Relationship 101

A little over a year and a half ago, I wrote an article on here called "The Ultimate Guide on How to Get a Girl Back." It fairly quickly became one of the more popular articles on the site, as getting girls back whose interest you've lost tends to be a common thing a great many men are all trying to figure out.

That piece also led to me getting a relatively constant stream of emails and comments and requests to write the post I'd promised, provided there was enough interest, at the end of it - a post on how to get your girlfriend back.

Here's the latest request, from longerjt on the article about using scarcity:

“Chase -

So yesterday I layed it out and challenged a girlfriend to get in or out and she slammed me. I said I needed to know where she stood and that I was ready to move on and bam! She said take a hike. Guess I misplayed it.

Hence, can you do the post you promised some time ago, "how to get your girlfriend back" in "how to get a girl back"? I could use it now.

Thanks for the great stuff!

JT”

If you've been reading this site a while, you may have thought I was asleep at the wheel, or that I didn't care to address this question. A lot of people have asked about it.

But in fact, over the past 19 months or so, I've probably written a half dozen versions of this article. It's not that it's technically difficult to write... it's that there are certain moral implications in taking a girlfriend back, under certain conditions, that I feel it's important for men to understand, and it's also that I find most men trying to get their ex-girlfriends back are more concerned with what they want than with what their former girlfriends want (and need).

I think I'm in a place now where I can communicate this right.

So today, let's discuss how to get a girlfriend back - and who you need to be and what you need to be willing to do if you're going to pull this off.

It isn't always hard. Plenty of people get back together every day. But I'll be writing this for the hard cases - the ones where she isn't already knocking down your door for another try. So I'll be giving you some stuff that's tried and tested, that I've used myself multiple times, and that I've watched friends and students and mentees use effectively again and again.

But believe you me, if I find out you've used this irresponsibly and hurt some girl by being selfish, I will come to where you live and demolish you.

That out of the way, let's get on with it.

This is part of a two-part series on Valentine's Day I'm releasing this year since we haven't really gone into the subject in any great depth before. Today's is "What to Do with Your Girlfriend on Valentine's Day," for all the attached beaus out there, and, early Thursday morning, I'll release, "How to Pick Up a Girl on Valentine's Day," for the gents who are single and looking.

I want to start this series with what Valentine's Day is in the West these days, and what it means to women, and why you should care about that.

After we cover that aspect of it, we'll have a look at how to treat the holiday if you're already in a relationship (or relationships!), and how to tackle it if you aren't.

Here we go.

Something I've noticed that a number of individuals untrained in relationship management theory tend to engage in is arbitrary (that is, seemingly random) punishment and reward inside of relationships. These sort of variable reward and punishment structures inside relationships generally lead to a host of negative outcomes for the person who's subject to arbitrary treatment, including:

• Emotional dependency
• Addiction and attachment
• Wild mood swings
  
• Submission
• Resentment
• Rebellion

Basically, the opposite of what you'd expect to see in a healthy, rewarding, productive relationship.

It's occurred to me that most of the people who use controlling, coercive, and more or less arbitrary relationship management tactics probably are not very familiar with operant conditioning - the system of punishment and reward established by B.F. Skinner for the purposes of behavior modification.

So today, I want to equip you with a very effective means of communicating your likes and dislikes to a romantic partner without ruffling feathers, being seen as an oppressor, or, conversely, a pushover.

I'm going to show you how to use operant conditioning in your relationships.

One of the series I introduced on here a while back - only to ever do two real articles in it - was on girl types... some of the different kinds of girls, that is. We've had some requests to do more articles like these, and I wanted to put together one here that's a primer of the four basic varieties of women you'll run into - and which type is best for you.

What's the use of something like this? Won't you magically happen into a relationship with the woman of your dreams, if you're out there long enough meeting large enough quantities of women?

Personally, I'm more a believer in having a set of logical guidelines, and then running your emotions on top of that, rather than just letting emotions run wild and hoping for the best. Having rules for selecting the right girlfriends (see: "Find the Right Girl;" "Choosing the Right Qualities in a Woman") tends to lead you to superior women as mates. Emotion is what first draws you to them, but logic helps you screen them (and screen out the other women you're emotionally drawn to who don't match your criteria).

