What It's Like with a Girl Who's Really In Love

Nuncle-

That absolutely happens, sure - that's the kind of magical instant spark I mentioned in "Love at First Sight" - although it is, of course, infinitely helped along by your own proficiency at conversation and seduction! Personally, I won't take a girl as a girlfriend unless we have sparks flying through the air and crazy chemistry on first meeting… I see the first few minutes as a great indication of what the rest of the relationship will be like.

Romantic feelings will always make you overlook flaws, or see them as adorable, though they may not always remain as such as passionate love abates.

As to the quote about a player taking the girl in a romance… that strikes me as a very cynical point of view, and probably one fed by meeting too many women in nightclubs (who WILL do that kind of thing quite regularly). There are plenty of women out there who you can take on romantic outings and will still be crazy about you and not wanting to go climb on the next playboy who comes along, IF you also do it for them in the attractive / sexy / seductive department yourself (if your girl thinks you're a steaming hunk of man, you can do romantic stuff with her if you want to and you'll still be fine). The general rule of thumb is, always make sure she's at least a little bit more in love with you than you are with her, and she'll be thrilled with the relationship and - unless she's a nympho / sex crazy / totally sexually liberated - you won't have to worry a huge amount about her leaping onto other men. Of course, be mindful of where you get your girlfriends from - if you're dating girls you meet in nightclubs, all bets are off!

Chase

Jamal-

I just got another post up on love to answer some of these questions - see here: "How to Make Her Love You: Passionate Love, and Old Love."

Basically though, passionate love fades away, though it can last (in declining form) for a very long time. There's another kind of love that's decidedly more enduring, however... something I call "old love": the kind of love you have for people you care about (friends, family, and a partner or spouse you have a great deal of affection and emotional association for/with).

As for love at first sight... I've no idea. I talked about some of my experiences with it here: "Love at First Sight", but my overall conclusion was that I don't know how it works... just that it does. There must be some kind of mechanism (perhaps multiple mechanisms) responsible for the phenomenon, but there are problems with each of the possibilities to explain this, so far as I'm concerned.

And as for what to say to a girl who loves you, see "What to Say to "I Love You"."

Chase

Black M-

Lying's a behavior that doesn't go away. I've had both girlfriends and male buddies of mine who will tell lies - everything from small, harmless ones, to big, important ones that you end up making decisions on only to find out weren't true. The only thing that pointing lies out to people who lie does, mostly, is train them to be better liars by making them realize they got caught and, thus, need to do a better job. Especially when someone lies about small, irrelevant things, that's a sign of compulsive lying, which is an addiction, or a brain pattern the person is stuck in - there's really nothing you can do unless she decides it's a problem she wants to solve... even then, it's mostly on her to get rid of it.

All you can do with someone who lies is decide if you like this person enough to keep around in spite of her dishonesty, or if that's a deal breaker. Although, I'll tell you, after having spent my fair share of time around people who lie about all kinds of things - because they're also often smart, charismatic people - the final decision I came to was that I'd rather find smart, charismatic people who DON'T lie than be stuck with those who can't stop doing it (and have no INTEREST in stopping doing it).

Chase

Tom-

From the sound of it, you're spending time with this girl and taking her on dates, but no sex, correct? This article was primarily focused on love in a sexual relationship - in a non-sexual relationship, the rules are different, because the girl is not yet "yours": that's what the "lean back and let her lean in" part of it was talking about (my view has always been that it isn't a relationship before sex has occurred - before that point, it's just a friendship).

With a girl you're seeing who is declining sex, my recommendation is always just to quit putting in any effort past the third date, and refuse anything other than her coming over to my place for dinner and drinks - some girls go for this (we then sleep together), while others do not. It sounds like you may be pretty far along with this girl already, and fairly attached to her, so you can just keep putting time in and trying to wear her down / hoping to overcome her resistance with enough time and energy... or you can withdraw your energy and focus yourself on other women, and tell this girl to come over for dinner and drinks while refusing all counteroffers. Neither one is guaranteed, unfortunately; you've simply got to take your pick, although persistence is probably somewhat higher probability, if longer to pull off and the greater time commitment.

