Cope-afornication

A perspective on a common pattern in alpha-male LTRs

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Back when I was in my 8-year LTR, I used to love the TV series Californication. Watched it full thru 3 times. Hank Moody seemed like an every guy’s kinda guy. Talented writer, a natural ladies man, a sprinkle of asshole. He always seemed to do better with the ladies (and in life) than he should, yet somehow all without giving a fuck. To me, the show was all about the legendary and hilarious stories that Hank got himself into. The whole thing with Karen (his ex) seemed to me like a distracting side-show. Why is he so hung up on her? He’s got tons of better options. I thought ‘Bro her breaking up with you was the best thing that ever happened to you. You’re swimming in it now’

So back in 2021 when my ex-‘wife’ (we had a wedding but never signed the papers) cheated on me out of nowhere and left me to go date a beta, about a month after that I got snowed in. Bored af, I decided, ahhh what the heck, Californication will be fun to watch. A good distraction. I turn it on and within the first 15 mins I could not watch it anymore. I realized what the show was really about.

In the first 10 mins, we find out that Hank has been left by his ex-wife. After being together a decade, she suddenly, out of nowhere, cheats on him. Except it wasn’t Hank’s true ex-wife, bc they technically weren’t married. He was completely blindsided by it. Now she’s dating boring beta Bill. His whole life is upside-down. He had pictured his life going one way, forever… all to wake up one day and realize it had totally gone off the rails in a matter of months, taking him totally by surprise. Sitting there on my couch, I realized Hank was in my exact same scenario. Everything was my current life to the T.

Hank’s blind-siding was caused for the same reason my own blind-siding was: years worth of LTR debt that we had passively accumulated all coming due at once. Just like how companies seem to be doing great, then suddenly their debt situation spirals and its bankrupt in a month. They didn’t leave enough margin for safety, a small spark happened, creditors suddenly worried, panicked, and demanded higher rates the firm couldn’t afford and boom its over. The difference between ‘its not perfect but its fine’ and ‘its over’ is small and happens fast. Lots of sparks can land in a damp forest with no issue. But as we let it dry out, the line between not-dry-enough and dry-enough is tiny.

Hank’s LTR debt was just like mine. Years of being ego-centric, caring more about his own story, his own image in his mind of how cool, contrarian, special, edgy, he was. Every time he had to make a decision to prioritize his partner over his own desire, he selfishly chose not to. ‘I’m just an asshole, that’s kinda what you signed up for so accept it’ was his attitude. Meanwhile, Karen is begging for a good teammate. But the more she puts up with his attitude, the more he tells himself ‘see… we won and everything was ok’. “This is the guy she fell in love with. If she didn’t like that, she wouldn’t have got with me”. So next time, he’s even more emboldened to not compromise since he’s prevailed every time before.

The problem is, that victory was NOT free. It generated unseen debt… a girl who compromised and feels owed something in return in return for it. Love, appreciation, affection, a nice gesture. The tragedy of the male mind here, is as we continue to give less, demand more, and still get away with it… we start to feel more empowered to give even less and demand even more. This debt accumulates until one day our creditor (our gf) wakes up and realizes ‘this debt is never ever getting paid back… its only gonna keep growing like it always has’. Once that hope is gone, the creditor starts mentally accepting the need to write off their losses. It takes us by surprise bc we think we can just really quickly pay down some of the debt, that will take us back to where we were a month ago and things will be ok. But its too late. The creditor has already learned the pattern and given up hope, they have mentally accepted swallowing the write-off. They’ve already crossed that bridge, we’ve sold them an illusion of hope just around the corner for too long… they just want to move on.

This sudden collapse for a man can be devastating. Just like Lehman Brothers, who had all these plans, roadmaps, a workforce, awards, its own culture, a daily routine… its just all gone. There’s nothing left to do but just leave the office and go home. People who were paper billionaires are now broke. They didn’t just lose their jobs and money. They lost their identity, their legacy, the inner stories they tell themselves of who they are, their time, everything they worked for was for nothing all because their debt situation grew until creditors panicked and fled. They lost everything bc they thought they were in a stronger situation than they really were, they took too many risks.

It feels like this ‘alternate timeline’ happened and we become haunted by the timeline that should have happened. Its April we should be getting ready to go to the horse races today like we always did. We should be doing the annual corporate awards today. It was supposed to just go on and on and on. Like falling off a cruise ship and watching the ship just sail on without you. It goes from ‘life is awesome’ to a realization of how fragile everything is very quick.

THIS is the situation Hank finds himself in, just like me, and the show is him going thru the process of him slowly realizing and coming to grips with this.

As we turn on our social vision, we can start to see how the show begins to make a lot more sense. The reason that he is a total dick to the redhead on the surprise blind date is bc he is hurting bc he is single and he wants her to hurt also for being single. “You wish you could find a guy so you could go back home and watch America’s Next Top Model and get fat again” is him projecting his own desire to want to go back to the original timeline where he was with Karen. Its not just ‘haha Hank is such a dick lol’… that is his cope response to his own inner insecurity, giving her the shame he himself feels.

