People don't cheat for no reason. The top five causes of infidelity are things that can happen to anyone – and very often do.A surprisingly large number of my coaching clients are victims of infidelity.
If your girlfriends' friends are wild, or slutty, or quiet, or toxic, what does that tell you about her? And what can you DO about 'bad influence' friends?If you've read this site for any length of time, you know I'm a big proponent of stringent screening for women you accept as girlfriends. Most of the major problems men face with their relationships are avoidable with proper screening.
One topic we haven't touched on much however is a girlfriend's (or prospective girlfriend's) circle.
Namely, what do a woman's friends say about her?
And how do her friends affect her... or influence her?
Because, certainly, each of us is his own man. And she's her own woman.
Yet if she surrounds herself with a certain kind of person, you'd be wise to assume it's going to rub off on her (if it hasn't already), or have some other kind of effect on her and you.
"Be strong" and no woman can whip or cuckold you, right? Well, the truth is, no matter how strong a man is, if he picks the wrong woman, she still may.There's this myth in male corners of the Internet that to not end up whipped, walked on, and cuckolded by women you've just got to be 'strong'.
If you can be strong enough, women will respect your strength and not cuck you.
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And while strength of frame is one of the most important elements in a man's character (and thus, his ability to retain his women), this alone is not nearly enough.
The unpleasant fact is this: every day, in every part of the world, women are cuckolding strong men.
Many a man, overconfident in his strength, walks into relationships where wily women gain the upper hand over him, whip him (also called 'betaizing' him), or cuckold him.
Hubris, the downfall of many a hero in the old Greek tragedies, causes the fall of these men too.
Yet the fate of these men is avoidable for you.
All it takes is a little humility... a little more self-awareness... and a healthy dose of self-control.
If the morals aren't a problem for you, there are some serious upsides to dating a married woman. Yet it isn't all sunshine… there are things to be wary of, too…Today I want to talk about the good and bad things about dating a married woman.
I’ve got a bit of experience with married women. I use the term “dating” lightly because the definition of “dating” is: a form of romantic courtship with the aim of assessing the other’s suitability as a partner, in an intimate relationship, or as a spouse.
I’ll assume that you’re not looking for a long-term relationship or marriage if you’re dating a married woman. If you are, then you’ve got one hell of a journey ahead.
You want to date someone long-term. But is she sexually compatible? Most people don't check… yet this is perhaps the #1 most important compatibility of all.I spoke recently with an experienced seducer who was having some issues with a girlfriend of his. The relationship had begun normally, with the girl having a normal sex drive, but then at one point it changed.
After the change, his woman almost never wanted normal sex with him. This was well-traveled girl who'd experimented sexually with all kinds of men and had a history of stopping having sex with prior boyfriends of hers.
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The seducer would notice flashes of desire come across his woman in inconvenient and novel situations (like say a crowded dinner with friends in the heart of downtown). She'd suddenly want some spontaneous, inconvenient sex.
He'd instead try to get her somewhere private. But a 20-minute drive to privacy later and her sex drive would be gone, never to wake up again that night, no matter what he did.
This was a guy who's been with many women and never had a problem turning most of his prior girlfriends on before. But with this girl he was in a sexual desert.
There's a problem with incompatible sex drives that most guys do not realize until they find themselves in a sex drive incompatibility scenario.
Often even when they're IN that scenario, they refuse to see it.
They tell themselves they can fix it.
That they must be doing something wrong themselves.
The fact is we tend to assume that others' sexual reactions to us are a result of us.
When in actuality a whole lot of the way someone reacts is in large part directed by that person's underlying sex drive.
And sex drives are a thing you really cannot change.
You can't train them. You can't 'wake them up' long-term (yes, there is sexual awakening. But it tends to be fleeting; the sex drive spike it brings last maybe 5-10 years).
You can only enjoy drives if they're compatible... or gnash your teeth endlessly if they're not.
The more women orgasm from sex, the more satisfied with sex and their relationship they are. But the less of a protective effect sex has against other men…It's actually a bit more nuanced than the title. But the title is not wrong either.
When I was a younger guy I was obsessed with making sure girlfriends had orgasms (as powerful as I could get them) every time with me. If I failed to make a woman I was seeing more than once or twice cum I felt like I'd dropped the ball.
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I knew other guys I respected whose philosophies were "I don't really prioritize whether the girl cums or not, honestly. Sometimes she does, sometimes she doesn't." These weren't guys who didn't care about the strength of their relationships; they cared too. But for them, having the woman's orgasm as a "sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not" effect of sex was a lot more acceptable.
Yet as I've aged I've come more inline with my buddies views than my original ones.
I realized a lot of my original focus on "always make her cum, hard!" was out of a fear that if I didn't, a woman would become dissatisfied with the relationship and start to withdraw.
It turns out though that that isn't really the case.
It's not really the case at all.
The other day, a friend shared a YouTube video with me from a guy on a channel called Entrepreneurs with Cars. The guy in the video (his name's Richard Cooper) seemed like an intelligent, thoughtful guy who genuinely wanted to help men, and I couldn't help liking him.
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He made some points about women leaving men, and men's need to be aware this might happen, I thought were perfectly solid. He also has a bunch of nice little quippy phrases, like, "she's not yours, it's just your turn," and, "a woman should be a compliment to your life, not the focus." This is useful stuff for the ordinary clueless man to hear, although the advice is imperfect (I'll discuss why below); regardless, it's going to help wake a lot of guys up.
