Programmed Sacrifice

A man wrote me describing his life after divorce. Sixty-three years old. Financially destroyed. Living as a zombie for eleven years following a six-year marriage that ended when his younger wife took everything and left. He wanted sympathy, advice, perhaps validation that life had treated him unfairly. I have none of this to offer. His situation was entirely predictable. He built it himself.

The marriage followed a script written in childhood. Disney programming: romantic love, unconditional devotion, sacrifice as proof of affection. He executed this program flawlessly. Found a young foreign woman. Married her at fifty-two. Would have died for her, by his own admission. She extracted maximum value over six years, secured citizenship and assets, then departed. He acted surprised. This reveals the depth of his programming.

People operate according to installed directives they mistake for authentic desire. The romantic script runs deep. It promises that sacrifice generates reciprocal devotion, that giving proves love, that selflessness earns gratitude. The program continues executing regardless of outcomes. Men destroy themselves financially and emotionally, then claim confusion about what went wrong. Nothing went wrong. The program functioned exactly as designed.

The purpose is not to create lasting bonds or mutual satisfaction. The purpose is to transfer resources while maintaining the illusion of choice. Someone benefits from this transfer. It is rarely the person doing the sacrificing. Yet the program persists because it operates below conscious examination. People experience the compulsion to give, to sacrifice, to prove devotion, and they interpret this compulsion as love. It is behavioral programming executing its loop.

This man spent six years with his wife and eleven years recovering. Seventeen years total consumed by one relationship and its aftermath. He claims she destroyed him. She did not. His method of loving destroyed him. The woman simply participated in an exchange where one party offers everything and the other takes what is offered. When nothing remains to take, departure follows. This is rational behavior responding to irrational offering.

People confuse giving with generating obligation. They believe that if they give enough, the recipient will feel compelled to reciprocate. The need for reciprocity is not distributed evenly. Some people feel no obligation when receiving. They accept what is offered and feel no debt. The recipient did not agree to reciprocate. You assumed reciprocity would follow from giving. Your assumption was wrong.

The Chinese have a proverb: if you want to make an enemy, render them service. When you help someone without them requesting help, you create imbalance. The recipient feels diminished by your assistance. You imposed obligation they never agreed to carry. Resentment follows. You helped, they resented, both parties feel wronged.

This extends to romantic relationships. The man who gives everything believes he is proving love. The woman receiving everything did not request this proof. She may even find it oppressive. His giving creates implicit obligation she never agreed to carry. When she leaves, he experiences betrayal. She experiences relief. Both are logical responses to a structure that was broken from the beginning.

The romantic program also creates vulnerability to specific targeting. Young women from poor countries recognize the pattern immediately. Foreign man with resources, romantic ideals, willingness to sacrifice. This man is a resource extraction opportunity. She provides companionship, intimacy, youth. He provides resources, citizenship, stability. When the exchange is complete, the arrangement ends. She executed her program. He executed his. Only one party understood what was actually happening.

Men in their fifties marrying women in their twenties know this at some level. They deny it because acknowledging it would require abandoning the romantic framework. Better to believe she loves you for yourself than to admit she loves what you provide. This denial costs everything. But admitting the truth would cost the fantasy, which feels worse than losing resources.

The man described living as a zombie for eleven years after the marriage ended. The programming remains intact. He still believes in the romantic framework. He still thinks he loved correctly and was wronged. He has not examined the mechanism that produced his outcome. If he lives another thousand years and loves the same way each time, he will be plundered a thousand times. Each time he will claim surprise and victimhood. Each time the result will be identical because the input never changes.

Love, as sold in fairy tales and romantic narratives, does not exist. What exists is exchange. You provide something, the other party provides something, both parties benefit or the arrangement ends. Making this exchange explicit feels unromantic. People prefer the fantasy where love transcends transaction, where devotion exists without calculation, where giving generates reciprocal giving. This fantasy costs people their savings, their sanity, their final decades. But acknowledging the fantasy is just fantasy would cost something people value more: the belief that they are capable of and deserving of unconditional love.

Unconditional love is programming error presented as virtue. Nothing in nature operates unconditionally. Every relationship has terms. Every exchange has boundaries. Pretending otherwise creates exploitation opportunities. The person offering unconditional love is offering themselves as exploitation target. Someone will accept this offer.

The reciprocity myth particularly damages men who accumulate resources then deploy them trying to purchase devotion. They believe providing resources, safety, stability will generate love. It generates something, but not what they want. It generates dependence, or performance, or extraction. The woman who married this man at fifty-two performed devotion convincingly for six years. This was her part of the exchange. When the exchange completed, the performance ended. He mistook the performance for authentic emotion.

Women performing devotion and women feeling devotion are indistinguishable to men who need to believe they are loved. The performance serves its purpose: extracting resources while maintaining the relationship. When resources are exhausted or secured through legal means, the performance becomes unnecessary. Ending the performance does not constitute betrayal. It constitutes ending a contract that was never explicitly stated but was understood by one party from the beginning.

Transactional clarity produces better outcomes than romantic confusion. If you want companionship, intimacy, presence, pay for it. Establish clear terms. Exchange resources for services rendered. Nobody pretends this is something other than what it is. When the exchange completes, both parties understood what was happening. No one feels betrayed. No one lives as a zombie for eleven years processing emotions that resulted from misunderstanding the nature of the relationship.

This offends people who need to believe their relationships transcend economics. They want love to be pure, uncalculated, unconditional. This desire makes them vulnerable to exploitation by people who understand that all relationships are economic whether participants acknowledge this or not. The person who refuses to acknowledge the economic dimension gets plundered by someone who manages it strategically.

The man who wrote me will probably not change his approach. He has sixty-three years invested in the romantic program. Abandoning it now would mean admitting those years were spent pursuing a fantasy that cost him everything. Easier to maintain the fantasy, feel wronged, hope the next time will be different. There will be no next time. He has no resources remaining. But if he did, he would execute the same program and produce the same outcome.

This is what happens when people mistake programming for authentic desire. They execute scripts written by others, Disney, religion, cultural tradition and experience the results as if they chose them freely. The programming persists because examining it requires admitting you spent your life executing someone else's code. Most people prefer continued execution to that admission.

I have no sympathy for this man because sympathy would validate his victimhood narrative. He is not a victim. He is someone who refused to examine the mechanism producing his outcomes. He gave everything unconditionally to someone who took what was offered and left when the offering ended.

People are not owed reciprocity for giving. They are not owed devotion for providing resources. They are not owed love for sacrifice. These are transactions. Make them explicit or be exploited by people who understand them as transactions while you understand them as romance. Most people choose romance and lose everything. Then they write comments asking for sympathy from people who cannot provide it because their situation was entirely preventable.

The programming continues executing. Men continue sacrificing. Women continue extracting. Both parties perform their assigned roles. Only one party benefits. The other spends decades recovering, claiming confusion, maintaining the fantasy that next time will be different. Next time is identical. The program never changes. Decades vanish into servitude disguised as love while the person executing the program calls themselves a victim for getting exactly what the program was designed to produce.