Relationships

Healthy relationships have boundaries. But what should you forbid a serious girlfriend (or your wife) from? The answer’s not “nothing”; in fact, it’s 10 things.

Let's get a little old fashioned!

That's the thing, right? Serious relationships that aren't whimsical temporary egalitarian restriction-free pairings are old "old fashioned", aren't they?

I joke, but that does seem to be a popular position.

Why that is is a matter for another article. This article will be focused on what to forbid a serious girlfriend or wife from doing if you have one.

This article is in response to commenter Anish, remarking on my article "Should Men Have Open Relationships?", where he says:

Hey Chase, you have never written an article on how to stop girlfriends from hanging out with male friends!! At least you should write one on what kind of boundaries you should set up and how!!

Boundaries. Rules. Forbidden activities and proclivities.

That'll be our topic for today.

Put succinctly: what is your committed girlfriend or wife NOT to do?

Before we list forbidden items, though, first we must define what relationships these strictures apply to, and why we have them in the first place.

If you want to be the best guy a girl has ever dated, you need more than “hope.” Instead, follow these 8 recommendations – yet watch out for “alpha widows.”

Commenting on my article about the Feminine Interest Spectrum, reader Fanfun asks:

[What] could we do if [a girl] already has many experiences connected to a guy to make us love more or / and forget others?

What he's talking about of course is how to be the best guy a girl's ever dated.

Most hardened playboys might chuckle sensibly at a question like this, but we allll care about it.

Sure, some of us are more confident in our ability to enter a new girl's life and immediately be the best guy she's ever dated... but if we found out we weren't, well, it would sure throw us for a loop.

No one wants to be second-best with someone of great personal importance to him. We all want to be the best.

It's not just about ego, either. It's a practical thing.

If there's some guy out there she likes better than you, she is never really going to be all the way 'both feet into the relationship'.

Girls care about this as much as guys do. I can't tell you how some of my girlfriends have drilled me on past girlfriends, trying to find out if I cared about those girls more than I care about the ones doing the drilling.

This is a human thing: if we're with someone, we'd much prefer to be #1 in that person's heart than we would #2, #3, or some other lower rank.

In this article, we'll talk about how to be that.

Yet before we do, first we need to talk about whether it's worth trying to be that with this particular girl.

First time sex that’s too rough or makes a girl feels slutty often backfires. The secret to passionate sex is to escalate to it over a series of encounters with her.

The first time you have sex with girls, you do not want it to be overly rough. Nor do you want to do anything to trigger feelings in a woman that you think she's a slut.

Yet I have noticed over the years that some guys are fairly (or even quite) rough during the first sexual encounter with a girl. They may do other things that imply to her they think she's a slut (such as using dirty talk where they might even tell her she's a slut. On the first night!).

Some possible reasons men do this with women include:

1. They've watched a lot of porn and have conflated 'rough' and 'wild' with 'showing her a good time'

2. They're just really physical, manly guys and think just being rough with a woman the first time is normal

3. They may have had a girlfriend or FWB who liked it rough and gotten into the habit of being really rough during sex, and that's carried over into their hookups with new girls

4. There's also the less-charitable interpretation is that they may not really care about the girl at all and are just using her to pump and dump (who cares if she has a good time or not!)

Regardless the reason for their roughness the first time they have sex with a girl, the fact is you should not be too rough the first time you bed her.

There are a variety of reasons for this. Some of them are quite important.

So, I hope you will read on -- and have better first encounters + avoid a lot of potential heartache for yourself and women.

Is it normal for a girlfriend to keep pics and other reminders of her ex-boyfriend? To some degree, but if she’s always looking at them or bringing him up, it’s a problem.

Commenting on my recent article about the Feminine Interest Spectrum, reader Fanfun asked about what to do when a girlfriend has pictures of her ex-boyfriend (or other past lovers).

He says:

Will you make an article on how to behave when the girl you are with has archived photos with her ex or old photos or otherwise things prior to the relationship that she says she keeps as a memory but that still convey a public message and one of respect towards you? How to deal with you in this regard?

I asked for a little more detail on the issue, and he expanded:

My thought is that if he still has photos with him both on social media and in the gallery he still has some relevance and danger like any other memory like a song connected to him, it would be interesting an article about how to deal with it even if we do not catch it (and that therefore means that he could or could not think about it or review any type of memory such as photos keep t-shirts etc)) the fact of still having of the material, how to act? And how could we do if if he already has many experiences connected to a guy to make us love more or / and forget others?

