(3) Journeyman

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).

You may think you only like girls of this personality, that look, or this background. Yet to truly know women, you must experience them in all their variety.

Hey, guys. I hope you enjoyed my latest series on calibration. This post is not about calibration per se, but the advice shared in this post will benefit your calibration as well as provide a lot of other benefits.

This post is more a reflection on life choices in regards to women, and how those choices can affect your future. I’ll cover why I believe meeting a huge diversity of women is beneficial to you. And we’ll tackle some biases men tend to have with women, why biases can be detrimental, and how to overcome them. Additionally, we will discuss the benefits of meeting a large variety of women, some of which include:

• Rewiring triggers so you can enjoy new women (sometimes even better women)

• Becoming more calibrated and skilled as a seducer

• Removing biases caused by observations made from an unrepresentative selection of women

A lifestyle of hedonism, pleasure, and abundant bedmates is quite delightful. Yet if you are a playboy, have you betrayed your society to become one?

Society is changing.

Tectonic plates of social mores are rubbing together and creating earthquakes. The ensuing chaos can be seen all around the world, especially in the U.S.

On one side, we can break it down most simply by Liberalism vs. Conservatism. These are the eternal spectrums of any society. Right now, Liberalism is concerning itself with identity politics and claiming to align itself with two ethical principles – tolerance and compassion. These ethical principles naturally create support for causes like climate change activism, racial and sexual equality, and wide-open immigration policies. Whether this is wrong or right is not the focus of this article. I’m simply pointing out what is happening.

Conservatism is currently concerned with nationalist politics and aligning itself with two ethical principles – tradition and independence. The focus on tradition creates a “the law is right, no matter how you feel” framework, which then leads to a direct conflict with policies like open immigration. Independence-focused politics creates conflict with macro ideas like the EU, NAFTA, and the Paris Climate Agreement. With the victory of Donald Trump, an aftershock is now sweeping countries like Hungary and Poland (who were already quite conservative) and pushing their conservatism farther to the right.

Society is now swinging to the right, toward more conservative values. In fact, it has been for a long time. Liberalism has hit its peak and may decline soon, as its surge from the 1960s has begun to lose its momentum.

This is most evident in the arena of sexuality, which I believe (through observation) to be the control point of the rest of society. Everything seems to revolve around sex (at least that’s how I connect the dots).

And since society seems to be swinging to the right politically, that means some big changes are going to affect our attitude toward sexuality, which has both its pros and cons.