The Reality Method 2.0

Relationship Arcs (and How to Control Them)

I’ve wanted to write this article for a while now, but couldn’t seem to get started until I was midway through writing Social Energy in Seduction. In that post, I wrote:

In fact, if you want a good relationship to last, that’s the key, right there: the relationship ac needs to not be a static unchanging line (which to many people would represent “stability”), or even a parabola, but instead a series of peaks and valleys, representing the buildup and subsequent dissipation of energy….over and over and over and over and over again.

That one paragraph was the hook I needed to finally flesh out this concept I’ve been meaning to address for so long: Relationship Arcs, and how you can manage them better to get the outcomes you want.

The 3 Relationships Stages
Let’s be clear; the average male-female relationship in America is composed of three distinct phases, or stages.

Stage 1. Discovery & Infatuation
This phase corresponds to your first meeting of the girl, the seduction process, and “falling in love” as many would say: the phase where you’re crazy about each other, can’t spend enough time together, the sex is great and inventive and everything is fresh and new. It’s no secret (or surprise) that this period corresponds directly with an accompanying increase in basal levels of certain neurotransmitters and metabolites in the brain. This period usually lasts between 3 weeks and 3-6 months.

Stage 2. Plateau
After 3-6 months or even a year or so, the initial “buzz” of the relationship wears off, and the couple moves on in one of two directions: either the comfort of more mature, secure attachment (corresponding to another shift in brain chemistry), or the angst-ridden discomfort of relationship stagnation. If the relationship stagnates, the couple will feel stuck in a “rut”; start arguing and fighting more, even about petty things; display unhealthy levels of jealousy; one partner may try to control the other, to the opposite effect; in sum, a general devolution of the relationship that is unpleasant and painful at most every step of the way. In comfort, the couple may get stuck in a “rut”, but it’s a pleasant rut that is acceptable to both of them.

This second stage may last just a few months, or it may last years. Usually, discomfort precipitates the end of the relationship, whereas comfort puts time on “fast forward” so that the couple wakes up several years later and thinks, “Wow, where did the time go?”

The couple’s next big challenge will come in Stage 3, where neurochemistry will give the couple a new window of opportunity.

Stage 3. Stagnation & Decline
Even if couples have moved into the secure attachment allowed for by their brain chemistry, eventually even those new, longer-term chemicals aren’t enough to satisfying their brain’s craving for novelty, adventure, and challenge. The brain, in other words, habituates to the longer-term feel good chemicals, and it does so on a rather predictable basis, giving couples distinct “windows of opportunity” during which to split up or divorce.

Researchers have found a few different statistically significant “windows of opportunity” for couples: there seems to be one at 2.5 years, 4 years, and then again at 7 years. Some also say that there’s a window at 1 year; this seems to be the case in my experience, but I think it has more to do with the significance and importance most people put on the relationship lasting “one year” than any neuerochemistry.

(As a side note, it’s been shown that introducing kids into the equation makes surviving this final phase even less likely).

Whatever the case, the fact is that couples must actively work against this inevitable decline if they wish to stay together. Relationships are a creative act, like gardening — they must be tended and nurtured or they will wither and die. Relationships of any type are not self-sustaining; romantic relationships even less so than others.

I know lots and lots of men who get into trouble because they think that, once they’ve seduced a girl and made her their girlfriend, all the “work” is done and they can just lie back and reap the fruits of their labor. This is not the case. If anything, relationships are more work than the initial seduction, because of their high-contact nature.

These three stages of the relationship can be easily visualized using a (more or less) normal distribution curve:

I’ve flattened the top, since a normal or Bell curve has a very distinct and small area under the peak, but I think you get the idea.

Avoiding the Inevitability of Stagnation
So, given the graph above, and assuming we want to avoid the stagnation that is typical of long-term relationships, what’s a guy to do?

The best seducers understand that women (and people in general) need near-constant excitement, adventure, challenge, and variety, especially in relationships. Women may talk a lot of shit about how guys “can’t commit” and are “such dogs” (meaning they sniff a lot of tail), but this is a double standard: women’s eyes are just as wandering as guys, they’re just better able to hide it, and additionally are biologically programmed to attachment (so it comes so easily to them it’s like nothing).

If a guy is smart, he will understand that, once in a “relationship”, if he wants to keep it, he will have to constantly re-seduce his woman. A smart woman will realize this too, only with an emphasis on the physical process of presenting herself in a different way so as to give her guy the illusion of sexual “variety”. There’s an old parable about the womanizer and the actress; although he loved her, he refused to marry her because he knew his womanizing ways would break her heart one day: but they had a long and happy life together because, every night, the actress would come to bed as a different woman.

