Relationships | Girls Chase

Relationships

The continuing and ongoing encounters and involvement you maintain with a woman once you've slept together and become intimate -- whether weeks or months or years -- or more.

How to Fix Problem Behavior in Long-Term Relationships

Chase Amante's picture

fix long term relationship
A mature relationship (older than a few years) often requires a more cooperative approach to behavior problem solving than younger relationships do.

On my article on how to erase your jealousy, a reader comments:

Chase,

I’ve noticed that in this article and in others, you appear to be open to breaking up with a girl fairly hastily (at least compared to most people) in favor of a higher mission and/or replacing her if things aren’t going well.

This totally makes sense to me in the context of shorter relationships. But what about longer ones? What if I’ve been dating someone for 5+ years and an undesirable behavior comes up. I feel as though just being ready to end it in favor of a higher purpose would be a bit more difficult and perhaps even unreasonable (i.e. given that I’ve spent so much time on it, it would be worth it to put a little more effort into making it work than just a few short talks, and if those don’t work, an ultimatum). Have you had experience in this situation before? What was it like?

It’s a good question.

First, I should clarify (in case it isn’t already clear) that I am not from the hardcore “if she does anything you even slightly dislike, NEXT her immediately!” camp. These things aren’t always clear when you communicate them over text on the Internet.

In my case, when there’s a problem in a relationship, I make it very clear to a woman what she needs to change. If I like her and want to continue the relationship, and the bad behavior is not too egregious, I will work with her over time to change the behavior. We’ll talk about that in this article (changing behavior over a bit of time).

If on the other hand the behavior is simply deal breaker behavior, then yes, as soon as I see it, she’ll be headed toward the door. But that sort of behavior always manifests itself in the first few weeks or, at most, month. This assumes you run your early relationships as I suggest, and keep things to just the two of you without involving other people, and are somewhat tough to be with at first (so you get to see her true colors). If you’re accommodating and you let her lead things then yes, you’ll have no idea who she is until six months in or maybe after your first kid. Then you’ve got problems.

Assuming you handle the early relationship well though, and screen well, you will end up in long-term relationships with some pretty amazing women who fit you pretty well.

Yet, sooner or later, people change. She gets stressed out, and her stress causes her to become disrespectful or insulting toward you. Her diet goes to hell and she packs on some extra weight, or she bears you a few children and the weight is slow to come off after the latest kid. She gets extra busy at work and has less and less time for you. Her best friend becomes single again and wants her to go out a lot like they did when they were both single, and she’s begun to go with it.

You’re years into the relationship. You might live together, be married, and/or have children. Regardless, you’re hugely invested in her at this point and have made all sorts of changes and adjustments to your life to accommodate the relationship (i.e., you probably don’t party with your pals as much, travel so much to exotic locales on guys’ vacations, or hang out all weekend at the sports bar anymore, I’m guessing).

Now she’s suddenly not behaving well. But you don’t want to just ditch her and walk. So what do you do?

She Liked Me Before, Why Not Anymore?

Hector Castillo's picture

she liked me before
One minute, she’s into you; the next, she’s gone cold. Why does this happen? Well, because if you’re not climbing a ladder, you’re sliding down a chute.

I like video game analogies for explaining social situations, but there is one element to a video game that sadly does not apply to real life.

When it comes to women, there are no save points and no pausing.

Take the Dark Souls games – although you get save points, there is no pausing. If you go into the menu during the game, it continues without you. Enemies can still attack you. Think of life this way.

Or more accurately, you may be old enough to remember the board game Chutes and Ladders, a modern take on the ancient Indian game Snakes and Ladders.

You roll the dice. If the roll brings you to a ladder, you climb up the board. But if you roll onto a snake, you slide back down to the snake’s tail. This can happen even if you’re only steps away from winning the game.

Seduction and relationships are like this. There are ladders, and there are chutes.

7 Signs a Girlfriend (or Wife) Is Checking Out of Your Relationship

Chase Amante's picture

girlfriend is losing interest
How do you know your girlfriend is losing interest and checking out? There are 7 signs of this, from makeovers to disagreeableness to new Sex in the City gal pals.

Picture this: you get into a relationship with a girl, and at first everything is pretty good. Not perfect, but good. Things coast along for a year or two, consistently pretty good: she’s fun to be with, she cooks you nice meals, you have nice sex. It’s good.

