you. So how’s your dating lifestyle been over the last four or five years and how is it today?

[Mark Manson]: Yeah. [Laughs] Well, it’s varied quite a bit, actually. I was in a committed relationship before I started traveling, for two years, and when I started traveling, you know, the fact that I was single again, on top of the fact that I was in all these new places and all these new women and all these new experiences, I kind of went on a run there for a while for about two years where I was just partying, hooking up all the time, just lots of casual flings and new experiences and new girls.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Mark Manson]: And then again, eventually, kind of it’s actually a similar effect as the traveling, it’s like after a while that gets a little bit old. It’s like after so many girls, like another fling isn’t that exciting or enriching, so I began to kind of slow down with the women as well and to spend more time with each one and get to know them a little better.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Mark Manson]: And then, about a year ago, I met a girl down here in Brazil, dated her while I was here, and then left for about five or six months, and she and I kept in touch, and she and I developed a really strong connection, so I told her that I’d come back and we’d see how things went. And so now she’s my girlfriend and we’ve been together, I guess we met a little more than a year ago, we’ve been together seriously for about nine months or so now.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay, great. That sounds great. Sounds like you’ve had a good fun time and now you’ve found a girl that you’re really interested in and you want to stay with for a while. I’m kind of in the same place myself, so I totally get where you’re at.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah, no complaints.

[Angel Donovan]: How old are you, by the way? Because these kind of things, like they vary by age, like different motivations.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah, absolutely. I’m 29, and I’ve noticed that when I was in my early 20s I was all about the excitement and the thrill and sleeping with a lot of women and doing all sorts of crazy things and having crazy sexual experiences, and I’ve noticed, you know, I still kind of have a little bit of a wild streak in me, but as the years go by, I feel myself calming down a little bit and my priorities are slowly shifting away from kind of the thrill-seeking and the excitement more to like a stable emotional fulfillment and just kind of relationship happiness.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. Yeah. So I know you’re into weights as well, and I am too, and so I just wanted to touch on this thing, because I think there are like two components to that kind of change. I’m a bit older, I’m 38, but I kept up a weights program and I’ve actually modified it over time to kind of give my hormones a kick, and I’ve noticed that I can impact what I kind of want to do, what I feel like, because it’s kind of got this biological level, like typically when we age our testosterone gets lower over time, but you can tweak that a bit with your nutrition and your fitness and how you’re approaching that, and I found personally that that can kind of impact the kind of lifestyle I want in a way as well. I might have more interest in seeing more girls or maybe I’m more interested in a relationship with a highly sexual girl or maybe I’m more interested in focusing on work and so on.

And then the other side of it is maybe the experience side, which you touched on earlier, is like there comes a time when you’ve seen so many girls and maybe it’s just a little bit old and you kind of want to focus on something a bit different for a while. How would you relate to those two points?

[Mark Manson]: Well, I’ve worked out with weights for pretty much all my 20s at this point, and I haven’t really… I mean, it’s been pretty consistent, so I don’t know, I can’t really comment on that just because that hasn’t really been a variable for me.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Mark Manson]: That's always been present. So if that is contributing, if that's pumping more testosterone into me and that's making me hornier or more thrill-seeking, I can’t comment on that, but personally I believe these things are a little bit complicated. Everybody’s wired a little bit differently. Everybody has somewhat different emotional needs or different preferences of how they approach getting their needs met. And it’s funny because for a long time, and I think a lot of guys do this too, is you get this idea that, oh, I have to be a ladies’ man or I have to have a girlfriend or I have to be married by a certain age or whatever, and we kind of just accept these ideas of what is supposed to be right for us, and a big thing for me a few years ago was just kind of letting go of like my own expectations of what I should be doing or what I need and just kind of paying attention to how I felt. So as soon as the rampant casual sex started feeling less fulfilling, that's kind of when I started to switch off a bit, and having a committed relationship felt better for me. And you know, there could be a point like there was in the past where that switch is back and suddenly I want to go out and have rampant crazy sexual adventures, and if that happens I’ll follow that. But I think we’re all wired a bit differently and we all need different things at different times, and that's fine.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, totally. Totally. Great points, man. Okay, well, the topic I got you on here for today that I hit you up for, it’s about an article that you wrote on your blog about personal boundaries. You wrote it at the beginning of this year, and it caught my eye because personal boundaries, or sometimes they’re called boundaries, has been talked about at least as long as I’ve been around, that's like 12 years or so in the community and in self-help stuff, probably much longer, but I’ve seen very, very little hard, practical advice on what to do about them and, honestly, some of it’s kind of conflicting as well. The typical advice is kind of to have strong personal boundaries, but that is very abstract and hard to grasp, so it doesn’t really tell us a whole lot. I’ve seen a lot of confusion amongst even the people writing about it as well, because people have different ideas of what boundaries and what they’re for, so you could even say they’re different topics. So I think a good way to start with is a definition of personal boundaries, and in your article you gave this definition. So, “Healthy personal boundaries are equal to taking responsibility for your own actions and emotions, while not taking responsibility for the actions or emotions of others.” What would you add to that to build on it and to explain it more clearly?