However, in this video, Cooper attributes the tendency of women to leave men to something you see strewn about the red pill / manosphere community: hypergamy.
That is to say, a very manospherian variety of hypergamy, better described as, "She's always looking for the Bigger, Better Deal."
It is when you stop chasing excellence, Cooper says, that women decide they're through with you.
You can watch the video here:
Women might not leave right away if you stop chasing excellence, he says.
Maybe it might take a while.
Nevertheless, once your pursuit of excellence ends, a countdown timer starts, during which you can either get back on track or get left in the dust.
Is this right?
Well, it's close... but it's no cigar.
Because it is not, in actuality, hypergamy -- nor even the end of chasing excellence -- that causes women to leave.
And there is indeed a cause, and it is indeed something you can control for.
However, the actual cause of why women leave is, in fact, something else.
On the forum, we have a member who has eased into a relationship with a girl he picked up off of day game. He never set expectations with her, and has insensibly come to treat the relationship as a girlfriend-boyfriend one.
There's just one problem: he wants to keep picking up.
Yet he's conflicted on how to proceed: he doesn't want to cheat on this girl and hurt her, but he also never said he was going to be her boyfriend, either.
So what should he do?
The answer, of course, is expectations.
More specifically, he needs to set some better (and much clearer) ones.
We typically advise against men opening up about their weaknesses to women they date. But won’t showing a little insecurity strengthen a relationship? No, and here’s why.
As a follow up to my article on the right and wrong ways to be vulnerable, a reader was curious why it’s important not to be vulnerable about certain things in your own life when dealing with women.
The anonymous reader commented on vulnerability below:
“So the thesis of the article is that it’s best not to be vulnerable unless it’s occasional and share something that you can easily attribute to something external? I wouldn’t be able to talk about what a struggle my adolescent life is because of depression? Or how my Asian parents did a poor job raising me, and it led to me having low self-esteem? We really can’t share our past traumas under any circumstance without losing our women? We have to pretend like everything is okay, and we never had any struggle in our lives past or current even if that’s not the case? What if you just make it seem like it was in the past, but you’re a different man now, and the only reason you’re actually telling her is because it feels good to share it with someone else instead of keeping it bottled in? I feel like men constantly have to do a lot of posturing just for the sake of attracting and keeping women interested in them whereas women don’t really have that concern.”
On the boards the other day, I read two similar comments about how unfair and inferior it is to be a male in today’s society.
The first comment:
“Women date up. Men date down. Men have to fear that their penis doesn’t [measure] up. Women can be relatively skinny and have unlimited abundance with[out] having to work for it. Men have to work to be providers. Women have so many options that they can choose and compare between looks, social status, wealth, dick size, confidence, and alpha male [status]. Women only seem to compete for looks, sometimes status, and only provide pussy. Being feminine does not seem to add any additional value to our lives. Yet we have to compete on various levels of value just to be good enough. Social media and Tinder has made 5/10s with unlimited abundance.”
HOW IS THIS FAIR?
And the second comment:
“Men are expected to give women pleasure, strength, attention, validation, and security to prevent them from cheating, etc. Yet, women basically give nothing in return besides pussy. That is what bothers me the most. Not only do women reap more rewards in the sexual marketplace, they don’t even have to try as much.”
Is this really how it works?
In this article, I want to dive in further and discuss what this means. I’ll clarify and expand on my response to the comments about the article.
A woman writes on Reddit about her relationship:
I’ll try to keep this short... my fiancé and I have been together for 5 years now. I knew very early in the relationship I had no intention of taking his last name. After the first year or so of dating when we talked about the future I mentioned I wouldn't want to take his last name because I like my last name. I’m second generation Italian and my last name reflects that. It’s an important aspect of who I am and my fiancé at the time understood. I said I probably would be fine if any kids we had had his last name and we dropped the conversation since it was so early in the relationship.
Fast forward four years we are obviously much closer to actually having kids then when we had that initial conversation. I mentioned today that I’m not sure I want the kids to just have his last name. I explained that it didn’t seem fair for them to be half genetically mine, and for me to carry them for nine months but for their names only to reflect him. I listed some options other people do, hyphenating the names, using one last name as a middle name, making a new combined last name, etc. To be clear this would only be for the kids I’m not asking him to change his name.
He said this wasn’t fair because he had already “compromised” by saying I could keep my name and that I told him the kids could have his last name so I can’t change my mind. I told him I’ve changed my mind as we have matured and the prospect of kids has become more real (which in my mind seems more fair then holding me to an off hand comment several years ago) but he is still extremely upset and not talking to me.
Now, Reddit, as you might expect, being Reddit, is in full support of this woman.
I'm not really interested in whether she should take your name, or the kids should take her name, or you hyphenate last names, or whatever. The whole situation is frankly a little ridiculous.
Regardless, my interest in this seemingly petty affair is this: what do you if you've already established something in a relationship, and then your woman decides to unilaterally change it?
The guy here was obviously upset. But look how he reacted: he just went off and sulked.
This is not the way you deal with someone attempting to renegotiate previously settled terms.
When a woman wants to pull a switcheroo on you, you don't beg, plead, or sulk.
Instead, if you can't shut it down, or talk it out calmly, you pull a switcheroo right back.
