Relationship 101

"It's odd that men feel they must protect women, since for the most part, they must be protected from men."

- Abigail Duniway

One of the true but uncomfortable facts of life is that men and women treat each other the same way they treat other resources -- food, money, shelter, possessions. "You are mine," goes the thinking, much of the time. Or, alternatively, "You should be mine."

You'll see this in women to some degree, both with guys they want as providers and with guys they want as friends (curiously, women don't seem as fixated on "keeping" men in the lover category), but where you'll really see it a lot is with men -- particularly, the kind of man who doesn't get the kind of success with women he needs to feel that women are an abundant resource.

That kind of man is what you might call a "white knight." And he sees it as his mission in life to "save" women he views as "damsels in distress" -- only to make them his, of course.

If you ask me, this "pretend heroism" is a particularly sleazy way to try and get girls.

I'll share a personal anecdote: while I was out of town a few months back, my girlfriend, in a stressful position then, took to confiding in people about, well, everything that could possibly bother her. And, of course, as often happens in relationships, one of the primary things she confided about was me.

As it were, one of the folks she confided to turned out to be a real white knight. He was a photographer on a shoot she did; while she modeled, she also talked. And she vented about me. And this noble, heroic man, he decided that my girlfriend needed to be "saved" from me.

"I have to be honest, while we were shooting photographs today, I felt something for you," he told her in an email message afterward. "I want to take care of you," he continued. "This guy, your boyfriend, he doesn't realize what he's got. Maybe because he's too young -- he doesn't know how to value a woman as amazing as you are. I would treat you so well," he told her. "I want to take care of you after you break up with your boyfriend."

Sigh... I go away for a few weeks, and this is what I get, huh? Here he comes to save the day.

The most frequent email I get from readers is of the very gracious, magnanimous variety, with readers reaching out to say thanks for writing your blog, your book, etc., and sharing perhaps some of the successes that have come from, in part, applying what they've learned from my materials.

But hands down the second most frequent email I get is the one that reads something akin to this:

“Hi Chase, I've been reading your site and I wish I'd come across it sooner. You see, there's this girl I like, and I guess I didn't move fast enough with her, because now she's cold and distant and I don't know what to do. Is there anything you can recommend I do to turn it around?”

I get about 2 or 3 of these emails a week. And as traffic to this site continues rising, I'm confident the number of them coming in will only increase.

And I commiserate. I've been there lots of times; watching a girl you really liked shut down and go cold on you when formerly it seemed like she was yours for the picking is maddening, gut-wrenching, and about as big a sucker punch as you can get. It's awful.

So, I want to lay it down here today, for all those guys out there pulling their hair out like I used to -- a complete guide on how to get a girl back.

Breaking up with a girl is quite often one of the toughest things you'll do. It involves cleaving yourself from someone else you've likely grown quite close to, and have quite possibly been with for a long time and shared a lot of experiences with.

It's often said that the end of a long-term relationship can have the same emotional impact on someone as the death of a loved one. It can be that strong.

So it's no wonder that most people have a really hard time breaking up -- and that relationships frequently limp on long after they should've finished. Instead, people wait, and put the decision off, hoping that somehow, it'll just take care of itself.

It never does, of course. What I'm going to talk about with you today, then, is how you recognize the signs that it's time for you to break up with a girl.

The other day, my girlfriend was upset with me again and creating drama. This is to be expected, as she's a high energy, energetic girl with a lot going on right now; I understand and commiserate. This is how it is with women and drama. But there's one thing she was trying to do that irked me somewhat.

She was trying to change me.

To any man out there who's ever had a girlfriend before, you probably know what I'm talking about. Women universally want men to change. It's only in those rare moments during the honeymoon phase of the relationship -- usually the first 90 days or so -- that this doesn't go on.

You also get a brief reprieve following a major capitulation, but this doesn't last and only breeds more struggles in the long term.

In any event, there's a famous quote about marriage by the eminent physicist (and philanderer, as it turns out) Albert Einstein, which we can pretty easily extrapolate to relationships of all sorts. What Einstein said was this:

"Women marry men hoping they will change. Men marry women hoping they will not. So each is inevitably disappointed."

Hmm. Guess they should've given him a Noble prize in humanities, too.

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.