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.
Even the best run relationships get sticky from time to time, and even the most stable, emotionally steadfast women occasionally resort to making accusations.
Accusations are themselves a very hazy area – what’s the best way to deal with them? How do you deal with a woman who yesterday was crazy about you today calling you cold? What do you do when a girl lashes out and charges you with not caring about her? How do you handle when a woman accuses you?
One of the things I always look to guide men out of doing, whether I’m coaching them in-person or advising them via phone or Internet or just writing stuff for them to read, is being the entertainer. I touched on this a bit in Acting With Intent and Faux Pas of the Sociaux Nouveaux, and I really ought to write a proper post devoted mostly to this, but the problem in a nutshell with being the entertainer is that you get a lot of false positives.
Here’s a short, powerful tip for getting girls feeling both attracted and special around you in a hurry: tell them you’re picky. Tell them you’re very picky – but you like them. And then have some valid reasons for why (them being beautiful does not count – there are a lot of beautiful women in the world!).
I picked this up originally from women I dated; it seems like every girl I date tells me she’s picky at some point or another. I’m not sure if that’s because I actually date mostly picky women, or if they just like to tell me that because they can tell I myself am picky. Regardless, it’s something I started telling women too: that I am picky.
One of the most enervating, life-sucking situations you can find yourself in is that of the relationship that’s slowly circling the drain. If you’ve had a relationship die a slow death before, you know what I mean – the sad, slow withdraw of good feelings in synchrony with the gradual build up of resentment and frustration and desperation.
The problem with a relationship fading out this way is it can creep up on you so slowly and under-the-radar that you don’t realize it’s happening until the little relationship snowball rolling downhill starts taking out trees, rocks, and ski lodges.
What do you do when she says, “I love you?” Do you run and hide, or say it too?
There are two near-universal responses to a woman saying those three little words, and they’re pretty much both absolutely horrible and flat out wrong from the standpoint of achieving anything good and healthy in a relationship. They are:
Ever notice how fairytales and about ninety-nine out of a hundred romance tales you see or read are about how two people first got together? Cinderella meets her prince, against all odds, and he manages to find her again after he's lost her, against all odds, and the two of them ride off together in the carriage, into the dusky sunset. Prince Charming defeats the evil dragon to free Sleeping Beauty from her hundred-year slumber. Belle falls for Beast despite his unsavory appearance.
How come we don't start the story with Cinderella five years into her marriage with the prince? Why not pick up a decade after Sleeping Beauty woke up and Prince Charming and she made castle together? Why do we never see Belle and Beast after they've had their first couple of half-human, half-animal offspring?
It's because there's nothing exciting about that. We don't care about two people that've been together for years; that's old news. We want to know about the new and exciting things that are going on: those two people who might get together – who should get together – but who still may not get together.
Back when I was newly focusing on meeting and dating girls as a skill I could develop, I made it a point to let women I was seeing know that I was going out and living a life of fun and parties and adventure travel and general debauchery.
In competitive endeavors, it’s important to maintain a stout defense. Whether discussing military operations, or man-to-man combat, or sports matches, or guarding a company’s secrets against industrial espionage, it is of vital importance to have a strong, effective defense protecting oneself from one’s opponents.
But seduction is not a military operation. Nor are relationships competitive sports matches. And a lot of guys don’t seem to get this.
Every man’s least favorite question to get: “Where do you see this going?” I seem to get this question a lot, personally, and after stumbling through it like a blind man a few times, I think I can recommend you a pretty reasonable approach to addressing it.
First, recognize that you’re likely getting this question because:
Once you’ve begun seeing a girl on a fairly regular basis, or you think you will likely start seeing her soon, you should be doing a lot of what I call passive screening in addition to any other screening you’re doing.
What’s passive screening? It is, quite simply, watching and learning. Keeping an eye on your woman’s actions, learning about her from. This is hands down the most effective way to really learn about your girl – how devoted is she, how much will she work for the relationship, how high or low risk is she.
