Relationships

Toxic behaviors (even the little ones) can make relationships aggravating. Yet there are ways to tackle them… and disincentivize a relationship partner from using them.

Unless you've chosen a highly enlightened mate, you'll probably deal with some bad behavior sometimes in relationships. If you've chosen someone who's a little more 'special', you may have more of these to deal with than others do... but almost everyone has to deal with toxic behavior at least occasionally.

Most strategies you'll see for dealing with toxic behaviors are based around withdrawing, closing yourself off, giving the other person space, and so on. This can be an effective approach. It's especially useful for people you decide you just want to wash your hands of.

However, "withdrawing into your shell" isn't so useful a strategy for an ongoing relationship... things like the 'Gray Rock' strategy are really for people you want to out of your life, not those you're entangled with by choice.

So let me give you a couple of more assertive strategies you can use to nix toxic behavior in your relationships.

Rewarding good behavior during courtships and relationships is pivotal to your romantic success. But just how do you go about doing that?

On my article about teasing a girl to her friends, a reader named Warcode asks:

Hi chase could you do an article on ways to generally reward her? Whether verbally or physically etc and on the basis of how does this mechanism change from the beginning of knowledge to a type of relationship? The basic mechanism and then decline it to every situation. Then, for example, I do not understand well in a relationship if giving compliments of a various nature and how to do them maybe a you're beautiful is so anonymous and recurring? And if compliments should be made / convey interest how often and of what types ?. I had also read on the forum that in sex do not pay her physical compliments because she gives her too much

Sure, I'd be glad to oblige.

Today, let's talk about rewarding women: when to do it, how to do it, and the nature of rewarding women both during the initial courtship and in ongoing relationships.

Why do women scream during sex? One theory claims it’s to draw other males near for sperm competition. But does this actually happen in real life?

I had a conversation the other day with a friend about women screaming during orgasm.

He told me about a hypothesis he'd encountered in the (idealistically egalitarian-utopian, not to mention panned by scholars) book Sex at Dawn that women yell during orgasm to attract competing mates for sperm competition.

Right on the face of it, this hypothesis has always seemed obviously incorrect to me.

First off, not to brag or anything (although I guess it's going to sound that way... can't be helped though, eh?), I've made a lot of girls scream quite loud from sex, yet I've never had a guy knock at my door and ask if he could have her next.

Second off, I've heard plenty of women I wasn't having sex with screaming, yet never has the urge come over me to knock on the couple's door and tell the man to beat it because it was my round with her now.

Third, I have never heard a single story in all my life and all the very many sex stories I have heard from the tons of men I've known in the seduction space of even a single man being chased off by another man following the first man's woman engaging in orgasm vocalizations.

Not even among hunter-gatherers, who are the cheerily idealized subject of the Sex at Dawn book, have I come across any evidence of moaning women attracting competitor males who chase off the guy making the woman moan and take her for themselves.

The "female sex vocalizations attract competitor males for sperm competition" hypothesis seems to describe a behavior that is completely absent from humans from anything I have ever actually seen or heard both firsthand and from others from anywhere else in the world.

Yet, when I dug into the research on women's sex vocalizations a bit more, I discovered some interesting tidbits that do tie in, a bit, to the Sex at Dawn theory -- although, I think, not quite in the way the authors framed it (at least, not based on the synopses I've read, not having read the book).

If you have herpes, how do you tell the women you’re dating… and how does it affect your romantic relationships?

Hey guys and welcome.

Last week, I wrote a post about living with herpes and how you can have a good sex life while avoiding transmitting it to others.

To recap the last post:

1. Get properly diagnosed.

2. Take your meds and get into full remission.

3. Once you obtain full remission, wait two to three days to ensure the lesions are gone, so your odds for transmission are close to zero.

I would still recommend using condoms with strangers.

In this post, I’ll go over how to deal with the social part of herpes. I’ll discuss how and when you should tell women about it and how to have a relationship (F-buddy or long-term, monogamous) as an HSV-positive person.

It feels odd to write this post because I’ve never considered herpes a big issue. For me, it was just “get cured,” and “get in remission,” and stay at home when I had an outbreak. I also never thought many guys had issues with this.

People kept asking me on forums, kept messaging me about it, and some even found my work email to ask me privately. They probably read somewhere that I had herpes.

I felt this was a non-subject and, I would rather have spent time writing about something else. But the questions keep coming in, so I decided to dedicate a two-part article on this subject.

I truly hope these two articles answer all your questions about herpes and living with it as a seducer.

When you find yourself in a conflict, you can back down… or you can escalate. How far should you take it? How do you know what the right thing to do is? A few simple rules can guide you.

I recently binge-read a series of colorful Quora answers from ex-convict Matthew Holmes. Holmes was someone who grew up, more or less, inside the US penitentiary system, and shares advice on how to survive the hostile conditions there. He contrasts the prison world with the outside world; inside the prison system, a prisoner's life is a Hobbesian war of all-against-all, where there is no real law and no one you can trust to have your back but you.

One of the many repeating sentiments in Holmes's prison advice is you must be prepared to defend your reputation at any time, and go to almost any length to do so. Holmes stopped short of killing anyone in prison (as doing so would've added an automatic life sentence to his 10-year term), but came close to it on several occasions, where he severely beat inmates who tried to fight or rob from him.

In terms of general principles, I'd call his approach to conflict "always escalate a confrontation until you win."

For some time, I've followed 'always escalate' as a general (but not absolute) rule. I generally follow it with:

• Girlfriend drama
• Some business disputes
• Some physical confrontations
• Moral high ground debates
• Any kind of interpersonal argument

However, the real world isn't a penitentiary. It is not (for the most part) a Hobbesian situation of all-against-all.

Thus, much of the time, you will not want to continue escalating to the extremes in real life situations. In many cases it's counterproductive; the gains you get from continuing to escalate outweigh the costs.

Today I want to talk about the 'always escalate' philosophy -- which is one I've long found helpful -- and where the limits are to it where you decide to hop off that train and not always escalate.

People ‘cuff’ mates into short-term relationships during cuffing season. Why do they do it – and who does it more, men or women? Our survey tells the tale…

As we enter October, 'cuffing season' begins.

Cuffing season is the time of year people enter into seasonal (winter) romances. The season occurs from October through March. Cuffing season romances are short; only long enough to last the holidays. During cuffing season, people seek partners more relationship-worthy than those they usually date. The majority of these relationships however end before summer.

We gathered these and other insights from a survey we ran to American adults. We also discovered a few other surprising facts about the phenomenon of cuffing a partner down when the temperatures dip low.

As an experienced dater, how do you juggle strict standards for girlfriends vs. the qualifying girls’ rarity? What must you compromise on to get the women you want?

Writing on my article "Must the Girl You’re with Be a Perfect Fit?", a reader asks:

So Chase how often do you compromise on your stated standards for women you would want as girlfriends? Because when you have described it over the years it's so strict and stringent to me it seems impossible to find a woman like that consistently. If your expectations are for her to be beautiful,curvy and busty,but slim without needing to workout at the gym,have a master's,be raised by two parents,only have a few sexual partners and never a casual one,never goes out at night,not a vocal feminist and have compatability plus mutual attraction with you it sounds like finding a needle in a haystack. I know your standards have increased over the years,but it sounds impractical to only date women who meet ALL of these criteria so surely there are instances where a woman doesn't have all of these?

I think that's a reasonable question.

I don't know how helpful it will be to the average reader -- maybe more of a curiosity? -- but perhaps my thinking/process on girlfriend selection may be of use to some.