Emotions

How do you turn a girl you’ve slept with into a friend? There are a few rules to follow – but also some pitfalls you must avoid.

Just dug an old topic out of my ‘topic ideas’ grab bag. A member of the Girls Chase forums, some years back, asked another member:

“You mentioned keeping these girls around as friends. Would you recommend this for women I’ve already slept with and hung out with for a bit? If so, how would you make that transition?”

... and that member responded:

“This is beyond my level. Maybe chase can shine some light on this topic. How to turn girls you’ve slept with into friends. Article worthy?”

I went into details in my response on that thread, but I’d like to explore the topic more today. How do you turn a girl you’ve slept with into a friend?

I’ve done it several times (I’ll explain why not more than that below), and it is eminently doable. However, there are some nuances involved in it you will have to keep in mind... to not have it blow up in your face, one way or another.

The mix of girls you’ve dated and slept with informs your opinions of women. Different girl mixes can lead to very different thoughts about women.

As you make your way through life, and particularly as you make your way through seduction, you will discover different men at varying levels of ‘jaded’.

There are romantically inexperienced men who are incredibly optimistically naïve about women. There are romantically inexperienced men who are incredibly pessimistically naïve about women. Like all views formed from a distance, these are unrealistic views, punctured by the first few experiences with women in the flesh.

Once a man begins to accumulate romantic experience, his views on women shift toward the middle. The optimist discovers women are not as pure as he’d thought; the pessimist discovers women are not so devious as he’d feared.

Yet, from this intermediate middle point, as men accumulate still more sexual and romantic experience, their views diverge again.

All experienced men’s views on women are ‘realistic’. Yet the tenor of the views can differ wildly from man to man. They range from the experienced man who thinks women are sometimes tricky but mostly sweet, to the experienced man who thinks every woman is a siren, luring men who fall off their guards for even a moment to the rocks.

There’s one single, easy way to predict how jaded about women a man with some experience under his belt will be, though: look at the mix of women he’s been with.

A mature relationship (older than a few years) often requires a more cooperative approach to behavior problem solving than younger relationships do.

On my article on how to erase your jealousy, a reader comments:

“Chase,

I’ve noticed that in this article and in others, you appear to be open to breaking up with a girl fairly hastily (at least compared to most people) in favor of a higher mission and/or replacing her if things aren’t going well.

This totally makes sense to me in the context of shorter relationships. But what about longer ones? What if I’ve been dating someone for 5+ years and an undesirable behavior comes up. I feel as though just being ready to end it in favor of a higher purpose would be a bit more difficult and perhaps even unreasonable (i.e. given that I’ve spent so much time on it, it would be worth it to put a little more effort into making it work than just a few short talks, and if those don’t work, an ultimatum). Have you had experience in this situation before? What was it like?”

It’s a good question.

First, I should clarify (in case it isn’t already clear) that I am not from the hardcore “if she does anything you even slightly dislike, NEXT her immediately!” camp. These things aren’t always clear when you communicate them over text on the Internet.

In my case, when there’s a problem in a relationship, I make it very clear to a woman what she needs to change. If I like her and want to continue the relationship, and the bad behavior is not too egregious, I will work with her over time to change the behavior. We’ll talk about that in this article (changing behavior over a bit of time).

If on the other hand the behavior is simply deal breaker behavior, then yes, as soon as I see it, she’ll be headed toward the door. But that sort of behavior always manifests itself in the first few weeks or, at most, month. This assumes you run your early relationships as I suggest, and keep things to just the two of you without involving other people, and are somewhat tough to be with at first (so you get to see her true colors). If you’re accommodating and you let her lead things then yes, you’ll have no idea who she is until six months in or maybe after your first kid. Then you’ve got problems.

Assuming you handle the early relationship well though, and screen well, you will end up in long-term relationships with some pretty amazing women who fit you pretty well.

Yet, sooner or later, people change. She gets stressed out, and her stress causes her to become disrespectful or insulting toward you. Her diet goes to hell and she packs on some extra weight, or she bears you a few children and the weight is slow to come off after the latest kid. She gets extra busy at work and has less and less time for you. Her best friend becomes single again and wants her to go out a lot like they did when they were both single, and she’s begun to go with it.

You’re years into the relationship. You might live together, be married, and/or have children. Regardless, you’re hugely invested in her at this point and have made all sorts of changes and adjustments to your life to accommodate the relationship (i.e., you probably don’t party with your pals as much, travel so much to exotic locales on guys’ vacations, or hang out all weekend at the sports bar anymore, I’m guessing).

Now she’s suddenly not behaving well. But you don’t want to just ditch her and walk. So what do you do?

The topic I’ll be covering today is one of my favorite concepts in seduction: fractionation.

It’s been covered on Girls Chase before, and for good reason – it is a powerful, versatile, multi-layered tool that will serve as a great asset to the skill set of any seducer.

Fractionation is also mildly confusing as a concept. It may not be immediately understandable for some readers who aren’t that experienced as seducers just yet, which is precisely why it merits another article – to make absolutely sure you understand just what you can accomplish with fractionation.

Additionally, I’ll also touch on a nuanced aspect of this tool that could be valuable to the readers who’ve already become certified lady killers.

Friend zones, friends with benefits, sexless marriages – many relationships are lopsided and unhappy. Why do these relationships exist (and how do you avoid them)?

In dating, there is one truth above all, and that is that men want a few things from women, and women want a few things from men, and not all those things overlap.