[Mark Manson]: So I think there are kind of two ways to look at boundaries, and I agree, this is an important topic that hasn’t really been treated with a lot of depth over the years. But as time goes on and the more I work with people, the more important I find it is to kind of have healthy emotional lives and a successful dating life. So the way I defined it in that article was taking responsibility for your own actions and emotions while not taking responsibility for the actions and emotions of others. Now, one thing that's really important where I think people start slipping up is when they assume—shit, I don’t even know where to start with this.

When people start assuming that other people are responsible for their problems, not only does this introduce manipulation or drama into a relationship, but it also actually I find lowers a man’s self-esteem. So let's say that you and I were hanging out one night and some girl came and talked to me and I was talking to her, and I said something stupid and she got annoyed and walked off, and then I turned around and blamed you for making me nervous. Now, that's actually like a very common kind of situation in a lot of people’s friendships and relationships, but it’s completely unfair to you because they see what’s happening is I’m not taking responsibility for my own emotions, my own anxiety, and I’m not taking responsibility for overcoming that anxiety and acting despite it. And basically what I’m doing is instead of accepting that responsibility and accepting that failure onto myself, I’m placing it onto you. And that introduces a lot of conflict, a lot of drama, and what it would do is it would introduce manipulation into our relationship.

So a lot of these unhealthy things that men see in their relationships and their interactions with women, or even their friends, I find actually has a root, is rooted in simply not taking responsibility for what you’ve said or done or felt and the other person not taking responsibility for what they’ve said or felt or done.

Now, the flip side of that, and a lot of people fall into this as well, are the people—and these people tend to be like people pleasers or like chronic nice guys who are always trying to make a girl happy or whatever—who basically take responsibility for other people’s problems. They’re like a fixer. They go around trying to fix other people. And again, this leads to a lot of surface-level problems.

It’s like, let's say, again, you and I are hanging out and you’re having a problem in your personal life and suddenly I decide that it’s my responsibility to fix your personal problems, you’re going to feel intruded upon, you’re going to feel like I’m controlling and overbearing, and it’s just going to generate a lot of resentment, and again, a lot of manipulation, between the two parties. And basically, a lot of the surface-level stuff, a lot of the game-playing, a lot of the anger and the drama that happens really starts with this core component.

So like you said, that's very theoretical and kind of abstract. The way boundaries or the way I typically teach boundaries is in terms of like establishing them clearly, because a lot of men have boundaries but they don’t establish them. I’ll give you another example, a very common example.

Let's say that my boundary is that I expect people to respect my time. So, for instance, if I’m going to go on a date and the date is scheduled for 7 o’clock and she agrees with 7 o’clock, I expect her to show up at 7 o’clock. Now, what happens sometimes? Sometimes she shows up at 7:30, 7:45. She calls and cancels at the last minute. And what do most people or most men with dating problems do? It’s like, “Oh, that's fine. Don’t worry about it.” Basically, they’re giving away their boundary. They’re not setting a strong boundary there.

