6 Simple Steps To Start A Relationship With A New Girlfriend

I’ve fielded a number of comments and questions from guys over the years on how to start a relationship off right with a new girl they’ve just started seeing. After all, you’ve used all the material on this site on how to turn yourself into a smooth, edgy, sexy man; and you’ve learned everything you need to know about how to get girls, you knew what to look for in a girlfriend, and you’ve found her, met her, and everything went perfectly. You took her to bed as your lover, and now she’s yours.

Now what?

Most people treat dating and relationships as some big, mythical, emotionally-driven process these days, devoid of much logical forethought or planning. It’s reached a point in Western thought where “giving in to your emotions” has become the ultimate ideal to be striven for and attained; you should seek to “just feel” and “go with your heart.”

But while emotion is a very important piece of your actions and decision making as a human, it’s only half the story, and, worse for relationships… it’s the short term half of the story.

Emotions will have you shortchange your tomorrow for a better today.

What I’m going to tell you to do in THIS article, however, is to take command of yourself, and build a relationship designed to be strong, successful, and rewarding long after the fires of early emotion quit burning so brightly, or even quit burning at all.

This is, you might say, the anti-guide to falling in love: it’s the guide not to getting there, but to staying there, and like all good stories it starts at the beginning.

One of the unfortunate realities of our modern society is that it’s an anonymous society, and it takes a lot of things that used to be taught, parent to child, and asks each individual to relearn these things through stumbling, failure, and experimentation.

Some of the lessons that have been lost, however, are things most people won’t learn in two lifetimes.

One of those things is how to start a relationship. It used to be that, when children began dating, their parents would counsel them not to rush in, and to plan for the future. While these advisements hardly restrained the rushing passions and bursting enthusiasms of new love, they did help guide them and channel them in young men’s and women’s saner moments.

Today there’s no such guidance. We’re told to rush headlong into things, trust in love, and throw planning to the wind.

The world of today is very much one of emotion; that is, swirling, lively happenings and counsel, focused on maximizing the pleasure and happiness of today and assuming that what’s good now will always be good.

Western society today, at least in regard to relationships, has the precise mindset of the grasshopper, instead of the ant.

If you’re unfamiliar with the tale of the grasshopper and the ant, or even if you’ve heard it before a few times already, allow me to regale you with this old yarn, and tell you what it has to do with how you ought to run your new relationship.

The Grasshopper and the Ant

One summer, a grasshopper sat chirping his song merrily in the fields, enjoying the fresh air and warm sun. By the by, an ant trudged by, off to the day’s work. As the grasshopper sat throughout the day, content with his lot and not a care in the world, the ant passed him back and forth, sometimes carrying a parcel of food, sometimes some other supplies for the ant colony, but always some burden that the grasshopper was sure he was not going to enjoy himself.

“Friend Ant,” the grasshopper finally called, “why do you burden yourself so? The day is beautiful; the air is fresh, the sun is warm, and to spend this glorious day at work is waste of the highest order. Come sit with me and enjoy the spectacular weather Mother Nature has provided for us to drink in.”

The ant, not even stopping along the trail, turned to the grasshopper and said, “Friend Grasshopper, now may be a beautiful day indeed, but I make preparations now, for things will not always be so wonderful. And preparations made today will allow me to be happy and content later. I advise you, do not waste all the day in idleness, but make yourself ready now for the days when the air is not as fresh and the sun not as warm.”

The grasshopper scoffed at this, and continued his enjoyment; the ant paid him no mind, and continued his work. Things went by like this all the rest of the summer, with the grasshopper chirping away in contentedness, and the ant slaving and sweating to make his preparations.

The seasons changed, and went from summer to autumn, autumn to winter. Like the ant had warned, the air turned less fresh, and the sun grew far less warm. Snow began to fall, and soon it covered the land.

One particularly bitter and frozen night, with the cold winds howling and the snow fiercely falling, the ant, warm and content in his home, with a bright fire burning and a pot full of stew almost ready for dinner, heard a knock at his door.

