Relationships

Now that we’ve covered a lot of the fundamentals of relationships - everything from love to relationship jealousy to relationship problems - I want to go explore with you the real backbone, the foundation you’ll need to understand in order for you to know how to build a relationship that will last… and last.

And the key, I have discovered, to building exactly such a relationship are something called the four pillars of relationships.

There are four pillars that hold up any healthy and functional romantic relationship… four pillars that I learned from a Senegalese Sage.

I met this guy on one of my travels, and I called him the “Senegalese Sage” because no matter what we talked about, he always had something profound to add to any conversation. A true fountain of wisdom, experience and insight.

And he was the one who taught me the four pillars that together are the key component of how to build a relationship.

Stepping away for a moment from the more cheery demeanor of most of our relationship series, I want to cover one very important, but potentially painful (for some guys), topic: relationship problems. Namely, identifying that you have them… as well as what to do to fix them.

What we’re covering in this post is permutation #2 that we talked about in “How to Make a Girl Fall in Love with You.” In case you haven’t read that one yet - or it’s slipped your mind since we first covered it - that permutation was this: you have feelings for her, but she does NOT have feelings for you.

The mother of all relationship problems, this one is.

There are really two possible scenarios here, though. Scenario number one is that she’s not in love… that’s the one we were looking at previously, and in that case your best bet is to CUT BAIT ASA (frickin’) P! I won’t mince words on that one… if you can’t stop thinking about her but she doesn’t spend a moment thinking about you, GET OUT. It’s bad, and you won’t turn it around. The movies aren’t real life.

Scenario number two, however, is the situation where you both fell in love with each other… but the love has slipped out of balance and you’ve grown much more infatuated with her than she has with you.

That’s the one of these two related-but-different relationship problems we’re going to address here.

Last week, I talked a good bit about love: if you should say “I love you,” and a post about understanding love; the week before we discussed how to not fall in love.

What we’re going to talk about in this post is how to make a girl fall in love with you.

I probably don’t need to spend much time laying out why this one’s something worth knowing - for obvious reasons, being able to make a girl fall in love with you is a good thing.

However, you’ll find as we discuss below that having her fall in love when you aren’t in love isn’t necessarily an ideal situation, either. Why not, you ask? Well, read on, about the four Perumutations of Love, and how exactly you go about making girls fall in love, to better understand why this is the case when it comes to that most celebrated of emotions.

As we continue on with our relationship series, there are a couple of ground rules you might set for your relationship if you want to ASSURE smooth sailing, avoid relationship jealousy, and generally have a happy and productive romance. The best way to lay these rules is, as usually, not by explicitly stating them… you don’t want to give her a list.

“These are the rules, woman.”

Not so smooth…

Instead, use the power of frame control to convey what you value and expect from a partner. For example, you can bring it up in conversation, or you can inoculate against an undesirable behavior by telling her about another girl who behaved that way… and how that did nothing to further her relationship with you.

As I said, I believe the most important rule in any functioning relationship is that both partners be always honest with each other. At the same time, however, I recommend that you trust each other implicitly until there is a reason not to. It won’t improve your relationship if you’re constantly suspicious of her… and it won’t help your relationship jealousy any. Trust is one of the four pillars of a great relationship (more about that later on in our series).

And knowing how to maintain that level of trust – and avoid relationship jealousy – is what this article is about.

We’ve been talking a lot about love lately, including in the posts on how to not fall in love and answering the question should you say I love you. What I want to go into today is a focus on understanding love and how it works - more specifically, the chemicals in your brain that cause that temporary madness that comes over us when we find someone captivating, and the process we all go through as love matures.

The best book about this topic is probably Why We Love by Helen Fisher. Fisher is considered THE authority on the subject, and you would do yourself a huge favor by reading her book – it will really help you to understand a lot of what’s going on underneath the surface when we fall in love.

In the meantime, here are some of the biochemical substances that get released between two people who have a crush on each other:

We’re continuing the theme of relationships on here this week, kicking it off with a post on bonding, and then onto a topic every guy wonders about sooner or later in his relationship: should you say “I love you”?

Now, in relationships, it’s paramount you keep in mind that you can only move FORWARD, to ever higher levels of commitment and intimacy.

You can’t take a girl out for dinner dates every week, and then suddenly try to make her into a pure friend with benefits who only comes over for sex and nothing else.

The other way round - taking a friend-with-benefits and progressing her to dinners and movies - usually works just fine, though.

By the same token, you also can’t demote a girlfriend into a friend with benefits. And again, the other way round usually doesn’t pose much of a problem.

You must make absolute sure you know your outcome, and plan the relationship dynamics accordingly from the get-go... if you want it all to go smoothly and well, that is.

We've been talking a lot about relationships on here recently - but so far, it's been more on how to have healthier relationships in your own right. But how should you go about selecting the girl you want to have a relationship with in the first place? As you might guess, your ability to find the right girl is enhanced significantly if you know exactly what you want her to be like.

We’ve all heard a million times before that a ship without a rudder ends up on a reef… and that failing to plan is planning to fail… but are you really planning what kind of girl you want to attract into your life?

Put down in writing the exact kind of girl you want to attract for your ideal relationship.

Describe her in detail… her physical traits as well as her personality.

What does her hair look like? What race is she? Does she have big breasts or is she super-slim? Is she educated and ambitious or sweet and homely?

Write it all down… and add it to your daily affirmations.

Whether you believe that the law of attraction is at work here, or whether you believe that goal setting isn’t much more than programing the subconscious mind and the reticular activation system… either way, their effectiveness has been established over and over.

You may have heard the old Yale survey that showed that the 5% of students who had written goals at the date of their graduation ended up having a higher net worth than the 95% of students who didn’t COMBINED within 20 years of graduation. Well... it turns out that was just an urban legend and there never was such a study - BUT, there's still been plenty of research since then that has firmly shown the strong positive effect setting goals can have on actually achieving those goals (see: A meta-analytic study of the effects of goalsetting on task performance: 1966–1984, or Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey, to name just a few).

In any case, I have some good news for you… the girl that is your EXACT type… the one you REALLY like out of all the beautiful women you’ll come across day in and day out… is the one that is most likely to also REALLY like you back.

I haven’t seen any scientific studies about this yet, but I have made this experience time and again… my personal theory is that this happens because you both subconsciously realize you’re an ideal genetic match for each other.