That’s basically the template for a successful relationship: continual change, variety, and challenge. Here’s what it would look like visually: not the normal-distribution curve of the “typical” relationship, but more like a sine wave:

It looks like the rocky mountains because the guys are always re-seducing the girl, and that allows the relationship to peak again and again.

It’s just like sex. You do foreplay, you get her super excited, she has an orgasm, you give her a little period of rest, then get her excited and do it all over again. Repeat 6-7 times in a single night and she’s in another universe; repeat as many times as needed in a relationship and she’ll stay with you forever.

Beating Commitment Creep
In this article I talked a little about the inevitability of what I call “commitment creep”; the (apparently hard-wired) need women have to continually ratchet the relationship up just one more notch, no matter where it is:

Once you have fucked a girl for long enough, well enough, she will invariably try to progress the relationship to the “next level” of commitment — if a FB, to a FWB…if a FWB, to a LTR….if a LTR, to marriage (if married, to divorce?!)

Women will ratchet up the level of commitment in a relationship just as surely as men will ratchet up the level of physical contact leading to sex. Men are in charge of physical escalation up until sex, during which they have to put up with women putting on the brakes; then, once they’ve gotten the sex, they are in charge of putting the brakes on while the woman takes over the emotional escalation of the relationship. It has a weird sort of symmetry to it.

It’s a truism that people want what they can’t have: so if a women presents as “hard to get” and not letting a guy get her sex, of course he’s going to chase it. Some guys have chased girls for years with no results, because the girl was playing him all along; and some girls have chased guys for years in hopes of getting a more committed relationship, only to ultimately get dumped, because he was just playing her for sex all along.

Women know that, as soon as they “give in” and give up their sex, the man stands a good chance of sooner or later getting tired of them and leaving them to seek more sexual variety (unless they are very, very skilled emotionally as well as sexually). And men know that, if they “give in” and give a woman monogamy, the woman is instantly going to take a mile from their inch and try to run their lives in whatever way possible (kids, divorce, money, etc).

It’s this knife edge between vulnerability and dominion that we walk in romantic relationships; both principals have much to give up, and much to gain. On a philosophical level, I would say I think there should be a lot less fear, and a lot more risk-taking, in relationships: on a practical level, I recognize that telling people to be less fearful is sort of like telling them to be less human (and about as likely to succeed).

So, coming back to the nuts-and-bolts of relationship management, how does one “beat” this “commitment creep”? Well, to beat it you have to understand it: and commitment creep relies on something called a “DTR talk” — DTR for Defining The Relationship.

Basically, the DTR is the talk you and your girl have after you’ve been hanging out / making out / having sex for a while, and finally one of you cracks (usually her, if you’re doing this right) and says “So….what exactly ARE we?” Or, “What do you want from me?”

I hear stories of guys doing the DTR, and I just cringe. A guy should never, ever start a DTR talk with a question — not only is it unmasculine, but it places all the power in the woman’s hands — in even asking the question, you are tacitly acknowledging that she gets to decide “what” the relationship status is. Bad. Ideally, it is a joint decision, and in practicality, it’s usually really your decision, as the more dominant partner in the relationship.

So, assuming you avoid this pitfall and simply wait until your girl tries to DTR, the procedure is simple: just refuse to DTR at all. I don’t mean stonewall: I mean actually refrain from putting any labels on the relationship:

“I don’t know what we are.” Or “I don’t feel the need to define us and put us in a box.”

This will frustrate her, because in doing a DTR that is exactly what she had hoped to do, classifying and categorizing you into a box: either “fuck buddy / sex toy” or “provider / beta I can take advantage of”. Putting you and the relationship in a box allows her to brag to her girlfriends about whatever it is you have (giving her social proof and inheriting status from association with you), and also gives her a mental construct to use to think about the relationship that sets up expectations: Well, now that he’s my boyfriend, he should really be doing X and Y, and also Z for me….and if he doesn’t, he’s mistreating me and I’m either going to dump him or cheat on him or do A,B,C because it’s justified.

I mean this literally. Girls think this way. Go hang out in a martini bar or shopping mall and listen to the groups of girlfriends hanging out together and gossiping. They say this shit to each other.

So in the modern world, one of the best ways to keep your “girlfriend” faithful is to say “I like you today, I want to see you tomorrow”.

Refuse to DTR and she’ll stay interested and stay striving, constantly re-discovering your relationship and what it could be.