Female Mind

If she likes you, but opts not to hook up with you, what does it mean? Why, it means you’ve failed her Chad test – and now she’ll make you wait.

You’re back alone at your place with a girl. What you know about her: she’s adventurous, independent, and, by all indications, probably has been with her fair share of men. Perhaps she’s shared some of her old war stories with you: guys she’s been with, wild hookups she has had, sordid escapades gone by.

For some reason, it feels slightly off. You feel like she likes you, it’s just... her walls are up.

You decide to go for it anyway. She’s near you on the couch, with her body turned slightly away from yours. Her arms are folded, her expression slightly tensed. “Come here, you’re so far away,” you tell her. She scoots a little closer, but she doesn’t seem excited to do it. You put your hand on her chin to turn her face toward yours. She stops you.

“I don’t feel ready for that yet,” she says. You feel let down. After all that talk about all her crazy past hookups... and now she “isn’t ready?”

“I should probably go,” she tells you. You figure she’s blowing you off. And to be honest, you’re not really feeling it yourself either. Her defensiveness has killed any interest in her you had earlier. You walk her to the door. “I had fun,” she says. “We should hang out again soon.” You grunt a response and let her go.

Two weeks later – you haven’t bothered to message her – she texts you, asking what you’re up to and why she hasn’t heard from you. It seems so weird... this girl resisted intimacy when you brought her back, but she still wants to meet up anyway. Why? For what?

Slowly it starts to dawn on you: she likes you... just not enough to make you one of the men she gives it up too fast.

You have, in other words, failed the Chad test.

Monogamy and non-monogamy each face their own unique challenges. Women in monogamous relationships can grow bored; women in non-monogamous ones, jealous.

There are many different kinds of relationships available to the romantically gifted man. There’s classical monogamy, of course. There are friends with benefits relationships and fuckbuddies. Open long-term relationships (polyamory). There’s one-sided monogamy. Even pimp-ho and master-slave relationships, if you really want to explore the dark side (which we won’t do here).

All these, more or less, fall into one of two categories: open (in which the partners may see other people) and exclusive (in which the partners don’t – or at least aren’t supposed to – see other people. Sometimes people are naughty though). Today’s article explores the two primary challenges each style of relationship faces: the biggest challenges to the health of exclusive and non-exclusive romantic relationships.

I recently kicked off a series (the “How to Build a Harem” series) to convey what I’ve learned about non-monogamous relationships and steer guys who are interested in such relationships in the right direction. I realized that before I can delve into non-monogamy, I need to showcase it as a comparison to the conventional model we all know about. I want to highlight the distinctions between challenges in both systems (if you’re in either one, you might see these in action in just a matter of months, but really they are inevitable).

No system is better than another. There are advantages and disadvantages to all flavors of relationship, but the challenges differ vastly by system. I’ll lay these out to help you figure out which system is right for you while also creating the best outcome for yourself long term.

What women say they want and what they actually choose often doesn’t line up. Why is so much of what women really want unconscious?

One of the most challenging aspects of psychological science is how often people say they want one thing, only to choose something else.

I saw this routinely back in my tire salesman days. A customer would come in and say he wanted the cheapest set of tires we had. I’d ask him about what he wanted his driving experience to be like; I’d discover he wanted great road traction and a comfortable ride; and he’d proceed to purchase a premium set of tires with excellent traction and ride comfort instead.

This “what you say you want vs. what you actually want” issue manifests in all sorts of ways in psychological science, too. Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel’s 2008 speed dating study “Do people know what they initially desire in a romantic partner?” found no matter how strong someone insisted a preference was (e.g., “I will only date a girl if she is beautiful” “I won’t date a guy unless he makes a lot of money”), that person was no more likely to pick someone who matched the preference in a live event than average.

In his chapter in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, on how women evaluate mate prospects, Bruce J. Ellis unfurls a host of items on how women select their mates. One of the most important things Ellis talks about, though, is some of the paradoxes in mate selection. For instance, much research finds women are drawn to men who are socially dominant: men who dominate their social environments. These men tend to be cooler, more aloof, and more detached. Yet a lot of other research finds women are drawn to men who are warm, personal, and caring. How do those two connect?

We’ll talk about Ellis’s solutions to the warmth-dominance paradox below. But first we need to pose a question: do people actually know what they want?

