Escape the Red Pill: Women Are Your Friends, Not Your Enemy
Men and women were created to complement each other and raise up one another.
This is a guest post from Dovid Feldman, LPC, a husband, father, and Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist. We’ve interacted for years on X. He has a great habit of gently calling people to take responsibility for their own feelings and actions, something we could use a lot more of. Check out his Recreating Intimacy program and marriage blog.
Today, men and women are at odds.
The messages are everywhere and inescapable. Between the constant screeching of “toxic masculinity” on one hand and “golddigger” videos on the other, the promotion of our incompatibility is the greatest disservice we do to each other.
Women are taught to view each man as a potential threat to their physical and emotional safety. Social media is inundated with the worst relationship content, replete with cheating, abandonment, abuse, and overall disdain. Men are not only toxic but manipulative, controlling liars as well. They certainly cannot be trusted under any circumstances.
Rise of the Red Pill
This anti-men content went unchallenged for years. Then along comes the “Red Pill” community, where hundreds of content creators make a living by showcasing the worst parts of female nature via stories, videos, and podcasts.
An innocent search on “masculinity” will take you down a red pill rabbit hole of unbelievable depth, whose main purpose is to showcase the worst female behavior. Youtubers such as Pearl Davis or podcast shows such as FreshAndFit and Whatever routinely disparage marriage for men, spreading tales of horror and despair.
The name is a riff off a meme from The Matrix when Morpheus tells Neo, “Take the red pill, and you’ll see just how far down the rabbit hole goes.” Take the red pill, and you’ll learn the real truth about women. The scales will fall from your eyes, and you’ll be free from their manipulations.
In the guise of educating and protecting you, the “red pill” creates fear and anxiety, keeping you single, unattached, and alone. What man wants to get married if they’ve been taught that a woman’s hypergamous nature will have her monkey-branching to a better man as soon as possible? That your wife isn’t yours, it’s just your turn? That despite her vows, she is always cultivating a backup plan?
How sad.
To be fair, many such YouTubers and podcasters are merely trying to help. In their imagination, by exposing the dark side of each gender, they are sparing you from learning the truth the hard way.
Why should you figure it out yourself when so many have been burnt before you? Rather than risk it all on a relationship and heaven-forbid marriage, it is better to absorb the lessons upfront from the online martyrs willing to share their tales of misery and woe.
Her: “Come swimming with me.”
Me: Nah, I’ll pass.
Her: “What’s wrong? You used to love the ocean!”
Me: Truthfully, I’m scared to go in.
Her: Really? How’d that happen?
Me: Umm…not sure. Could it be because I’ve watched 1000 shark-attack Tiktoks?
Her: 😡😡😡
And just like this new TikTok-induced fear of the ocean, this is exactly what happens to us when we ingest false, disparaging messages about each other. We begin to project our worst fears upon our unsuspecting partners and criminalize them without even giving them a chance.
Or, just as bad, we never give love a chance because we’ve convinced ourselves that we will be irreversibly damaged. Hence, because of our poor choices in the content we consume, we limit, if not destroy, our connection with those we love.
Escaping the Red Pill
In reality, God created men and women with different but complementary natures. And while we sometimes rub each other the wrong way, the underlying purpose of the masculine and feminine is to lift each other, creating something greater than we could build by ourselves. It was men and women, working together, that conquered a continent.
This process isn’t always pretty or comfortable, just as putting a square peg into a round hole is not easy. But the mission of loving each other and even liking each other, precisely when we are at wit’s end, is the entire purpose of connecting with your soulmate in the first place. When we overcome our differences and smooth out the edges that separate us, we create a beautiful life that highlights our joint strengths, not our individual weaknesses.
The First Step
The first step in escaping red pill messaging is a profound understanding and strong belief that women want a good, loyal, committed marriage even more than you do. Love, intimacy, and family are integral to female nature, and no amount of social brainwashing can change that.
While it’s wise to be cautious about who you marry, assuming goodwill and trust is a great place to start on your journey to building your own home. As a leader, your confidence in your future together is infectious and will bring out her natural attraction and femininity.
Our shared life, man and woman, will hopefully bring out the best in us—it certainly can bring out the worst in us. But without the underlying goodwill, we cannot become one. If we don’t trust that we need each other, can lean on each other, and are meant for each other, we will instead remain forever separate.
Trusting that our spouse is committed to our shared mission—a loving, connecting, and intimate relationship—is a necessary foundation for making our shared dreams a reality.
It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.
Genesis 2:18
You can find more of Dovid Feldman’s writing at dovidfeldman.com.