Abundance mindset doesn't mean you shouldn't try when it gets hard
Just because you can easily throw away a relationship, that doesn’t mean you should.
There is a very fundamental piece of advice in dating (which generally men struggle most with), which is to never derive your actions from the angle of scarcity. One should always act from abundance. However, this leads to a paradox when things get hard.
Scarcity
As men, we’ve all been there at some point: you’re old enough to date, but young enough such that you’ve essentially been invisible to every woman walking this Earth, and then finally, one gives you the time of day. You instantly pour your heart into it despite all the personal flaws exhibited by this person and your lack of compatibility together, and of course, because you put so much on the line, you end up badly hurt. It is a canon event.
Scarcity will make you betray your values. You tolerate disrespect that should be an absolute dealbreaker – meanwhile, fooling yourself that “we can always keep trying to make it work” – and you become the polar opposite of daring, assertive and controversial. You put on your “harmless guy” persona and seek to avoid every possible way in which she could take offence to what you say and do.
This is bad in two respects. On the one hand, if the woman you are dating is manipulative, she will walk right over you and you will allow it, because putting your foot down might make her think twice about your relationship and then you go back to being lonely. So, she can chip away at your confidence until you’re no longer playing pretend, but you actually lose the sense of self-respect you were suppressing at first, and now you’re stuck in an abusive cycle.
On the other hand, if she is a healthy feminine woman, she will be highly turned off by your passive, careful, uncontroversial behaviour. She wants to be certain that you’re a wall that can protect her from the snakes of the world, and she wants to know that you are honest and trustworthy. When you walk on eggshells and treat her with oven mitts, she feels like you’re weak, and because women are highly talented at sniffing out inauthenticity, she won’t trust you. She doesn’t trust you in either case. Bad dynamic. Can never work.
Abundance
Abundance mindset means that you don’t filter who you are, you set clear boundaries based on what you think goes and doesn’t go, and accept the possibility to lose the other person’s interest or them losing yours. If you have abundant options, this shouldn’t matter, since you can just move onto the next one. It’s okay to lose someone. In fact, it’s necessary to lose as many people as possible, especially everyone who is not compatible with you.
The paradox
But here is the issue: if you take this to its logical end, there is no point in even trying to make amends at any point in a relationship. If any mismatch makes itself apparent between a couple, a radical abundance mindset would dictate that you break up. There is always someone out there who is Pareto-better: i.e., they have all of the qualities of the last person, except they don’t clash with you in whatever are you did with that person.
So, paradoxically, a true abundance mindset rescues you from bad relationships, but it also evacuates you from all the good ones.
Why? Because there cannot exist a relationship between two people where there is never a mismatch between them. It cannot even exist in theory. If there would ever be a person who would be eligible to agree with you on everything at all times, it would be you yourself, and even you don’t.
So there should be some non-zero “trying to make it work” even past some discomfort. Of course, “trying” does not mean trying to resuscitate the corpse of your relationship (which I have done in the past, big mistake). If the other person says they’re out, that means they are essentially so flakey that they would accept the thought of leaving you. That’s fine, except not when you’re with them. So accept those terms and leave. With a smile.
For less fundamental cases of incompatibility, I will need to do some thinking.
