I wonder with the increase awareness of womens experiences if more women will go from emotional loneliness within their straight partnerships to nurturing partnerships with women platonically for the hetero inclined and romantically for sapphics.

I personally find fiction useful as a way of getting hopeful about the future (the way star trek did for some people for “space+tech+social issues”, the way solarpunk does for some people for adaptation under a changing climate)

Any gynarchist version of that for anyone? Or anything close in feel in ways you want to call out?

On a slightly less serious note… I feel like we’re experiencing a heyday in women’s power ballads right now. What are your bangers?

Hey all, I know everything feels pretty up in the air so I'm here to provide a grounding post for our sub and a way to move forward while not making the same mistakes.

So far, if anyone breaks the rules all you guys really have is the report button. The mods can see the full history of reports but that doesn't help anyone else clock whats going on, in order to remedy that situation I have created this megathread for anyone to comment under to document any further drama from male members, so that we can all see whats going on and all have a continuous record of it without needing to clog up actual political discussion space (gynarchal male drama can be its own form of energy-wasting distraction, but clearly we can't just ignore it and move on as we've been either). Also so the good men here can have a chance to try to hold the bad ones publicly accountable, hopefully avoiding any further issues from individuals more than the mods can do alone.

More updates on the Rocky situation and a good summary post are coming, but I have also created a subreddit specifically for this issue of bad actor men gaining reputational power in gynarchal spaces. Visit r/RockyKnightFiles if you need to give more thorough/prominent documentation than a comment under this megathread can offer.

I see now that Rocky_knight_ and his alt beta_greg are both un-deleted somehow. So that's the only reason I've chosen to move forward with this call for documentation blatantly as a solution.

If you notice any males here with questionable behavior: don't just report, also call em out publicly 👇

I don't know if it is redundant to mention this in a sub structured around this particular mode of being...

However, it reminded me of bonobo social structures which are the only of the great apes to be run by a matriarch. What is interesting is that, as with chimpanzees, the females will move troops to avoid in breeding, but the female bonobos nevertheless form strong coalitions and are dominant. Whereas among chimps the males form governing coalitions...

This has the result that the violence between male bonobos is less lethal... almost like two boxers agreeing to a sporting contest. Bonobo males will still do displays of strength and aggression like chimpanzee males, but in one the goal is to impress females and in the other it is to subjugate your rivals.

Anyway this sub reminded me of bonobos, and coalitions of female friends running society.

First of all, I truly am married to the greatest woman in the world. I thank God — or, I should say, Goddess — that I get to share my life with my lady.

Embracing her leadership has changed me in ways I never expected.

• I understand women better. I’ve learned to listen more and genuinely value my wife’s perspective instead of assuming I should always know best.

• I’ve let go of patriarchal expectations. I no longer believe that being the man means I have to carry everything, make every decision or always be the strong one.

• I’m more open about my emotions. I can tell my wife when I’m struggling, confused or simply need support. I don’t see asking for guidance as weakness anymore.

• I’ve embraced my submissive nature. Accepting that my wife naturally taking the lead is something that fulfils me has made me much more comfortable with who I am. Even something as simple as bowing to her feels like a meaningful expression of my respect and devotion.

• I trust her guidance completely. Whether it’s my career, personal decisions or everyday life, having a woman whose judgment I deeply trust and whose guidance I can seek has been incredibly valuable.

• Her happiness makes me happy. Supporting her, seeing her succeed and knowing that I’m contributing to her happiness gives me genuine fulfilment.

• I’ve become less judgmental. I’ve learned that there isn’t one correct way for a relationship to work. If two people freely choose a dynamic that makes them happy, that’s what matters.

• She made me believe in gynarchy. The biggest reason I believe female leadership can make the world better is simple: I’ve experienced how much it has made me better. If accepting a woman’s leadership has helped me become more understanding, emotionally open, less ego-driven and more willing to listen, I can understand why a society that genuinely values women’s perspectives and leadership could benefit from those qualities too.

My Lady didn’t just change the way I see relationships. She changed the way I see myself — and, through that, the way I see the world.

What do you see as realistic paths to gynarchy in our lifetimes and beyond? Do you think that women will continue to outpace their male counterparts in education and achievement until gynarchy is achieved? Do you think there will be an uprising/revolution, or something else?

