“The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.”

– Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It’s me or ______”

When men reach their 20’s they start settling down. After college comes marriage. And while there’s nothing wrong with being in love, I suspect that most of the guys committing to serious relationships are doing so for the wrong reasons.

A lot of guys think that they have to do whatever their girlfriend tells them. They worry that ignoring her demands will end the relationship and leave them all alone.

“What if no other girl likes me and I never find love again?” Is a question that I hear from a lot of young guys. This is a pretty stupid idea. Most of the dudes who end up giving into ultimatums aren’t exactly living the dream. In fact, I know three men who are in for some serious issues over the next decade. And all because they couldn’t stand up for themselves.

Three men and a lifetime of disappointment

I know several dudes who’ve buckled to the marriage demands of their girlfriends. While I don’t want to sound negative, I think that each of these relationships will end up in peril.

• Guy #1

I personally don’t know this dude super well, but he’s a guy who lives in my hometown. “Average” would be my best description of him. He’s just a normal looking man with a nondescript job and zero interesting hobbies. From what I know, he’s a guy who goes to work and then heads home to drink beer and watch television. Not a bad guy, but nothing special.

His soon to be wife on the other-hand…

This girl’s been banged out by every meth dealer and two-bit criminal in the state. She has two different kids with two different dudes, neither belong to her future husband, and is a big fat skank. This chick literally looks like a cross between the Michelin Man and a recovering drug addict.

According to what I’ve heard, from multiple sources, this guy basically got talked into marrying her. She brought up marriage enough times that he eventually caved and went “Okay honey” before buying a ring.

• Guy #2

The second guy I know is interchangeable with the first. Both men are boring but safe. They aren’t that interesting to talk to, but neither is going to be committing any crimes or causing trouble.

Guy number two’s girlfriend is pretty average too. She’s equal to him in looks and acts pretty normal. There are no illegitimate children or meth fueled hook-ups going on over here.

However, this girl pretty much mapped out the entire course of her relationship and how it has to go. A set amount of time dating, engagement, and then a wedding. She actually gave the man a specific date to propose by.

I can’t really say that there’s anything horrendously wrong with this or that the relationship will fail, but I do believe that a marriage started with an ultimatum will have trouble. It isn’t natural and it really shows who wears the pants in that relationship.

• Guy #3

The third dude I know is a lot lazier than the others. His girlfriend is, overall, better than him. This dude is the standard 90’s sitcom dad. He’s cool with whatever he’s told to do so long as he can still play video games and watch sports. I hate to use the term, but he’s a manchild.

Unless he was in a relationship with a blow-up doll, any girl this guy dates would be out of his league. While I’m not sure if their wedding plans were actually the result of an ultimatum, this dude certainly wasn’t the one to propose them. I’m sure their relationship will go well for a few years, after which excessive pudding cup consumption will somehow trigger a divorce. At which point this guy will have no idea how to take care of himself.

What all these situations have in common

Nerdy bloggers love to write lengthy essays pardoning men from any responsibility in life. If you end up in a bad relationship it’s societies fault, or the woman manipulated you, or there was too much pressure from your family. In truth, the answer is much simpler.

It’s always the man’s fault.

In every one of these situations the guy could have just got up and left. There’s no special knowledge required there. You don’t have to be some playboy or master of psychology to know that marrying a women with multiple illegitimate kids is a bad idea. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that placing an ultimatum on an engagement is problematic. And everyone should know that being a lazy slug makes you vulnerable to all kinds of dangers.

Any sane man who has to choose between his freedom and making his girlfriend happy should eject from the relationship as soon as possible.

Negotiations will get you nowhere

If a woman ever says “It’s me or ______,” choose the second option. There are plenty of girls who try to dominate the lives of men who date them.

The other day I ended up on a date with some girl. We were walking around when she saw a place that sold really expensive candies.

Upon seeing the candies this girl made a comment about them, I dismissed it. A few minutes later she brought them up again, I dismissed it again. About 10 minutes after that she erupted into a full-scale temper tantrum about not getting her stupid candies.

Instead of rushing to buy some sweets in hopes that it would appease her, I just turned around and walked away.

Situations like these make negotiations worthless. Being the nice guy and trying to fix the issue just leads to more tantrums down the road. Being the bad boy with some cocky argument and bag full of tactics is pointless too. You’re simply going to prolong your interaction with an unpleasant person.

