Relationships

Back when I was newly focusing on meeting and dating girls as a skill I could develop, I made it a point to let women I was seeing know that I was going out and living a life of fun and parties and adventure travel and general debauchery.

In competitive endeavors, it’s important to maintain a stout defense. Whether discussing military operations, or man-to-man combat, or sports matches, or guarding a company’s secrets against industrial espionage, it is of vital importance to have a strong, effective defense protecting oneself from one’s opponents.

But seduction is not a military operation. Nor are relationships competitive sports matches. And a lot of guys don’t seem to get this.

Every man’s least favorite question to get: “Where do you see this going?” I seem to get this question a lot, personally, and after stumbling through it like a blind man a few times, I think I can recommend you a pretty reasonable approach to addressing it.

First, recognize that you’re likely getting this question because:

1. You’re the kind of guy your girl wants to hold onto and keep around, and

Once you’ve begun seeing a girl on a fairly regular basis, or you think you will likely start seeing her soon, you should be doing a lot of what I call passive screening in addition to any other screening you’re doing.

What’s passive screening? It is, quite simply, watching and learning. Keeping an eye on your woman’s actions, learning about her from. This is hands down the most effective way to really learn about your girl – how devoted is she, how much will she work for the relationship, how high or low risk is she.

One of the things that’s hugely important to remember to do after you sleep with a girl for the first time is to set the post-coital tone. That is, to let your girl know, to some degree, what she can expect from you, and what you expect from her.

Doesn’t happen too often, but I recently got a little annoyed at a situation with a girl I’m seeing. She wasn’t behaving as I felt she should have; she was being secretive and defensive around me, and that’s a big no-no for me generally. And that raised my hackles a bit.

Then I stopped for a minute, looked around, and asked myself: why on Earth am I taking this so seriously?

It's an age old question – one that most men spend their lives trying, unsuccessfully, to figure out. What do women want? Books and films have been made about it; men have spent fortunes in pursuit of it; reputations have been staked upon and lost in the timeless search for the answer. Even the venerable (now largely-discredited) Sigmund Freud, who claimed to have spent thirty years peering into the “feminine soul”, ultimately found himself asking, close to his death, “What does a woman want?”