Then at some point, things start to feel ‘different’. It’s hard to put your finger on what. But it feels like your girlfriend is losing interest. Your gut tells you she is checking out... but when you confront her on it, she tells you not to be ridiculous. It’s not that she’s checking out, she says; she just wants to [whatever it is she’s doing]. You grumble a bit and try to ignore your misgivings. Maybe she’s right and it’s all in your head.

A few months go by and the relationship quality is now definitely not what it used to be. When you try to talk to her about it though, she dismisses the thought. More and more, she seems checked out of the relationship.

Eventually she tells you she wants to “take a break” for a while and maybe get back together again later. You knew it was coming; but you couldn’t put your finger on exactly why. And you knew of no way to stop it.

Today’s article looks at the 7 most common signs a girlfriend is ‘checking out’ of your relationship. These are the signs she isn’t out yet – but might be on her way there. Forewarned is forearmed; if you don’t want to be broadsided by a surprise breakup (or a surprise affair), these signs are your fair warning. Note that these signs serve equally well for wives as they do for girlfriends; any serious relationship is subject to the same potential signs.

Lopsided Relationships: the Friend Zone and FWBs

Chase Amante's picture

unhappy relationship
Friend zones, friends with benefits, sexless marriages – many relationships are lopsided and unhappy. Why do these relationships exist (and how do you avoid them)?

In dating, there is one truth above all, and that is that men want a few things from women, and women want a few things from men, and not all those things overlap.

The result of this failure to overlap is sometimes you have a woman who is good at getting what she wants without giving the men she gets it from everything (or anything) they want. Likewise, you sometimes have a man who is good at getting what he wants without giving the women he gets it from everything (or anything) they want.

This mismatch is the root of all the most unhappy relationships with the most broken dynamics you see in dating. The friend zone, where a man who wants intimacy with a woman is exiled to her sexless borderlands without it. Friends with benefits, which some women are fine with for some time, but most women eventually go at least a little crazy in. Disrespectful and/or sexless long-term relationships or marriages, where the man is treated as a second-class partner. And neglectful and/or domineering long-term relationships or marriages, where the woman is treated as a second-class partner.

The Zen area of dating, of course, are setups where both partners get what they want: where the woman gets everything she desires, and the man gets everything he desires.

But not every coupling will be this way. Most won’t.

Instead, most fall somewhere into that overlap zone – for a very simple reason.

How to Build a Harem, Pt 2: Jealousy and Discretion

Varoon Rajah's picture

jealousy and discretion
When you have more than one girlfriend, a few rules are key: she may suspect you see other women, but you must never give her PROOF.

Welcome back to the Harem Series!

In Part 1, I shared the vital importance of Queen Theory, and why every woman you’re dating emotionally must feel like your #1 woman at all times.

I also recently wrote an article where we talked about the core differences between monogamy and non-monogamy: getting bored and losing interest versus dealing with jealousy, respectively. In that article, I discussed how to prevent boredom from seeping into your monogamous relationships. So now we’ll discuss how to prevent jealousy in non-monogamous relationships, and the importance of being discreet.

This article was inspired by something I witnessed one night while in one of the cafes I frequent. I know a few of the regulars who go there. There’s a cute girl, Rebecca, who is sought after by some of the guys, including my friend Rob. Rob has been after Rebecca for over a year, but she’s never paid him any heed, even though they were friends. Eventually Rob moved on, and a few months later started to date a new woman, Elizabeth, whom he brings to the café from time to time after she gets off work. I’ve met Elizabeth, and she’s cute, fun, and cool.

However, this act sparked a new interest in Rob – from Rebecca! After all, preselection is one of the surest signs of an attractive man, and girls are copy cats; they want what other women have. This caused Rebecca to start pestering Rob and his business partner Dave on afternoons while they were both working when Elizabeth wasn’t there yet.

That night, I witnessed Dave take a chance and seduce Rebecca just to see how far he could get. Elizabeth wasn’t there, and Rob was playing a video game on his computer, facing Dave across the table. Rebecca went right along with Dave and did it in her own way; she placed herself on Dave’s lap right in front of Rob while she and Dave were flirting with each other. And I got a second-row seat to the action as well. It got to the point where Dave was massaging her back and putting his fingers in her mouth while she was giving him sultry looks. Rebecca was openly talking with Dave about great sex, and Dave could have taken her out to the back right then and there and shagged her if he wanted.