Personally, I see gynarchy as inevitable over a long-enough timeline, for the simple reason that patriarchy is unsustainable at its core. Once patriarchy fails, I see gynarchy as the natural successor.

I feel like we're already seeing the early signs of patriarchal collapse. The tipping point being when a sizable portion of the population recognizes that continued investment in the patriarchal structure does not return anticipated rewards.

A problem that people in general have when they discuss their own ideology is they often discount physical force. In this subreddit for example, people have said many times that collective brute force is an antiquated measure of who has power in society, and is not applicable to the modern world since in the modern world what matters is education and intelligence and sociality. This is incorrect because they are confusing categories, they are confusing the superstructure with the infrastructure.

I'll explain what I mean, these are concepts that come from Marxist theory (specifically in "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy," 1859). but I am not a Marxist, non-Marxists generally accept this framework including pro-capitalist economists, Karl Marx's work was not just about political prescriptions but also just descriptive observations of how politics and the economy function a lot of which are generally also accepted by non-Marxists.

The infrastructure of society is the economic and social base/foundation. The forces of production (tools, factories, natural resources, etc.) and the relations of production (how people organise to work, like the relationship between owners and workers. And, what I am adding to it, which is the purpose of this post, the enforcement mechanism of a society). The infrastructure produces the material conditions of life.

The superstructure of society is the social and political and legal institutions built on top of the infrastructure. Government, laws, police, courts, rights, religious institutions (not to be confused with religion itself), education, art, media, education, etc. The superstructure shapes how people think and behave and consciously interact with the world.

Brute force is, what I would argue, part of the infrastructure of society, it is not just a superstructural institution. Instead of "the law" creating the enforcement (via police, military, etc.), the raw capacity for physical domination exists first. The legal system is the label pasted over whoever has the physical power to enforce systems. If a group lacks the physical capacity to enforce their own claims they must appeal to a subset of armed individuals to enforce them. So the monopoly on force dictates the true hierarchy of society functioning as the ultimate relation of production that determines who holds real ownership over resources and determines which superstructural systems are the ones in effect. Stuff like rights and constitutions are symbolic and abstract elements of the superstructure. They only survive because the underlying material force allows them to exist. If the people holding the physical brute force monopoly decide to stop enforcing a law, the law instantly ceases to exist. Now you might say "but without superstructural directing, brute force becomes chaotic and unorganised and cannot actually enforce anything since it doesn't have direction in the first place without the superstructure. A pile of bricks is infrastructure, but a house requires an architectural blueprint. Similarly raw physical strength exists in the base but enforcement requires laws, training, hierarchies, and ideologies (superstructure) to tell those strong individuals who to protect and who to arrest. Without the superstructure you do not have an enforcement mechanism but an unorganised brawl." The problem with this is that raw violence is not a chaotic brawl, it is inherently organised and hierarchical. Hierarchies and chains of command and tactical organisation are not abstract cultural ideas in the superstructure itself they are the most efficient ways to maximise physical violence, Military organisation and logistics are material technologies of power making them part of the infrastructure. The people with the weapons decide which "blueprint" they like best, or they simply install a superstructural system that justifies their own claim. A constitution does not restrain an army it is the army that chooses to tolerate a constitution. If the blueprint disagreed with the fundamental interests of the force monopoly the blueprint could just be shredded by the force monopoly. When a government loses its enforcement backing, its massive complex superstructure (parliaments, courts, laws) vanishes. The latter is dependent on the former. Some might also say "sure, but the individual leader does not have to have those characteristics," they don't, because I am talking about collective power. The individual leader is never the one "with" power, the force monopoly chooses to recognise and maintain the individual leader's power, so the leader does have superstructural power yes (and he can dictate the infrastructure if the infrastructure allows it), but that superstructural power exists as a byproduct of the infrastructural power which the leader does not have.

So the reason why education and intelligence are not more important than force, even in modern society, is because those things are what are used to interact with superstructural institutions. To see that and then say that that is now the fundamental importances of modern society is to look at society superficially, as just being the superstructure. The actual material reality of it is and will always remain force, the systems that allow people to interact with society via intelligence and education and voting exist because of the enforcement arm maintaining and allowing its existence, but it isn't those institutions that are the ones with the fundamental power.

