Emotions

Byronic flaws make a man more interesting, and much more bondable in courtships and relationships. Yet there’s an art to revealing them that many men often get wrong...

I recently worked with a hard case guy on a repeated relationship problem he has. Periodically, his relationships fail, inexplicably to him, with every woman he dates peeling off and wanting out.

He's been unable to understand why, but with this latest girl she gave him a lot of very clear feedback, that also mirrors feedback he's gotten from other girlfriends, as well as mirrors my own feeling personally with him.

That feedback was this:

That the girl, despite six months of trying to peel back his layers, was never able to get to know the real him. She feels like, after six months of attempts, she's still right back where she started with him, and is tired of trying.

This is a guy who, in most on-paper respects, should be a desirable guy. He's tall, accomplished, has good fundamentals, and good game. He's well-nigh unshakeable in his frame and is relentlessly optimistic (without being unrealistic). He's an ex-military man and is tough-as-nails, yet is also a religious man and is caring and intelligent, if sometimes not always totally attuned to why a woman is doing what she's doing.

What I realized on looking at how this latest girlfriend quit the relationship is that he isn't letting women peel his layers back properly, and this is causing women to feel like they don't even really know him.

Which in turn causes those women to feel like failures, then causes them to leave.

What I said to him was, "You need to help women peel your layers back properly. You might also need to get more comfortable yourself showing people more of whom you are underneath your armor."

Your girlfriend is hinting she wants to get more serious. But she won’t ask outright and you won’t go out on a limb yourself. How do you not chase – or ignore?

It's always a bit fraught dealing with the "how much does this person like me?" "how serious should this relationship be?" question.

You'll notice most people of both sexes will dance around this issue. There's a lot of tentative feeling out of the other partner. Both sexes hesitate a lot, miscommunicate, and make incorrect assumptions.

There's a reason for this: by being the first to put yourself out there and 'show all your cards' in a relationship you run the risk of all kinds of unpleasant things:

• Maybe the other person doesn't like you as much, and feels like you're coming on too strong when you do

• Maybe the other person likes you a lot more, and feels disappointed at how uninterested you seem to be

• Maybe you totally misread the other person and actually s/he was happy the way things were and didn't want the relationship to escalate

Any kind of escalation of commitment is in fact a minefield where it's all too easy for any misalignment between the parties to blow the whole thing up.

So it's no wonder this is a difficult step for your average relationship.

However... there is a little tactic you can use to navigate this step a lot more fluidly.

Breaking up can pull you through a wringer. How you handle a breakup, and how you manage your emotions and recovery, will determine where you go from there.

When you break up with a girl, it won’t always be an easy process.

Some breakups go down easy. The ones where you weren’t overly attached to the girl, and you part as friends. Or the ones where for whatever reason you never got all that into her.

Those breakups, a lot of the time, can be smooth breakups.

Yet even those can sometimes have hiccups.

The tough breakups (whether it’s expected or not) are the ones where your emotions play games with you post-breakup.

They stretch you around like Silly Putty and break you to pieces like a ceramic pot.

How you handle yourself in the weeks and months after a breakup determine the life you’ll lead following it.

Women will throw all kinds of tests your way. On dates and in relationships, the tests don't stop. That can grate you… or you can learn to love it.

Whether you're approaching a woman for the first ever time, or you're dealing with her in your long-term relationship, she's going to test you.

These tests never go away. Not permanently.

You can get a woman to a point in a pickup where she is more or less fully on board with you and the tests subside to a light flirtatious murmur... so long as you maintain the vibe, the forward progress, and don't make big mistakes.

You can get a woman to a point in a relationship where she has fallen back in-love with you again after a time not being so, where the adversity in the relationship has quelled, and she's staring at you with dreamy eyes again... for a while.

Tests always return, though.

Sometimes they sneak back in in little ways, dancing around the fringes.

• The girl you're picking up pushes back gently and playfully when you invite her home: "Oh, we're leaving so soon?"

• The girl you've been dating for 6 months who's mostly pretty happy with you puts your feet to a gentle fire: "Where do you want this relationship to go?"

Sometimes the tests come roaring in in earth-shattering ways. She tells you there's no way she'd go with you, or that the relationship is done.

The first time most guys realize this, it feels like a colossal burden.

"The tests never end!"

Yet so much of life is how you frame it. This is true with tests as it is with anything.

Tests can be an endless burden, yes. Or they can be a thing you appreciate, or even love.

You must fail before you succeed at any great skill. This is especially true for getting girls, a skill so many men fear failing at so greatly.

I was working with a client who is struggling with all the usual suspects:

If you view some women as virginal saintly Madonnas, and others as dissolute slutty whores, does that create problems for you?

Have you ever heard of the Madonna-whore complex?

When I was young, there was this special girl.

She played volleyball for a rival school’s team. When she’d come to play at my school, I’d watch her bounce and frolic and think: “If only she were my girl, I’d be the happiest guy in the world.”

I built her up in my imagination to be the perfect girlfriend, even though I’d never met her. She was my “one-itis.”

Fast forward a couple years. I entered high school, infiltrated her social circle, asked her out, and wow, she became my first girlfriend!

I spent a few months going to her house, making out on her couch, annoying her while she did her homework. I never slept with her because I “knew” she wasn’t ready (hah).

In retrospect, I was the one who wasn’t ready. I was young, needy, and insecure. So she dumped me.

I cried many boy tears. I left roses on her doorstep. I wrote her love letters. And then, a few days later, I saw her making out with the captain of the rugby team in front of my locker.

What? My angel must have been seduced by this evil bastard! He drugged her. He brainwashed her!

Many years later, I found her on Facebook. “You were my first girlfriend. I was crazy about you,” I said.

“Oh, I remember that. I was such a slut back then,” she replied.

And pop went my illusion of the perfect girl. By this point, I was an experienced man-whore. But I still had a Madonna-whore complex, and I saw her as a Madonna.

If you're like most guys, you're not going out right now. Yet single women are lonelier than ever, and more receptive to your approaches than ever before.

I'm just about finished an epic "3 potential futures for dating in a post-lockdown world" article that explores the current and potential long-lasting social changes we're looking at, depending on one of three scenarios (lockdowns lift in 2022 as currently promised; rolling annual lockdowns become a normal part of Western disease-fighting; or permanent lockdowns are here to stay, with freedom passes awarded to good citizens).

But then you get into speculating about the future, and as neutral as I try to make an article like that it's hard not to veer into this side or that side, and, frankly, at this point, we're living in a dystopia, and talking about the dystopia we're in is sort of depressing.

And everyone's got enough depression to deal with already.

So instead I want to do something different.

Instead, let me set that huge long massive article aside (and maybe I will or won't publish it at some point) and do something else.

Let me talk to you about what women are going through right now.