Chase

J.B.-

The edgy look is that "been around the world and nothing surprises me anymore, and I know more than you do" look you're talking about - see this article: "How to Be Edgy (and Turn Women On)."

Chase

Anon-

When you're very aware of women's moods, you learn to be able to read her excitement levels - even very shy women will have a large degree of nervous excitement when they're around someone they really like.

If you're not quite at the place where you can tell for sure, though, there's one surefire way: just keep moving things forward. Ask her out, get her on dates, move her, invite her home, kiss her, take her clothes off, make love to her. If she isn't interested, she won't go all the way - sometimes the only way you'll ever know for sure is by trying (and some women will REALLY surprise you... I've certainly slept with my fair share of women that I thought, "There is no WAY this girl is interested in me, but... let's see what happens if I push things forward anyway").

Chase

Anon-

Yes, absolutely; as you become more experienced in a thing, your emotions calm down around it. If you remember the first girl you fell in love with as a teenager, for instance, you'll probably never feel an attachment that intense again because never again will it be so new, so unfamiliar, and so out-of-left field. It's the same with anything - your first plane ride, your first kiss, your first baseball game, your first piano recital, your first day in college, your first day in a new city, your first trip overseas... the emotions are most intense for things that are new, and become less and less so as you become more familiar with a thing, and the wonder and awe that comes with being overwhelmed with confusing new stimuli dies down.

By getting good with women, you make something of a trade off - you trade in the sporadic extreme emotional highs and lows for a far more consistent feeling of contentedness and satisfaction, interspersed with the occasional burst of excitement. You'll still get some in-love feelings with new girls you're with (especially if they're "love at first sight" girls), but it's not nearly the intensity of the unskilled man, whose love is mixed with a sense of desperate relief at no longer being alone anymore. Once you're skilled with women, you lose that constant low-lying depression / loneliness that most men have, and don't experience the thrill of it being lifted anymore when entering a relationship, because it isn't there anymore to begin with.

Personally, I'd never go back - the crazy "in love" feeling make you vaguely nostalgic when thinking back, but it's always coupled with a feeling of hoping and not being in control and never quite having what you want. It's sort of like asking if you'd rather be a millionaire, or rather have the dream of becoming a millionaire, because being in love is really about the dream of completely having a girl - whereas having the skills to have her really IS completely having her. I'd much rather be a millionaire, then go find another enticing, inspiring dream to chase down after that one's accomplished, than be perpetually chasing one shade after another of the same elusive, quixotic objective - which, when you're chasing emotions rather than achievements or milestones, is what you end up doing.

Chase

Anon-

If you've had purely platonic interactions with her since getting her phone number, then yes, that complicates things. All the more reason why you want to state what you're after right away and move fast with women - you do yourself no favors by letting time slip in and letting her get comfortable with you in a non-sexual, non-romantic role.

I'd probably wait a good 3 to 4 weeks after last seeing her before sending a text like that, and I'd change the "Sorry I've been busy" to something more along the lines of "Hey, I haven't seen you around lately! Anyway, I've been super busy, but schedule's just starting to clear up... we should grab some food sometime this week or next!" and then end it with asking for her schedule.

Re: phone vs. Facebook - if you have her phone, always use that over social media. The rough order of preference is: in person, phone, email, social media. Basically, the *cheaper* something is, the *less* you want to use it for anything important. If she gives out her phone number more than her Facebook, Facebook may actually be preferred; but for most girls, they give out their Facebooks a lot more liberally than their phone numbers, and use Facebook for collecting orbiters. Most of the guys contacting her over Facebook are guys who don't have her phone number, usually because she doesn't WANT them to have her phone number... and you don't want to look like one of those guys.

