HedgeDoc - Collaborative markdown notes

<h1 class="entry-title" style="text-align: center;">Alpha Redux?</h1> <img src="https://media.istockphoto.com/id/2234442070/es/vector/hombre-fuerte-y-musculoso-con-traje-negro-que-simboliza-el-poder-la-autoridad-la.jpg?s=612x612&w=0&k=20&c=XuvKNeZ0QrRcVv5cR-YqZPaXglup9BNWw2JPKfpe_k0=" alt="" width="612" height="612" /> This is a "thinking out loud" post. It's based on something I'm seeing among acquaintances and longtime friends. Lately I've noticed an uptick in <a href="https://www.loveawake.com/free-online-dating/United-States-dating-service.html?gender=female&page=10">divorced women</a> of my acquaintance meeting up with, and returning to, romances with, past boyfriends and lovers from high school and college. I admit this is purely anecdotal. I don't know of or have any science or studies or surveys to back this up. <h2>Women Circling Back To Old Flames</h2> --- For the past year, my sister's best college friend has been having a sexual affair with a married man she dated for a short time in college. I had become acquainted with the friend over the years from her friendship with my sister. The adulterers reconnected on social media after more than 20 years of no contact. Both are unhappily married but have no intention of divorcing their respective spouses, or so they say. --- A high school female friend married a man she met in college and returned with him to his rural hometown where they had and raised four children. After 23 years of marriage, the last 7 or so unhappy, my friend divorced her alpha provider husband. Reasons: her inlaws' intermeddling into the marriage, her ex-husband's refusal to do anything about it, and her general unhappiness and isolation while living in Podunkville. She "came back home" to regroup, and has rekindled things with her high school boyfriend, who is himself divorced and a father of one son. In high school, he was a jock; she was a cheerleader --- a stereotypical football quarterback/prom queen pairing. --- Another female acquaintance never married after college, and remained unmarried for 15 years. She had a chance meeting with a college boyfriend and rekindled things with him. He was a frivorced father of two. She since married College Boyfriend, after a hiatus of 15 years and 2 years of dating. These two were always, and still are, the least physically attractive of the three pairings. I can think of a few others, but these are the most illustrative. <h2>These women have the following in common:</h2> --They are all in their mid to late 40s. --They all first met (and first became sexually active with) their current paramours before reaching age 20. --They all had dating/sexual experiences between the end of the first relationships with these men and the later reconnections. --They are all around the same age as their paired men. Their age differentials do not exceed 2 years. --They all moved away from home to attend college and earned 4-year baccalaureate degrees. #1 holds a master's degree. --They have all worked as professionals. #1 is a public school teacher. #2 was briefly an office administrator but was a stay-at-home mother for a long time. #3 is a lawyer. Finally, #1 and #2 are still reasonably physically attractive. #3 is not. <h2>Social Media And The Return Of Old Lovers</h2> 1. Social media has undoubtedly influenced a lot of this. <a href="https://blog.loveawake.com/2019/04/15/5-social-media-and-modern-dating-downsides/">Social media</a> allows people to find each other and reconnect easily, inexpensively and unobtrusively. One can search for and find people with a minimum of effort and money; no private investigators or skip traces required. And one can tailor "friendship" on social media to suit one's liking. One can be as forward or as coy as one wishes. And most importantly, connections can take place on computers and phones, away from the prying eyes and ears of spouses and other people. It doesn't require phone calls or face to face meetings unless and until the participants want to meet. It would have been much more difficult for these people to have found and reconnected with each other had social media not been the catalyst. 2. With social media, there's some "chicken/egg" stuff going on here. Were these unhappy women before social media and reconnection with past lovers? Or did social media cause otherwise content women to seek out past lovers and feed into "fear of missing out" and "you only live once"? 