There are very few content creators on YouTube I follow closely but plenty I check up on every once in a while. Just now I finished watching the latest video by Thinking Ape, in which he discusses fear of missing out (FOMO) in the context of sex and relationships. There is one comment he makes in passing, which deserves much closer attention. He speaks of relationships potentially harming you, setting you back by years. There is a lot more to that. Entering a relationship with the wrong woman can fuck up your life beyond repair.

As Thinking Ape rightly points out, you are never going to get time back. Plenty of hucksters online claim that you can always make money back, but even that is not correct. A woman who stunts your ambitions at the wrong time can easily irreparably damage your career, putting you into a hole you are never fully going to climb out out of. One of the smartest guys I have ever met lives in a small town because that is what his girlfriend wanted, and his career is going nowhere. He is looking at essentially a lost decade, working for some small companies with zero brand value where he does, based on what I can tell, utterly mundane work that is not going to set him up for future success. It is not even clear to me how he would be able to leverage the experience he has gained into a better job. Obviously, guys should not harbor any delusions about work or their fantastic future careers, but there is normally a level of success that is attainable with a bit of hard work and persistence. In tech, you should be able to become a senior software engineer after some time, for instance, and this is where the career of most people in this field tops out. Likewise, in banking it seems that the VP title is within reach for everyone whereas the levels beyond that are much more difficult to get.

A woman derailing your career is bad enough, but it could be worse. There is the “manic pixie dream girl” trope, and these women exist in real-life, i.e. eccentric if not unhinged but very attractive women. God bless you if you do not have a strong personality because theses women can send you into a tailspin. I cannot count the number of guys who were introduced to various drugs by some hot chick they were banging. Presumably, a hot slut asking you if you want to do coke on her tits is all the motivation some guys need. In the club scene, there are a lot of women who take little mystery pills, which could contain anything. It was not that uncommon that chicks I just met asked me if I wanted to take some MDMA or LSD with them. Some even tried passing a pill to me mouth-to-mouth while kissing. For me, this was a hard no. If you have gone to clubs with some regularity, you have probably heard of guys, or perhaps even knew some, who ended up in a rough spot due to drugs, and often they were introduced to drugs by girls. I knew several guys who delayed graduation by a year or more, or even dropped out, because they were stuck partying and doing drugs, for instance.

Of course some women are genuinely evil. They just want to exploit you financially. Gold-digging whores are plentiful, with some deliberately targeting well-off men who seem to lack confidence. Before they know it, these guys rent swanky apartments and spend a big chunk of their money on their new girlfriend who will be with them until she has siphoned off all his resources. There is no need to go into details as there are countless stories of women who empty out their husband’s bank account before they file for divorce so that they get even more money. A few of the more tragic stories involve guys putting their girlfriend through college, paying her tuition fees, only for her to dump him the moment she graduates.

There is also the problem of social contamination. Women often want to introduce you to their friends, even if you only bang them casually. Most people are easily influenced by the company they keep. If she has friends who get wasted two or three times a week, this will also be expected from you, for instance, if you are part of her social group. I had little empathy towards most women I knew and because I was not concerned about any feelings I may hurt, I had no qualms about even laughing when some ditz asked me if I wanted to hang out with her friends. It was not that I deliberately tried to hurt them. Instead, the thought was so patently absurd that I involuntarily had to laugh. Yet, a lot of men are easily swayed and may adjust to the group they are in. Think of guys who drink because others in their group tell them to drink, for instance. Similarly, how often do you see a guy, when people take turns smoking a joint, who skip it? Or think of someone arranging lines of coke, one line per head in the group. How often do you see guys bow out? Amusingly, in the case of alcohol people sometimes get upset if you do not drink yourself but with cocaine I never got a negative reaction. After declining, you may get some pushback like, “Are you sure? This is good stuff!” but if you do not budge, then etiquette seems to be that the cokehead who prepared the lines just snorts the leftover one.

A common phenomenon is the constantly buzzed husband. There are guys who become habitual drinkers because they cannot stand being around their cantankerous wife when they are sober. To numb their pain, they just have one beer after another. If you see a middle-aged guy with a huge beer belly then this is a likely cause. I seem to be seeing less of this phenomenon these days but it could very well be due to guys getting married later or not at all. There is a difference between a beer belly and being fat from eating too much, albeit both can happen at the same time. Perhaps I see fewer beer bellies because people are just fatter in general. In any case, you probably do not want to end up in a situation where you are stuck with a woman who annoys you so much that you think that your only way of coping with it is to down a six-pack every evening.

The wrong woman can keep your career from taking off, cause your career to stall, or even make you lose your job. If you have a crazy bitch at home who makes your life hell, it will sooner or later affect your performance on the job. Some women only ruin your finances: they steal money while they are in a relationship and in the case of a divorce, they get half your assets. Many guys never recover from that. There are also serious legal ramifications. Some women are so adept at pushing the guy’s buttons that he will hit them at some point. Domestic violence can lead to you spending a year or more in prison. I am sure there are guys out there whose girlfriend was so aggressive towards them that their fight or flight response kicked in. Getting into a relationship can be an enormous risk and guys should be extremely careful about it. In an older post, I wrote about chances of finding a decent girlfriend or wive being low. That is is the case. The odds are stacked against you and you better bail if you see red flags. The wrong woman, of which there are many out there, will ruin your life.