“Who could this be, now, in the dead of winter?” the ant asked himself. He opened the door to peak outside.

“Friend Ant,” cried the grasshopper, his teeth chattering and his knees knocking, “I beg you, please let me in! I’ve nothing to eat and no fire to warm myself by, and I fear this winter will be the death of me.”

“Friend Grasshopper,” said the ant in reply, “if but I had enough, I would, but alas I only have enough food and fuel to support myself through the winter. If I let you stay here, we would be out of stores halfway through winter, and then we both would freeze and starve. You should have taken my advice; he who contents himself with happiness now in place of preparation must be ready to accept unhappiness later from lack of preparedness.”

Are You a Relationship Grasshopper?

How’s the apply to new relationships? Well, answer me this – do you:

• Rush forth into relationships without much thought or planning, and insist on “following your heart?”
• Lack a relationship “game plan” – where you’d like the relationship to go and what steps along the way you see it following?
• Trust that if things are “meant to be,” they will just “work out?”
• Lack an end goal for your relationships; that is, a point at which the relationship ends and you can smile with satisfaction and say, “I consider this relationship a success?”

If you said “yes” to even one of those, you’re a relationship grasshopper, trusting that so long as you enjoy the present, the future will just “work itself out.”

But the future never works itself out.

And, especially as the man in the relationship, you have a certain responsibility to plan how things will proceed for both of you. Women are the more emotional half of 95% of male-female couples; that means they’re more inclined than you are to rush into things emotionally, lack much planning or foresight, trust in “destiny” (don’t get me started with women and “destiny”…), and get upset at the very mention of a relationship ending, even if they’ve had 10 relationships before and all of them have ended.

You’re the man; you must lead.

And if you’re leading from emotion, rather than from careful planning or forethought, you’re no better a leader than the head lemming of a pack of madly rushing lemmings, leading his followers right off a cliff (or, more factually correct, to a watery grave).

If you want to know how to start a relationship off so that it becomes asuccess, you’ve got to do it with care, thought, and planning – same as any other important undertaking in your life. Compared to the amount of deliberation people put into choosing a university to attend, or a major to select, or a career to pursue, or a position to take or a move to take once in that career, how they run their relationships is given far less thought by comparison, despite the fact that the impacts of these are often just as great as a career – or even greater.

Let’s change that for you.

So how do you plan something as complex as a relationship? There are two people involved, remember – and you have no idea what this other person is going to do or become later on down the road. You can’t plan that… right?

Actually, planning a relationship is a lot like planning a career. You’re going to fail miserably if you try to plan out and micromanager every individual little detail… both relationships and careers have ways of throwing you curve balls that you had no way of expecting and that take you far afield from where you intended to be or go.

The way you plan for it, then, is by reserving your planning for a few key areas:

1. Commitment and Focus. You need to be able to both commit yourself and focus on a particular job or a particular girl wholeheartedly, while at the same time keeping your options open enough so you won’t end up crushed if you get laid off or broken up with. The issue of “trading up” comes into play here; I’m a big believer in getting a job at your dream company ASAP, and dating your dream girl ASAP, and not settling for less, although this isn’t always 100% realistic. We’ll talk about this below.
2. Discipline. Running a relationship properly, especially in the beginning, is a lot of work, and you’ll frequently be facing opportunities where your emotions want you to do one thing while your mind thinks you ought to do something else. Kind of like when you wake up in the morning and you’ve got to go to work, but what you’d REALLY like to do is call your boss and tell him you quit, thanks for the opportunity, but you need to get caught up on sleep. If you can’t overcome your emotions and discipline yourself to do what you’ve planned to do (go to work; not become a wild texting fool sending his new girlfriend heart <3 icons and cat photos),you’re going to suffer for it in the not-so-distant future (when the money stops coming in or the girlfriend runs out).
3. A Finish Line. What’s your end goal? You’d be amazed how many people absolutely CANNOT answer this about their careers, relationships, or anything else important. They just go, try stuff, have no idea where they want things to go or how they should end, and hope that everything works out okay. That’s kind of like playing a sports match or a video game or a game of chess not to win, but to “see how it goes,” or like getting on an airplane without knowing what you’re going to do when you get wherever it is you’re going. Romantic? Yes, sure. Adventurous? Absolutely. Successful long-term strategy? Only if you’re very, very lucky, and most people are not very, very lucky. You need to know where you’re going if you ever hope to get there.