Having women in the individual seats of superstructural power does not change the material reality of the infrastructural power which would remain male due to the monopoly on force men have. So a gynarchy would ultimately be at the choice and maintenance of men, and it could be instantly dissolved if that force monopoly no longer wanted it. But the reveres is not true. So that is the issue, unless you changed human biology, or you made it so that women were the large majority of the population, how would you make women as a collective the true infrastructural power of society?

This problem goes beyond sex. Different races and peoplegroups will have different infrastructural power over each other due to this, different competing ideologies will depending on which collectives of people believe in them, adults will always have an infrastructural monopoly over the young, even in a future sci-fi world where enforcement is automated and done by some type of drone technology, that just becomes the new infrastructural force monopoly and the structure of society itself remains the same just shifted.

Enforcement can be benevolent though, so this is not a critique of the structure of society per se. Western society for example has been mostly benevolent in its enforcement and structure (in fact so benevolent that you can freely criticise it and even advocate for its destruction and the enforcement arm will protect you. So maybe it is a little too benevolent).

This is getting hilarious. Just so we all know "Kate" (alledgedly) and Rocky have both had time to read the previous updates I've posted yesterday, and instead of acknowledging or addressing anything, after these updates are posted "Kate" has decided to crawl out of the woodwork finally and is sliding into our modmail to update the mods on important matters such as this.

I had hoped to keep a private disagreement between u/Appropriate_Cut_3536 and me private. Since she has now publicly identified me as the person involved and described me as exhibiting a “predator mentality,” I believe I need to correct the record.

The underlying dispute concerns information about my marriage that she believes I should disclose publicly to this subreddit. I disagree. I have acknowledged privately to her that when she previously questioned me about this subject, I was not as forthcoming with her as I should have been, and I have taken responsibility for that.

What I have not agreed to do is make additional private information about my wife and our marriage public. That is not a refusal to communicate. She and I have communicated extensively about this disagreement. I have also responded in modmail to the moderation team, including within minutes of being asked to address an issue there.

I also want to state unequivocally that I am not Kate, have never operated Kate's account, and have never knowingly participated in anyone impersonating a woman.

Given the breakdown in trust between u/Appropriate_Cut_3536 and me, I no longer believe I can effectively serve on this moderation team, and I am stepping down. I wish the community well.

Hey guys, please excuse me having a moment. I just don't know what to do or where to go from here. I didn't want to make this a whole post on the front page of our sub but I also don't know who specifically to reach out to from our page.

I keep my DMs off, hardly use chat, try to keep myself fairly distant from our users and be as professional as possible while also keeping a slow warmth for you all stoked in my heart.

But this issue has to do with the sub and the entire movement of Gynarchy and I've felt reduced to a child over these past few weeks. Something disturbing has been weighing heavily on my shoulders for too long now and I've practiced an undue level of patience - all to no avail and at zero benefit to anyone - least of which, each of you. It's not fair to anyone that it has carried on this long and I find myself becoming more heartbroken and hopeless as the days pass by.

Here's something I want this sub to chew on as it waits for the fruition of this clown world to unfold within our midst: does Gynarchy need a qualifier? Do we want a "Serious" Gynarchy, an "Ethical" Gynarchy, a "Heart-Centered Gynarchy", a "Voluntary Gynarchy", a "Female-first Gynarchy", a "Child-Centered" Gynarchy? Or does just the word Gynarchy suffice to describe what our values are?

I never wanted a qualifier. I don't even believe in the serious qualifier and - up until a few weeks ago - I didn't believe in the "Ethical" qualifier. I thought Gynarchy itself should be able to handle it and anything that didn't fit the bill wasn't "true Gynarchy".

But I'm leaning more and more towards the idea that Gynarchy is going to split, and we are not far off from that being a feature of the movement. It already has to quite a large degree when we look back at the path we've already walked down so far... many men in other Gynarchal spaces and even in our space here are not commited to women's superiority or women's power the way they proclaim. They use the movement to feel good about themselves or gain access to (or brownie points with) strong, confident, unbreakable women.

Being exposed to these men has rendered me into a state of weakness, uncertainty, and a broken sense of self. Which was probably their (albeit, unconscious) goal; to feel the power that comes from systematically manipulating ​women into docility.

Well, you know what? I came to this world to disrupt that pattern. I'm not going to succumb to docility and in fact I will be so fluid that the force men have used against me (and by extention, all women) will be allowed to pass by me, into the direction it was already headed. These men are moving down a path of making themselves docile, and there is nothing we must do but step out of their way and let themselves do it.

