The Correct Response to Drama in a Relationship

Most guys don’t understand why women create drama in relationships, so their response often makes things worse. Here’s how to deal with it constructively.

How should men effectively deal with drama in their relationships? It’s one of the more common problems men experience. Guys rarely get thrown into a dramatic situation by choice. In cases where the drama is perpetuated by the woman, it is her negative response to a man’s behavior, and it’s an attempt to put her man back in line.

Often, the drama is unexpected, and you are totally unprepared to respond to it in a measured, constructive way. In which case, you typically make things worse.

I talked to one of my best friends in New York City recently about this. We discussed how 90% of the time guys treat drama in a way that makes things worse. Largely, it’s because guys don’t truly understand what the drama is. Like all things with women, the situation isn’t what it actually seems. You can get more information about what to do by reading between the lines from the woman’s point of view.

It’s important not to concern yourself with the drama’s details, for which there could be an infinite number of reasons. Instead, we’re going to cover what factors cause drama and how to respond while remaining attractive. After all, continual drama can result in the decline of the connection between both of you. If you react to it in the wrong way, the chance of maintaining that connection becomes slimmer and slimmer. Or worse, it incentivizes the girl to find a more suitable guy to be with.

 

Drama Is a Loss of Social Frame

Often, when men experience drama, they don’t know exactly what it’s about. Sure, the girl is complaining about something, but it can seem very trivial to the guy. This is due to the different ways men and women perceive life. A woman’s primary intention is maintaining her reputation, thus a lot of the time, the drama unfolds when her man has done something to screw up the social frame. In other words, he’s done something that could affect her reputation.

A guy typically does this in two ways:

1. He’s done something to lower his value

2. He’s done something that lowers his woman’s value (and thus disrupted the connection they share)

For example, your girl finds out that you’ve cheated on her. This makes her feel low-value because you found another woman for sex. Maybe you did something uncalibrated with her that made the two of you look bad in front of her friends or family. Or perhaps you forgot to do something that maintains her connection for you, like celebrating Valentine’s Day — all these situations usually cause drama.

As we can see, the reasons can be many. All forms of drama require a response if you want to keep the girl attracted to and interested in you.

 

The Right and Wrong Responses to Drama

It’s easy to understand that the loss of social frame creates drama. However, you might not be sure how to respond to it. Understanding the source is easy, but guys have been taught socially to respond to most forms of drama in exactly the wrong way. It almost always makes the situation worse.

Sometimes it can cost you the relationship with your girl, or it incentivizes her to cheat on you.

Most movies show drama incorrectly. The guy does something stupid, she reacts to him with high emotion, and he shows up with flowers and makes everything better. That’s actually not the right response to most kinds of drama.

What REALLY happens when you bring her flowers in these situations.

Most guys respond to drama (a loss of frame) with placating her in the following ways:

• Comforting her, telling her she’s beautiful, or that it will be okay, or that he won’t do it again
• Reaffirming his interest in her: “I still like you, I still love you.”
• Chasing after her: “Take me back, please!”

Unfortunately, these approaches are an anti-social frame. Because guys are responding by showing more interest, more investment, and more comfort, it makes the social frame even worse. Guys start sucking up to a girl and start acting like a pussy, which is the last thing she wants!

As you probably know, such moves have disastrous results. From the perspective of frame, when a girl gives a guy drama, she is punishing him with her criticism. But most guys REWARD her acts of punishment by giving her MORE of what she already has. It’s no wonder that women are not only utterly confused but leave the situation with even more disdain, resentment, and lack of respect for the man.

This response is ONLY okay if the problem is lack of comfort, like when a guy:

• Is too unavailable
• Is deliberately emotionally detached from her and avoids connection
• Doesn’t pay enough attention or give her enough comfort

My hunch is that the lack of comfort is not the real problem. For naturals and more advanced alpha guys, it addresses most dramatic situations. It’s because the guy is avoiding intimacy and closeness with a woman when it’s what she truly wants. For the rest of you, the problem is that you did something to destroy the social frame.