And so what I found as one of like the key or crucial things in situations like that is to tell them, say, “Look, I don’t have all night. I expect you to respect my time. If you’re not going to be here, then I’m just going to go home,” and actually saying that to her or actually calling her and telling her that, or just going home. And so many men are kind of caught in this frame of like chasing and doing like, “I’ve got to make her like me. I’ve got to make her attracted to me. I’ve got to make the date perfect and I’ve got to do all these things so that she’ll have sex with me,” that they completely forget about their boundaries. They completely forget to stand up for themselves and to treat themselves with respect.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Mark Manson]: Which makes them unattractive.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. Well, actually, when I was thinking about this earlier, like the last example you just brought up, which was setting boundaries with other people, which when I think about it sounds like standards for the behaviors you accept and don’t accept with others, and also some people describe it as respect versus disrespect or, you know, dissing, so kind of like in the gangster world, like someone dissed me, it’s a big thing there, and they have boundaries, for example, in that world, where you could say sometimes it’s too severe, right? Maybe you look at a guy the wrong way and he gets really upset with you and he starts trying to assert his boundaries on you. So this type of, basically, this kind of like a respect line of how you treat me, is one of the ways I’ve seen people talk about it, but again, not so clearly over the years. Are there two scenarios where you have to be careful not to go too far in how you assert yourself and what way you leave this respect line? Versus the other side, which is what you’re saying earlier, which is where I let someone walk over me and they can disrespect me, they can do whatever they want and I’m not going to say anything. I’m going to say, “Yeah, that's fine.”

[Mark Manson]: Yeah, absolutely, and this is really the crucial point. So people, there are two ways that you can kind of… Well, let me start with the right way to go about boundaries. The right way to go about boundaries is to respect your own boundaries and establish your own boundaries, and also respect other people’s boundaries. Now, that's hard for most people to do because it requires them to both respect themselves and respect the other person at the same time. People who particularly lack confidence or are insecure about themselves fall into one of two camps. Either they only respect the other person’s boundaries and spend all of their time trying to please the other person, or they only respect their own boundaries and infringe on other people’s boundaries and break other people’s boundaries and try to dominate other people’s boundaries.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Mark Manson]: And both of them are rooted in the same insecurity and low self-esteem, because the person who only respects the other person’s boundaries and is always trying to make the other person happy and sacrificing their identity to make the other person happy, basically they feel inadequate and they don’t feel like they’re good enough, and so they’re trying to constantly meet the other person’s standards. And this is where you get this chasing behavior, and it makes them… Ultimately, it signifies inadequacy and it makes them very unattractive.

On the flip side, what you described and what I referred to in my work as overcompensation, the people who only respect their own boundaries and try to dominate other people’s, they have the same insecurity, they have the same feeling of inadequacy and inferiority, but they’re trying to overcompensate by trying to constantly prove that they’re superior to others.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Mark Manson]: And so this ultimately backfires. It basically makes them an asshole and makes them unenjoyable to be around. So you have one guy who kind of becomes a putz that people walk over, and people say like, “Oh yeah, Jim, he's a great guy, we all like him,” but like nobody really respects him and women aren’t attractive to him, and then you’ve got the other guy who is just like a raging dickhead and is trying to run over people all the time, and people don’t really like to be around him, but sometimes they’re able to impose their will enough to get what they want from other people.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. So it sounds like, maybe I’m not seeing the connection completely here, but it’s like two topics, really. There's the aspect of taking responsibility for emotions and actions, so on your behalf, and letting other people live their lives basically and not trying to take responsibility for them. And then there's from the other part is like basically a balance in a healthy way to relate to other people and to make sure that they relate to you in the right way as well. Do you see these two areas as one and the same thing or are they kind of separate ways of looking at it?