She was having fun, but she was also doing all this because of her jealousy for Rob and Elizabeth. Rebecca really wanted to make sure he saw how desirable she was to his business partner. Some guys might ask “Why didn’t Rebecca just get with Rob when she had the chance?” Well, it doesn’t always work that way with women. The point of this story is also to show you how jealousy can manifest – and it can cause some extreme behavior.

Tactics Tuesdays: Orgasm Anchoring

Chase Amante's picture

orgasm anchoring
You can train a woman to do and enjoy something – or to cut that something out – with a simple (but mighty) operant conditioning tactic called “orgasm anchoring.”

Have you got something you’d like a girl to do, but she isn’t that excited about? Anchor it with orgasms!

Or maybe there’s something she does, and you’d like her to cut it out? Anchor it with orgasms!

This article presumes you’re adept at making women climax from sexual intercourse already. And ideally, that you’re able to string together multiple vaginal orgasms in her. If you’re not yet, or you’ve got a girl who’s sexually closed off and hasn’t learned to cum yet (or to cum easily / multiple times in a row), give these two articles a gander:

Also, you should probably have a decent grasp of how anchoring works. I’ll give you a quick overview, but I suggest you check out my full article on it here:

That discussed, let’s talk about how to make women you’re seeing do what you’d like them to do... with orgasms.

Women Can Get Bored with Monogamy, Jealous with Non-Monogamy

Varoon Rajah's picture

monogamy and non-monogamy problems
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.

How to Erase Your Jealousy (Without Turning Into a Pushover)

Chase Amante's picture

get rid of jealousy
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).

Wounded Man, Nurturing Woman

Chase Amante's picture

nurturing girlfriend
Guys often want a woman who will nurture them. How does a man come to desire this – and is it really the healthiest relationship setup?

There is this dream many men have. In it, a man opens up and tell all his pains, fears, and weaknesses to a woman. In turn, the woman takes it all in, consoles the man, nurtures him, and loves him even more for his sensitivity and innocence.

Often men with this dream try to pull this off with this girl or that. Yet, they are disappointed. The girls they try it with do not respond with the warmth and acceptance they wish for. Instead, the girls they open up to are critical, rather than nurturing. These women often lose respect for them, rather than gain it.

Sometimes this reaction will cause a man to adapt: women are for companionship, homemaking, and sex; they are not for emotional support. Other times, it can cause a man to become bitter: there are no good women out there. No woman will accept me and love me for who I truly am.

Today’s article is about this idea of a nurturing woman you can tell anything you want to to, who will love you regardless how much weakness and vulnerability you share with her, and who will never leave you, no matter what. Are there women out there like this? And is there any role you must play in this – other than to simply offload your emotions to her, and have this girl carry your burdens for you, and bandage your wounds?

How and Why Women Try to Domesticate Their Men

Hector Castillo's picture

relationship domestication
Once you’re in a relationship, the domestication process begins. Why do women do this – and how do you not become totally broken and domestic?

The difference between a serious long-term relationship and a short-term relationship, from the girl’s point of view, is complex in many ways.

She expects more investment from you, emotionally and logistically. You will have to spend more time with her than you would if she was a simple hookup. You will also have to do more than simply shag her then kick her out. You will meet her friends, her parents, and go with her to events and on dates. How much you should do this is up to the precedent you want to set and how often you WANT to see her. If you LIKE doing those things, then do them.

The emotional side of things is a bit more complicated. How much emotion you should show depends on the girl. The harder she is emotionally, that much harder you should be (i.e., the less emotional you should be with her). She should be the one most in love, the most lovey-dovey, and the most cuddly. This is not up to debate. However, if you show no emotion, you can cause her to become too insecure and cause a lot of drama so that you end up proving your love in a small burst (an emotional down payment into the “I won’t suddenly leave you” fund), or she’ll seek that emotional fulfillment elsewhere, in another man (and this might turn into sexual fulfillment, too).

She also expects some level of commitment. Sexual faithfulness is far less important to women than emotional faithfulness. A hookup or having some low-key side chicks doesn’t bother women too much, so long as they know they are your queen. Obviously don’t rub this in her face if you choose to have side chicks. Be discreet and low-key.

All of this, when viewed from the complete freedom of singledom, cannot be described any other way than domestication.