Relationships

In the previous article, we answered the question "What do girls look for?" as it relates to picking up girls – how you can become a man of higher value, how you can be perceived as having higher value and how you can leverage supply and demand in several ways to get an almost unfair advantage over other guys.

This week we’ll have a look at the value equation again, but from a different angle… this time, we’ll look at value under the lense of dating and relationships.

Read the other article first (linked to above) if you haven’t yet, just to make yourself familiar with all the fundamentals of what women value in a man, and then come back here and we’ll get started.

Read it already?

I take it you’re back… all right.

Let’s dive right in.

A friend of mine has been going through some growing pains recently as he's grappled and come to grips with the fact that he makes promises all the time... and often doesn't deliver on them. I've longed been used to having people make a promise that doesn't get delivered on around me, and I've long since learned to not put much faith in people who do so.

When I was first studying relationships in my teenage years, I noticed one theme occurring over and over, wherever women were hurt in a failed relationship: they were accusing men of breaking their promises. It was so incredibly common that I started to see this as a major pattern that a number of relationships hewed to:

1. Man makes woman a promise, either to allay her concerns or in the height of passion
2. Woman plans her life on the basis of that promise
3. Man later breaks the promise
4. Woman's life is turned upside down

Now... women aren't necessarily totally innocent victims here either, and I'll explain why below. But as a man, you need to understand the impact and effect you have on a woman when you make a promise to her - and how a promise binds both you and her.

Here's a post that's sure to raise some ire.

Ricardus and I were discussing men's tendency to want to sleep with sexually open women, but to date or settle down with or marry sexually conservative women - and how difficult it is actually figuring out how many partners women have actually had because of this. You see, women are acutely aware of this male bias against sexually experienced women when it comes to getting into serious relationships - and they do everything in their power to avoid getting pinned as such a woman.

"Everything in their power" here including, sometimes (okay, oftentimes), stretching the truth, leaving things out about their forgotten pasts, and, well, lying.

Of course, women don't think of it as lying. It's more like, "Well, I slept with that guy on vacation, so he doesn't count," or, "That guy was totally gross, I should never have hooked up with him... as far as I'm concerned, that didn't really happened."

It's a form of selective memory used by a woman to preserve her idea about herself as fitting perfectly into society's recommended mold: that of the "good girl" who doesn't give it up too often to men. Women who do part with their bodies too easily, society tells women, aren't valued as highly, so it's a big no-no.

But, well, women are people, and people like and want sex, and sometimes it... just happens. Of course, a woman doesn't want other people to know it just happened... at least, not as much as it actually has just happened... because that impacts her perceived social and reproductive value.

So, she stretches the truth, leaves things out, and, where necessary, tells a lie or two.

Any women reading this site may not especially like this article, but if you're a man who's seriously considering a relationship with a girl, and you want to know what you're actually getting instead of what you're being told you're getting... how do you tell who's whom?

As I've involved myself more and more in the world of start up businesses, I'm finding myself increasingly involved in close relationships with dynamic, intelligent people who are accustomed to calling the shots... just like me. Inevitably, this leads to blow ups, power struggles, and all kinds of messy issues, very similar to the fighting in a relationship you see of the romantic variety.

I've been comparing a lot of what I've experienced here to the fighting I've gone through in my own romantic relationships and that I've witnessed in the relationships of friends, students, and others, and I've started teasing out some really interesting correlations.

What I'm realizing is that fighting in a relationship - everything from when women test men to a lot of the underlying rationale behind women and drama - arises out of a handful of required ingredients.

... no, I'm not going to suggest that you dodge the dangers of sex and the dangers of dating by dodging sex and dating. That's a little too extreme - I'll leave the abstinence education to the religious institutions.

But if you're active sexually and you're active in the dating world these days, you're probably meeting, dating, and getting together with a fair number of different women. And like anything where you're inviting people into a level of intimacy and closeness to you, you need to be very careful of the dangers that can come with that, too.

It isn't all just good times and happy memories. If you're not paying attention, you can literally open yourself up to all kinds of problems from sex and dating... and not just the ones you hear about in high school, either.

Therefore, today, we're taking a momentary break from giving you tips and techniques on how to get the girls you really like, and instead bringing you this public service announcement - to make sure that when you get those girls, you'll be well-prepared to enjoy your time with them to the fullest - and not have to worry about getting taken to the cleaners or something else you don't want to have happen.

Let's dive in.

Apologies if you haven't seen me on here much recently. I'm working on a few new things that should help you take your game to the next level; the first one due out is a book on relationships that I'm really thrilled with the development on. I'm aiming for it to be as complete a book on relationships as How to Make Girls Chase is for pick up, and I have some truly outside-the-box thinking in it that I've developed through my own personal relationships and through advising a number of friends and clients on their own, and that I haven't seen or heard anywhere else.

Anyway, I wanted to take a break from all the big project stuff and stop by here with a few of the things I've been working on lately. Today's blog post is a monster, at over 5,000 words, on something called "ego depletion." As you get better with some of the more advanced techniques from this blog and from the programs available here, you're going to start experiencing more and more of this, as one of the downsides to efficient and effective pick up.

If you're familiar with a sales tactic called "hard selling," you know that, even when people know what this is, it still works a lot of the time. You also know from this site that the hard sell can be a useful seduction technique - but that it's not without its drawbacks. And the chief among those drawbacks is ego depletion, and the after-the-fact effect it can lead to: buyer's remorse.

Buyer's remorse is, of course, when you make some headway with a girl - she gives you her phone number, kisses you, fools around with you, or sleeps with you - and then she disappears, never to be seen again, or (sometimes) suddenly acts coldly toward you in social situations. Coldness can also be caused by auto-rejection, but there's one important difference:

• Buyer's remorse is what you get when a girl feels like you made her go too far, whereas
• Auto-rejection is what you get when a girl feels like you didn't take her far enough.

Mildly confused? Great. Confusion's the stage that immediately precedes learning something that will prove, hopefully, rather useful.

So let's talk willpower, decisions, buyer's remorse, auto-rejection, and ego depletion - and let's discuss how you can avoid shooting yourself in the foot when it comes to forming a relationship with a girl you really like.

Have you ever noticed that in almost every relationship… sooner or later, but often right from the start or at least very early… one of the two partners is more emotionally involved than the other? And that it's invariably the other of the two who retains the most relationship control?

That one often seems to be more invested, more in love, more interested… that there always seems to be a certain lack of balance?

This phenomenon is what psychologists call a “Passion Trap”, and it has been explained in great detail in Dean C. Delis’s excellent book about the topic, The Passion Trap: Where is Your Relationship Going?, which I think everybody should read in high school… it is THAT important to understanding relationships.

But in the meantime, let me give you a primer… and some insights we “professional seducers” have come to, that psychologists haven’t even written about yet.