[Mark Manson]: I think they’re borne out of the same thing.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Mark Manson]: And this is the interesting thing, right? So when you look at men—actually, let's back up. If you look at women who complain about men’s behavior, what are all women’s complaints? They’re either like guys are too weak and they’re pushovers or that guys are assholes and disrespectful. And even though these behaviors are polar opposite from one another, like I said, they’re both borne out of the same insecurity and the feeling of not being good enough. And what’s interesting and what I’ve found over the years working with a lot of men is that these men will go back and forth from one polarity to the other, and actually a good example is a lot of, and I know you want to talk about this in a little bit, but a good example is a lot of the pickup artist stuff.

So the pickup artist community, a lot of the advice is marketed and sold to men who have, well, let's call them the nice guy and the narcissist, I think that's an easy way to refer to them. So pickup artist stuff is marketed to the nice guy, the nice guy who never asserts himself, who becomes every woman’s best friend, who’s always trying to make everybody happy, who doesn’t have any confidence around people. And the pickup artist community gives that guy a lot of advice that basically tells him, “No, you’re the man. She is to work for your approval. You’re high-status. You’re higher-value than her. You need to make her feel insecure and you need to make her feel like she’s not as good as you. You have to be alpha. You have to be the alpha in the club,” and all these terms and all these behaviors, and it’s basically the encouragement to adopt a lot of these kind of narcissistic behaviors where they only assert their own boundaries and don’t pay attention to what the woman is feeling or what the woman thinks.

And you see this all over the place. I mean, whether it’s, you know, it’s like if she rejects you, you have to plow through it. Oh, she doesn’t want to have sex with you? It’s anti-slut defense, you have to like tell her this or that or the other. Flakes on you? Text her 10 times this and this and this. You consistently see a disregard for the woman’s boundaries in this advice.

And the thing is that what often happens too is that men adopt this advice, they get laid, and then, say they meet a girl they really like and they try to get into a relationship with her, and then what happens? Nice guy comes roaring back because basically he's been there all along. It’s the same low self-esteem. And so over the years I’ve seen guys go back and forth between these two things over and over and over again.

The real issue here, the real important thing to address is actually the man’s self-esteem, his feeling of inadequacy. Because when a man feels like he's good enough, when a man feels like he's genuinely on the same level as all the women he meets and all the women he talks to, he is, A, able to stand up for himself without anxiety or without fear, and B, he is able to respect her desires and her wishes without anxiety and without fear, without feeling threatened or without feeling inferior.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay, so you’re saying when someone has a good self-esteem, you know, because I’ve been thinking about balance as you’ve been talking about these concepts, because you can go too far one way or too far the other way, but when you have a healthy self-esteem, are you saying that you naturally get that balance in the way you treat other people, and you’re not being too harsh, you’re not being too weak, and you’ve just got a healthy balance which is appropriate?

[Mark Manson]: Right. Right. Balance is absolutely one way to look at it, and the way I usually describe it is the key here is to, you know, most men have the problem with that they don’t respect themselves around women enough.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Mark Manson]: And that's why they’re not attractive. And then, a lot of other men only respect themselves and don’t respect women, and that's a lot of women’s complaints. The trick here is to respect yourself and respect women, and that is actually surprisingly hard to do, because there's a lot of sexual shame in our culture and there's a lot of objectification of both men and women that goes on.

And so that's actually the trick. The trick is to respect your own needs and desires, and also respect hers. And so that means not chasing, not trying to convince her, twist her arm into doing something that you want her to do, but at the same time, standing up for yourself and caring about what she wants and what she needs, but also, when you reach that point where you’re no longer willing to accommodate that, like stand up for yourself as well. And it’s… I mean, there's a reason that this topic is so hard to talk about…