That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy your relationships, of course. You certainly can.

All it means is that if you want a healthy relationship that goes the way you’d really love it to, you’re going to need to do a little more than just follow your heart and trust in destiny.

How to Start a Relationship: The Game Plan

To properly kick off a new relationship, you need to understand a few basic relationship principles:

• Women want to date men they respect as leaders and who treat them as equals, but NOT men who white knight or put women on pedestals.
• Women quickly become disillusioned, and eventually disgusted, with men who are more in love with them or more invested in the relationship than they are
• The relationship investment patterns you set during the first 90 days you will be expected to keep up indefinitely; any reduced investment later on will lead to your girlfriend feeling as if “things aren’t the way they used to be” or that you “don’t love her as much anymore”

These in mind, let’s look at all the things you should do in the first 90 days if you want to have the BEST possible relationship later on down the line.

Note: I’m certain people will protest in the comments and say, “But I want to do X,” or, “But I really like doing Y!” And that’s great; if the most important thing to you is satisfying your immediate emotions, do that. If the most important thing to you is having the best relationship possible for yourself later on down the line, do this instead. I’m not forcing anybody to do anything here; I’m simply arming you with the strategy to succeed at building an amazing relationship, if you so choose.

#1: Act Slightly Warmer After First Sex, But Otherwise the Same

After you sleep with her for the first time, a girl’s going to be uncertain what you want, how you’re going to react, or what she should do with you. There are three standard male archetypes women run into most of the time after first sex:

1. The Cold Party Guy. The Cold Party Guy loses interest in a girl immediately after sleeping with her. The very fact that she slept with him means she probably sleeps with lots of guys, he figures; only easy girls sleep with him. So, he acts cold and even rude to her after sex, makes her feel bad about having slept with him, and leads her often into feeling buyer’s remorse (unless she’s very experienced with men).
2. The Awkward Guy. This is the guy who isn’t quite sure how to act around a woman he’s just been intimate with, so he tries to control his emotions and ends up coming across awkward and a little bit off. He might be feeling more like the Cold Party Guy and want to kick her out but he doesn’t want to be cold so he awkwardly makes insincere faux “warm” gestures, or he might be feeling more like the Romantic Guy and want to profess his undying love to her but doesn’t want to come across as overmuch and so tries to tamp down his enthusiasm, and it comes across awkwardly. Women feel uncomfortable with this guy, but will sometimes see him again if they are very confident and know what they want and prefer inexperienced partners (who tend to be somewhat easier to manage in relationships).
3. The Romantic Guy. The Romantic Guy is the guy who’s decided that now that this girl and he have consummated their passion, they are now in a swirling whirlwind romance that no doubt will lead directly to the altar and a life bound together forever. If this guy is very confident and charming, his romantic courting of her can sometimes be sweet; the rest of the time, it freaks most women out (or vaguely unsettles them if they also had romantic feelings, though they aren’t sure why).

There’s one thing that the vast majority of men NEVER do though, and that is both very surprising and very reassuring to women: act exactly the same, plus a little bit more warmth.

That’s right: if you’re the SAME guy she wanted to sleep with AFTER she sleeps with you, well… that means you continue being the guy she wanted to sleep with. And that’s good! She decided to sleep with you for a reason – there’s no reason for you to change things up just because the two of you did sleep together.

You can add a dash more warmth – a little bit of a warmer smile, a bit warmer voice tone. But don’t change too much. If you don’t want her revisiting her decision to go to bed with you and racking her brain to take in this new data and decide if sleeping with you really was the right thing to do, don’t give her new data to go over; just keep being the same guy you were with her before.

