Investment

A new relationship can be a time of great excitement, passion, butterflies, and anticipation of what’s to come. Or… it can be a disaster, and over just as quickly as it started.

I’m sure we’ve all been there. It’s a terrible feeling to get caught up in all of that excitement and emotion one day only to have it all taken away from you the next.

So how do you avoid this unfortunate scenario? I’m going to show you the 8 things you need to do to make sure that your new relationship starts off of on good footing and continues as smoothly as it can.

In the piece on Dale Carnegie’s advice, a commenter asked about dealing with power struggles:

“Hey Chase this is a great article. Could you do an article about how to handle power struggles in friendships? I find it really has to do with investment. For example, my friend wants me to meet him somewhere, but I want him to meet me. Its like five minutes away, but its a power struggle thing. I get really annoyed when people do this because I’d like to have friends who don’t try to make things a competition like this. But I also have learned from this site that everyone is like this. Can you help me out?”

In the end, power struggles are always about the same thing, whether they’re in your romantic or sexual relationships, or your platonic ones – and I’ll cover all of these and everything else in the scope of this article.

There’s little more frustrating than having to deal with the relationship equivalent of guerilla warfare, but this is exactly what power struggles are – someone using frame control attempts, passive aggression, moral superiority and other forms of social subterfuge to undermine your position and climb the social ladder to a position above you in the hierarchy.

Not fun at all... and frequently quite draining.

So let’s talk about how power struggles come about, and what you can do once you realize you’re in one.

Sex is a fantastic thing – for both men and women. But unfortunately, many women find themselves dissatisfied with their sex lives for one reason or another. Sometimes they settle for a guy who doesn’t have very much value. Sometimes they can’t find a guy at all.

And sometimes…the sex is just too vanilla. The girl walks away lamenting the fact that the guy was unable to truly take control of the situation and give her an unforgettable experience.

And if there’s one secret I can share with you, it’s this: girls are always looking for that guy who will give them an unforgettable experience.

So how do you put yourself in the position to have wild sex with pretty girls? And what do you do once you get there? That’s what we’ll be covering today.

In terms of relationships, a topic that is often discussed is cheating. Men talk about the consequences of cheating, times that they were involved with a girl who was cheating on her boyfriend or husband, or methods of preventing their girl from cheating to begin with.

But a potential relationship-destroying force that is often overlooked in the rhetoric of men is the emotional affair.

Emotional affairs can be just as detrimental to your happiness and stability in a relationship as sexual ones can be.

So today I’m going to talk about the events and signs that often lead to an emotional affair and what you can do as a man to try to ensure that you don’t end up in this position.

Note from Chase: Ross is one of our senior discussion board members, with a very steady hand and plenty of sage advice to go around for men aspiring to excel with women. Ross’s shared a few guest articles on GC before in early 2013, and I’m really happy to announce he's joining the team as one of our new regular contributors. Please welcome him back to writing for the site! Without further ado, I give you Ross.

A situation that has been popping up more frequently on the discussion boards entails a scenario where guys think girls are chasing after them. These guys get frustrated, as they believe that the girl is chasing after them, yet they cannot figure out why things still aren’t working out. They’ll often point to some behavior that’s supposed to be indicative of chasing, yet this doesn’t necessarily provide insight into all of the dynamics at play between the guy and girl here.

The ever-so-popular stand-up gig that pokes fun at women for being illogical in arguments comes to mind when I think of this issue. The husband will argue with his wife using facts, only to be completely shut down by her emotionally charged response. On paper, it will look like he’s won. However, anyone viewing the event could tell you that he obviously lost.

As a result, it’s difficult for someone critiquing a guy’s interactions to tell whether he’s really winning with girls... or only paper-winning. All a forum member can do is read what people have written about their interactions with women, and form opinions and give feedback based off of that. Thus, many guys will receive positive reinforcement that they are doing a good job, even though in real life they just aren’t getting results or reaching their goals.

Today, I hope to relieve some of the issues surrounding this misinterpretation of data. It’s time for a mental model update, because the dynamic of chasing goes much deeper than the surface.

We’ve talked about the friend zone on Girls Chase before: why it’s bad, what it looks like, and how to get out of it.

But you’ve asked for more.

You’ve asked for clear signs you can look for that are undeniable proof you’ve careened off the Road to Sexytimes and into the Bog of Asexuality. Irrefutable sign posts that the good times of dreaming about lovingly gazing into one another’s eyes are long behind you, and you now exist solely to stroke her ego as proof that she is so charming, so wonderful, and so hypnotically mesmerizing that great guys like you will just hang around in awe of her... all while she samples her fill of sexy bad boys.

Well, never fear. While the greatest danger of the friend zone is your own denial, all the rest we will solve with this enlightening post.

So, provided you can handle the healthy dose of cognitive dissonance you’ll receive from discovering that the girl you were so certain you were just one more funny text message away from talking onto your johnston really doesn’t think of you “that way" and probably never will, let’s dive in...

... and arm you with the 14 Terrible Signs You’re Deep in the Friend Zone.

I’ve been seeing more questions lately in both the article comments sections and on the boards from men who are ending up in awkward situations where some girl they’ve flirted with and expressed interest has turned them down... but they keep running into her socially.

How do you act around a girl like this? What do you do? What if she’s cold to you and ignores you, or treats you like you’re beneath her?

I’m going to assume for the purposes of this article that you’re at least somewhat socially savvy, and that most people like you and find you reasonably attractive and cool. If that’s not the case, and you are universally socially shunned or socially ostracized (more or less), this post won’t help with that, and you’ll need to focus on leveling up your social calibration, and getting other “coolness factors” handled, like edginess, sprezzatura, and a devil may care attitude, first.

But if you’re normally a pretty well-liked guy, yet suddenly find yourself dealing with some girl things have gotten awkward around or who is downright treating you as subhuman, then this article is for you; it’s all about saving face, and turning her reaction to you right around.