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Mark Manson]: Because it’s like… [Laughs] Because it’s like you said, it’s very abstract, but it’s also there are almost no good role models for this in our culture.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. And I think personally that even guys who have been studying this for years and are doing really well, they still struggle. Everyone I know like still has problems with boundaries. Pretty much everyone I know across the board still has sometimes these problems with boundaries. Or, I’d say I’ve looked at other situations where I guess they feel like they’re putting those boundaries exactly where they want each time, but for me I look from a bit outside perspective on like, well, that's not really healthy long-term, you know.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Not for you, not for the girl, and you often see those relationships kind of crash and burn or become trauma or distracting relationships, which you touched on in your article. So I do think it’s incredibly complicated, but your article does help to make some sense of it. And there’s another thing you said which I think kind of covers what the stuff you were saying in one phrase, is personal boundaries are a side effect of having a healthy self-esteem and a general low level of neediness with people around you.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So, I mean in the pickup artist community, something that is being pushed around for a while is not being reactive, and when I kind of read that I was thinking, well, neediness, obviously it’s like when you’re not needy, you’re not reactive, right? So is that a way we can simplify and look at it in a way? It’s like if you’re not being reactive, you’re setting these personal boundaries in a more healthy way, are you just looking after yourself, your own emotions and actions about like verging onto the other person’s if you’re not being reactive?

[Mark Manson]: I think that the reactive advice has been around for a while, and I think it gets at the issue, but I don’t think it completely gets there. And this is the reason, is because, like I said, you know, if you take the stance that “I never react to her, I only act on my own,” there's an implication there in that basically there's an inflexibility there in terms of, “I’m not going to let my values and my perceptions and what I want be affected by her.”

So let's say for instance you’re on a date with a girl, I mean this is a really extreme example, but I think this shows kind of the flaw with using that word, using “reactive…”

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Mark Manson]: Let's say you’re on a date with a woman and it’s going pretty well or whatever, and she suddenly gets a call and she finds out her brother’s been in a car accident and is in a coma in the hospital, and she just becomes a blubbering emotional mess. And you know, there is nothing you can do in that moment that… [Laughs] Like anything you can do in that moment that is not reactive makes you basically inhuman. Like if you could be like, “Well, she’s crying and can’t even stand up because she’s so distraught, but I’m not going to be reactive. I’m going to be alpha and I’m going to be over here and I’m going to like say this and try to distract her or whatever.” You know, the only right answer in a situation like that is to go and hold her and make her feel better, is t be reactive to her needs in that moment.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Mark Manson]: Now, the thing is, the reason you need to be reactive sometimes is because sometimes your own needs overlap, or like your own values and needs overlap with somebody else’s values and needs. So like, for instance, one of my values is that I care about people and I treat them well. And so if I’m in that situation, then being reactive fulfills my value, fulfills my beliefs of what I should be doing.

And the other problem I see with the reactive thing is that, again, a lot of men who come for dating advice, one of the big problems they have is that they’re very unaware of subcommunication. They only see surface-level behaviors and words. And so when they hear the nonreactive thing, “You have to be nonreactive, you have to be nonreactive,” I’ve seen a lot of guys go out and they basically like turn into statues or like monks, you know.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Mark Manson]: It’s like nothing she says matters, like he only is like focusing on his own thoughts and ideas.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. Well, you know, I’ve seen that a lot too, and what it actually looks like is that the guy’s kind of like scared, because he's scared of doing anything, you see what I mean?

[Mark Manson]: Yeah. Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: When you take it to an extreme like that, basically you’re kind of scared of acting because you figure everything’s a reaction, and you end up doing nothing and then that doesn’t go anywhere.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And without getting too philosophical, I mean, you can easily argue that all of our actions are reactions, you know, to the stimulus in our environment and previous experiences and stuff like that. So like I said, the reactivity thing, it’s good in that it kind of gets men to think, “I should act on my own values, not necessarily on her values.” So I think it’s good at kind of pushing them off that nice guy polarity and more towards the center, but I don’t think it describes the center accurately.

[Angel Donovan]: So to kind of bring it back to guys and their problems and kind of what they’re thinking about, how does a guy with healthy personal boundaries operate? How do personal boundaries help you to attract women, and what would be a good example of that? Because, are they important to attracting women?

[Mark Manson]: Absolutely. Absolutely. So attraction basically, and this is kind of what my entire book is about, and as guys who are familiar with the community know, is that female attraction is based on the perception of status. It’s based on the perception that this man is high-status or whatever. But the interesting thing about the whole status thing, and a lot of dating advice spends a lot of time like you have to dress… You’re high-status and you have to like have high-status body language and you have to tell these cool stories that imply that you’re high-status and all this stuff, and that's fine.

