Late Blooming Alpha Males In Trouble

One slice of America's gender role confusion I know well

“I don’t think a trust fall has to be this intense.”

I came of age in the latter half of the 1980s. Like most nerds, I was also an anxious, socially awkward kid. But I was NOT shy. If you got me talking, I might go on and on and on…and on. God help you. I still excel in the lost art of talking at people, so I never really qualified as shy by any definition you pick. If you want a conversation with me, however, it will probably be painful…for you.

I rant with the best of ’em.

Dating was a miserable experience on the front end because the culture at that time (1980s and 1990s) still asked men to do the romantic chasing. Women who chased men were becoming more common but struck most guys as creepy (is this a scam? Does she just want my sperm?). This was the cultural code of the time. And it did not work for me at all. Why? Our society asked hetero-men to front all the emotional risks in initiating relationships (i.e., potential rejection). And my Aspie brain was not built for social rejection. It also tended to obsess about what was never going to happen. I had not yet concluded that modern dating is essentially a volume game for many people. Eventually, you’ll find a match in the ugly sock drawer.

The modern phrase for my predicament is - “dude has no game.” Indeed, my first two girlfriends selected me. Perfect. It’s how I preferred it at the time. I lacked the alpha male’s sexual confidence.

Passivity is not the stuff of suitable matches, however. In reality, both people need to filter and select. Yet, this requires maturity, not just what Joseph Campbell once referred to on a PBS special as “the zeal of the gonads for each other.” Unfiltered horniness leads to loads of one-sided selections and failed relationships.

The two times I tried to ‘chase’ a female as a young adult according to the dominant masculine code were a total emotional disaster..for me. The women involved then cited When Harry Met Sally and wanted to be my platonic friend. Of course, they did. Of course. I moved on eventually.

My passive social awkwardness was deemed sad and pathetic by the standard of the time. As an upper-middle-class young adult, I was also expected to have even more refined soft social skills (e.g., Richard Gere, George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, or Ryan Reynolds). These subtle communication skills are critical to romance and career networking. But Americans, historically, are notoriously brash and unsubtle (if you ask citizens of classical civilizations like India, Indonesia, China, and Japan)—especially American men. Think Teddy Roosevelt or George Patton. Or Robert Duvall’s famous performance in the opening scene of Apocalypse Now - “God! I LOVE the smell of napalm in the morning!”

Robert Duvall in his iconic appearance as Colonel Kignore in Apocalypse Now

Unsubtle. Very. These were the male role models the media incessantly fed me as a child. I watched, terrified that I would be asked to perform this level of aggression despite my completely awkward persona.

Romance has always been a mating ideology of the Euro-American social elite, originating in the late Medieval aristocracy of Western Europe, especially France.¹ Oh, those fussy French! The code of romantic courting is full of subtlety that my particular brain is not great at deploying. I can appreciate it passively in film but not execute it like a neurotypical peer or a French Cassanova. My social skills still align more with Clint Eastwood and Al Pacino’s crude, profane masculinity than Ryan Reynold’s nonbinary, whatever it is. Eastwood seems much easier to pull off for any hetero male of my generation. His alpha male approach has just one skill continuum - aggression/dominance. I’ll come back to this in a bit.

I was not completely hopeless in love, but I relied on attracting very tough, emotionally thick-skinned women (e.g., Tom Boys) who do not need routine validation and verbal stroking and who can handle a vigorous intellectual debate. This approach was possible, yes, but statistically unlikely in a random sample of women. Most humans, men and women, need tons of validation on an ongoing basis to feel comfortable in their relationships.

I just never need this myself. It’s an Aspie superpower in an alienated, individualistic society. And a massive liability in the 21st century.

The Triumph of the Romantic Couple And Subtle Soft Skills

My romantic awkwardness pointed to a broader inability of mine to manage complex social relationships in an individualistic society like ours. American civil society hands young adults enormous amounts of autonomy in complex life decisions long before they have any real wisdom to manage them independently. And because the rules of work, friendship, and dating keep changing all the time, the elders are not as effective as they used to be, even when consulted.

In graduate school and my first full-time desk job in the aughts, I fumbled around trying to figure out what people wanted me to do, especially the disinterested professors and passive-aggressive managers I encountered. Clients were a complete mystery in their indirect communicative subtlety. Just say what you want! For fuck’s sake!

Modern urban life for the educated involves a pretty high standard of social interaction, and I did not understand it. This standard is built around at least four principles that are not intuitive to working-class men, American men born before, say, 1960, or neurodiverse grumps of any age like me.