#2: Text a Girl Something Pleasant 3 to 6 Hours After First Sex

That is, text her something nice like:

“Had a great time last night, Heather. Hope you’re not too tired for work today ;)”

… simply to reassure her that, no, it wasn’t an act and you were just pretending not to be cold or pretending that you weren’t obsessed with her but you are. This text is a means of telling her that you are still cool, calm, and like her in a relaxed, low pressure way even post-intimacy, even once she’s gone.

You’ll tend to get a very cheery reply from almost all women in response to this. Unless you’re being directly asked a question, no need to reply; don’t get into a text conversation, or ask her what she wants to do or when she wants to see you again. You can do that tomorrow.

For now, she needs to cement the impression in her mind of you as a (very rare) man who retains his composure after sex, and (unlike with almost every other man out there) what she signed up for when she went to bed with you was exactly what she got.

#3: Don’t See Her Too Often, at Least at First

If you like her, your emotions may be bursting through the door, but you’re going to need to stay those emotions and refrain from spending every day with this girl at first.

There are three reasons for this:

• You set the pace for relationship progression this way. If you want a relationship to move very fast, see a girl very often. If you don’t, don’t. Mind you, relationships moving fast don’t only move fast to where you want them to move, then stop; they also move fast to where the girlwants them to go. So if your objective is, “Date this girl for a while, then figure out what I want,” (which it shouldn’t ever be, but we’ll cover that below) and hers is, “Get married and have six kids,” she’s going to expect things to continue rapidly on course the way they have been toward what she sees as the eventual aim of the relationship.
• You communicate strong romantic desires and set expectations. A man who’s willing to move fast in a relationship with a woman communicates to her that he’s very interested in her and likely wants the same things she does: a long term relationship aimed squarely at marriage, commitment, and scads of little ones running around drawing on the walls with Crayons. If that isn’t what you want, this sets the wrong expectations, which means big trouble for you down the road.
• You also set expectations for how often you’ll see each other. Will you still want to see this girl every single day three years from now? If not, be careful what patterns and expectations you set early on, because you’ll be expected to uphold these. Whatever you do early in a relationship, you commit yourself to doing for the life of that relationship.

Therefore, because you while you may know exactly what you want right now, you don’t really know what you want three or five or ten years from now, and I strongly recommend you to use great care in how often you see her and how quickly you let things move early on.

The general recommendation for how often to see a girl during the first 90 days of your relationship is:

• 1 day a week maximum for a casual / open relationship
• 2 or 3 days a week maximum for a romantic / committed relationship

There’s another reason for keeping the number of days you see a girl reduced in the early stage of the relationship, too: it allows you to increase days later, and communicate to her that the relationship is making progress. You need to give women feelings of continual relationship growth throughout the course of your relationship, and this is another way to do that.

#4: Know Your Purpose for the Relationship

You may not realistically be able to do this in your first couple of relationships, because you won’t have much relationship experience yet and won’t really know what you want. And that’s okay. You can view those relationships as learning experiences, and you can follow your heart with them and indulge in your emotions if you like.

Once you’re serious about building amazing relationships though, you absolutely, positively, no two ways about it need to do this. You can’t get out of it.

You must know what your goal for the relationship is.

You know what most guys’ goals for relationships are? They don’t have one. So they end up in these relationships where the whole purpose of the relationship is to get to some point that feels emotionally good to them, and then just KEEP things there, forever. The problem is, what feels emotionally good in a relationship for a man, and what feels emotionally good in a relationship for a woman are two different things.

And that means that the men who focus on trying to keep their relationships in the “stasis” where they feel most comfortable and not have things change end up in direct opposition to their women, who are trying to push things forward and achieve their own relationship goals. This is a recipe for disaster, and it’s why most relationships fail horribly.

What’s the solution to this quagmire? Know your purpose.

Why are you in a relationship, and what’s the end goal? Is it:

• To get more experience having relationships and learn what it’s like to date?
• To get more experience having a relationship with a particular kind of girl (e.g., a really beautiful girl)?
• Is it just to have a casual sex partner?
• Is it to get married?
• Is it to have kids?
• Is it just to have someone to talk to?
• Is it for emotional support?