The thing that I think gets lost in all this is that people, and there are tons of psychological research that back this up, is that people, when we meet each other, we unconsciously evaluate each other, and the way we evaluate each other is that we basically judge the other person based on how they perceive themselves, or we perceive the other person based on how they perceive themselves.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Mark Manson]: So to give you an example, the example I give a lot is like, if you think about like your group of guy friends, like a group of guy friends, you know there's always one guy who just gets picked on all the time, and sometimes you think, “Why is it him? Why him?” It’s like nobody ever sat down and like had a committee like, “Oh, we’re going to pick on that guy.” It’s just as humans we’re wired to pay attention to how people see themselves, and then we proceed to treat them that way.

And so the argument I make in my book is that if a woman is going to perceive you to be her equal or to be attractive or to be higher-status than her, then you need to perceive yourself to be her equal. And the biggest problem in our culture with men is that we grow up being conditioned to feel inferior to women, or women’s sexuality. We’re taught that it’s something to achieve, something to work for.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Mark Manson]: So where boundaries fit into all this, and kind of getting back to the example I started with, you know, the woman showing up late, when you assert your boundary with a woman, what you are implying there when you assert that boundary is that you’re asserting that you value yourself as much or more than you value her opinion of you, and what that subcommunicates to her is that you perceive yourself to be a high-status individual, and that's where the generation of attraction comes from. I give a few examples in my books, but I’ve had tons of situations where I’ve asserted my boundaries and I actually really upset the woman, but like she still became attracted to me.

Like this is the thing. Most men don’t… Like nice guys don’t assert their boundaries because they’re afraid of upsetting a woman or making her angry or offending her, but on the contrary what happens is when you show that you’re willing to upset a woman or offend her because of your own values, she respects you more, she pays attention to you more, and she’s attracted to you more.

I’ll just give you one example. In Western culture, there's a lot of flirting through teasing and a lot of kind of mind games and head games, and you kind of go back and forth or whatever. And I was talking to a girl once in a bar, and she was like very sarcastic, very just kind of busting on me a lot, and within a couple of minutes it started to get really annoying. The first few times it’s like I joked with her and teased her back or whatever, and then after a few minutes it’s like, I’m like, “This isn’t right.” And one of my values is that I don’t enjoy, you know, I discovered living in other cultures, I don’t enjoy picking up girls who are like really bratty and sassy and have these attitudes. So I don’t tolerate that.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Mark Manson]: And so I was talking to this girl and she’s like being very sarcastic and kind of bratty. She was very attractive. And she said something like just really flippant and kind of rude. Like I said something about like hanging out, I think I said something about hanging out with her later, and she was like, “Yeah, if you’re lucky.” And I looked at her and like I just cut through all the bullshit, I looked at her and I said, “Do you like me?” And she’s like, “What?” And I’m like, “Are you attracted to me, yes or no?” And she was like, “Yeah, why?”

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Mark Manson]: And I said, “Okay, then stop acting like you’re not, or else I’m going to leave.” And like her mouth dropped, [laughs] and she looked at me like… And actually like you could see her like she was confused, but she was like, “Well, fine, you don’t have to be a dick about it.” But I’m like, “No, look, I’m not being a dick. I’m just letting you know that if you’re going to pretend like you don’t…”

I was like, “Look, if you don’t like me, tell me, but don’t pretend like you don’t when you do, otherwise I’m going to leave.” And she calmed down, and it was like the attraction just went through the roof. And no more sarcasm, no more like ditching and playing games and talking to other guys. Like, I mean, she was mine, and that was it.