This standard has four principles I can discern (at least):

• asking for what you need in relationships

• conversing with high emotional intelligence

• setting clear standards/boundaries (because society will not)

• defending those standards/boundaries (because society will not)

Re-read that list. These are the social skills many of us now associate with highly secure, emotionally confident middle-aged adults (40 plus). It takes decades of ‘autonomy’ to master these skills because our society does not actively manage relationships from the top down (except at work). The elders are not that involved anymore in your personal life (unless you share everything). We tend to fumble around for years, even if we are neurotypical.

Moreover, women have a major edge because they have always been socialized to have higher empathy and, therefore, higher EQ. This is critical to managing highly subtle social interactions like corporate meetings or romantic dates.

When you are bad at the above four skills, like I used to be, you tend to have a passive relationship style that applies to any relationship in your life, from dating and work. I know this was my case. I did not make demands of those in authority or communicate intentions well with peers. I did not know how to soften my criticism. I trusted authority to have my best interests at heart without communicating them, something possible only in a highly conservative, slowly changing society. And when relationships floundered, I would suddenly exit stage left. Silently. I would flee. There was no structure to block my flight, sit me down, talk constructively, and redirect me.

But running from people is not setting boundaries. It’s avoidance. Our society lets people run for years if they want to. Watch Five Easy Pieces for a tragic depiction of what unending, autonomous male flight from reality looks like.

The Late Blooming Alpha Male is Now Dated

It took me until about age 32 to finally develop a ‘normal’ 20th century, highly autonomous, alpha male orientation to the world, the idealized one preached to me in film, media, and among male role models I had available to me. Finally, I was willing to select and ‘chase’ women and deal with the rejection appropriately. I was willing to set boundaries at work and not just run from conflict. I was willing to do ego battle at the workplace and seek promotions. I stopped taking shit from colleagues. I outmaneuvered them to get what I wanted from the boss.

The passivity of my 20s was gone. Living in India and almost getting killed there three times had a lot to do with my newfound social confidence.

The problem is that this transformation released my inner alpha male, who had always been hiding amidst the social awkwardness. He was the guy who came out in all those intellectual arguments and rants, and “HE” was very happy to be out and about all day long. My inner “Dirty Harry” was not that socially skilled—just aggressive and intimidating. Oh dear.

My trajectory then crashed into a much larger social trend unfolding across American offices in the 2000s - the co-edification of the modern white-collar workplace. Although women started entering white-collar work in large numbers in the 1960s and 1970s, they did so in male-dominated organizations. By the 2000s, this was changing fast in many fields (e.g., marketing, sales, market research, project management, insurance, accounting, etc.). Gender ratios reached 50/50 or 70/30 female: male by the 2010s in various fields like mine.

In a female-dominated workplace, the dated model of aggressive alpha masculinity rapidly became uncool—at work and elsewhere. Mine was aided and abetted by Aspie neurology and very hard to change, however. It took me a long time to realize what was irritating some female colleagues. I still have difficulty switching my interactional code to “co-ed.” I tend to see the whole room as male unless it’s a very expensive corporate workshop I’m leading.

I remember distilling my predicament into one pithy phrase, quietly sitting alone in my office:

“I finally got the courage to act like the crude alpha male women wanted to date in the 1980s to find out they can’t stand them at work in the 2010s.” FUCK!!!!

If that isn’t confusing to read, you must be neurotypical. I still can’t understand why the same aggressive confidence is sexually attractive at the bar AND ‘egomania’ at work. I’m missing something in my analysis, I’m sure.

I do understand the difference intellectually. It’s the difference between how women influence the interactional codes of very different social spaces (work and love). Work has bureaucratic tools to contain ‘inappropriate’ male aggression, much like a conservative Yanomami village in the Amazon jungle. For the latter, male aggression is for interclan battle, not for your relatives, wife, and children.

My solution to my late-blooming Alpha status was to fire myself and give the women in the office their historically earned reprieve. After all, it was now their social space. Social dominance has consequences, like elections.

I work for myself now and irritate only my wife, kids, and dogs.

Don’t forget to grab my new book for friends or family this Holiday Season…

1. Romantic marriage has only been a broad, middle-class norm in America since the end of WWII. Prior to that, marriage was an incredibly practical, socially managed channeling of normal sexual energies. Most of the elders in my parents’ generation (born in the 1930s/1940s), for example, did not date more than 1-2 individuals before getting married in their late teens and early twenties. Many married their first serious boyfriend or girlfriend. Huh? The idea of having a series of placeholder relationships before settling down makes no sense to them (still) and hence they had little guidance to offer us about things like ‘recreational sex.’ They were also not believable sources of advice because they had dated so little. Dating really was a means to a rapid marital end for them. They thought adding ‘romance’ was enough modernization.

(This is why today’s Gen X and Millennial parents have switched to a proactive coaching model of parenting (which sometimes goes too far). They want their kids to avoid their own years of dating fumbles and silliness.)