What’s the purpose? I guarantee you you have one… although if you’re like most men, you don’t really have any idea what that purpose is. You need to understand your purpose, understand its implications for your relationship, and plan things accordingly.

For most men, most of the time, the purpose of most relationships seems to be “have a friend and companion I’m comfortable being around, who doesn’t pressure me, and we can have sex.”

If that’s your purpose, like it is for most Western men these days, you need to understand that a woman will be content in this “relationship stasis” only temporarily, but you won’t be able to hold her there. At best, you’ll keep her with you in stasis until the 2 year drop; at worst, you’ll lose her a heck of a lot earlier.

You have two courses for directing your relationship:

• Refuse to give your girlfriend what she wants and needs, and accept the relationship will end at some point. If she wants to move in together, see you more often, go on vacations together, get married, have children, etc., and you don’t want that with her, then accept that at some point the relationship is naturally going to end, because you will no longer be meeting her needs. This is fine and natural; it will only end poorly if you try holding onto her when she tries to leave but still won’t give her what she wants.
• Accept to give your girlfriend what she wants and needs, and the relationship will likely continue on. This doesn’t mean you capitulate to every whim and fancy she has, of course; if she tells you she’d really like to go hunt mountain lions with you and you’re morally opposed to hunting mountain lions, this probably won’t break your relationship. But you will need to give her what she needs to continue the relationship; and you’re fine giving these to her, so long as you either do so on your own terms, or she understands that whatever it is she’s getting from you is something you don’t care much about (e.g., if you don’t care either way about marriage and just see it as signing a contract, then she can ask you for marriage and you can say, “Sure, if you want that,” and it’s neither a capitulation on your part nor a big deal).

Either of these are fine, but you must choose one: give her what she needs, or don’t give her what she needs. If you take the “normal” route of not wanting to give her what she needs but trying to hang onto her in a relationship that has failed her, you’ll cause her pain, distress, and eventually force her into a corner where she breaks up with you unilaterally or cheats on you to force a decision out of you (as discussed in “How to Prevent Cheating by Your Girlfriend“). If you don’t want this to happen, don’t box her into that corner; give her what she needs, or let her go when she needs you to.

#5: Don’t Frontload the Excitement in the Relationship

When I was young and inexperienced with relationships, I figured that the best way to make sure a girl wanted to stay with me was to provide as much excitement and fun in the relationship as I possibly could. So, I’d take girls to nightclubs, parties with friends, dinners at really nice and fancy restaurants, out to movies, on exotic vacations, and to interesting nooks and crannies around town. We’d go to the beach, to the desert, to the forest; we’d go hiking, boating, the works.

And while I enjoyed this too, I soon learned that it set an expectation that for the rest of the relationship I was obligated to continue doing things like this at the same pace I set out doing them, or run into the “we used to do so many wonderful things together” problem.

See, the thing is, this will happen for you with women: they will take their emotions for you, and give all the reasons you give them as the reasons for why they like you.

So, if you’re an attractive guy who’s great to talk to and good in bed, and you take girls to nightclubs, parties, dinners, movies, vacations, and adventures, then girls will love you because:

• You’re attractive
• You’re great to talk to
• You’re good in bed
• You take them to nightclubs
• You take them to parties
• You take them to dinners
• You take them to movies
• You take them on vacations
• You take them on adventures

If you ever fall on hard times though and don’t have the time or the money for those things, or you get tired of doing them, or you burn yourself out… and you stop doing those things… a girl will say to herself, “He doesn’t do all those things with me that he used to do… this relationship isn’t as good now as it used to be, and he isn’t as excited about me as he used to be.”

If on the other hand you’re an attractive guy who’s great to talk to and good in bed, and you never do anything with your girlfriend, she will feel almost or exactly the same degree of emotions she’d feel for you if you did those other things, except that it will be tied to comparably fewer aspects of “you” and “your relationship”:

• You’re attractive
• You’re great to talk to
• You’re good in bed

If you never take a girl to nightclubs, parties, dinners, movies, vacations, or adventure during the early stage of your relationship, you never have to do them or not do them later and have her think to herself, “Things aren’t like they used to be.”