Of course, the immediate male brain cope response is ‘haha Karen will be sorry, I can find a girl who is way hotter than her, I’ll show her’. Hank and I both went out and immediately started painting the town milky white. But that is just male brain thinking ‘one girl is just like the next, just a commodity. I can just swap them out, no problem’. And for a guy that had a very shallow, distant relationship, maybe this is possible. But if you had a real connection, if you and your ex had ‘your special thing’… you are just lying to yourself that your ex wasn’t shit so you can feel more hopeful you aren’t totally fucked in trying to replace what you had with her. We want hope that we can get back onto that original timeline.

The issue is your past girl grew way past that. She knew your story, your successes, who you are at your very best, she’s seen you in situations where you were excellent and she remembers that, she seen you surpass adversity. She’s read your whole book, and has even written her own fan-fiction essays based on the characters in it. After the breakup, when you start talking to other new girls, its like she’s never watched Shameless, turns it on in Season 5 and then starts acting like she knows all the characters after one episode. She starts acting like she knows you just bc she is fucking you. Its like ‘girl you don’t know shit’. But instead we have to play along and be like ‘wow you are really good at picking up on things’ so she’ll be inspired to keep learning more and eventually one day ‘get it’.

The first few seasons of Californication are all Hank getting with hotter and younger girls, as proof to him and us the audience that he really can do better than Karen. To the single-circuit male brain, this is why the Karen thing seems like such a distraction… why does he still care? “Bro you have gorgeous young 20-something crawling all over your dick.” But the inner pain is that, while he gets younger and hotter, it becomes clearer that the relationships lack depth.

THIS was a major trap that I also found myself in in the years after my break-up. The ability to get laid with LOTS (15-20 a year) of hotter & younger (15-20 years younger than me) girls. To be able to keep them on speed dial, to have them crazy into me. But to be able to feel all this massive amount of depth that we were missing. That yeah we are cool and click really well… but she just doesn’t really care about ‘who I am’. I am just a really cool guy that she is getting to fuck.

She’s not really interested in reading my book. They don’t really want to know ‘you’… they are happy to really only know their impression of you, which they like. You: “The song is about suicide”. Her: “yeah but on first listen I thought it was about living life like there was no tomorrow and that makes me happy so I that is what the song is to me”. They don’t care to understand it. Even though we are crushing in terms of conquests, its all a very ego-centric kind of love we are receiving. They are in love with the image they made-up in their heads of what we represent to them, not with what we actually are. That makes us feel the loss of our ex even more, someone who really knew us. This is one reason why Hank connects so well to Trixie the prostitute… she looks into his soul not just her own desired projection of him.

In later seasons, we start to see Hank starting to prioritize and find girls he actually can have this level of connection on. Particularly Faith in Season 6. Faith is actually going thru the exact same heartbreak that Hank has been slow-simmering thru since Season 1, suddenly losing the rockstar bf she was in love with. She is left with trying to replace the irreplaceable. One thing they have in common is being able to respect this inner void and not trying to act like they can fill it for each other. They each recognize they missed the first 4 seasons of each other’s Netflix series and they are respectful that they are picking up mid-way through. They each try to learn from the other person where they are at, not where they wish they were at or want to believe they are at. They are each open to learning about who they were and their past. This is further seen in how Hank goes to her parents house and sees her religious upbringing. The main point here is both parties are looking to really read the other person’s book. They care that the song is about suicide and want to know the back story behind it, when it was written, how you felt when you wrote it, etc…

When I first watched Californication, it was shocking to me that Hank didn’t opt to continue to go on tour with Faith. It seemed extremely on-brand for everything we had seen since season 1. Partying with rockstars. Adventures. Debauchery. Beautiful woman by his side. But the fact that Hank suddenly opts to leave, a departure that also breaks him up with Faith… shows us that this whole thing since the Karen break-up has been cope. He doesn’t actually like any of that, it has all been an emotional reaction to the pain he hasn’t found a way to cope with. Faced with going on that tour bus, it became clearer to him that he was moving further and further away from the original timeline he wished he had still been on and who he wanted to be.

This also puts into perspective the theme song that often is used in the show, Rocketman by Elton John. ‘I miss the earth, I miss my wife. Its so lonely out in space’. Earth was his original timeline he got blasted from, and he’s been trying to find a way back to it. He misses his old life. That tour bus was going going to be a continuation of the cycle we’d seen all show…. taking him further and further from it, further into this life he didn’t recognize which was just an emotional band aid for dealing with his pain. And he recognized it.

