Shawn T. Smith

I posted this video nearly a month ago. A more responsible professional would have written an announcement at the time.

The thing is, videos like this one are colossally time-consuming. By the time I hit the “publish” button, my mind has moved on to other things.

That leaves me wondering how to write this type of announcement.

Should I summarize the video? Should I cover material I wish I had included in it? Maybe you would like to hear a story about my dog?

I finally decided the most sensible option is:

New video. Enjoy!

 

This might be the most important horse story you read all day, or at least one of the top three.

I know a man who frequently visited Scotland as a child. His extended family there owned a business delivering milk in horse-drawn carriages.

Among the horses in the stable, one was particularly prized by the family: the white horse whose name the man couldn’t recall.

This clever horse had learned his route so well that he could walk it with minimal guidance. He even knew which houses to visit. (I don’t know if he could recite each customer’s order. The man didn’t say.)

The white horse was also unusually even-tempered. Unlike other horses, he was never stubborn or oppositional, and he didn’t demand breaks. He simply hitched up each morning and did what was expected of him.

The white horse made life easier for the family, and they loved him for it — or so they said. Their actions didn’t align with their words. They gave him the heaviest workload. They neglected his health. They ran him constantly and gave him little attention.

I’ve heard that neglected draft horses can develop debilitating bone problems. Maybe that was the white horse’s demise. Whatever the case, the man said the white horse died young. The family had simply worked him to death.

Question: do people train horses, or do horses train people? Any good behaviorist will tell you it’s a two-way street. The less agreeable horses in the stable lived longer than the white horse, in part, because they were more demanding of their owners.

The man who told me this story recalled the white horse with some sadness and kinship. “I’ve been the white horse my entire life,” he said. Many of the people closest to him have exploited his industrious and accommodating nature. (He has had enough, and he’s changing that.)

Countless men play the role of the white horse. Breaking the pattern means retraining people, which isn’t rocket science. If a horse can memorize a delivery route, then a man can learn to say things like “yes please,” “no thanks,” and “fuck off.” It’s simple, though not necessarily easy.

The white horse was merely following its nature, but the man who acts like the white horse has two natures: one that insists on giving, and one that resents those who accept. Half of him says, “Let me pick up the tab!” The other half thinks, This is the third time I’ve paid. The selfish pricks. He is a house divided against itself.

Resolving that conflict is challenging, but it is no coincidence that anyone who has the strength and resilience to be the white horse also has the means to overcome the habit once he decides he has had enough.

 

A stranger once glanced at the cover of The Tactical Guide to Women and concluded I must be some sort of pickup artist. I understand the misapprehension, but he couldn’t have been more wrong.

I’m the anti-PUA. The matchbreaker. The intimacy Grinch. I’m trying to persuade people to disobey their glands and rethink their relationship strategies — especially those strategies that squander potential and impede a values-driven life.

For example, there’s the strategy of choosing chaotic relationships, in which a capable adult chooses a partner who struggles to manage the minor challenges of daily life.

This partner is as lost as last year’s Easter egg. She hates her boss. She’s behind on her rent. Her friends are boneheads. She’s broke, she drinks too much, and her dog is a holy terror that rages at everything and pisses indoors.

The man who chooses this relationship submits himself to chaos and drama. Drama is expensive, so what’s the payoff? Simple: he gets to be the competent one.

This relationship is the kiddie pool of life, with all its silly little scrapes and tangles. Rather than mastering himself in the open waters of the real world, this man gets to be the most powerful swimmer in the shallow end.

Plenty of women choose these relationships too, but I think men are particularly prone to it simply because most of us are service-oriented by predisposition and training. The world consistently demands of men that we give more than we take.

That’s not a complaint. This arrangement presses us toward meaningful challenges, but it also creates the risk of misplaced effort.

Any competent and dutiful man, who is so inclined, can make a chaotic relationship the centerpiece of his world. It’s a simple matter of replacing his goals and values — to whatever extent he has defined them — with the task of propping up a child of misfortune.

The descent into chaos is especially appealing if she’s hot and the sex is good. That shiny package is a convenient distraction from the knowledge that he could be doing something more useful.

I’ve never met a man who didn’t come by this strategy honestly. The people who should have taught him about harmonious relationships fell down on the job, so he arrives at adulthood thinking, for a variety of reasons and to various degrees, that others will only tolerate him in the role of servant and problem-solver.

The punchline? These allegedly helpless women are perfectly capable of being resourceful and resilient, but they relinquish their competence because they are compelled to be saved as much as he is compelled to be the savior.

People with reciprocal insecurities have a way of finding each other. There’s something useful in that: the patterns of behavior among the people we choose can be a reflection of motives we don’t yet recognize in ourselves.

 

I’m a little embarrassed to say it’s been nearly two years since I updated my website, but that’s not due to laziness. Most of my creative energy has gone toward video lately. For starters, there’s last year’s response to the APA’s guidelines for working with boys and men:

…or my video on how men can avoid a particular type of dangerous encounter with volatile women:

…or my more recent video on hypergamy. If you’re unfamiliar with that term, this video will tell you more than you ever wanted to know:

There’s plenty more on my YouTube channel, and you can also find me these days on Twitter. I’m happy to say I have more content in the works, along with another major project I’m excited to tell you about later.

I’ll strive to do a better job of updating the website and getting emails out when I post new goodies.