Dalrock notes that is ten years since that paean to being a narcissist came out: Eat Pray Love. Which has caused more damage than it helped, and made a series of tourist destinations.

While some women saw Eat Pray Love as nothing more than an entertaining beach read, others have used the book as a recovery manual for their own heartbreaks and spiritual explorations – something which pleases the author no end.
While some women saw Eat Pray Love as nothing more than an entertaining beach read, others have used the book as a recovery manual for their own heartbreaks and spiritual explorations

A great number of women have even emulated Gilbert’s geographical quest for self-discovery, leaving behind husbands, homes and soul-sapping jobs to travel around the world.

During the Indonesian third of her book, Gilbert lived in Ubud in the Balinese uplands, a town which became a mecca for middle-aged women wearing white linen and thoughtful expressions as they drifted from green tea breakfasts to prayer sessions to guru appointments on a sort of perimenopausal gap year.

Today there are still Eat Pray Love tours and T-shirts, Eat Pray Love hotel packages and a mind-bending tourist trail of Eat Pray Love dining choices; you can eat at the restaurant where Elizabeth Gilbert ate, you can eat at the restaurant where Julia Roberts ate while playing Elizabeth Gilbert, you can eat at the restaurant where Julia Roberts ate when she was really eating.

Now 46, Gilbert is a wildly successful author, a happy second wife, a woman of unquenchable confidence and good cheer. She is also rich. ‘Yeah. Very. I made millions,’ she says. ‘The tsunami of money is over but Eat Pray Love made me very wealthy, which was not something I ever expected or set out to be.’

Yean. Right.

The focus of the article is on the “empowerment” the book and later movie lead to at the cost of broken families. But this is the text. If you look at the pictures the most striking aspect of the story is that all of these women are alone. None of them are pictured with their secret multimillionaire hunky handy man. One of the three women featured managed a short marriage to a retiree before he tragically caught a virus and died. The other two women weren’t actually married when they decided to EPL, and neither of them describes a current man in their life.

Then the article turns to the author of EPL, Elizabeth Gilbert. Unlike the three women who followed her EPL prescription Gilbert is remarried. But like the other women in the article, Gilbert is pictured alone. Why is that? The power of EPL is not that Gilbert managed to dump her loyal husband and travel to Europe and India. Being rewarded with cash and prizes for betraying your marriage vows is something the US and UK offers all wives. The power of EPL is that betraying her marriage vows not only made Gilbert more moral, it also allowed her to trade up to a better husband*. Gilbert appeared to have defied the odds and stuck the landing.

The obvious answer to Gilbert being pictured alone is that her remarriage was no more a trade up than her divorce made her more moral. In real life “Filipe” is 17 years older than Elizabeth, and appears to be shorter than her. Featuring 46 year old Elizabeth with the mid sixties “Filipe” doesn’t fit with the image of the story. The Daily Mail author doesn’t comment on the real Filipe, but she closes the article hinting at the disconnect between the EPL fantasy and reality

And as if the culture would allow men to discover themselves. The pickup artiste, Roosh included, are not examples: they are a warning.

Has there ever been a film or book that has portrayed the opposite; depicting a man leaving his wife, “finding himself,” and then connecting with a younger, hotter, tighter gal?

Almost every “masculine” film I see has fidelity or love for one’s wife championed and promoted. Think of 300. An uber manly film and Leonidas’ love for his wife is conveyed very well. Or Braveheart. Heck, even in the Last Boy Scout, a deeply cynical film, Bruce Willis’ character still loves and sticks with his wife after she cheats on him.

In other words, there is no male equivalent of this.

The natural male inclination is to champion loyalty and devotion to their woman as a sign of honor.

And that honour is a foundation for us. For men, and for women. It is far better that we take what we have and where we are and make the best of it that we try to seek the ideal: the ideal lifestyle does not exist, and if one gets close, you find that as you age and your tastes mature, what you want changes.

Better to be faithful.

For the disciples of Julia will not inherit the earth.

