I agree. In fact, I said something like this on a previous post today. Some men believe that they need to work on themselves first, and then the women will come later. However, there's two major problems with this sort of thinking: For one, it isn't natural to actualize
before relations with other people have developed; that's putting the cart before the horse. Second, the only kinds of women who will be drawn to you after you've
already become a success are women with ulterior motives (i.e. gold diggers). Consider Maslow's hierarchy of needs for a moment:
Notice how actualization comes
after acquiring friends/relationships, coupled by prestige (or validation) from one's peer group. Case-in-point, you need to establish relationships
FIRST, and then you can achieve your full potential. Those relations don't have to be romantic either; we inherently derive validation from our families, followed by our community.
To be fair, some people are orphaned or come from broken homes, but that's usually where the other type of person you mentioned comes from. That is people who believe that they can become the best version of themselves by themselves. It comes from a place of hurt, rather than a place of empowerment. Even feminists who gloat that "they don't need men" forget that even
men need other men; one-man armies (unless your name is Leo Major) only exist in fiction, which is where I suspect this mindset came from (i.e. fatherless youths raised by television).
As I previously said, the kind of women who will only notice you
after you become the best version of yourself are not the kind of women who you want anything to do with. Growing up, a lot of my peers were fascinated with gangsta rap, where rappers often pointed out that they wished to achieve success in order to attract
hoes. Hoes, as in sexually loose women who they could love and then leave. The rational behind this made no sense to me; why would you spend all your time and energy working hard to better yourself and become rich and famous, only to squander it on nefarious, attention-seeking women? It's almost like they're begging to be used.
Yesterday, I went out for coffee with a lady friend before dropping her off at work (almost all of my friends are women). She told me that all she wants in a guy is someone she's attracted to (how refreshing to hear women say it out loud for once), and also be someone she enjoys spending time with. Sadly, there truly are many women with unrealistic expectations (make six figures! Drive a Porsche! Have a mansion!), but those women usually ended up alone as a result of their pickiness and lack of self-awareness. They often lacked the value they expected in others.
At the end of the day, I'm not against anyone working on themselves per se, but years ago I learned a hard lesson: Most people's opinion of you won't change even after you work on yourself. The same people who liked the unimproved me still liked the improved me, and the rest either didn't notice or care, or still disliked me all the same. In other words, you can't control how other people view you. That said, once I realized this, I now only spend time with my immediate family and my closest friends; I can count them all on one hand for each group, but I wouldn't give them up for the world.
The reason people feel they have to be this way is because their desire to "improve" is mostly coming from feeling of inferiority, rather than a desire for a better life. This is why I view self-help as a scam for the most part; in fact, most of western society has normalized body dysmorphia.
Improving to get women is not really improving; it's just a man running from his own feeling of inferiority that he himself internalized. When I see guys cold approaching, only to get rejected over and over again, to me it looks like a man reliving the trauma of rejection doing something that's almost certain to fail. It's sad, actually.
I'm really glad you wrote this. It took a lot of effort to write this, and I hope it changes people's viewpoints.