My first response was that this isn't really worth worrying about.

But I considered it a bit more, and the reality is that it really does depend.

It depends on how attached she is to the ex in question. It depends on how romantic/nostalgic she is. It depends, too, on how likely a threat this man from the past is to your current relationship with her.

Open relationships are an increasingly popular relationship setup. But should you as a man engage in them? It all depends on what you’re after.

I'm pretty familiar with the open relationship.

The open relationship has been linked with the seduction community, which I've been a part of since the tail end of 2005, more or less since its inception in the late 1990s.

Through my connection to it, I've watched countless men begin, engage in, and recommend to other men open relationships. I've seen guys transition their monogamous relationships to open relationships. I've listened to men proclaim that open relationships are the only workable long-term relationship solution and that "monogamy is dead" or "monogamy doesn't work."

Most of the OGs who stick around in the seduction community are open relationship guys -- there's a strong survivorship bias in online seduction community posting for being inclined toward open relationships. Which makes sense, right? If a guy's off in some long-term committed monogamous relationship he's not too likely to keep keeping up with a bunch of rapscallions sharing notes on tagging new tail.

Generally speaking, if you are in seduction, you will not usually get much of an alternate perspective from the open relationships cheerleading you'll see in the space coming from OGs.

It's the same in mainstream media, Reddit, and much of other social media in general. Here's an article in Vogue this month talking about "love's sharing economy" and declaring that open relationships (here dubbed 'consensual non-monogamy') are the next stage of romantic evolution -- a sort of inevitable future we will all be a part of, in a kind of joyously open sexual egalitarian utopia. Monogamy, according to the current sexual zeitgeist, is "boring", "stifling", "patriarchal", and "outdated"; non-monogamy is "progressive", "liberating", "egalitarian", and "modern." Non-monogamy is the way all the cool kids are doing long-term relationships these days! Right? Right?

The thing with open relationships folks don't tell you though is that this relationship configuration is:

• Highly suited to SOME types of people over the long-term

• Fun for OTHER types of people over the short-term only to degrade for them over the long-term

• Simply unappealing altogether for a third chunk of people over either the short- or long-term

How do you know which camp you fall into?

Is the open relationship for you? Is it a joy and a liberation, a temporary dalliance, or a mistake?

Well, it's going to depend -- on you, on what you're after, and the way your life plays out.

Uncareful men end up unready fathers. Pregnancies can be accidents… but not all accidents are unintended. Here’s how to avoid getting baby trapped.

What's a pregnancy trap?

A pregnancy trap is when a woman intentionally becomes pregnant (or lies about being so). One reason she may do this is to tie a man into a committed relationship whether he wants that or not. Another is to get money from a man, typically in the form of child support.

Pregnancy traps are one of those things you will have people try to convince you "don't really happen" but, in actual fact, are actually not at all uncommon. I've known multiple cases of obvious 'trap pregnancies' personally, of the "gain a man's commitment" variety. The ones I know were all middle class, too -- including by an aunt of mine who owned her own home and had a well-paying corporate job. Very nice, kind, sweet aunt, and it was something of a family scandal when we realized she had pregnancy-trapped a guy.

But that's the thing with pregnancy traps: you imagine it'd be some sneaky, conniving devil woman who'd be willing to pregnancy trap a man... but you can't really tell. The sweet, kindly ones are just as capable of doing it too.

Today we'll take a stroll through the enlightening world of pregnancy trapping, and I'll show you things you possibly had no idea took place (or not to this extent).

Forewarned is forearmed.

You’ve taken a girl to bed. It went fine. But now you’re texting and she won’t come back over to your place. What gives, and how do you turn it around?

On the forum, member DoWhatWorks had slept with a new girl who was enthusiastic their first night together. Yet, when it came time for their next meet, she didn't want to go to his place. He says:

A girl I slept with on the 1st date is avoiding a 2nd meet up at my or her place. Instead counter-offering bars & walking dates. She’s the one pushing for the meet, not me. Why do you think that is?

Today we'll have a look at why girls do things like this, what it means, and how to get a girl you've bedded once back into your bed for another round.