After the Enlightenment, the rapid advance of science and its logical but nihilistic explanations into the universe have removed the religious narrative and replaced it with an empty narrative of scientific progress, knowledge, and technology, which act as a restraint and hindrance to family formation, allowing people to pursue individual goals of wealth accumulation or hedonistic pleasure seeking. As of now, there has not been a single non-religious population that has been able to reproduce above the death rate.

Even though many people today claim to believe in god, they may not step inside a church but once or twice a year for special holidays. Religion went from being a lifestyle, a manual for living, to something that is thought about in passing.

Besides, Gilbert is giving all her money to Planned Parenthood, the fully converged abortion merchants. The elite that support her will disappear.

Do not be them. Do not be like them.

UPDATE.

Two of the very sane women who correspond here echo the horror of having to go “out there” and date in what has become a toxic culture. The pressure to hook up and be casual and destroy oneself is huge, and comes as much from the Elizabeth Gilberts of this world as any preaching on how to pick people up.

And the number of women who would — once you have found someone — elbow in and ruin what is good and, not without effort, held within the bounds of righteousness is fairly high.

And yes, I’m quoting Elizabeth Gilbert. She did not leave her husband because of spiritual seeking, but for more base reasons.

It started with a boy I met at summer camp and ended with the man for whom I left my first husband. In between, I careened from one intimate entanglement to the next — dozens of them — without so much as a day off between romances. You might have called me a serial monogamist, except that I was never exactly monogamous. Relationships overlapped, and those overlaps were always marked by exhausting theatricality: sobbing arguments, shaming confrontations, broken hearts. Still, I kept doing it. I couldn’t not do it.

I can’t say that I was always looking for a better man. I often traded good men for bad ones; character didn’t much matter to me. I wasn’t exactly seeking love, either, regardless of what I might have claimed. I can’t even say it was the sex. Sex was just the gateway drug for me, a portal to the much higher high I was really after, which was seduction.

Seduction is the art of coercing somebody to desire you, of orchestrating somebody else’s longings to suit your own hungry agenda. Seduction was never a casual sport for me; it was more like a heist, adrenalizing and urgent. I would plan the heist for months, scouting out the target, looking for unguarded entries. Then I would break into his deepest vault, steal all his emotional currency and spend it on myself.

If the man was already involved in a committed relationship, I knew that I didn’t need to be prettier or better than his existing girlfriend; I just needed to be different. (The novel doesn’t always win out over the familiar, mind you, but it often does.) The trick was to study the other woman and to become her opposite, thereby positioning myself to this man as a sparkling alternative to his regular life.

Soon enough, and sure enough, I might begin to see that man’s gaze toward me change from indifference, to friendship, to open desire. That’s what I was after: the telekinesis-like sensation of steadily dragging somebody’s fullest attention toward me and only me. My guilt about the other woman was no match for the intoxicating knowledge that — somewhere on the other side of town — somebody couldn’t sleep that night because he was thinking about me. If he needed to sneak out of his house after midnight in order to call, better still. That was power, but it was also affirmation. I was someone’s irresistible treasure. I loved that sensation, and I needed it, not sometimes, not even often, but always.

I might indeed win the man eventually. But over time (and it wouldn’t take long), his unquenchable infatuation for me would fade, as his attention returned to everyday matters. This always left me feeling abandoned and invisible; love that could be quenched was not nearly enough love for me. As soon as I could, then, I would start seducing somebody else, by turning myself into an entirely different woman, in order to attract an entirely different man. These episodes of shape-shifting cost me dearly. I would lose weight, sleep, dignity, clarity. As anyone who has ever watched a werewolf movie knows, transmutation is excruciating and terrifying, but once that process has been set into motion — once you have glimpsed that full moon — it cannot be reversed. I could endure these painful episodes only by assuring myself: ‘‘This is the last time. This guy is the one.’

I have seen women reduce those I care for to tears because they are trying to get the attention of their beloved. They have set their target. Particularly if, as a man, you make the lifestyle changes that lead to weight change and a more stable mindset.

But this is a trap. These women are crazy. They bring nothing but chaos with them. Better man, to avoid such.

Better, woman, to encourage the husband you have to be righteous than trade down. For trade down you will.