Suffering Equals Success In Life, But Not In Relationships

Why suffering leads to success in life but not in relationships.

In this video coaching newsletter I discuss an email from a viewer who’s new to my work. He shares how just one read through of 3% Man has changed his perspective from thinking he was cursed when it comes to women to realizing that there is nothing wrong with him. He simply had a bad dating, relationship and attraction strategy.

My comments are in bold italics like this below in the body of his email.

This particular email is from a viewer, I believe he’s in his late 40s, if I remember right. He’s a former U.S. Army Special Forces member and multiple combat deployments, spent a lot of time in the sandbox in the Middle East.

He grew up in a not so perfect environment at home. He’s only been through my book one time. He just found my work recently, but after going through it, he just had a lot of epiphanies and realized what he was doing to unknowingly sabotage the relationships or budding relationships that he’s had with women his whole life. He thought maybe he was cursed because in his family, and what he learned from his mother was that suffering in relationships basically leads to good outcomes. In other words, you suffer, you’re going to have success when it comes to business or accomplishing hard things, or like in his case, becoming a Green Beret. That toughness, that mental and emotional toughness that he learned to deal with in childhood really helped him deal with the Special Forces selection course, in addition to anything else he went after in life.

However, when he took that same approach that in relationships, well suffering is just part of the process. He made himself miserable, thought he was cursed, thought there was something wrong with him, led to bad thoughts. After reading my book, he realized that there’s nothing wrong with him. The only problem was, is that he had a bad dating and relationship attraction strategy. So now the light bulbs are going off and he’s realized it was his own behavior, his own unmanly, unmasculine behavior, when it came to women is what turned women off. Even though he’s a badass in the battlefield, when it came to dealing with women, as you’ll see, it created a lot of suffering, but now he sees the light at the end of the tunnel.

Viewer Email:

Hi Coach Wayne, 

I’m writing to say thank you. I’m not going to ask any questions now because I am only on my second reading of 3% Man and I don’t want to waste your time or mine. It’s obvious to me that the answers are in there once I’ve sufficiently absorbed and contemplated the material.

Well, you got to apply it too, because the idea is you get to know the material so well, then you’re practicing it, applying it, and then you see the results show up in real life, in the real world, because that’s what really builds your confidence.

You can read a book a thousand times, but you got to really experience what’s in the book in order to really own it and live it to the point where it becomes innate and intuitive, and you just naturally behave the way, or in ways that are attractive to women because it’s natural and innate to us guys.

But when you grow up in a society like ours, this is not common knowledge. They don’t teach this stuff in school. You have to learn it either on your own or through people who do know, and so few know. Again, that’s why it says 3% Man, because not a lot of us around.

So, the first thank you is for your excellent book and your videos and podcasts. The bigger thank you is for the epiphany to which your work has led me.  

I have absolutely no deficit in confidence as a man among men. 

Well, what is confidence? Confidence is doing what you know how to do and doing it really well. That comes from successful repetitions. As the great Aristotle said, “Excellence is not a singular act. It’s a habit. You are what you do repeatedly.” You’ve just got to know what things to do repeatedly to get you the desired results. Obviously, 3% Man does that, and if you’re new and you haven’t read it yet, it’s free to read at UnderstandingRelationships.com. Put your name, your email address, create a password on my website and it’ll open up right in your web browser. The address is right on the screen.

After college, I realized my life was not heading in any direction in which I could take any pride. With nothing to lose, I enlisted in the U.S. Army and spent 13 years in U.S. Army Special Forces. I deployed to the Middle East nine times. After separating from the Army, I went to law school and I have served as a prosecuting attorney for the last four years. I never doubted that I could achieve my goals and I still believe that with enough hard work and endurance, most people can achieve almost any aspiration to which they set their will. Unfortunately, my confidence in relationships has been the complete opposite, with predictable results. 

Well, as I was saying earlier, it’s really just a bad strategy and you get your strategy mostly from your family, your parents, your peer group. The reality is, very few people really understand this stuff.

Your work, as I’ve gathered from your book and commentary, is not for people whose upbringings left them with healthy or beneficial instincts when it comes to women. 

My book is for everybody. Every guy has some amount of information. In other words, he’s got a knowledge gap. Some dudes, guys like us, it’s a really wide knowledge gap. Other guys got a real small knowledge gap and my book will close the distance. So it is for every man. I have lesbian clients, I got gay clients, I even got trans clients. It’s like you have to act in accordance with what your dominant natural essence is. That’s what creates attraction.