But the thing is… And that's a success story. For every time that's happened, I’ll say that to a girl, her jaw will drop and she’ll be like, “You’re an asshole,” and she’ll walk away. But when that happens, that’s good because that's not a woman I’m going to enjoy being with anyway, and it gives me time to go meet a woman I am going to enjoy being with. So that's a tangible example of respecting myself and asserting my values and asserting my boundaries in a way that generates strong attraction.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. No, I know exactly the types of girls you’re talking about, like sassy, feisty, you know, that you tend to meet more in clubs. And some guys would say that they like that, that that's a lot of fun to be with those girls because they’re playfully like basically hitting on each other the whole time and…

[Mark Manson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: You know, the banter. You know, they’ll call it banter and they’ll say like it’s like a semi-argument but it’s not really. And what you see is that if those two people get together, then the relationship will continue in that fashion, right? It’ll have a lot of peaks and troughs and it will tend to be passionate. Would you agree with that? Like people will label it as a passionate relationship rather than a… They wouldn’t call it a stable, like steady relationship. It’ll be more like, oh, this is their passion. Those guys have a lot of passion. It’s a very passionate kind of type of relationship.

[Mark Manson]: Right. And the thing is, really, interactions like that are very difficult to escalate, because you know, one of the contradictions is that if you are doing the whole like indirect thing, like trying to make her think like you don’t like her when you do and all this stuff, then escalating, like trying to kiss her or asking her out or something like that really sabotages that whole thing. So the more you get invested in this whole like battle of wits between one another, the more difficult you make it to escalate.

But what you said is a really good point as well, and I actually wrote an article about it back in January. It’s actually… I called it The Dismal State of Flirting in the Western Culture.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay.

[Mark Manson]: And basically what I talked about is that in Western culture we are expected to show interest and affection for one another through sarcasm, through teasing, through irony, through like these indirect methods, and the argument that I made is exactly what you’re talking about, is that what that does is it leads to unstable relationships. And the reason it leads to unstable relationships is, A, there's always a perception of a power struggle, so that both people are trying to constantly one-up each other, when if you’re going to have a stable long-term relationship both people need to treat each other as like 50/50 equals, equal respect and equal admiration and stuff like that…

[Angel Donovan]: So you’re saying that all healthy relationships should be 50/50 in terms of respect and power?

[Mark Manson]: Yes, which by the way I should differentiate that I don’t… That doesn’t mean I think that men should do 50% of the housework and women should make 50% of the money. I don’t mean 50/50 in behavior.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Mark Manson]: But I mean 50/50 in respect and like willingness to listen to one another, compromise, etc.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. So the way I like to think about that is you’re a team, right?

[Mark Manson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: You’re working together to build this better life together. In any case, even if it’s like kind of a loose relationship, you don’t see each other so often, then you’re still working together to have fun when you see each other, even if you’re not working on such serious stuff and long-term stuff.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah. Yeah. Actually, a female friend of mine once said that seduction is a team sport, not a competition, and I love that.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Mark Manson]: But the other issue with getting back to the whole like verbal sparring thing is that it muddies communication. So you create a precedent where you’re not really either able to say what you actually think or mean without being judged for having this like power battle go on, or you never learn how to actually communicate yourself authentically and honestly. And one of the things that I pointed out in that article is that if you look around the world, divorce rates in English-speaking countries are far higher than any other culture, and I really think it’s that because we treat sex, I mean we approach sex through misdirection and sarcasm and irony, and actually even like insulting one another. And so I do think it has a lot of deleterious effects on relationships further down the road.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. So this kind of comes around to a point, does this say anything about the way we should relate to women, like, or the way we judge them in general? But basically our overall perspective on women, you’re saying we should look at them as equals, right? Whereas, I guess, most of the pickup artists’ approaches tend to be this dominant, like the object is to dominate and control the situation.

[Mark Manson]: Right.

[Angel Donovan]: Would you say that's wrong? Because you know, I know a lot of guys I know that I would say they’re dominant in their relationships.

[Mark Manson]: Right.

[Angel Donovan]: And what would you say is unhealthy about that?