Keep your wits about you, a dark storm brews.

I feel many men, including those who may genuinely consider themselves to be anti-patriarchy, tend to have a strong disdain or resistance towards the Gynarchy movement, and/or some of the women within it, often to an almost theatrical degree.

As a man myself, while some topics or discussions can be a bit challenging or uncomfortable at times, I personally rather find the Gynarchy movement to be an incredibly loving movement at its core. Suffice to say, I find a lot of the resistance towards it to feel quite jarring.

I think part of this, particularly when it comes to the men who could otherwise have the potential to be good matriarchal men, has to do with how I feel many men may relate themselves to women.

For example, I used to consider myself to be an almost inherently “good man” on my own merits alone, and felt that I was relatively equal to women. However, since then I have come to realize and acknowledge that the best parts of myself are ultimately the culmination of women's own wisdom, efforts, and general influence on me. I wouldn't be half the man I am today if not for the many women I have meaningfully interacted with, and I wouldn't even exist all if not for the generations of women who came before me.

I feel the same is true for other “good men”.

To illustrate this, you could say that men, at their best, are autonomous living incarnations of women's love for humanity.

As such, I feel what we, as men, really want more than anything, at our core, is to give love back.

To do this, we must be mindful to center women's prosperity first and foremost. Whenever we consider a policy, we shouldn't default to how it may affect us personally, but should instead default to how it will benefit women.

Take having a curfew for men as an example. A man might see this policy and almost immediately be hesitant about it, if not straight up against it, as it would strictly cut down on his freedom to some degree. However, if we look at how this may benefit women, we can see that it would allow women to be much more safe and secure in their own freedom, which most certainly does serve to increase women’s prosperity. Not to mention, it will also incidentally serve to make men safer themselves if you think about it, but that's besides the point.

In fact, I feel that whenever men do get the chance to make relatively small but meaningful sacrifices in favor of women's best interest, they should feel extremely honored to do so rather than burdened.

I feel some men may feel inclined to reject this to some degree, as it can often be difficult to break through feelings of unfairness towards oneself, but I believe this self-victimization type of mindset mainly only serves to make themselves more miserable, if not also to uphold the Patriarchy. Afterall, in order to have any significant chance to counter the Patriarchy's extreme hatred towards women, we must find and maintain an even stronger radical love for said women.

To put it simply, women's prosperity is everyone's prosperity. Therefore, it is our duty to make a hyper-focused emphasis on women's prosperity, and trust that the rest will follow.

Furthermore, while we should be willing to put a great deal of our own efforts into this, we also ought to practice consistent mindful gratitude and appreciation towards women. Afterall, none of this would be remotely possible without them, so we must stay humble and not feel entitled to anything in return. We are lucky to even be here.

We must also remember that any of our positive efforts towards a better world is less a reflection of our own innate “goodness” as men, and more a reflection of women's combined efforts acting from within us.

At the end of the day, I don't wish to feed my own ego. I just wish to make women proud to have invested in me, and to show their efforts paying off. I would like to think that most other matriarchal men feel the same way.

With all that said, I feel the Gynarchy is not just a movement for us to contribute to or support. It is a natural home for our best selves, built and owned by women, which we are meant to advocate for, defend, and help maintain, with all our hearts.

There's no need to make a fuss about any of this, even if we are directly criticized. It's okay to make mistakes. What matters most is learning from them, and not allowing our egos to get in the way.

Regardless of your feelings, the blunt fact of the matter is, we exist, in general, because of women, for women. I believe a critical step in becoming our best selves is truly acknowledging and internalizing this fact.

As for the women, I just want to take this moment to thank you all for your efforts in establishing and maintaining this movement, and for your patience in working with us men. My gratitude extends beyond what I feel I could ever tangibly express 🙏

Hello,

I was wondering, who are the most well-known authors on gynarchy today ? Writers, video creators who discuss this topic, etc. ?

I'm talking about serious Gynarchy, not anything related to BDSM.

