Relationship 101

A reader writes in:

Hi Chase,

Just a quick message to say I've learnt a lot from your insights and blog over the last year. I decided to improve myself after hitting an embarrassing rock bottom with a girl I had been chasing after for over a year and your website has helped me do just that. These days I know I can go out and acheive high success with very attractive women of my choosing.

The problem is, I have now reached a point where I would like a girlfriend and I currently have two 2nd dates and 3 first dates with potential girlfriends. I am at a point where its almost too easy to get girls highly interested even past the first date. You teach a lot about how to get girls interested but I wondered if you had any advice about how to let girls down easy without coming across like an asshole. I enjoy having a choice of women for the first time in my life (!) but I don't like the idea of just enjoying the 'sport' of it.

I know there's probably no easier thing to do than to just to pick the one I like the most and dump the others but I just thought I'd ask your thoughts anyway,

Ta,
E

No doubt, that can be a tough one: how do you let a girl down without being a bad guy or a total heartbreaker? It can make you feel like a pretty underhanded guy – maybe even like you were just leading her on – when you have to turn her down when you know she was hoping to be with you.

But, in fact, there is a right way to do it.

There's something in a normal relationship called the "honeymoon period." The honeymoon period is the period in the relationship where both parties are blissful and neither one feels the other can do any wrong and everything about one another seems special and amazing and great. Your girl thinks you're the most perfect man on Earth, and you may very well think she's the most perfect gal on Earth a little bit too.

But before you completely drop everything and immerse yourself into the sunshine and daisies and rainbows of the honeymoon period, there's something you need to know: dropping rational thought and running solely on emotions is what kills things long-term.

What are emotions? Emotions are, defined quite broadly, compelling short-term decision-makers. Emotions compel you, more powerfully than anything else in your head aside from the instinctive, entirely subconscious reactions of your reptile brain, to take certain actions. The thing about emotions is, the actions they compel you take are almost always short-term focused.

How often are the emotions you feel right now related to something you think might happen in a year or two? Very rarely. Your emotions are almost always contingent upon what's going on in your life right now. And that's problematic for the outset of a relationship, when you're in the beginning of the relationship-building phase, for this reason: running a relationship on pure emotion without setting relationship expectations is a strategy that dooms you.

I was looking at my pal Mark's blog over on Practical Pick Up, and read through a blog post he has up on something he calls "Chronic Texter Syndrome," referring to American girls who are on their cell phones texting all the time, even throughout the course of a seduction.

I put a post up on phone calls and text messaging on dates in early February discussing exactly this phenomenon, and on Mark's blog I noted in a comment that this is by no means restricted to women in America. It happens in China too, and I've seen it in other countries I've visited over the past year. I dare say at this point that it's a worldwide phenomenon.

The other thing I noted in my comment to Mark's blog post is what I want to focus on in today's post here: specifically, on being girls' secret lover. Because often, when girls are calling or texting in front of you, the people they're contacting are the more "public" people in their lives, with whom they must keep up appearances. Oftentimes, the reason you're getting texted or called in front of in the first place is exactly because you aren't a public part of her life with public influence and accountability... and if you ask me, this is a very good thing.

I had a couple of discussions with friends yesterday about the women they’re dating. One of my friends is going through a rough breakup with his live-in girlfriend whom he’s been financially supporting for the past half year since she hasn’t been able to find a job and has run out of money. He’s been giving her “emergency cash” that she’s then been using to go party, buy drinks, take skiing trips when he’s not in town, and lend out to her girlfriends. And at least once, she’s called him up in late at night out with friends of hers pleading him to come help her because she’s run out of money and no one else has money and she needs cab fare to get home.

My other friend is dating a girl who cooks well for him and is positive, but who also isn’t the greatest on the looks-scale and isn’t the smartest. He wasn’t crazy about her at first, but now she’s starting to grow on him.

