(Qixi is approaching — republishing a classic)
Before we begin formally, let’s establish a few foundational principles:
1. In this world, there will always be 20% of people who are simply not suitable as marriage partners. As friends, lovers, or even casual companions — perfectly fine. But as husband or wife? That is a suicidal choice. These people must be avoided.
Yes, some people are destined to grow old alone, for their entire lives. Whoever gets entangled with them pays the price of sacrificing another person’s entire life. Master Chi does not want that person to be you.
2. Not everyone has your level of self-awareness — the kind that, upon recognizing your own shortcomings, allows you to face the pain squarely, slap yourself awake, and level up.
The vast majority of people are exactly the same at 30, 40, 50, and 60 as they were at 20. They accumulate years, never wisdom or depth.
Yes — for most people, a single glance is enough to “read” them. They are destined for little change in this lifetime.
3. Marriage is a long-term partnership. It is only worth continuing when both parties are genuinely happy collaborating.
You may continue for the sake of affection, material stability, or children — but you need some reason to justify it.
But if your marriage gives you nothing at all — the mic is yours, the comment section is open. Tell Master Chi: why haven’t you given yourself a way out sooner?
Marriage exists in only three states:
- A union of fate and love — happily ongoing;
- Maintained for a clear, specific purpose;
- Meaningless, painful, and heading toward an inevitable end.
Here is the thing: people at the lower rungs of society tend to lack one critical ability — what I call discernment.
Discernment is not about having taste in luxury goods, or the confidence to critique lavish lifestyles.
Discernment means: when you look at a potential partner, you can instantly assess their quality, their potential, their innate caliber.
In other words — do you have the ability to instantly see whether someone is trash or treasure?
Don’t second-guess this. If your parents and your current social circle sit at tier C-3 or below, your discernment has almost certainly never been trained or cultivated.
This ability matters at different scales. In your career, you can develop it gradually. But in marriage? Without discernment, you will almost certainly go blind.
You will be easily deceived, manipulated, played with, and used.
At first, you will feel smug — convinced you married a good man or found a good woman.
Then you will spend the rest of your life paying for that blindness.
Do not think a bad marriage only costs you a few years. Regardless of gender, a terrible marriage will typically produce all of the following:
- Completely and utterly waste years of your life — often a full decade or more;
- Subject you to daily suffering during that marriage, with zero personal growth;
- Leave you so emotionally exhausted that you can barely muster the courage to truly love again;
- Destroy enormous amounts of your material resources, blocking your ability to build wealth;
- Drag down your life, corrupt your career, and ultimately ruin your reputation.
This is why, if you look around at friends who have been through terrible marriages — every single one of them, no matter how vibrant and full of promise they once were — a marriage like this can shatter half a lifetime. Not even a sliver of luck can save them.
To use an analogy: take a pristine ice-grade jade specimen, drop it into a vat of pickling brine for a few years, pull it out — no matter how fine the original stone, it is ruined.
So today, Master Chi is laying out a reference guide — a checklist to help you judge who is truly worth marrying, worth trusting, worth building a life with.
The Deadbeat Section (Men)#
This section is written for women. If your partner matches two or more of the five traits below, Master Chi strongly advises you to take a serious, hard look at your situation.
Why address the men’s section first? First, because 60% of Master Chi’s readership are elite men and 40% are elite women — serving the majority is fair enough. Second, while this helps women identify deadbeat men, the men reading this can also run a self-audit — two birds, one stone.
(Fine, I am rationalizing — the women’s section works equally as a mirror for self-reflection.)
1. Lacking desire and ambition.
For a man, this is fatal — it is the very line that divides a man from a boy.
Understand: everyone goes through periods of weakness. That is not the issue. What is the issue is whether you accept that weakness or are ashamed of it.
So even if the man you fall for is a delivery driver, a rideshare driver, or a courier — if his every word and action radiates “I may be ordinary, but I will use every drop of my sweat to hold up the sky for my family, for my woman” — trust me, this man will rise. And even if he has other flaws, his core character is sound.
What is truly frightening are the men who have snagged some mid-level position at a corporation or government agency, earning around 100K a year, hovering between tiers C-1 and C-2.
Note: this is not living freely and simply, and it is not contentment. Remember — you are looking for a husband. Someone to lean on and entrust your life to.
The evidence is overwhelming: when a man loses even his basic drive while still young, everything else that follows in life — elderly parents’ medical needs, children’s education, family disputes, major decisions — he will throw up his hands and let things drift.
Tell me: are you truly willing to accept that?