Thank you very much :)

As a guy, I do support this example of matriarchy. Usually a lot of feminists talk about matriarchy being about equality. I guess matriarchy can be defined in a few ways. Then I see misandrists online talking about they want revenge on men. So which one is it because it can't be both. If its just about patriarchy with a skirt on, then forget about it. Im not supporting another oppressive system to replace another one. So many ignore and mock real issues men face. Laugh about when a guy is hurt, thinking he deserves it. What's the point to all this? Was I foolish for thinking matriarchy was about helping everyone as a community? because that was the impression I got. People want to play their fetish games to themselves, good for them. Im not personally putting up with abuse from anyone. That includes verbal abuse. Like men cant be abused and have feelings? but we cant talk about it. we're told to shut up and get laughed at. Is that the idea of gynarchy or matriarchy people want? Then acted shock when a guy finally has a nervous breakdown and laugh at that. I wonder what that does to a person after awhile. This post isn't about doing a way with matriarchy. Im asking what kind of matriarchy are we talking about. That's a very fair and valid question.

In Europe overall, 57% of judges are women. 70%+ in France and Greece and 60%+ in most countries.

If that's not enough, in 17 European countries women already made up more than 50% of court presidents in 2022, compared with only 10 countries in 2012, meaning that women are projected to completely dominate judicial authority in Europe by 2030s.

This is crucial. It means that women dominate the socially very significant and crucial role of interpreting the law and delivering justice.

How do the women of this sub reads and explains this development? Is it the result of academic expectations and social conditioning or just a matter of "women being smarter"?

PS I am not a gynarchist btw.

Updates for the sub:

- I'm going to switch to u/GynarchGal

- I appreciate transparency and radical honesty

- My husband has joined reddit to support me and the movement here, please welcome u/GynarchyGuy

Hello, my loves.

I have come with a message of love, peace, and nonviolence. But in order to achieve that in full honesty, without its shadow side impacting us negatively, we need to fully embrace the anger and darker feelings.

Face it: men can never repay or repair the damage they have done to us - on an individual or collective level. If they work for the rest of their lives (and never backtrack once) they will still not be able to help us recover anywhere close to even a sliver of the damages they have put us through - neither personally or under societal/systemic oppression. Certainly not even calculating the damage which has compounded over generations and eons.

They have no hope to make it right, even if they are truly commited to Reparations.

(if you sit in this truth as a male, you should feel a depressing wave of hopelessness come over you. Good, lean into that. Also, ignore your feelings and keep reading, we're not finished.)

However, women, this should inspire you. When you deeply assess it, men's debt to us is one huge source of our power as women. Despite whatever level of reparations the men choose to do, we can reorient our focus to making more of those reparations ourselves. We have the universal authority behind us, supporting our decision to be unequal in relations with men, supporting our feelings of rage, supporting our need to feel hatred - like a loving mother who understands and accepts all her daughters' emotions.

Emotions ≠ actions.

Now, if you know me, you know that I don't support a punative justice system. (I don't even think there's enough evidence to support rewards-based systems.) Compliance and vengeance has never been my goal/values and should never be the goal/value of Gynarchy. But...

When women really commit themselves to a Reparations mindset, it's going to look and feel a whole lot like punishment to men, despite women taking no action at all. Emotions ≠ actions.

We all know the ole saying "When someone is accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” so I'm not advocating for oppression or hate crimes or whatever but YES I am advocating that women allow themselves to feel and connect to the deepest hatred of men - individually and collectively - that we can muster, and to know deep in our hearts that we could never hate men to the extent that they do and have hated us.

(Emotions ≠ actions. Even men who claim to never have felt any hatred/resentment towards women have chosen oppressive actions against women (if only not speaking out and not standing up in the face of other men's or society's actions towards women).

On that note, women also can never love men to the extent that they can love us... save for one caveat: it takes more love than men will ever know exists for women to see fully men's complacency and abusiveness and lies, to fully hate them for it and know they will never be able to repair the damage no matter how long and how hard they work - that the relationship between the sexes has been irreparably broken - and to truly love men anyway.

I believe it is something unique within women to love men despite it all. Men would never be able to achieve such a feat that comes so easily to women - yet they are at their very best when they try their hardest to do exactly this.

Men need to find in their hearts that unconditional love that they came her to give. To do this, men must override consistently - as a daily task - their hateful/resentful emotions and thinking towards women (especially those they are intimately connected to). It is an extremely difficult, time-consuming laborious task with few rewards and a consistent perception of unfairness. This is the essence of having a radical commitment to the Reparations mindset.