The result of this failure to overlap is sometimes you have a woman who is good at getting what she wants without giving the men she gets it from everything (or anything) they want. Likewise, you sometimes have a man who is good at getting what he wants without giving the women he gets it from everything (or anything) they want.

This mismatch is the root of all the most unhappy relationships with the most broken dynamics you see in dating. The friend zone, where a man who wants intimacy with a woman is exiled to her sexless borderlands without it. Friends with benefits, which some women are fine with for some time, but most women eventually go at least a little crazy in. Disrespectful and/or sexless long-term relationships or marriages, where the man is treated as a second-class partner. And neglectful and/or domineering long-term relationships or marriages, where the woman is treated as a second-class partner.

The Zen area of dating, of course, are setups where both partners get what they want: where the woman gets everything she desires, and the man gets everything he desires.

But not every coupling will be this way. Most won’t.

Instead, most fall somewhere into that overlap zone – for a very simple reason.

Everyone out there is trying to influence you. How susceptible are you to that influence – and how susceptible are those around you?

I wanted to write a quick post (that turned out not to be so quick) on resistance and susceptibility to influence. This article is something of a cousin piece to my piece on grouping and herding in dating from last week.

The subject of this article - resistance and susceptibility to influence- goes for you and the people around you. Your friends, your family, your workmates, your lovers, partners, and dates.

Everyone is susceptible to the influence of other people and forces. The degree of susceptibility varies from person to person, and situation to situation. Some people are more easily influenced than others. Some situations make it easier to influence people than others. Most people are only marginally aware (at best) of their influencability.

If you are susceptible to influence but do not realize it, other people can step into your mind and make you think things and believe things you might not really want to think or believe. This can lead you to taking actions you might previously not have agreed with. Sometimes this turns out to be beneficial; sometimes not really.

For an example of the beneficial sort, I had a friend in university who influenced me to apply for an internship with Nike and pick up a minor in supply chain. Until this friend, I did not care about getting a job after school, was doing the minimum necessary to get through school, and disdained the idea of internships. Yet because of this friend, who'd had an impressive co-op run building a new supply chain process at Tyco, I grew excited about getting a good job and doing better in school. I didn't get the internship, but came in second in a pool of 200 candidates and got some very valuable feedback from the interviewer which played a key role in me getting the job I did get, a year later. I got more a lot more focused on school and got straight As again the next semester, for the first time in years. And I got my dream job on the first try - I zeroed in on them and the job fair and blew their socks off in my interview. Had that friend not influenced me, none of that would've happened.

Years later, I was in a startup where one of my business partners influenced me to open up the purse strings more than I thought was wise, against my instincts and all the reading I'd done on startups spending all their money too quick being one of the #1 reasons they go under. He influenced me to do a number of other things more in-tune with how he thought we should do things and less in tune with how I thought we should. We ran out of money and I had to close the business and lay everyone off. The partner who'd influenced me to spend more managed to negotiate the rights to the business away from myself and the other partner (despite having joined the startup much later, and having taken far more capital out of it than he'd put into it), then sold those rights to another group of founders. The business is now a successful venture-backed business doing everything I originally wanted to do, and would've had it do... had we not run out of funds so quick.

I don't regret the experience (I enjoy Girls Chase much more as a business; and I received a lifetime of invaluable lessons in negotiation, predatory partnerships, and sticking to your guns - plus a healthy dose of business confidence after I found I'd been right all along), but the outcome was a direct result of that business partner influencing me to act in ways contrary to how I'd have acted on my own.

Every human being is susceptible to the influence of other human beings. There are no exceptions to this. Locate the strongest, most resolute human being in the world, and I guarantee you we can find a way to make him crack with enough time, and the right people, in the right situation.

The question we want to look at today though is how susceptible vs. resistant are you and those around you?

Commenting on my article about 12 common unsexy nice guy traits, a reader named Colin writes:

“Your article stings and hurts [f]or one reason...which is #8 on this list [don't have any interests or passions]. That's me. That's the reason I'm a mid-30s virgin and am too scared to try any relationships with women. I have a well paying job, own my house, have good relationships with my parents, and behave the way in my "nice guy" mind an attractive guy should be. But I have no passion. I hate and avoid competitive things, because I feel so bad about myself when I fail. I never played sports as a kid for that reason. I'm sort of a wuss, really. #8 is KILLING me. Girls I like have passions. Guys they are with have passions. Why should they like a wuss like me who avoids passionate things? At least it makes sense to me. I even have a girls number and I'm too afraid to call her for fear of exposing my wuss, passionless self. That and the fact that I don't socialize with any friends...don't really have any at that. I realized long ago I had no hobbies other than masturbating, and so I started taking up guitar. But even that's wuss because that's not competitive. At least not the way I play. I'm lost and I don't know how to get around this, no matter what I read. I need specific help.”

We've had a lot of guys ask the "How to be passionate?" question over the years. Most of the advice out there is ephemeral - you've got to search for what you're passionate about! they tell you. Makes for a nice sound bite, and while it is true, it is also pretty useless, as far as advice goes.

We're going to nail it down for you today, and give you some practical tips you can use to immediately get the 'passion' area of your life handled.

Because, well, everything's better with passion. Until you reach the point where everything's better with Zen... however, that's a discussion for another day.

Today, let's put the magnifying glass on passion, and see how to add it into your life even when it seems like it isn't there.