Put more simply, especially when it comes to weird, ephemeral topics like dating and mate selection that are taboo to discuss anywhere in polite society, knowing stuff gives you advantages.

And the "stuff" I want to get you knowing today consists of the four basic varieties of women.

I've fielded a number of comments and questions from guys over the years on how to start a relationship off right with a new girl they've just started seeing. After all, you've used all the material on this site on how to turn yourself into a smooth, edgy, sexy man; and you've learned everything you need to know about how to get girls, you knew what to look for in a girlfriend, and you've found her, met her, and everything went perfectly. You took her to bed as your lover, and now she's yours.

Now what?

Most people treat dating and relationships as some big, mythical, emotionally-driven process these days, devoid of much logical forethought or planning. It's reached a point in Western thought where "giving in to your emotions" has become the ultimate ideal to be striven for and attained; you should seek to "just feel" and "go with your heart."

But while emotion is a very important piece of your actions and decision making as a human, it's only half the story, and, worse for relationships... it's the short term half of the story.

Emotions will have you shortchange your tomorrow for a better today.

What I'm going to tell you to do in THIS article, however, is to take command of yourself, and build a relationship designed to be strong, successful, and rewarding long after the fires of early emotion quit burning so brightly, or even quit burning at all.

This is, you might say, the anti-guide to falling in love: it's the guide not to getting there, but to staying there, and like all good stories it starts at the beginning.

All right, I know I said no more relationship stuff for a while so we could recover from that big relationship series binge, but I'm sitting here after missing my flight (I should be somewhere over the Pacific right now), going through some of the past month or so's posts, and I see I also said I'd try to get some posts up regarding earlier comments, and... well...

Back in early August, Anonymous commented on the post on how to prevent cheating, saying:

“Could you write about what you mentioned, the whole making a girl feel TOO secure?”

Okay - here's one more on relationships for now. Just think of it as an expansion pack to the relationship series!

Having a girl start feeling too secure with you is a BIG problem in any kind of relationship. Big.

It's the reason why girls start treating guys disrespectfully 9 times out of 10.

And, it's the reason why a girl is bored in her relationship 10 times out of 10.

That's right - not just most of the time on that last. But, EVERY time!

But wait, you say - Walt Disney taught me to make women feel safe and secure! Isn't that what they want?

Actually... no. Everyone takes away the message of, "Protect her and make her feel safe!" from the movies most of the time... and they get it all wrong.

Because there's something else happening in those movies too - another reason why girls swoon for Prince Charming, and it isn't his trust fund.

But everybody misses that part... and everybody ends up with his own bored girl as a result.

Well, here's how to get yourself back in line with what women actually want.

Well, that time has come - time to wrap up our relationship series.

This has been a long collection of articles about the topic of relationships we’ve put out over the last several weeks… and if you asked me to, I could easily write another one just as long. Relationships are simply an incredibly complex topic, with a million little counterintuitive nuances.

Every time you think you’ve got them down… you don’t.

On the one hand, many of the rules we learn for dating go out the window… the game changes completely once you get into a monogamous, committed relationship with a girl.

On the other hand, you still can’t suddenly be a pushover, so a lot of the inner game advice still applies… and where and how to apply everything and in the right context is certainly an art and a science unto itself.

A lot of readers had written in with questions about relationships… and in my experience, this is what a large portion of our students ultimately want to get out of this game… sure, it’s nice to have a lot of choice in beautiful women, and sure, it’s nice to at least have the ability to live a playboy lifestyle for a while.

But when it comes down to it, most guys don’t really want to live life as far out as Chase or myself. The two of us have taken dating to the extreme, which is why we’re now in a position to teach just about anybody about almost any situation – after a decade of obsessing over this skill the way an Agassi would obsess over the game of tennis, there aren’t many situations we haven’t experienced yet. You might not want to be this obsessive… most people don’t.