Chase

M-

I just did a follow up article and addressed some of your comment here: "How to Make Her Love You: Passionate Love, and Old Love."

When I write articles, I'm usually not just talking about my own experiences, but a lot of different relationships I've observed, examined, broken down, and analyzed. I've yet to see a relationship where two partners are 100% equally in love with one another - not to say it isn't possible, but I've yet to see any relationship anywhere where two people provide 100% equal amounts of value or emotions to one another of whatever it is that's being measured.

You certainly can have two partners who are roughly approximately the same amount in love - when you have these relationships, it isn't the crazy wild "Oh God, I'm in love!" feeling, at least not over the long haul, but there is a very nice "We really care about each other, and still have chemistry, and do enjoy getting it on." This is typically when both the partners are attractive and charismatic, and both know that they can get someone else in a heartbeat if they want to - however, they're with each other because they like being with each other.

There's also the early falling-in-love stage - the first 90 days - when "who's in charge" in the relationship has yet to be firmly established, and both people can feel completely out of control (and completely in love). That settles down after a time, but it can give you that wild, emotional rush if you want it - I have a number of friends who won't get into a relationship unless they feel head-over-heels in love with their girls (and it's kind of funny to watch - I just had a friend recently who transitioned from strong, in-control, commanding guy into nervous, excited, second-guessing-himself-all-the-time guy because he took a new girlfriend and couldn't tell if she liked him or was stringing him along or not).

The most usual setup is something similar to what you see with Nick Vujicic and his new wife in this video:

I see this all the time with guys, where the guy is calling her his princess and kissing her and on Cloud 9, and the girl is smiling, being nice, and talking about how she couldn't get all the hot, sexy guys when she was younger, and now she's with a guy who makes good logical sense for her as a husband.

The difference is subtle; show something like that to less perceptive people, and they won't consciously pick up on the fact that one partner is more into the other. The partners involved aren't usually conscious of it either; the one who's chasing doesn't think, "I'm chasing!"; he just thinks, "GOD, I'm lucky to have this girl!" And the one who's being chased doesn't think, "I'm being chased!"; she just thinks, "He's nice. And it's good that I have him."

You can fall in love if you like; the further you fall in love, the more relationship control you give up, and the more this leads to a loss of relationship respect, except when you are naturally the untamable sort - if you ever read Casanova's biography, I have a few friends who are that way - they find some girl, fall madly in love with her, get her, she falls madly in love with them, then they fall out of love with her and realize that they love some other girl, then start chasing after that girl, and the first girl's heart is broken. You can make a girl fall very much in love with you by falling in love with her, but one of you will fall out of love much further than the other when the emotions are that intense (I've seen it more times than I can count, with both men and women doing it), and the other person gets left high and dry.

So, I suppose it depends on what you want; if you want the roller coaster ride, you can wade into it with wild emotions, but in my opinion, it's irresponsible, because it always leads to either you or the girl (sometimes both) being deeply hurt. If you haven't experienced love yet though, this may just be something you need to go through a few times before you're able to get behind the reasoning on that; some things you cannot be taught, you simply must do.

Chase

Anon-

It's tough to leave a girl you still genuinely care about, I know. But the content of your comment makes it clear that the diminishment of your social life and the holding-back of yourself from pursuing women more locally available is probably the bigger concern for you at this point than hanging onto a girl you care about but who isn't there most of the time.

Personally, I don't think it's worthwhile for anyone to do long-distance relationships unless one of the partners is planning on moving to the other's city sometime very soon, OR both partners are living in places without suitable replacement options (e.g., she's in a small middle-of-nowhere town, and you're out working the oil fields in towns where the male-female ratio is 40-to-1). Otherwise, eventually (and it usually doesn't take long), one of the partners starts longing to experience some of the local variety, just as you're doing.

You can try hanging on longer, but those cravings will only get more intense. The breakup will happen when the desire to try something new outweighs the fear of losing what you've already got.