2. Lacking restraint and self-discipline.
Men being attracted to women is completely normal. Any man with healthy hormones will glance twice at an attractive woman walking by. Fine — looking does not mean acting.
Men loving their hobbies is equally normal. Games, watches, cars, whiskey, photography, fitness — whatever it is. Fine — having hobbies does not mean letting everything else go to ruin.
Let Master Chi be very clear once again: we are not talking about whether someone is a “good man” in the abstract. We are talking about whether he is fit to be a husband and a father.
For a husband and father, the single most essential foundation is sufficient self-control and restraint.
Hobbies are not the problem — losing yourself to them is. Attraction is not the problem — drowning in it is.
It is hard to imagine a man who claims to love you, yet cannot keep himself in check, constantly in murky entanglements with other women — then has the nerve to tell you it was “just playing along” or “unavoidable.”
You are not naive, and Master Chi has spent enough time in the real world to say this: I have never once seen a situation that required sexual ambiguity between men and women to maintain.
If he lacks this kind of self-control — unless you happen to enjoy sharing — recognize this for exactly what it is: a definitive mark of a deadbeat man.
3. All talk, no substance.
Some men are terrifying — and disgusting. For them, words cost nothing.
This means that every time you are on the verge of giving up, he finds exactly the right sweet words to reignite a flicker of hope in you.
And then? You extend trust, opportunity, love — even resources, even marriage.
And him? He opens with a speech and closes with another.
Do not mistake this for talent that will somehow pay off. This is a parlor trick — it has no place among serious people.
Master Chi knows some truly masterful con artists. What makes them genuinely impressive? They con resources, connections, and real ventures — on their own, with brains and charisma. Their wives end up with tens of millions, even hundreds of millions. These men go out and face the real battles themselves.
So ask yourself: why is your man’s con game aimed squarely at you?
Master Chi is a straightforward person, and my standard for men is equally blunt: less talk, no excuses. I know you may be struggling right now — fine. But at least show some basic sincerity.
He says he will take care of you? Even when he is swamped, does he spend every free moment with you? Or does he silence you with “you’re being unreasonable” the moment you bring it up?
He says he will provide for you? Even when he is exhausted, does he actively try, explore, and push forward? Or does he laze around and blame the world for not recognizing his brilliance?
Working hard without results and not working hard at all are entirely different things. The measure of a man’s worth is in the honest sweat he puts in — not in how smooth his words are.
Of course, some women love men like this. Good for them — they are helpfully absorbing some of these deadbeats so you do not have to.
4. Self-awareness versus arrogant stubbornness.
Deadbeats share one very distinctive trait — something I have mentioned countless times: the “low-tier poverty mindset” of extreme self-righteousness.
This looks similar to genuine self-awareness but is an entirely different animal.
Genuine self-awareness looks like this: knowing you are at 75 points and eagerly attempting 80-point challenges. Genuinely learning from others’ experience. Genuinely valuing your wife’s perspective — not necessarily agreeing with everything, but always listening, considering, then sharing his own thinking in return.
This is healthy. Even after a failure, he will laugh and say: “Honey, I should have listened to you on that one. Now I know.”
Arrogant stubbornness? That is someone who was never built for greatness but somehow picked up all of a strong person’s worst habits.
In his eyes, everyone else is an idiot — especially you. The closer someone is to him, the more he looks down on and dismisses them.
He needs to diminish you to feel relevant. He needs to deny you to feel accomplished. Even when you are genuinely trying to help or advise him, he will snap: “What does a woman know?!”
This type might have scraped through in the 1980s. Today, they are the ones who look perpetually busy but somehow drift through decades without ever amounting to anything. Same verdict: deadbeat.
5. Cowardly users — men who treat their wives as mountains to mine.
This type of deadbeat is the most shameful and most insidious — but also the hardest to detect without life experience.
If many women in your circle are married and approaching their forties, you will start to see these men exposed over time.
Their characteristics? They may be polite, refined, even attentive and thoughtful. But everything they do is to get you — your resources, your family’s background, everything you bring with you.
And yet they will never willingly take on any responsibility or face any difficulty on your behalf.
This is worse than being a kept man. At least a kept man operates transparently — a clear exchange: you provide financially, he contributes in other ways. And if he has any loyalty, he will stand up for you when you are wronged.
But this type of cowardly user? Do not expect him to bear any risk or pressure for you. Yet he will frame it all with impressive dignity:
“Darling, we should face this together. How about you put up the money — or ask your family — and I will handle things from here.”
Or:
“Babe, I can only count on you for this. Why don’t you take care of it, and I will make sure everything gets arranged properly.”