So if you’re attracted to the feminine, you got to act masculine. If you’re attracted to the masculine, you got to act feminine. It’s pretty simple once you understand the basic principles. It’s really just teaching human behavior and what creates attraction, what draws women towards us and what repels them from us because they’re drawn to strength and confidence. If you’re not displaying strength and confidence, even if you’re a badass war fighter like this guy is, doesn’t matter. If you act like a bitch, women will treat you like a bitch. You’re supposed to be more masculine than they are, and when you’re not, you’re gonna have problems.

My parents’ relationship was fraught. My mother is extremely loving and conscientious, but fell for a very depressed, very emotionally stunted man. I loved my father deeply (He passed in 2024), but his father’s horrific treatment of his family and subsequent suicide while my father was only 13 scarred him for life. I fought for my dad’s love throughout my childhood and rarely got anything in return. 

It’s like, well how could you? Who was there to teach him? So it just didn’t happened. That’s why I did a video in the past few weeks about Why You Should Forgive Your Parents. It’s like they did the best they could with where they’re at. Again, nobody comes along with an instruction manual like these two great books here, 3% Man and Mastering Yourself. Mastering Yourself is also free to read in the Members Area, by the way, if you’re new, or if you’ve been around for a while, you can read it too.

My mother, by tolerating it, modeled for me that suffering for someone you love is just our lot in life. I only had one dad, so I had to take what little affection and validation I could get from him.  

I have realized that this bad programming ended up fused with the lesson that enduring deprivation and suffering has led to the greatest rewards of my life, be it suffering in the Q Course to earn my Green Beret, suffering in combat deployments, or suffering through bar prep to earn my law license. 

Well, as Elon Musk said, one of my favorite quotes, which is also in Mastering Yourself, he says, “Being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death,” because you just don’t know. You could lose it all, you could lose everything, and it’s all on you. It’s not easy.

Unfortunately I applied that lesson to relationships: Suffering equals success, combined with the scarcity mindset I learned from my father’s inability to express love.  

So again, what you do often, you do best. If you’ve got a dysfunctional relationship model at home, well that’s all you know. That’s your ,what’s the word? When you use AI, it’s like your training set, if you will. If you get trained on bad information, well you’re going to have problems.

I was in good shape in Special Forces, but I’m 5’9,” went bald very young, and am certainly not anywhere close to “tall, dark, and handsome.” But, being that I’ve been in very manly, mysterious, and demanding professions, and owing to the confidence I have around other men, I’ve often “punched above my weight” and attracted the attention of very beautiful women.  

You know the rest of the story, Coach: I meet a beautiful woman. We date for a few weeks or months. I fall in love immediately. Once she starts expressing genuine feelings for me, I latch on, over-communicate, and over-emote. 

Because again, if you didn’t get enough hugs and I love you’s in childhood, you presuppose that you’re never going to get it. So when a woman doesn’t call when you expect or she says, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” and then tomorrow comes and goes and she doesn’t do that, and you freak out, a man who understands that grows up in a healthy environment just goes, “Oh, she’s probably busy. She’ll she’ll be back. She’ll reach out. You watch.”

Women are like cats. Sure enough, maybe the day after that she reaches out, but when you go into a panic mode, that’s the opposite of confidence. You panic in combat, you get killed. You panic with women, you get dumped. You get, “I’m not feeling it. There’s no chemistry. There’s no spark. You’re a great guy, but I just think of you as a friend.”

When she inevitably reduces communication, I panic, terrified of the pain and loneliness I will feel if I lose her. I lose her. Then my feelings persist and I torture myself for months or years. 

Well, it takes the average person about 18 months to get over a breakup. It’s just the way it is. That’s where it just completely loses the emotional charge and you’re no longer bothered by it. You have peace, basically.

We remain “friends.”  She has an emotional sounding board in me, she gets unlimited attention and validation, and I sign on for celibacy, frustration, and misery indefinitely. 

Yeah, you basically became her gay male girlfriend, her emotional tampon, because your mom was trying to teach you to be a nice boy, be a nice young man, don’t ever break a woman’s heart in a way that your father broke your mom’s over and over and over. Made you tough in the battlefield, but again, when it came to women, when you’re not tough emotionally, it makes them feel unsafe and they’re going to flee. It dries them up, turns their pussy into a haunted house in the Sahara Desert. Pretty dry in there.

I can’t move on because I still love her, and I never let go of the shred of hope that she will suddenly reciprocate my love, despite all evidence to the contrary. 

Well, if you’re used to getting scraps as a kid, well when you get scraps when it comes to women, you’ll be like, “Oh, this is normal. It’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

As long as I continue to suffer badly enough and long enough, eventually I will be rewarded. 