And, plus - it may not feel like it, or seem like it, but when you're a freshman in college, you're really just starting your life and dipping your toes into the dating pool soon - you won't be selecting a girl to play house with for a LONG time, and not until you feel sufficiently satisfied that you've tried most of what's out there, and she's the best. College - especially early on in college - is the time to enjoy your singledom, unless you have a strong urge to be paired up. You'll almost certainly never be in a place with so many pretty young single women in your life again.

Chase

Edd-

Great to see you putting the material from the book into action and making some headway with it. Glad you're finding it a good read.

When you get girls telling you "I don't do that anymore" and "I've been hurt by that in the past", what that basically translates as is "I still do that, a LOT, but I'm trying (unsuccessfully) to turn over a new leaf." Women who truly "don't do that" don't tell you they "don't do that" - they just stay out of situations where they will, most likely, do that.

The "I'm not going to sleep with you" statement is also one you can invariably translate to "I'm going to sleep with you", with the 'not' taken out... because, again, women who aren't thinking about sleeping with you don't say this, because it isn't even on their minds. She's saying out loud because she's trying to convince herself more than anyone else... and if she's trying to convince herself, it means she doesn't really believe it.

The thing to do here is just ignore or tease her - e.g., she tells you, "I don't do that anymore," and you say, "Do what? This?" and kiss her, and she says, "No... you know, THAT. Sex," and you say, "Yeah, totally... I don't do sex anymore either. I'm over it," and keep escalating. And she protests, and you get serious and go, "No, wait - seriously. We are NOT having sex tonight. I like you too much as a friend," with just a hint of a smile on your face, and then stare at her and see what she does - usually you get tackled here. If all else fails, just keep escalating.

Also, when you get in bed behind her, rather than pretending to be asleep, just start escalating all over again - kiss her neck, stroke her legs, run your hand between her legs, etc. If she doesn't want it, she'll leave; but she alone in bed with you because she wants to be platonic friends with you.

As for dealing with the aftermath of a failed escalation... some percentage of the time, you can just have her come over again and re-escalate and it'll go okay; sometimes not closing when the girl put herself there and wanted it, though, nukes a lot of your value as a sexual option, and the only thing you can do is try to rebuild that with preselection. I'd probably just try seeing if you can get her to come over to hang out and cook dinner / have drinks, then start up with her again; and if not, you can try the second set of advice from this article, which should actually be less difficult to pull off considering your setup (same building, lots of friends there, etc.): "3 Second Date Strategies to Make Her Flirt and Swoon."

More or less though, man, you had this one - you've just got to get a better handle on woman-ese ;)

Chase

Harvey-

It's a learning curve. The first year or two running relationships with an eye to power dynamics and (especially) reading and addressing women's subcommunication is challenging, but after that hump it gets easy pretty fast. After a couple of years, you stop thinking about relationship dynamics... things just go your way.

Once you reach that point, you relax way more in your relationships than all the guys who don't bother to learn and instead end up constantly going crazy trying to figure out and appease their mates. They run around fighting fires; with you, things hardly ever even go on fire in the first place, when they do you put the fire out without barely lifting a finger.

Women who do not test you are generally either women who are not interested in you, women who are not investing in you, or women who feel sufficiently stable with you. On that first, those are girls who have you in their friend zones; the second are women who, say, maintain a casual sexual relationship with you but are uninterested in anything more (because for whatever reason you don't make the cut for them as a longer-term partner - intentionally on your end or not); the third are women who did test you originally, but who became sufficiently satisfied with your strength and settled into a comfortable pattern with the relationship - in this case, either a sign of weakness or a sign of less stability (i.e., growing strength that threatens to destabilize the relationship) will cause a reemergence of testing behavior - basically, any change in the status quo.

Testing's just a part of how women (as the non-dominant partners) continually gauge and assess their men's strength and commitment - there's a learning curve on this, too, but same as with relationship dynamics, once you've got it, you've got it, and it's no longer an issue.

Chase