The real solution: ramp up your alpha, treating her like a girl that you haven’t gamed or slept with yet. The correct response to drama is NOT to be a nice guy. It’s to treat her like a new woman, addressing the void that exists between you two.

The right way to resolve drama:

• Remove intimacy, and game her like any other girl
• Keep her at arm’s length
• Treat her as a second date and re-seduce her

Yes, you want to be at arm’s length and treat her like any other girl. Stimulate her and build investment just like you would with a new girl. Instead of asking for compliance, you’re building investment slowly until you sense that she’s ready to be brought back into the normal state of the relationship.

In previous articles, we’ve discussed that another way to treat drama is to dial up the alpha by removing yourself and soft nexting the girl. Have a listen to my podcast with Blackdragon here, and you’ll get a great idea of this. Our former author, Drexel Scott also has a great article here on how and when to soft next.

This effectively shifts to attraction game. Avoid placating a girl or building comfort or "being there for her" (these reduce her attraction). Instead, remove yourself and let her come back to you. Do this almost as if you’ve never met before, and you’re evaluating her for something more.

 

Using Drama to Keep Relationships Passionate

Girls find drama just as annoying as guys do, but their motive is different. A guy just wants to keep a happy status quo, but the girl cares most about how her reputation could be affected by a guy. She will throw out drama simply because she’s bored and wants something interesting to happen.

To combat random drama and greatly reduce the chances a girl will ever break up with you, create a degree of drama for your girl to be happy and stay in the relationship. What usually happens is that the guy gets closer to the girl and becomes more comfortable. However, the irony is that the more intimate you get, and the higher her comfort gets, the more her attraction goes DOWN!

You should already know by now that when attraction drops for women, they start to look elsewhere. This helps explain the two-year (and multi-year) relationship drops, along with cheating patterns in women. They often occur because the MAN is too comfortable in the relationship and not doing anything to improve it or keep it vibrant.

Sometimes girls will deliberately create friction to lessen boredom. This shows up as drama.

Instead of appeasing her and building MORE comfort (you already have enough), remove yourself and get her seduced once again.

Therefore, in every relationship, you must:

• Deal with friction through attraction game whenever she starts giving you crap
• Re-seduce her

If you are already skilled with women and relationships, you likely know this. When the going is too good, you know something’s coming from her soon! However, even if you’re not good with women yet, always keep this in mind when it comes to women and relationships.

A relationship cycle of friction then re-seduction is something every guy MUST maintain. There’s no way around it. This cycle is what ultimately maintains a girl’s attraction to you. By successfully creating this friction and re-seduction, the relationship doesn’t grow stale and lose passion. It’s exactly what she wants from her man.

Comfort doesn’t create passion; tension does. It’s why naturals and bad playboys are so attractive and sexy to girls. They’re masterful at creating the emotional ups and downs that maintain tension, and the girl almost always invests herself even more deeply into the relationship.

 

Drama Management Is an Art

As you can surmise, it’s not difficult to avoid drama. Simply pay attention to a girl’s position in the social frame, and adhere to it. By maintaining social frame correctly with a girl, 90–95% of the time, you will never put yourself where you’ll receive drama from a woman.

Remember, these things mess up the social frame:

• Lowering your value (relative to hers)
• Diminishing the connection between you two (this drops self-esteem because it challenges her ego)

However, we know most guys are terrible at doing this. They inevitably get stuck in situations where they must handle drama from a woman. Always remember that when it happens, unless it’s comfort-based drama, you should NOT placate a woman. Instead, use attraction game to bring her back into your life via re-seduction. By doing so, you can pace the path to her return, while simultaneously maintaining attraction and respect.

Girls ultimately want the exact opposite of what many guys want in relationships. They don’t want sameness; they want variety in emotion and experience. Thus you can create drama (or remove attention) so you re-attract a woman to maintain passion in your relationship.

Varoon