Jealousy is a green-eyed monster. But to overcome it, you must adjust both your focus, and steer your partner’s worst behavior.

Sometimes you’ve got a girlfriend who’s a bit of a flirt and keeps guys around her on a hook. Sometimes you’ve got a girlfriend who’s a little oblivious (or at least, presents herself that way)... and keeps men around whose intentions with her are more than platonic, yet she acts like she doesn’t see it. Sometimes she doesn’t do any of that, but you’re nervous anyway. Maybe a girl’s burned you in the past, or you’re just a little short on trust in general. Regardless the reason, you know jealousy’s an issue for you... and it’s time to rein it in a bit.

This article is not about how to prevent cheating. If you need that, read my article on it: “How to Prevent Cheating by Your Girlfriend.” Nor is this article about how to screen for girls less likely to cause problems or cheat; for that, check out the list of resources in this article: “Her Raw Material or Your Relationship Skills: Which Matters More?”

Instead, this article is a reframe of normal male jealousy. For this article, we’ll assume you’re in a fairly healthy, fairly safe relationship where cheating is not that big of a real issue. If infidelity is a big issue, of course, you shouldn’t read an article on how to get rid of jealousy. You should, rather, probably read about how to get rid of a troublesome partner and replace her with someone less heartache-inducing.

We’re going to walk a bit of a fine line here. Because the goal is not to totally and completely erase jealousy altogether. Think of jealousy as a warning sign. It’s your canary in the coalmine. If the canary flips out and starts to chirp and squawk every time somebody comes down the mine elevator, it’s obviously not doing its job so well. But you don’t want to completely take the canary out of the mine either; otherwise you’ll receive no warning when the roof is about to collapse.

So, in this article, we will seek to get jealousy focused on only the right signals – and train it to ignore that which is not as much of a threat (or at least, that which is less of a threat).

All women have a wild side. But they won’t show it except to certain types of men. The pleasure-loving man knows how to bring this side out.

Sometimes despite your best efforts, a girl will tell you “the spark isn’t there” or that she “just isn’t feeling it.” When this happens, you have 3 options on how to proceed.

I recently responded to a comment from a reader named Jason about an issue he ran into, where a girl he had a good thing going with (they’d progressed fairly far into intimacy, though hadn’t had penetrative sex yet) told him, about their kisses, that she “didn’t feel a spark.”

There’s a certain category of rejection girls can hit you with, where they object to the potential between you and them. Usually this takes the form of a girl telling you it just doesn’t ‘feel’ right, in this way or that. Examples:

• “I just don’t feel any chemistry”
• “The spark just isn’t there”
• “I don’t know, I’m just not feeling it”
• “I just don’t feel into it, I don’t know why”
  

The most maddening thing about this is its vagueness. Vague problems are hard problems to right.

So what do you do? Pack your things and go? Give chase and try to convince her she’s all wrong, and there was a spark? Obviously, neither of those is ideal.

There are a few superior options you can use to deal with objections like this. Those better options are the subject of this post.

Once you’re in a relationship, the domestication process begins. Why do women do this – and how do you not become totally broken and domestic?

The difference between a serious long-term relationship and a short-term relationship, from the girl’s point of view, is complex in many ways.

She expects more investment from you, emotionally and logistically. You will have to spend more time with her than you would if she was a simple hookup. You will also have to do more than simply shag her then kick her out. You will meet her friends, her parents, and go with her to events and on dates. How much you should do this is up to the precedent you want to set and how often you WANT to see her. If you LIKE doing those things, then do them.

The emotional side of things is a bit more complicated. How much emotion you should show depends on the girl. The harder she is emotionally, that much harder you should be (i.e., the less emotional you should be with her). She should be the one most in love, the most lovey-dovey, and the most cuddly. This is not up to debate. However, if you show no emotion, you can cause her to become too insecure and cause a lot of drama so that you end up proving your love in a small burst (an emotional down payment into the “I won’t suddenly leave you” fund), or she’ll seek that emotional fulfillment elsewhere, in another man (and this might turn into sexual fulfillment, too).

She also expects some level of commitment. Sexual faithfulness is far less important to women than emotional faithfulness. A hookup or having some low-key side chicks doesn’t bother women too much, so long as they know they are your queen. Obviously don’t rub this in her face if you choose to have side chicks. Be discreet and low-key.

All of this, when viewed from the complete freedom of singledom, cannot be described any other way than domestication.