How you deal with love is the easiest way to determine just what kind of man you are. This is always an uncomfortable topic for guys. The fact is, few men are comfortable expressing our emotions, so why would love be any easier? Well, easy or not, we need to discuss how alpha males show love.
Of all the emotions, love is the one that scares people the most. To love someone is to risk them rejecting you, abandoning you, or crapping all over your feelings. All the stuff we actively work to avoid.
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How You Show Love Reveals What Kind Of Man You Are
Because of this, no matter your gender, love makes you act a little crazy. Relationships can lead to jealousy, manipulation and game playing.
It is how you handle this craziness, both in yourself and others, that reveals what kind of man you are. When you feel neediness, do you manage it? Or do you express it in toxic, manipulative ways? Do you live your life bogged down in dependency, or do you live it in a way that allows you to love genuinely but independently? Do you express your feelings regardless of how you “want” them to be received? Or do you repress them or overindulge in them based on some response you want to get?
This is something that is hard to find information on, even in the most useful books for men to improve their dating lives.
In other words, when it comes to how alpha males show love, the question is something we should all ask ourselves: “Am I doing what I genuinely want to do?”
How an alpha male doesn’t treat his girlfriend
Because this article deals with showing love, it applies largely (if not entirely) to relationships of any length. With this in mind, I want to first address the opposite of how alpha males treat their girlfriends and then break down why they don’t show love this way.
Let’s start with an example:
Here is Guy 1: He has a girlfriend who loves him. She’s affectionate towards him, respects him and takes care of him. But he treats her pretty badly. He’s always partying with other women, even sleeping with them, and never telling her where he is. His friends think he’s “the man,” but he’s also treating another person like crap. In the rare moments he’s emotionally intimate with her, he finds it uncomfortable and feels like he’s losing power in the relationship. As a result, he becomes aloof, and soon enough, has retreated completely to sleep with other women while wanting to win his girl back at the same time.
Some of you might be thinking he sounds cool. I mean, he gets laid a lot, right? Sure. But this is not how alpha males treat their girlfriends.
Here’s another example:
Here is Guy 2. You’ve definitely seen this guy before. He also has a girlfriend who loves him, but he’s terrified of losing her. When he got with her, he couldn’t believe his luck, and as a result, spends all his time in subservience trying to keep her interested, impressed, and approving of him. He's always desperate to make his girlfriend love him. If she expresses her independence, he becomes threatened, and her phone blows up with messages. “Where are you?” “Are you okay?” Their relationship ends not long after.
Yet again, this is definitely not how alpha males treat their girlfriends
Alpha males take care of themselves first
There are a few main reasons why alpha males don’t behave like either of those examples, and the first is that they take care of themselves before anyone else. What do I mean by that?
Before an alpha male gets into a relationship, but also during the relationship, he takes care of his own emotional needs. This means he builds a life that he finds fulfilling. He has an abundant social life, enjoys his career, has a place that he likes, and takes actions that validate his own self-esteem for himself. An alpha male isn’t looking for validation from others.
An alpha male lives for himself so that when he ends up in a relationship, he doesn’t fall into strong feelings of neediness and dependency. He’s already happy. He also has options. Now, this doesn’t mean he’s fooling around with other women. It just means he’s aware of his own worth, has a social life that involves women, and he knows if he wanted to meet one, he could.
Unlike Guy 1, he doesn’t feel the need to constantly assert his life against his girlfriend by whom he feels emotionally threatened. He can integrate both, and he’s happy with both.
And unlike Guy 2, he isn’t terrified of being alone, and he isn't always wondering if his girlfriend is cheating on him. His life was fine before she showed up, it’ll be fine after.
This principle lies at the heart of how alpha males show love. They take care of themselves first and foremost, which allows them to act with others in a way that is honest and genuine.
Alpha males don’t act from a place of insecurity
When your emotions - in this instance, love - threaten you, you start to think insecure thoughts. You will think your partner is looking elsewhere, or that you are losing “power” in the relationship, and this will, in turn, amplify that original threatened feeling.
This is called neediness, and it’s an unfortunate part of the experience of love. There’s no avoiding it. If you want to experience love, you have to risk getting hurt, and it is that fear of getting hurt (and what it implies about you) that makes you feel needy.
Now first off, this is completely normal. Whether you’re an alpha male or not, feeling neediness is a completely normal and acceptable feeling. It’s called being human. Neediness isn’t the problem, it’s how you act as a result of that feeling that is.
Guy 1 is manipulative, plays games, seeks validation from other women, and excessively asserts his independence. This all stems from his discomfort with the vulnerability of love. Maybe he's trying to get over a cheating ex or he's incapable of letting people get close. He tries to control it, and thus, his girlfriend by either manipulating her or keeping her at arm's length.
Guy 2 is dependent, in constant need of validation and subservient. Everything he does orbits around his need to feel that his girlfriend still likes him. His discomfort with his own vulnerability has him trying to put a band-aid on it.
In contrast, an alpha male feels this same neediness and vulnerability. But unlike the other two, he admits it to himself and doesn’t allow it to control him. He has the same impulses to manipulate, cheat, appease and so on, but they don’t become actions. They’re just emotions and thoughts that pass as he returns back to what it is he genuinely wants to do. This informs how the alpha male treats his girlfriend.
Alpha males aren’t invulnerable
When it comes to how alpha males show love, they aren’t invulnerable. In fact, they’re well aware of their own vulnerabilities. What distinguishes them is that they’re well aware they’re okay as they are and their entire attitude towards love stems from this.
An alpha male has a take it or leave it approach to himself. Whilst he wants to feel loved (who doesn’t?), if someone rejects him, cheats on him or hurts him, he still knows he’s okay. It doesn’t confirm anything about him deep down. It just means they weren’t interested.
He’s great. He is who he is, and anyone else can take it or leave it. Some will and some won’t.
Here’s the important part: The alpha male is only looking for the ones that will take it. In order to find those people, he actively makes himself vulnerable, exposes himself to rejection, and accepts the result. He's willing to talk to his girlfriend about what's really in his heart.
This means he doesn’t pretend he never feels neediness. That would be lying to himself and allowing himself to get pushed by its influence. He also doesn’t play games or seek approval, because he isn’t scared of being rejected by someone who isn’t into him. After all, he already approves of himself.
In practical terms, this means that when he likes a woman, he tells her. When he feels something he wants to express, he expresses it. When he wants to do something, he does it. But he doesn’t do any of these things to ensure some kind of result from her. He doesn’t do it for more power, or to impress her, he simply does it because it’s what he genuinely wants to do.
That is the heart of how alpha males show love. It’s not fake or a trick. It’s honest.
How you can improve your ability to show love
There are multiple ways you can learn to start incorporating this into your life. Here are some questions that will help you figure out what kind of man you are when it comes to love, and what changes you need to make in order to improve this area of your life:
- Be honest with yourself. How does feeling needy make you act?
- What would be a better, more authentic way to act?
- How do you respond to rejection?
- What would be a better, more self-accepting way to act?
- Are you really taking care of yourself, or are you looking for a woman to make you feel better?
Answering these questions honestly will help you isolate where you’re going wrong. Then all you have to do is start taking the steps to improve. You will feel vulnerable, you will feel neediness, and you will have an impulse to act in manipulative, dishonest, or supplicating ways. That’s normal.
Being an alpha male isn’t about not feeling those things. It’s about not acting on them.