To be honest, both of these situations freaked me out a little bit. To my first friend, I said, “Why the hell are you financing this girl’s frivolity?” He said he knew, and he was ending it, but he hadn’t expected all that to happen and he just kind of fell into it. To my second friend, I said, “You realize you’re getting comfortable and settling in with a sub-par woman, right?” He said he knew, and he should probably go look for something else, but he was just so comfortable.

Neither of these guys are bad with women, or inexperienced with women. They both do all right. But both of them didn’t do something that’s a top priority for me early on: screening out bad potential situations before they arise.

I’m writing this article not as a “how to” on being a good lover, but rather to explain the rationale behind why I think you ought to be one. I may get around to giving specific insight on technique at some point [UPDATE: see the end of this article for links]; like seduction in general, there’s a lot of advice on the topic but the actual good information is spread out quite far and there’s a lot of nonsense out there. But that’s for another time. Anyway, on with our post…

There are two reasons that nearly every woman I get together with falls very quickly and very deeply in love with me. One of them is that I give a woman a mental and emotional experience like no other man does – I make her feel good, and special, and accepted, but also empowered, emboldened, and ambitious, in ways that probably no one else ever has. I am a motivator, an encourager, and I truly, genuinely want a woman who comes into my life to leave feeling like the world is within her grasp and anything she wants she can reach, with enough determination and perseverance. Women know very quickly that I am one of those rare few people in life who will truly believe in them, and be on their side 100% of the way.

The other reason women fall for me so hard is that I give them better sex than anyone ever has, or likely ever will.

Just walked out the second girl I slept with in a 12-hour period. Oh my, going to need to get a good night’s sleep tonight… and I’m all out of bed sheets.

So I slept with a new girl yesterday who continues this streak I’ve been on of young and inexperienced girls. She’s the second new girl in less than a week to tell me I’m only her second lover, in fact. This is a girl I’d met a few months earlier at a dinner related to some work I was doing at the time. We’d spoken a few times since, and yesterday we had our first date. She spent the night with me, and this morning told me she loved me.

She asked me if I loved her back; I looked at her and gave her a warm smile. “You don’t love me,” she said.

“You don’t love me either,” I told her. “We just got together yesterday!”

“But I loved you the moment I saw you,” she said. “I walked into the restaurant and I saw you, and you smiled at me, and I said, ‘Oh God, I’m in love.’ Didn’t you feel it? Why did you smile at me that way?”

Women have a thirst for the untameable man. That’s why the rugged, hard-living, macho guy who’s a bit of a loner and whom no one seems to understand is so exciting for women, and why the sensitive, attentive nice guy that society seems to keep wanting to shepherd men into being is so boring.

Just like men don’t want a woman who’s easy too easy to bed, women don’t want a man who’s too easy to wrassle into a relationship. If he’s so easy to get into a relationship, women figure about the quick-to-commit man, he must not have a whole lot of options.

And chances are, they’re probably right. Men with lots of options naturally are difficult to pin down. Getting them to quit the bachelor’s life and give up those freedoms they’re so used to enjoying requires a woman more exceptional than they are accustomed to having, or a tiring of the playboy lifestyle – or perhaps a combination of the two. But sooner or later, most men settle down.

And then things go fine for a while. The lucky girl who convinces that untameable man to be saddled is ecstatic at her prize; she got the guy every other girl couldn’t get. She was the one who was good enough to get him.

Because believe it, just like men tend to take things personally and resent women who won’t sleep with them as judging them unworthy for intimacy, so do women tend to feel slighted by men who won’t have relationships with them, feeling as though they’ve been told they’re not good enough for the man to give up pursuing other women. So when a woman gets a man to settle whom other women failed to, she feels especially accomplished and victorious.

But just like all victories, with time this one fades in importance and exuberance. Eventually, it becomes an accepted fact: “Well, of course we’re together. How else would it be?”

And when the dust settles, and the excitement slips away, we’re left with one chilling scenario:

The man has passed a commitment point.