Relationships

The other day, my girlfriend was upset with me again and creating drama. This is to be expected, as she's a high energy, energetic girl with a lot going on right now; I understand and commiserate. This is how it is with women and drama. But there's one thing she was trying to do that irked me somewhat.

She was trying to change me.

To any man out there who's ever had a girlfriend before, you probably know what I'm talking about. Women universally want men to change. It's only in those rare moments during the honeymoon phase of the relationship -- usually the first 90 days or so -- that this doesn't go on.

You also get a brief reprieve following a major capitulation, but this doesn't last and only breeds more struggles in the long term.

In any event, there's a famous quote about marriage by the eminent physicist (and philanderer, as it turns out) Albert Einstein, which we can pretty easily extrapolate to relationships of all sorts. What Einstein said was this:

"Women marry men hoping they will change. Men marry women hoping they will not. So each is inevitably disappointed."

Hmm. Guess they should've given him a Noble prize in humanities, too.

"Can you get me a glass of water?" she asked me. "Please?" She gave me big, dewy doe eyes, and her cutest, most charming pursed lips.

"It's over there," I said playfully, pointing to the water cooler. "You can get it yourself."

"Oh!" she exclaimed in mock frustration, getting up to go get herself more water.

Does it offend your sensibilities that I told her to do that? It might offend some people's. How can a guy be so cold as to not even go and get a girl a glass of water? they think.

But it isn't about being cold. It's about returning to the basics of sprezzatura and the Law of Least Effort; it's about understanding that the men who supplicate -- the men who kiss up -- the men who try to impress women -- those men end up holding the bag.

It's about understanding what women are really attracted to... and what causes them to lose that attraction. And it's about understanding that where the line is, and how much is too much when it comes to doing for women.

A reader writes in:

Hi Chase,

Just a quick message to say I've learnt a lot from your insights and blog over the last year. I decided to improve myself after hitting an embarrassing rock bottom with a girl I had been chasing after for over a year and your website has helped me do just that. These days I know I can go out and acheive high success with very attractive women of my choosing.

The problem is, I have now reached a point where I would like a girlfriend and I currently have two 2nd dates and 3 first dates with potential girlfriends. I am at a point where its almost too easy to get girls highly interested even past the first date. You teach a lot about how to get girls interested but I wondered if you had any advice about how to let girls down easy without coming across like an asshole. I enjoy having a choice of women for the first time in my life (!) but I don't like the idea of just enjoying the 'sport' of it.

I know there's probably no easier thing to do than to just to pick the one I like the most and dump the others but I just thought I'd ask your thoughts anyway,

Ta,
E

No doubt, that can be a tough one: how do you let a girl down without being a bad guy or a total heartbreaker? It can make you feel like a pretty underhanded guy – maybe even like you were just leading her on – when you have to turn her down when you know she was hoping to be with you.

But, in fact, there is a right way to do it.

Ever find yourself talking to a really cute girl, and have her start acting bored and distracted?

You probably began scrambling hard to try and get her interested again. And, if you succeeded, you likely felt like you'd won a crucial victory, and you felt like things with this girl were now stronger than ever. You'd been on the brink, and recovered.

You also probably were very careful to keep her interested after that, and stay on topics she'd find engaging, and off topics she wouldn't like. You worked harder to make things work, and likely came to value her more highly than you do other women who never seemed bored with you.

I want to work on getting you doing the same thing now with women. We've talked about nonverbal communication before here; this is another piece of the nonverbal puzzle. In this post, I'm going to show you how you can use boredom and the bored look to keep women off of bad topics and on good ones, and make them pay more attention and invest more in your conversations.

This is a strategy that women use all the time. So let's even the odds a little bit and get you using it too.

There's something in a normal relationship called the "honeymoon period." The honeymoon period is the period in the relationship where both parties are blissful and neither one feels the other can do any wrong and everything about one another seems special and amazing and great. Your girl thinks you're the most perfect man on Earth, and you may very well think she's the most perfect gal on Earth a little bit too.

But before you completely drop everything and immerse yourself into the sunshine and daisies and rainbows of the honeymoon period, there's something you need to know: dropping rational thought and running solely on emotions is what kills things long-term.

What are emotions? Emotions are, defined quite broadly, compelling short-term decision-makers. Emotions compel you, more powerfully than anything else in your head aside from the instinctive, entirely subconscious reactions of your reptile brain, to take certain actions. The thing about emotions is, the actions they compel you take are almost always short-term focused.

How often are the emotions you feel right now related to something you think might happen in a year or two? Very rarely. Your emotions are almost always contingent upon what's going on in your life right now. And that's problematic for the outset of a relationship, when you're in the beginning of the relationship-building phase, for this reason: running a relationship on pure emotion without setting relationship expectations is a strategy that dooms you.

I was looking at my pal Mark's blog over on Practical Pick Up, and read through a blog post he has up on something he calls "Chronic Texter Syndrome," referring to American girls who are on their cell phones texting all the time, even throughout the course of a seduction.

I put a post up on phone calls and text messaging on dates in early February discussing exactly this phenomenon, and on Mark's blog I noted in a comment that this is by no means restricted to women in America. It happens in China too, and I've seen it in other countries I've visited over the past year. I dare say at this point that it's a worldwide phenomenon.

The other thing I noted in my comment to Mark's blog post is what I want to focus on in today's post here: specifically, on being girls' secret lover. Because often, when girls are calling or texting in front of you, the people they're contacting are the more "public" people in their lives, with whom they must keep up appearances. Oftentimes, the reason you're getting texted or called in front of in the first place is exactly because you aren't a public part of her life with public influence and accountability... and if you ask me, this is a very good thing.

A couple times over the past week, my girlfriend came to my apartment and brought some drama along with her. If you know me, you know I'm a pretty Zen kind of guy, and part of the reason I'm able to keep my calm is because I do my best not to be directly involved in others' drama. Help them out, give them a hand and some insight, by all means, but do not get involved in the swirling maelstrom that is the drama of other people. I have my own life to tend to.

Well, Saturday afternoon and Tuesday evening each ended up being among those rare occasions these days where the drama was pointed squarely at me. Where it came from, and how I handled it, and how you can do the same, is what I aim to address in this post.