If you ever read blogs or forums about picking up women you’ll notice that guys quickly become jaded and bitter. That’s because they don’t respect themselves enough to take a loss and move on.

If a girl has a tantrum, or acts unpleasant, those guys will put up with it in hopes that they can get laid and brag online. As a result you’ll see a lot of dudes saying things like “I couldn’t stand her and the sex wasn’t even fun.” For guys that spend countless hours studying social interaction they seem to have missed the most basic advice out there: Stay away from negative people.

Closing thoughts

This post wasn’t written to try to paint women as being evil, or tell men that they should never get married. If you want to commit to a serious relationship, that’s great. Just don’t go through with it because your girlfriend tells you to. Men need to make decisions that benefit them. Entrapping yourself in a one-sided relationship will bring nothing but misery.

Advising men to swear off women would be stupid. Girls can be a lot of fun. But, I would advise men to find a hobby that brings them just as much joy as sex does.

This way you always have a bargaining chip.

Being able to enjoy something like exercise or reading makes it easier to deal with women. You never have to feel pressured or worry about being lonely and upset because there’s always something you’re passionate about, be it boxing or model trains, waiting for you when you get home.

“Success seems to be connected to action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.”

– Conrad Hilton

How to model your business

Over the past 12 months I have made money from numerous ventures. Freelance article writing, penning product reviews, ghostwriting books, affiliate marketing, sales, and a whole slew of other hustles.

Although most of my ventures panned out pretty well, very few of them were actually enjoyable. They took up a lot of time and offered no long-term rewards. I was a stay at home office drone toiling away to line someone else’s pockets.

Writing articles paid by the hour. I was making more than I had at my old job, but there were no other differences. I still lacked freedom and had to be chained to my desk at all hours.

The mistake that I had made was basing my business around one time payouts. If I wasn’t making new things to sell, like articles and books, I wasn’t earning anything.

All over the web you can find pseudo-intellectual articles about passive income. Most of them are written by guys who have very little expertise with the subject. They make money by writing books about making money, their other endeavors don’t do nearly as well.

Rather than wasting both of our time with some drawn-out bull, I’m going to share a little analogy that I came up with a few weeks ago. I call it hamburger theory and it summarizes the importance of making a business that can run with as little input as possible.

What is the hamburger theory?

Imagine that you love hamburgers and have an obsession with them. Burgers are your destiny. Since hamburgers, like most subjects, have a very limited range of career options, you really only have two choices. You can make burgers for a living, or you can create something that ties into your passion.

If you choose to make hamburgers you’ll either end up working for someone else, or owning your own restaurant. The first one will pay horribly and the second is a lot of stress. Owning a restaurant  means that you have to constantly draw in customers, pump out food items, and try to manage your time. Eventually you have to scale your business to try and meet new demands. The more successful you become, the less freedom you have.

Freelance writing is like running a restaurant. As you gain more clients you lose free time. Saturday nights are spent drafting documents and days off lead to angry emails from customers. You have to constantly be your own marketing team, factory, and customer service representative. All the stuff that Internet moguls casually leave out of their get rich quick books.

Your other option is to create an enterprise with perpetual profits. Going back to the hamburger analogy, you could write a book about the hundred best burgers in America. Or make a YouTube cooking series. Or come up with some other creative venture like a blog. Each of these is infinitely harder than making a single hamburger for one client, but they continually pay out over time.

There are books that are still making money after their author has died. A restaurant, on the other hand, will implode if the owner takes two weeks off.

Blogging and affiliate marketing is the same. It’s way harder to write a quality post for your own site than it is to draft a fake book review for someone else. Before it was banned, I had a private area on Reddit that was making me $15 a day. It was very little work and I was making money in my sleep.

Right now 30 Days To X is one of the top 80,000 websites in the United States. It took some sleepless nights and a lot of work to get there, but I could probably “retire” to a place like the Philippines once I finish up the book I’m writing.

Freelance writing isn’t a bad gig, I actually learned a lot from it, but you shouldn’t rely on it long-term. Constantly having to churn out new material will wear you down. You’d be better off developing a business which allows you to take some time off. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you won’t have to work as hard, especially when you are trying to get established, but you can eventually ease up. Some of the tasks will run on autopilot and take care of themselves if you want to go on vacation or recuperate.

“Exercise is King, nutrition is Queen, put them together and you’ve got a kingdom.”