Again, that’s the perfect mindset for business and achieving great things as a man, but when it comes to women, no. She’s supposed to make your dick hard, not your life. She’s supposed to be the cherry on top of your hot fudge. Delicious hot fudge sundae from Dairy Queen.

And in the meantime, since this is all I have, I have to take what I can get. 

Well, if that’s what you’re used to, then you go, “Well, this is normal.”

I am 45 years old. I’ve never been married, never been engaged, and never had a relationship that lasted more than a matter of months. I was convinced that I was cursed, that there was something terribly wrong with me, that I was ultimately unlovable, and that no one, not my friends, not my family, not my exes, would ever tell me what my insurmountable flaw was. 

Well, if you ask women, they don’t understand how attraction works. They’re going to give you something that’s usually them just trying not to hurt your feelings, but at the end of the day, it’s not helpful information anyways. That’s why, as a man, you have to understand this stuff because the woman’s job is to test you. She’s testing your strength. If you don’t know this stuff, you got your knowledge gap, you get exposed and then you get rejected.

I was convinced that I would die alone and never know the answer to that question. 

Again, that all was part of the story that you developed in childhood.

That question has been front and center of my PTSD, alcoholism, suicidality, all of those things that are far too common with veterans like me…

Well, really the biggest thing in life, the biggest challenge, and I would highly suggest reading Mastering Yourself, is learning to deal with the conversation that’s happening between your ears. If you got a shitty tape playing and a shitty program, you’re going to get shitty results. So that’s why these nice little blue book here, 3% Man, is the cure for the mind virus or the cure for the woke mind virus, if you will. Fills in the knowledge gap, spells out what’s attractive and what’s unattractive, so you can accentuate attractive behavior and no longer display unattractive behavior. Again, you learned a lot of unattractive behavior just because of your environment, but I believe we choose our parents from a soul level we know we’re getting into because of the experience. So you have nobody to blame but yourself.

At the end of the day, you’re trying to find a way to enjoy the ride. Like one of my dearest friends and I talk about it every time we get together. It’s the art of having fun, trying to enjoy your life, no matter whether you’re up or down, shit’s going sideways, shit’s going great. You got to maintain the art of having fun, finding a way to enjoy your life wherever you’re at, because it’s not going to last. It’s all going to turn to dust anyways.

…And which have taken the lives of several of my friends long after they came home from war.  

Yeah, they basically had a mind virus that was running around that didn’t serve them, and unfortunately, they were unable to get out of it. That’s why you should get as many buddies as you can to read the book, because you solve the pussy problem, solves a lot of problems.

Coach, thanks to you, for the first time in my life, I’m starting to comprehend how I have created my own heartbreaks over and over again. I am starting to understand how I chased away every single beautiful woman with whom I’ve ever been involved. 

Yeah, because you grew up as a little boy going, “Mommy, daddy. Love me, mommy. Daddy, love me. Why don’t you love me?” So you rehearse that pattern thousands and thousands of times, thousands of desires to get loved and thousands of times getting rejected. Then you grow up and now you got a negative mind virus running that just wrecks your life in a lot of ways. You’re not aware of it. It’s just you were lacking the right strategy, that’s all.

More importantly, I’m realizing that you are not just teaching men about how to understand women, but how to understand and respect and love themselves when they never learned those lessons growing up. I’m starting to believe that there is not a damn thing wrong with me. 

There’s not, and you should cut yourself some slack. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’ve only ever done what you were meant to do, and what happened, happened. It couldn’t have happened any other way.

At this point in your life, as they say, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear,” and somehow you were ready, and I appeared, and here you are, and here we are. I’m reading your email.

I’m not cursed, and if I apply myself to this task the same way I did to every challenge in the Army or law school, my success is all but inevitable. 

It is simply a matter of time, not a matter of hope.

I cannot even express to you how grateful I am to you for what you’re doing for me and for countless others. Thank you brother, a thousand times, thank you.  

De Oppresso Liber, 

Bob

That’s from the Green Berets. That means typically “To free the oppressed” or “To free from oppression,” I think is the actual translation.

So I got some good buddies that were Green Berets, and overall, most of them are pretty good dudes that I found, people that are in the Green Beret Special Forces. They’re the best of the best. The creme de la creme. So if you’re a Green Beret, this little book is a piece of cake for you, bro. But you gotta read it to 10 to 15 times. Don’t get cocky. Trust the material. Learn it so well you could teach a class on it and all your other buddies that are suffering, You can show them the way out of the mental prison that they’ve painted themselves into a corner with unknowingly.

So, if you’ve got a question or a challenge and you’d like to get my help, go to UnderstandingRelationships.com, click the Products tab at the top of your screen on any page, and book a coaching session with yours truly.

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