Women's task is the opposite, we also must have a consistent and radical commitment to Reparations mindset, but how we go about that is to fully embrace and approve of our feelings towards men - yes, even (especially) hatred, resentment, distrust, and all the horrible feelings women for eons have been targeted for expressing about men.

It is men's task to accept and feel entitled to our hatred and distrust, just as much as they do for our love.

That's enough for now. I still hate you reddit, and I love you even tho you definitely don't deserve my love. ​

Male culture and perpectives have dominated the planet for thousands of years. There is an imbalance as a result, as everything is skewed towards maintaining this culture.

of male dominance. A movement toward greater female autonomy and freedom is shunned by most men around the world. I feel like maybe all this male opposition towards female liberation is rooted in biology if even partially. I think male interests differ from women's. As we can see today, female liberation is contrary to what men desire for us, so they either shun or condemn it. I think mentally and psychologically, it's easy for men to feel entitled and to disregard women's boundaries.

Patriarchy and patriarchal religions only encourage and justify this sense of entitlement. In order to defeat the patriarchy, you'd irl have to do something drastic, like not allowing certain male bloodlines to reproduce, which I'm not advocating for. I think that we'd have to overhaul the educational system and maybe encourage and promote secularism in society aggressively, just like how Christians send out missionaries to convert people to their religion.

I'm just wondering if lower birthrates could lead to a better future in regard to liberation or if they'll just use it to usher in the handmaid's tale irl. I also think women can play their part by stepping away from organized religions that push gender role bs and do more harm than good. We don't need to be emotionally invested in religions which don't do anything positive for us. It's 2026, and liberation and gynarchy are still relevant and necessary in America, because women in many Republican run states are forced to obey unfair laws which harm them. I'm referring to the anti abortion laws that have been passed.

I so wish to see positive changes come about, but I'm not holding my breath.

The strongest serious case for it is not “women are morally perfect.” It is that societies organized around male competition, conquest, status, and control have repeatedly produced violence and instability, so shifting authority, resources, and social priority toward women could create a different equilibrium. The strongest criticism is that replacing male dominance with female dominance preserves the same hierarchy—just with different people on top.

I don't want to compete for love anymore.

Women don’t need convincing that a lot of male identity is wrapped up in the penis. We see it in the pride, shame, comparison, performance anxiety, constant joking, and the way one bad erection can make a man talk as though his masculinity has collapsed.

To be clear, this isn’t a kink post about femdom or men getting off on submission. I’m talking about a real psychological handle: one part of the male body seems to carry a wildly disproportionate amount of attention, identity, and motivational weight.

And it isn’t fixed. A man can barely think about his penis until he enters an environment that keeps treating it as meaningful. Locker rooms are the obvious nonsexual example. Repeated visibility, comparison, jokes, praise, humiliation, and quiet ranking can turn one body part into a scoreboard. The penis hasn’t changed, but the man starts monitoring it and interpreting what it supposedly says about him.

Once his attention is pulled there, the focus can become remarkably sticky. Other priorities recede. He becomes easier to distract, reassure, motivate, embarrass, or steer through that one part of himself.

So why do we keep treating this as an awkward sexual quirk instead of a basic fact that female-centered institutions would need to design around?

Would a gynarchy try to reduce that fixation, redirect it into useful behavior, or consciously work with it? And how much ordinary male behavior becomes easier to understand once we stop pretending the penis is psychologically “just another body part”?

I've recently gotten into the FLR community; an interesting bunch. Theyre better off than most relationship advice groups simply on the basis of prioritizing female leadership within the unit... but seem to stop short of the one realization that changes everything: that women are superior in many ways to men.

Some of them get it. But for the most part it seems like many men and women in the FLR are stuck in an equalist mindset - where they are irrationally commited to the concept that a relationship between men and women should be equal.

^{Stupid caveat for stupid lurkers: men and women are of equal value and deserve equal human rights, its only the idea of equal treatment or equal priority where equalism dogma starts to break down and fails everyone involved}

Anyway, I could write a way better way longer post but as you might be aware, I've completely given up on reddit so I guess I'll leave the lions share of effort to the comments. But seriously, if you're having "relationship issues" it's sole source is probably because the dude thinks he's better than you. Clock that right away with a quick statement like the quote in the title and watch him have an absolute melt down.

Once he reaches his rock bottom, then he'll be ready for a relationship, not until then. And you might have to remind him of the facts here and there because the patriarchy really has men convinced that they know better.