Instead, you can actually do them far less than you’d like to do them at first…and let yourself gradually begin doing them more as the relationship progresses. This will give her a feel of progress in the relationship… instead of a feeling of decline.

These days for me, I don’t do anything with women I’m newly dating other than have them come over to my apartment, talk, maybe watch a movie, maybe eat some dinner there, and have sex. That’s it. No movies, no restaurants, no parties… nothing.

But that’s so un-fun! you might say. Well, my goal isn’t to maximize my fun; my goal is to start a relationship that’s going to be very healthy and strong later, and give me the maximum amount of flexibility to go out or not go out with my girl as I choose to.

There are two “lines” you’ll cross at which you can ramp things up in a relationship:

• The 90-day mark
• The 2-year mark

The first 90 days (or 3 months) are the passionate height of a relationship, when everything is new and she’s still figuring out who you are and what she can expect with you. It’s very important that you give her nothing but the most core aspects of who you are to attach her feelings to. You don’t want her attaching her feelings to anything you won’t always be able to provide with ease later on (like: money, dinners, movies, parties, etc.), whether because of your financial situation, because of the amount of free time you have, or anything else that can change suddenly when you least expect it to.

After the first 90 days are over, you can ramp things up somewhat, and she’ll attribute less of her feelings for you to these than she would have had you done them from the start.

After the 2-year mark is when you can really ramp things up and not suffer much if you need to ramp them down or change courses later. e.g., if you only go out to dinner five or six times during your first two years together, you can start going out once or twice a week after two years, and then go back to never going out after three or four years, and it won’t affect your relationship much. If you go out to dinner once or twice a week from the start, and try to quit going out to dinner a year or two into the relationship, you’ll cause your girlfriend to assume you like her less and feel that the relationship has gone into decline.

Do the opposite of what most men do, and give women less at the start of a relationship and more later on in that relationship.

This also extends to things like texting (don’t text her all day… in fact, don’t even text her EVERY day) and phone calls (only talk to her for 40 minutes on the phone every night at the start of your relationship if you want to talk to her for 40 minutes on the phone every night for the REST OF YOUR LIFE together [presuming you remain together long-term, of course]). Set the a minimal tone early, and you give yourself the freedom to make it whatever you want later. Set a maximal tone early, and you’ve locked yourself into that and stripped away the ability to choose from your future self.

#6: Date the Right Girl

There are a handful of articles on this site that deal with how to get a girlfriend who’s the right match for what you’re looking for. These are:

• Choosing the Right Qualities in a Woman
• Find the Right Girl: What to Look for in a Potential Girlfriend

What I find a lot of men do is they fall into these relationships with women who aren’t the right match for them, and it’s a disaster because they’re constantly on the fence. They’re with the girl only because they lack an abundance mentality sufficiently solid enough to allow them to walk away from a girlfriend who isn’t everything they want, but they aren’t comfortable giving her what she wants because she isn’t really what they want.

It’s not a good place to be.

For those reasons, I recommend never taking on a girlfriend who isn’t exactly what you want and whom you can’t feel excited about having as your girlfriend.

You can have casual partners, sure; but you must date multiple women while doing this to avoid ending up in a relationship by default. That’s where you have a girl who originally wasn’t “good enough” to be your girlfriend, but seeing her casually over a period of time, eventually you get complacent while seeing her, you stop going out much to meet new women, and a scarcity mindset sets in… and suddenly, this girl who wasn’t good enough to date full-on before you’re now afraid of losing.

This also happens to men dating multiple women (so that’s not surefire protection), but generally not until they start hitting the age at which they lose interest in picking up much or start wanting to settle down.

To not end up in a relationship that you don’t really want but are afraid to let go of, simply don’t date women you aren’t excited about. It’s that simple. Look for love at first sight if you need a metric to go off of… when you feel it, there’s a girl you’ll be happy having as a long term girlfriend you can commit yourself to in a relationship.