– Jack LaLanne

There’s more to life than protein

One of the very few downsides to living in a major city is the pollution. If you go downtown or into a highly crowded area you’re going to ingest a lot of smog. Millions of vehicles coupled with poor air circulation makes this unavoidable.

Thanks to all the smog I ended up with a terrible cough. I was always short on breath and constantly hacking up mucus. It was awful.

Rather than whining about my predicament and gobbling up medicine, I decided to change the way I ate. Since moving I haven’t juiced or taken any vitamins. In fact, I hadn’t even eaten as much fruit as I usually do back home.

Due to the fact that diet and health are closely related, I figured my eating habits might affect my illness.

Changes I made

To combat my cough, I started to eat more fruit and began juicing again. I didn’t do anything crazy, most of my juices were just simple orange and carrot concoctions. And most of the raw fruit I was consuming was very basic as well. Bananas, oranges, stuff like that.

In addition to this I continued going to the gym set up some fans in my apartment to get air circulating.

It wasn’t much, but it helped tremendously. While I haven’t completely beaten my cough, it has been waning. I’m no longer choking on mucus or feeling horrible.

A lot of times people make the mistake of assuming that being in-shape is the same as being healthy. You look at some of these bodybuilding diets and they consist of nothing but protein and oats. When you’re only focused on protein you’ll miss out on all the protective benefits that fruits offer.

I thought I was too cool to juice and I ended up horribly sick. Were I to have packed a travel blender and eaten my vegetables things would have went a lot differently.

According to a study published in Chest magazine:

“The diets and respiratory symptoms of 2,012 high school students were examined for one year. By the study’s end, researchers found that participants who consumed fewest amounts of antioxidant-rich foods were most likely to develop chronic bronchitis and other respiratory problems, such as asthma and wheezing.”

If you’re doing any travel to a developing nation or city with lots of pollution, like Los Angeles, you need to eat those fruits. They’ll keep you from developing serious respiratory problems.

“What’s a somebody in a nobody town?”

– The Weeknd, Professional

Young men need to live in a major city

Unless you’re really old you should never live in a city of less than a million people.

It will kill your brain and make you bitter.

Living in Iowa I always thought that I was depressed. The only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that I could escape. While the Midwest has some fun stuff, like crazy college parties and natural beauty, it’s not the best place for an ambitious young man.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m an eccentric guy. I’ll read a book or blog post and then go out and try what I learned. The idea of looking stupid, or failing, never crosses my mind.

But I usually had to keep my activities to myself. Any idea I had was met with insane amounts of resistance. People would come out of the woodwork with a thousand reasons against whatever I wanted.

It would be easy to sit here and bash these folks, but I don’t have any hostility towards them. They’re just simple people who weren’t exposed to a lot. In 10 years all of them will be in the same place they are today.

However, I’ve always wondered how many young men gave up on their dreams due to pressure from family and friends. Thousands? Millions? When you’re a teenager, or even a young adult, mom and dad seem like the ultimate authorities and you don’t ever want to upset friends.

As such, plenty of go-getters end up folding in hopes that it appeases others.

You have to go out into the world before you quit

I’m sure there are guys living in L.A. and New York City who have a tough time getting support from peers. It’s a problem that happens everywhere.

But those guys can always find a mentor or get inspired. If you wanted to become a professional blogger in Manhattan there are a million resources for you. Groups you can join, free classes you can take, and places that you can write about.

In the Midwest you don’t have that. Telling someone about a professional blogger who makes $10,000 a month would get you scoffed at. No one would say “Cool, I wish you luck.” Instead you’d hear some B.S. about “You can’t believe everything you read.”

On top of this, there isn’t much to inspire you. Most of “cities,” are just hives of office drones. Unless you love Applebee’s and the Gap they’ll leave you underwhelmed.

If you want to find a source of motivation you need to get out. I moved to a city of nine million and it reinvigorated me. Although there are issues, you can find your niche and surround yourself with like-minded people. A couple of weeks ago I was out socializing and mentioned that I write professionally. Nobody said “That’s dumb, real men wear khaki pants and toil away in a cubicle.” Instead I was put in contact with another dude who gave me writing advice.

The middle of the map is great if you want to live cheaply, get drunk, and have sex with a lot of Midwestern college girls. However, anyone who aspires for more is likely to become disappointed. If you want to grow as a man you need to move to bigger places.