Master Chi is an egalitarian — I criticize entitlement feminism just as readily as I demand women take responsibility in marriage. But this kind of man is genuinely a disgrace.
Think this type is rare? I am sorry to say: refined, self-serving freeloaders are quite common — and will only become more so.
Those are the five traits of a deadbeat man. Use them as much for self-screening as for partner evaluation.
The Low-Grade Section (Women)#
Master Chi has long believed: being a woman is easy. Being a high-tier woman is hard — extremely hard, extraordinarily hard.
The reason is that the gap between women’s tiers is starkly defined, and fundamentally different from the gaps between men’s tiers — something I have touched on many times. For example:
- Low-tier women — this group absolutely constitutes the vast majority of women, and includes many well-known types: entitlement feminists, man-haters, and the high-confidence/low-value crowd.
- Average women — cheerful, no major drama, no particular ambitions, ordinary on all counts.
- High-tier women — their thinking, values, and awareness are crystalline through and through. In their careers, they command most men. In relationships, they outmaneuver most women.
Simply put, the difference between a high-tier woman and a high-tier man is this: the high-tier woman monopolizes. In any given circle, besides her husband, there are at least a dozen men competing to work alongside her.
I have written several pieces on this and will revisit the topic. But today’s focus is the absolutely untouchable low and mid-tier women — the ones you should keep at a safe distance in both marriage and friendship.
1. Women without self-awareness versus women who know their worth. (This section runs long — bear with me.)
“Knowing your worth” means understanding, as a woman, exactly what tier you occupy — or as a man, knowing exactly what caliber you are.
Do not accuse Master Chi of objectification. I have explained this many times: the world has always been full of ruthlessness and ill intent toward women. Giving women a clear, honest assessment is the most precise and useful reading you can offer them.
Because the universal trait of low-tier women is this: they never understand exactly where they fall short.
They generally think: “I’m female, I’m biologically functional — that’s already a 70-point baseline.”
Their logic? “Ordinary people start at 60, don’t they?”
Please. Who said scoring starts at 60? It starts at zero.
So let’s calculate honestly:
- Basic, functional biology: 10 points
- Strong enough awareness to carve out a place for yourself in society: 20 points
- Solid family background that can help establish you in a top-tier city: 20 points
- Ongoing capacity for growth and self-reflection to handle marriage and children: 20 points
- Ability to integrate all your own resources so you remain powerful even without marriage: 20 points
- Variable items — appearance, figure, taste, and so on: 10 points
By this scale, you will find that most women online score around 30 points. Reaching 50 is already rare. But 50 is not impressive — and a high-tier woman starts at 70.
(In the eyes of high-value men, that is.)
This is also why there are so many unmarried men and women — because the world truly and permanently contains a sizable proportion of people who are simply not marriageable. Not everyone has the preference to settle.
(Many people cave and rush to grab the nearest low-quality option just to say they are paired up. You already know how that turns out.)
Visit any lower-tier gathering space and you will find no shortage of beautiful, well-figured women who score low by this measure — yet all of them believe their score is high. Result? They are too proud to marry low-status men, land middle-tier men by chance, and have absolutely no shot at high-tier men — who see them only as entertainment.
And the low-status men? They made the mistake of treating these women as high-scorers, without realizing she may have earned 8 points for youthful looks — but that still leaves 92 points untouched.
That is what having no self-awareness looks like. A woman without self-awareness is someone you must never marry — or even befriend. She will become the single greatest disaster in your life.
2. The woman who is entirely a “fragile little lady” — can’t carry weight, can’t think for herself.
Many low-grade women operate on this logic: once I am successfully married, I have arrived. I have crossed the finish line. No need to do anything more.
You can see this in everyday interaction with them — and unfortunately, women’s socialization genuinely tends toward this pattern of “low-grade fragility,” so the signs are unmistakable:
Either they lack any independent opinions — you ask them anything and they do not know, but once you have decided everything, they have complaints about all of it.
Or everything must revolve entirely around them — otherwise you “don’t care” and “aren’t considering her feelings.”
You can read this type within two meals. If you still cannot tell by the second meal — either seriously examine your own judgment, or just marry her and help reduce society’s burden.
Because once married, the result is inevitable: she will endlessly demand that you reshape yourself around her logic and her habits. And her justification will be:
“If you love me, you should nurture me! Dote on me! Sacrifice every masculine habit and interest you have — all of it for me!”
So I will leave you to decide: is your home a place where both partners soar — or one where a dragon wraps itself around a pig?
No need for Master Chi to weigh in. Judge for yourself.