I have this picture of me. It is the very last picture of me before my girl dumped me. I don’t know it but 2 days after my girl will be in another guy’s bed. This picture means a lot to me, it’s a guy that is oblivious to what is about to happen, how his whole life is about to change. But its also important for other reasons. It’s a sign of who I was. There I am, 36, in my shitty torn up bootcut jeans that I bought 6 yrs before, wearing sneakers. My hair is a mess. I am oblivious to how out of style, out-dated I look. I had just left her family’s NYE party early, leaving my girl behind there to chill with the rest of her family. It had been xmas holidays, to me that is all college football bowl betting, chilling with her dad. I had wanted to go home and analyze the New Years 6 games for the next day. She had several times wanted me to play board games with the family but it was like, ‘girl… I have $1500 on this game, have some respect for the situation’.

This was who she had fell in love with when I was 28. I always dressed down. Torn jeans, don’t give a fuck what I look like vibe. Slinging cash on games, the thrill of it. Never afraid to lose her, always ready to walk out that door, not some beta bitch that feels the need to be at her side all the time, never worried to lose her. Nothing really changed, but that is kind of the problem. The perception of it did.

This to me is Hank Moody’s old Porsche. Karen must’ve loved that Porsche when he first got it. Nothing really changed, its still the same old Porsche. But the perception of it has changed over time. It has gone from this cool thing to a representation of what he used to be. Of how he has stopped trying, because he has not taken care of the car. On one hand, we can see his argument of ‘but Karen its still the same porsche you used to love, nothing has changed!’. More realistically, we can sense the car has been left behind by time. Its changed from something classic, timeless…. to a symbol of just how static Hank is, that he has peaked and the best times are behind him. Same as me in my picture.

The lesson here is we have to keep growing, to keep up with the times. If we just stay static, we fall behind. That is true in our relationships. We must make them better every year. Most people are resigned to the common social template that relationships always just get slowly worse over time, “you can try to slow that descent but might as well accept it”. I don’t buy that, I think its weak-minded defeatist bullshit. Its cope for laziness. I know many older couples that started dating when they are older (ie they’ve learned from failure) who have LTRs exactly like this, they get better and stronger every year. They put the effort into it, just like they did when they were single. I think we can actually make our relationships better every year, and that is the bar that we should set for ourselves. That is the bar I set for myself now, in my current relationship.

I have also walked my talk. One thing my current gf and I do is, I have us every 3 months do a relationship check-up. Its scheduled, we know its coming. We have a series of 10 ‘health of the relationship’ questions. Good/bad. “what are the top 3 emotions you associate with our LTR”.

I wanted that. Just like an annual eval with my boss at work, I know that it makes me think about things correctly. That I am lucky to have this job. That ‘just doing my job, clocking in’ is not acceptable. I need to be excellent. I need to have a growth plan. I need to take ownership of my perception. I need to be prepared coming into that meeting. It’s a reminder I could get laid off at any moment… I respect that. People who don’t do that… no wonder they just let things drift and fall apart. Imagine if you never did an annual eval with your employees? They’d just drift and drift until they became whatever.

The other reason I do these is because it allows me to get ahead of these little complaints of hers, rather than letting them simmer and grow. Without these, it seems like she bringing a compliant up out of nowhere, often her frustration has boiled over. That can often make a guy defensive… he may be more focused on handling her compliant as a threat to ‘his frame’ than hearing it as the justified compliant that it is. Since she has no other avenue thru which to air the compliant, it just gets brought up over and over. He calls it nagging and over time feels justified in ignoring it ‘she always says that, just handle it like you always do’.

In our 3 month check-ins, it removes the feeling of it being a threat to my frame… I am asking for it. It prevents me from dismissing it… it must be important if it is being brought up, if in the context of a 3 month view this is one of the things that stands out to her. It makes her prioritize and focus on the big things, helping me separate minor complaints from major ones. It separates us from the emotions of the moment (when her frustration boils over and the compliant blurts out), and instead allows us to be collaborative and creative on what a real solution could be. Finally, it allows her to have a recourse so that she doesn’t have to boil over. Rather than think ‘I’m mad and if I don’t tell him right now he’ll never know so here goes’… she thinks ‘ok well this is DEFINITELY getting brought up at the next quarterly’. And 3 months is not so long to have to wait for that to feel like a long time before she gets some remediation.

This is all part of my commitment with her to make us better every single day (really every single quarter). Knowing that I have a measurement day coming up, I put in that extra little effort. I look at the Porsche and think ‘needs a wash, a wax, fix the headlight, the seat leather is torn needs to be fixed’. I know we both expect things to be getting better, always. When I have to make that decision between the game I have money on or spending a special moment with her, I have the incentive to now. I want that to be on my quarterly. What will future me be more proud of?

Anyways, I wanted to write this up to show these themes of LTR passive debt accumulation, how the risk of losing our girl seems improbable and invisible until it is inevitable, how just like a funeral we have a hard time appreciating everything they actually meant to us until they are gone, and why we need to shift the expectation from slowing the descent of the relationship to instead setting all-time highs in it consistently. We also went into a concrete example of one solution (the 3 month check-in) that we can use to help do this, which should inspire you to think of other ways to improve it also.

Best, Angel

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