[Mark Manson]: Well, first of all, it kind of gets into, what do you mean by dominant? Let me ask you this first. Let's say you had a job, and let's say that one of your coworkers came in every day and tried to dominate the other coworkers and tried to tell the other coworkers what to do, how to do it, when they should do it, and consistently like teased them or made them feel insecure, made them feel uncomfortable around them. You would probably say that coworker is, A, insecure, and B, overcompensating, right?

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah. So that's basically what I think of guys who feel they have to do that. Now, when you say being dominant in a relationship, I think, again, it gets back to the 50/50 thing and the team sport thing. So for instance, men and women generally tend to have different needs, and couples therefore fit together in different ways.

So when you say, “I have friends who are generally dominant in their relationships,” what that means is that they may be dominant in the aspects of the relationship that you see. Generally speaking, men tend to be more dominant in relationships when it comes to, say, decision-making or finance or whatever. Women tend to be more dominant in the emotional arenas and making social decisions.

And I think every guy that's been in a relationship has kind of had this experience too, like been in a long-term relationship, like been in love with a girl, has had this experience where it’s like you’ll be hanging out with your buddies, like you’ll be like with your girlfriend and your buddies, and you’re like ragging on each other and you’re joking around and you’re like telling her what to do or whatever, and then it’s like the next day you’re like… It’s Sunday morning, you’re lying in bed together, you’re making all these cutesy faces and cutesy sounds, and you sit there and you’re like, “God, what would my guy friends think if they saw this?” [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Mark Manson]: So, I mean, it just goes to show that it’s…

[Angel Donovan]: So the point you’re making there is that she’s leading you sometimes emotionally, right?

[Mark Manson]: Yes.

[Angel Donovan]: You wouldn’t be making those cutesy faces unless she made one too first and you follow.

[Mark Manson]: Right, and that in some arenas women are more dominant or in more control, which typically is the emotional arena, right? And I would also argue that that's actually what we’re looking for. It’s healthy relationships involve a tradeoff of value. So it’s you’re able to provide her value in areas that she may lack or have a strong need for, and she’s able to provide you value in areas that you lack or have a strong need for, and typically the way that plays out is that men are more dominant in the decision-making and the logistical stuff and the financial stuff, and then women tend to be more dominant in the emotional arena because that's typically where men lack on their own and have a higher need for.

So what may appear as dominance to us I think is actually just a tradeoff. It’s a tradeoff of needs, and I don’t think there's… You know, and some men have a higher desire to be dominant or like a higher need for dominance, and some men have a higher need for emotional connection, and again, that's fine.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. Yeah, I’ve got an analogy for this. I used to work in consulting and we would have consulting teams, and people have different strengths, right?

[Mark Manson]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Some guys would be good at like financial modeling, and other guys are good at some marketing creative kind of stuff and so on. So a guy would take the lead with the area where he was good or you’re giving the lead by someone else because he's good in that area, and in the same way in a relationship, you know, it’s more obvious in a long-term relationship of course, you’re giving the lead to one of the partners in some areas, and like you say, maybe the finance or whatever it is in the guy’s domain, but the girl’s taking the lead in some of the others, right?

[Mark Manson]: Right.

[Angel Donovan]: So I know from my parents’ generation the typical thing was like the father is going to take care of the finances and then the woman’s going to take care of the house, right? That doesn’t exist today.

[Mark Manson]: Exactly, yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Today I guess it’s a more complex world where we have to kind of figure out where we’re going to make these… which parts am I going to be more dominant in and which parts are you going to be more dominant in? And in a way it’s a bit more of a complex world as to how that all comes together in the end. And it might be another reason why there are more divorces and stuff, because it’s a bit more complex to navigate these kind of relationships where you’re trying to figure each other out to get some kind of stable alignment where it isn’t all in favor of one person kind of taking the controlling shots.

[Mark Manson]: Yeah, absolutely. And I would argue that because it’s more complex, honest communication becomes even that much more important, so like being able to express like, “Hey, I don’t like it when you assert yourself in this way,” and not have your partner like flip out and play these like power games with you.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Mark Manson]: So yeah, absolutely.

[Angel Donovan]: You know, I think this is a complex topic and it’s hard to cover in one interview.