Every girlfriend I’ve ever had was a girl I thought, “Wow!” about when I first saw her, and my heart started beating fast, and I got uncharacteristically nervous. And every one of my relationships has been great, probably because of that. This is one of the times I’d tell you to always listen to your emotions; never date a girl you don’t get that feeling about.

#7: Even If She’s Perfect… Keep Your Options Open

We’ve discussed this before on here, but women – even women in committed relationships – have men approaching them all the time, and have options with men at all times because of that. Most men – even very attractive ones – don’t get approached by women much, if at all, and thus, when they enter into committed relationships and stop meeting new women, their abundance mindsets gradually recede, and their confidence in their abilities to find a replacement partner or partners for their current girl gradually disappear.

The relationship is led by the partner who is more confident of being able to find an equal or better replacement partner; if that’s you, you’ll be in charge, you’ll be happy, and, provided you’re taking good care of her in the relationship, so will your woman be. If it’s her though, she’ll become disinterested and somewhat disgusted at dating a weaker man.

As relationships progress, a power shift generally takes place as the man loses certainty in his ability to find a replacement partner, and the woman’s remains steady. It isn’t the woman who changes here; it’s the man. But the woman’s attitude toward the man changes as he does: she begins to respect him less, and tests him for weakness and pushes the limits with him more.

As soon as the woman in your life knows that you CAN’T leave her, but she CAN leave you, your goose is cooked.

She can order you around or be rude to you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

She can treat you like a second-rate citizen, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

She can cheat on you with a manlier man, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

You need to keep your options open, enough so that you maintain an abundance mindset. There are several ways of going about this, including:

• Actually dating and sleeping with other women (of quality equal to or superior to your girlfriend’s, optimally)
• Continuing to pick up and bring interactions close to sex, but aborting the pick up just before you’d have sex with the girl (enough so that you constantly reassure yourself that yes, you have the ability, whenever and wherever you want it)
• Having some other place you want to move to in the world that will give you a fresh start with women you’d like to date (e.g., NOT the same city where you live with her now). This might be another city with women you’ve always wanted to date (California girls if you live on the East Coast of the U.S., for instance, or Melbourne girls if you’re living in Sydney), or it might be another part of the world (scintillating Latinas, pouty Eastern European girls, cute Asian girls, sultry African girls).Why not your own city? Because after too long of not meeting new women in your city, your mind begins to assume that you’ve got the best girl you’re going to find in that town. It isn’t right, of course; but it doesn’t know that, and it won’t believe you if you try to tell it that. So thinking that you’re going to date other girls in town doesn’t help with having an abundance mindset when you need it; you need to be thinking somewhere else… a new adventure, with lusty new women. And it needs to be somewhere with some women you’re excited about.

If you’re able to keep your options open, you’ll retain your ability to walk away, which paradoxically makes you better able to maintain strength and thus attraction and respect inside your relationships.

Being able to leave means you’re better able to stay, and better able to keep things healthy and strong.

Starting Off on the Right Foot

This stuff isn’t easy, but it’s not the hardest in the world to do, either.Essentially, you’ve just got to be able to say, “I know I want this emotionally right now, but I need to do this instead so that I and my girl will be happier tomorrow.”

Then do these:

1. Act Slightly Warmer After First Sex, But Otherwise the Same
2. Text a Girl Something Pleasant 3 to 6 Hours After First Sex
3. Don’t See Her Too Often, at Least at First
4. Know Your Purpose for the Relationship
5. Don’t Frontload the Excitement in the Relationship
6. Date the Right Girl
7. Even If She’s Perfect… Keep Your Options Open

They’ll allow you to start a relationship out strongly, and set it up for continued success, and a very rewarding experience. All you need to do is plan for the future a little bit, and be a bit more ant than you are grasshopper.

If you’re able to follow these tips, you’ll have many happy relationships to come – or maybe just one, and it simply won’t end. If that’s what you want, of course!

(via Girls Chase)