3. This ties into something I've seen Buena Vista talk about. He posited that the traditional "alpha fux, beta bux" model doesn't completely describe what's happening with the older set. It's more accurate to call it "alpha fux, beta bux, back to alpha fux." In other words, AF from 18 to mid 20s; BB from <a href="https://www.loveawake.com/free-online-dating/United-Kingdom-dating-service.html?page=121">marriage to about mid 40s</a> or the last child is more or less independent; then back to AF from age 45 or so.... The blogger Black Dragon has noticed this too. He has talked about what he calls "Long Soft Next for Temporary Exclusivity". In this situation, a woman "nexts" an attractive man who won't offer commitment in favor of a man who will commit. But, she always keeps the attractive "nexted" man in the back of her mind and in her sights in the event she wants him or things don't work out with "commitment man". A "soft next" means she is still attracted to him despite the relationship not working. This is in juxtaposition to the "hard next", meaning she never has anything to do with him again. The "soft next's" duration can be a few weeks to many years. Black Dragon says this explains how a lot of women <a href="https://blog.loveawake.com/2020/05/25/so-my-ex-husband-is-coming-to-stay-with-me-and-my-boyfriend-for-the-weekend/">reconnect with past loves</a> after years of no contact. 4. I have to believe that women's unprecedented independent access to resources enables this too. It used to be that women's "cougaring" and pursuing "old flames" was limited to the landed gentry; the so-called "idle rich"; the Western European aristocracy; the old money, upper crust, "polite society" Americans. Now you have $40K/year middle school teachers and legal secretaries doing this, with kids in tow. 5. These examples are anecdotal observational support for the alpha widow concept and the sexual bonding concept. These women are returning to men who are now well into middle age. These men have lost at least some of their past male vigor, and one is unavailable for commitment due to his marriage to another. This suggests more than just raw sexual attraction or need for sexual release. It suggests these women have very, very deep <a href="https://blog.loveawake.com/2019/10/28/connections-attractions-entering-into-relationships/">emotional connections to these men</a>. These bonds were forged in a cocktail of carefree socialization and hormonal flooding when both the men and women involved were in their late teens and early 20s, right around the same time lifelong friendships are formed, and around when marriages used to happen. Women in their late teens and early 20s, have sex only with men they are REALLY attracted to. I knew these particular women back then, as I was and still am one of their contemporaries. They were as most of us describe -- sexually feral and uninhibited; and willing to do just about anything with and for a sexually attractive man. <a href="https://www.loveawake.com/free-online-dating/China-dating-service.html?gender=female">Women at this age</a> have sex exclusively with attractive men. They aren't thinking about Beta Bucks at 19 or 20. Women at this age who get sexually active can be, and are, very selective about who they'll sleep with. I think those women really, truly fell deeply in love with these men. Those women never really got over their <a href="https://blog.loveawake.com/2021/03/01/being-single-the-difficulty-in-ridding-the-ex/">long lost first loves</a>; and they didn't get over them because they bonded hard to those men. There is no other reasonable explanation why women who are still reasonably attractive return to the old well of boyfriends from ages past, after 15 to 25 years. There's more to it than just comfort and sexual attraction. They're still in love with these men. 6. And why do the men do this? I think for the men, it IS about comfort (modified wife goggles) and easy sexual attraction. These men are comfortable returning to these women who they remember from years past. I think they also bonded to these women (though not as hard as the women did), and they find it easy to return to women with whom they had early sexual success. I suspect that the sex comes easy, because these women fell so hard for them. And, well, they don't really have to work for it. I know the men involved, too. These men weren't hot stud alpha top 10%, not then and not now, but they weren't Poindexters either. I'd consider them at best Vox Day Betas in their younger days --- the guys who got with Alpha castoffs; the Alpha sidekicks, so to speak. And they've retained most of their sexual market value. The involved men are also in middle age, mid 40s to early 50s. These are not lifelong bachelors with options who cleaned up with women. But they were not gammas or omegas either. Man #1 is a physician who would take a massive hit in a divorce. Man #2 was a high school jock and is now a high school principal/football coach (and dumber than a bag of hammers). Man #3 is now a middle manager for a utility company; his new wife is a lawyer. Or, maybe I'm just all wet on this. Maybe these six people are just horrible human beings.