3. The Soul Hook and Stage Anchor.
This is the type of client Master Chi dreads most. Let me explain what I mean by soul hook and stage anchor:
The woman herself may come from a humble background — that is completely fine. Most of us climbed up from the bottom.
But due to a particular kind of upbringing, she has come to believe she is personally responsible for her parents’ wellbeing. Still fine — filial piety is a virtue and a natural duty.
But she also believes that once she marries up, she becomes responsible for her brothers and sisters as well.
So she will channel the resources of her own household to her siblings at her own family’s expense, framing it as filial devotion and family harmony, then righteously declaring: “They are my family!”
What this actually does is drain and exhaust the precious resources of your immediate family — even diluting what your own children will one day inherit.
From a moral standpoint, there is nothing you or I can say against this woman. But as a man — if you marry her, congratulations: you are not marrying one woman. You have married an entire extended family.
Your home may become their family hostel. Your resources become their default pool to draw from.
And if you show even a hint of resentment, prepare for blame and dissatisfaction from your wife.
In short: get ready to spend your entire life hauling them forward.
4. The Hex Woman — the slow-burning drain.
This is the most dangerous kind of landmine among women, because in your early marriage — when you are both young — she is completely impossible to detect or predict.
But once you have been married for years, her destructive power fully reveals itself.
Her method of torment: she never explodes. But at the slightest friction or inconvenience, she goes quiet — sulking, looking miserable, sighing endlessly, giving you the cold shoulder.
Do not dismiss this as normal moodiness. Ask any woman with a mother like this: is the household atmosphere perpetually overcast? Always cloudy with occasional drizzle, forever and ever?
This kind of woman may seem like she causes no dramatic upheaval — but she will have a profound negative impact on the husband and children in that home.
Most critically: there is no solution for her. She is simply this way. Permanently half-hearted, permanently joyless.
Not just as a husband — even as a female friend, having a woman like this around is exhausting, because you feel like you are living alongside a shadow.
And the result? The man will almost certainly not want to come home. He would rather accept every insult she throws at him than return. Even if she calls him scum, a beast, garbage — he will say: “You’re absolutely right. I’m begging you — just divorce this terrible man.”
5. The brainless followers and mama’s girls.
The comparison to mama’s boys is instructive here — same symptoms, completely different damage.
A mama’s boy is at worst a cowardly user. Marrying him is frustrating, but he will usually have a “weaning phase” eventually.
A mama’s girl and brainless follower has no such arc. She simply cannot change. The cause is usually a domineering mother, or a clique of meddlesome, petty friends.
Every single one of them seethes with righteous indignation on behalf of their beloved girlfriend or daughter — convinced she is being mistreated by you. So they are perpetually enthusiastic about coaching her in the art of “managing her husband.”
They also love having her report back on the husband’s every move and daily life, which they then enthusiastically twist into the darkest possible interpretation — without any basis whatsoever.
In short: her domineering mother and busybody friends will endlessly equip this brainless follower with every underhanded tactic available to “outmaneuver” her husband — calling it “having her back.”
Then, once the marriage inevitably collapses, they will mutter: “See? Told you he was no good.”
While in the same breath gleefully gossiping about the wreckage of her life for entertainment.
So if, in getting to know a woman, you discover she has an extremely meddlesome girlfriend — or worse, an entire clique of domineering, low-tier women — she will almost certainly display this problem after marriage.
Do not touch. Do not marry. Let some other brave soul step on that landmine — blazing the trail so you can find someone better.
Closing#
Today’s article is among the more street-level, practical content Master Chi has written — because the intended audience is primarily readers in the C-1 to C-4 range.
I simply do not have the bandwidth to personally evaluate every client’s romantic destiny and map out a partner’s individual traits.
So — a comprehensive article, once, for all time.
In this tier of society, the one resource that is never in short supply is people.
So your task — regardless of gender — is simple: the moment someone you are seeing matches two or more of the five traits above, cut ties immediately. No hesitation, no looking back.
Because they are genuinely not worth your time.
It is like walking past a row of clean, well-maintained buildings and insisting on moving into the one that has been gutted by fire, left unmaintained, and is falling apart.
Why would you do that to yourself?
This society has plenty of family-loving, career-driven men who happen to have minor rough edges.
It also has plenty of virtuous, growth-oriented women who are just a little unpolished.
But remember: the marriage and romance arena is a hunting ground, through and through. The truly high-quality men and women are identified and claimed the moment they step out into the world.
If you keep gravitating toward deadbeats and low-grade partners from the start — I am sorry. Your future will be an endless cycle of exactly that.