What I Learned in the Car, Driving My Pickup Teacher Home
He waited until we were on the freeway.
I'd volunteered to drive him back after the workshop — the good student, holding the door open for one last piece of the secret. He had a girlfriend. He'd mentioned her from the front of the room that afternoon, offered her up as proof the method worked. Somewhere past the second exit he started talking about the women he'd turned down over the years, and he kept going, and after a while I understood he wasn't reminiscing. He was itemising. He said he thought about leaving. Not dramatically. The way you'd mention a noise the car has started making.
I kept my eyes on the road and said something agreeable.
An hour earlier he had stood at a whiteboard and told a room of us that the thing standing between a man and a marriage that lasts is skill. Get good enough and you keep her. That was the product. That was what I had paid for, more than once, for longer than I want to write down.
The man teaching me how to hold on to a woman could not hold on to a woman. He couldn't even hold on to the ones he'd already turned away.
I had heard the other version of the same sentence in a different room, on cushions, from a red tantra teacher with a much gentler voice. Self-love is the key. Fill your own cup. Nobody can love you until you love yourself, and once you do, the rest follows.
Look around that room, though. Look at who's in it. Look at the teacher. Not one of us was managing to stay bonded to anybody for very long, including the woman at the front saying it. We came back every term. That should have told me something, and for years it told me only that I hadn't done the work properly yet.
That's the design of it. If self-love is the key and your marriage failed, you didn't love yourself enough. If skill is the key and she left, your skill was insufficient. Neither claim can ever be wrong. They just get more expensive.
I have a compulsive habit. When something hurts I go looking for a paper about it, at hours when I should be asleep, and I read until the hurt has a citation attached to it.
A week ago I found one. The finding, roughly: people with more money and more education stay married longer, and the gap is not closing. I read the abstract twice.
Three things arrived at once and they didn't agree with each other.
Terror, because I have never been that person and I was reading a sentence that seemed to be about my odds.
Anger, because a long marriage shouldn't be a thing you can be priced out of. It shouldn't be an amenity. It should be a right, and I still think that, and I don't have anywhere useful to put it.
And underneath both, something I didn't expect and am slightly ashamed of: relief. I felt heard. Because that abstract was calling my teachers liars in a way I had not been able to.
Here is the part I couldn't stop turning over.
The people I know with long marriages did not learn how. My colleagues — the comfortable ones, mortgages behind them, ten, fifteen, twenty years in — never sat on a cushion and they never sat in a hotel conference room with a whiteboard. They have no vocabulary for any of this. Ask them how they did it and they'll say something so unremarkable you'd throw it away. They have less technique than I do. I would beat every one of them in a workshop.
They also have something I mistook for personality for a long time. When the car dies, it's an annoyance. When someone gets sick, one of them can take the time off. Nobody in that house has had the conversation where two exhausted people fight about a number at eleven at night.
The instinct is to read the research as saying money makes people better at love. It doesn't say that, and it isn't true. What I've come to think it says is that a marriage is not an exam you pass. It's a structure standing out in weather. Some structures get hit four times a year and some get hit forty, and after enough years you can look at the ones still standing and tell yourself a story about the quality of the timber.
The researchers who work on this — Karney and Bradbury are the names I keep hitting — put it more bluntly than I would have dared. Governments spent two decades and a great deal of money teaching relationship skills to struggling couples, exactly the theory my teachers were selling retail. The large evaluations came back close to nothing. And there's no evidence, none, that the communities with more divorce want marriage any less. They want it just as much. They're standing in worse weather.
That finding cost my teachers nothing. They're still teaching.
This realisation didn't come to me for free. I spent almost a decade and tens of thousands of dollars and blood, sweat and tears learning as deeply as I could the rules of pickup and red tantra together; a rare and hard-to-achieve combination, putting my ego aside and tragically sacrificing my own personal judgement too to be a humble student and learn what it is that women want and how to not let the sexual marketplace exploit, use or abuse me. I trusted my pickup and red tantra teachers with my love life to the brink and told them tonnes of deeply vulnerable secrets that I hadn't mustered the courage to have told even my ex-wife, any friend or family member. And yet after all that I sacrificed, they gave me nothing beyond a littering of empty promises and no self-awareness to admit that they couldn't deliver what they told me and all of their other students they could.
The last conversation I had with my pickup teacher was when I opened up and told him that this isn't working out because of X, Y and Z, and he had an unusually intense emotional moment with me and said he respected my decision but that I was completely making the wrong decision because women won't be "complicit" in the strategy I was proposing I'd embark on without him. I left my tantra teacher with a similar conversation that "I'd never find the one" with the strategy I'm embarking on without her because the mainstream women out on the streets are not well trained enough for someone with my training type and skill.
I didn't come out of that with a silver lining like "well at least I learnt something useful." I turned to Claude eventually, an AI robot, after having come to the conclusion that both teachers had flaws that were preventing them from healing and helping me to the level that I needed and being an AI Engineer possibly naively trusting that AI didn't have those flaws but maybe even keeping the benefits in tact if you prompt it well enough, and Claude nailed it both horrifically and perfectly: "you're not feeling grief because you're deserving of a high quality woman because of all of the training you've done, you're feeling grief because you've finally realised that you've been unethically sold the wrong tool: pickup training when you should have been doing attachment work with a proper therapist."
So here's the smallest true thing I can say, and it's much smaller than the story it took to get it.
I don't know how to keep a marriage. I'm not finished. I'm writing this from the middle.
But I know the two answers I was given are the wrong tool for this particular job, and I know how I found that out: not from a book, and not from the paper either. From a man in my passenger seat telling me the truth by accident, and from watching people who had the thing I wanted and no idea how to sell it.
What I did about it was unglamorous. I stopped enrolling. And I started asking the ones who'd actually done it — clumsily, and it's awkward every time.
If you want the single move, it's this, and you can do it in a bad week because it takes about four minutes. Find one couple who have been together longer than you've been trying, and don't ask them their secret. That question has a useless answer; they'll say communication, or luck, and you'll leave with nothing. Ask them about the worst year. Ask what they actually did in the week they nearly didn't make it. Who they called. Who lent them money. What they stopped arguing about, and why.
You will get a fact instead of a slogan. It'll be the first one anybody has given you for free.
To the version of me who was twenty-something and taking notes: I'm not going to tell you the courses were worthless. They weren't. You were frightened of people and they got you into rooms and taught you how to speak to a stranger without your voice going. I'd learn it again.
Just leave earlier. Learn it, take it, and get out. Don't stay for the second year, or the fifth, waiting for the part where they hand you the thing they promised, because the ones at the front of the room don't have it either. Nobody selling you the answer to lasting love has managed it themselves. That's not a coincidence and it's not bad luck. If they'd had it, they'd have been at home.
Go and find the quiet ones who did it and can't explain how. Sit next to them. Be a nuisance. Ask about the worst year.
If someone came to mind while you were reading this — the friend still in those rooms, still paying — send it to them. That's the only thing I want from this post.
Next one: I did start asking. Here's what my married colleagues actually said, including the answer that annoyed me for a month before I understood it.