(3) Journeyman

You won’t always be certain. But you need to be able to at least appear certain, when you are in leader-follower (or male-female) situations that demand certainty.

You might have it in your head that you are certain about something, and being certain will help demonstrate certainty. But if your certainty isn’t visible, people will not be fully sold on your certainty, and thus not follow you as wholeheartedly. In seduction, even the slightest error can have her questioning your sincerity, confidence, and any other facet of your personality.

In the first article of this series, we covered the three types of certainty (certainty of knowledge, desire, and morality), then we detailed how to become certain in part 2, and now we will cover how to demonstrate certainty.

If she likes you, but opts not to hook up with you, what does it mean? Why, it means you’ve failed her Chad test – and now she’ll make you wait.

You’re back alone at your place with a girl. What you know about her: she’s adventurous, independent, and, by all indications, probably has been with her fair share of men. Perhaps she’s shared some of her old war stories with you: guys she’s been with, wild hookups she has had, sordid escapades gone by.

For some reason, it feels slightly off. You feel like she likes you, it’s just... her walls are up.

You decide to go for it anyway. She’s near you on the couch, with her body turned slightly away from yours. Her arms are folded, her expression slightly tensed. “Come here, you’re so far away,” you tell her. She scoots a little closer, but she doesn’t seem excited to do it. You put your hand on her chin to turn her face toward yours. She stops you.

“I don’t feel ready for that yet,” she says. You feel let down. After all that talk about all her crazy past hookups... and now she “isn’t ready?”

“I should probably go,” she tells you. You figure she’s blowing you off. And to be honest, you’re not really feeling it yourself either. Her defensiveness has killed any interest in her you had earlier. You walk her to the door. “I had fun,” she says. “We should hang out again soon.” You grunt a response and let her go.

Two weeks later – you haven’t bothered to message her – she texts you, asking what you’re up to and why she hasn’t heard from you. It seems so weird... this girl resisted intimacy when you brought her back, but she still wants to meet up anyway. Why? For what?

Slowly it starts to dawn on you: she likes you... just not enough to make you one of the men she gives it up too fast.

You have, in other words, failed the Chad test.

Monogamy and non-monogamy each face their own unique challenges. Women in monogamous relationships can grow bored; women in non-monogamous ones, jealous.

There are many different kinds of relationships available to the romantically gifted man. There’s classical monogamy, of course. There are friends with benefits relationships and fuckbuddies. Open long-term relationships (polyamory). There’s one-sided monogamy. Even pimp-ho and master-slave relationships, if you really want to explore the dark side (which we won’t do here).

All these, more or less, fall into one of two categories: open (in which the partners may see other people) and exclusive (in which the partners don’t – or at least aren’t supposed to – see other people. Sometimes people are naughty though). Today’s article explores the two primary challenges each style of relationship faces: the biggest challenges to the health of exclusive and non-exclusive romantic relationships.

I recently kicked off a series (the “How to Build a Harem” series) to convey what I’ve learned about non-monogamous relationships and steer guys who are interested in such relationships in the right direction. I realized that before I can delve into non-monogamy, I need to showcase it as a comparison to the conventional model we all know about. I want to highlight the distinctions between challenges in both systems (if you’re in either one, you might see these in action in just a matter of months, but really they are inevitable).

No system is better than another. There are advantages and disadvantages to all flavors of relationship, but the challenges differ vastly by system. I’ll lay these out to help you figure out which system is right for you while also creating the best outcome for yourself long term.

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed the fundamentals of certainty – The Triumvirate of Certainty.

The Triumvirate goes like this:

• Certainty of Knowledge

• Certainty of Desire

• Certainty of Morality

If any of these pillars are missing from your mind, your certainty will be imperfect. You will be uncertain. This article is dedicated to managing these uncertainties.

Let’s get to it.

If you get your hackles up, or start to feel defensive, it’s easy to turn adversarial on dates and in conversations. Yet do this, and you will quick run into walls with women...

Here’s an insidious problem it’s easy to overlook.

Sometimes if you hit the bars, or the street, or a party, and your first few approaches don’t go well, and you pick up a couple rejections, you can start to sour on the whole ‘chat up new girls’ thing.

Or sometimes if you have a history of rejection... or you’ve been reading too much anger-inducing content on the Internet... or you’ve just had a terrible day in general... this can happen.

Basically: you start to expect the worst, and either bristle for it, go in adversarially, or both.

And when a woman talks to you, she can feel it: you’re defensive, guarding against rudeness, insult, or dismissal. And/or you’re aggressive, treating her like an opponent whose defenses and objections you must ‘beat’, instead of as a friend you’d like to help lead around those objections (and into bed).

Yet the more adversarial you let your approach become, the worse it will usually do.

You need to not do this to make things work better with girls.

You never want to explain yourself to a woman’s tough questions. Yet to brush them off, you need the right tactics – and the right mentality.

We’ve talked about tough questions (which fall under the umbrella of ‘tests’) before. I’ve given you some ways to answer these well, as well as a formula to know how to respond to such challenges (i.e., status and respect). And, perhaps most importantly of all, I cautioned you never to explain yourself to women.

Today we’ll talk about a few specific varieties of challenging questions you can receive (from both men and women... though we’ll focus mainly on questions from women today). That variety is tough questions; questions that put you on the spot, in a not-so-helpful-to-your-cause sort of way.

We’ll talk about brushing these questions off. But there’s going to be a twist to how we do this; we don’t want to do a brush off in a way that looks like we are trying not to answer. That’s because if you evade someone’s questions (for too long), it seems like you’re frightened, or have something to hide.

So instead, we want to brush tough questions off in a way that either blows up the question, or lets us answer it on more favorable terms.

Jealousy is a green-eyed monster. But to overcome it, you must adjust both your focus, and steer your partner’s worst behavior.

Sometimes you’ve got a girlfriend who’s a bit of a flirt and keeps guys around her on a hook. Sometimes you’ve got a girlfriend who’s a little oblivious (or at least, presents herself that way)... and keeps men around whose intentions with her are more than platonic, yet she acts like she doesn’t see it. Sometimes she doesn’t do any of that, but you’re nervous anyway. Maybe a girl’s burned you in the past, or you’re just a little short on trust in general. Regardless the reason, you know jealousy’s an issue for you... and it’s time to rein it in a bit.

This article is not about how to prevent cheating. If you need that, read my article on it: “How to Prevent Cheating by Your Girlfriend.” Nor is this article about how to screen for girls less likely to cause problems or cheat; for that, check out the list of resources in this article: “Her Raw Material or Your Relationship Skills: Which Matters More?”

Instead, this article is a reframe of normal male jealousy. For this article, we’ll assume you’re in a fairly healthy, fairly safe relationship where cheating is not that big of a real issue. If infidelity is a big issue, of course, you shouldn’t read an article on how to get rid of jealousy. You should, rather, probably read about how to get rid of a troublesome partner and replace her with someone less heartache-inducing.

We’re going to walk a bit of a fine line here. Because the goal is not to totally and completely erase jealousy altogether. Think of jealousy as a warning sign. It’s your canary in the coalmine. If the canary flips out and starts to chirp and squawk every time somebody comes down the mine elevator, it’s obviously not doing its job so well. But you don’t want to completely take the canary out of the mine either; otherwise you’ll receive no warning when the roof is about to collapse.

So, in this article, we will seek to get jealousy focused on only the right signals – and train it to ignore that which is not as much of a threat (or at least, that which is less of a threat).