relationship management, Uncategorized 
No Comments The Basics of Relationship Management
Relationship management is a crucial topic to improve your long-term success with women – unless all you want out of your relationships with women is drama and one night stands.
Relationship management encompasses everything you do after you sleep with someone, but, like many phases earlier in the model, your success is dependent on the groundwork you’d laid earlier. Just as what you did in comfort influences your chances in seduction, what you did in qualification, comfort, and seduction influence what will be possible in relationship management.
And a lot is possible. Anything from a long-term committed relationship to dating multiple women to friends with benefits; it’s all possible if you have the skills and know what to do. Much of what is regarded today as obvious was once highly controversial before I came along. For example:
-You literally never have to lie to get what you want, even if you want to date more than one woman at a time.
-99% of all relationships fall into six major categories. Which pattern your relationship falls into determines where you can go with it.
-Relationship management begins before you even sleep with her the first time.
You have many relationships in your life. You have a professional relationship with your boss, you have a fraternal relationship with your brother, and you probably have a dating or a “friends with benefits” relationship with at least one woman in your life.
So, when we talk about relationships and relationship management, we are assuming that you and a woman are boyfriend-girlfriend. Relationship management refers to the frame in which you and a woman are interacting.
Relationship management begins well before you sleep with her, but most of the important work comes after. Commonly, men only start thinking about relationship management after sex is over: “I slept with her; what do I do now?” It’s a rookie mistake to leave it so long, because a little bit of work to set the frame during comfort goes a long way afterward. But we’ll cover this later.
For now, let’s start by looking at some of the basic relationship types:
Traditional: One boy, one girl, no one dates anyone else.
Traditional Plus: Like traditional, but sometimes you involve other people in your sex life (not your emotional life). Usually this is when both you and her enjoy threesomes with other women.
Open: Your primary emotional commitment is to each other, but you are both free to date other people. Open relationships vary in intensity: some are much like Traditional Plus relationships while others are far more casual.
Multiple: You have a strong commitment to each other, but nothing theoretically limits what you can do with others.
Dating / Undefined: The rules of what you’re doing and where you’re going are unclear, but there is no explicit commitment. Often early in your relationship and usually the case before you sleep together.
Friends with Benefits: No significant emotional commitment. Relationship is primarily sexual.
As you can probably see, these relationship types are ranked in decreasing order of commitment. Drilling down, we see that there are pretty clear distinctions between the types, in which you are #1 to each other, the middle two, in which this may be more ambiguous, and the lower two, in which there should be no expectations at all. For simplicity’s sake, we will call these three groups High Commitment, Medium Commitment, and Low Commitment.
What you seek is a matter of preference. There is nothing inherently superior about one relationship goal over another. It depends on your desires, her desires, where you are in your life, and all kinds of other factors.
That being said, many of you are going to skip straight to the Multiple Relationships section. That’s fine if that’s what you truly want. But pause for a second and truly consider things. Don’t just want something because it feels socially impressive or some of the top Pickup Artists in the world want it. It’s a lot more work than it seems. Many of the top names in the “Seduction Community” have never pulled this off successfully, despite their marketing propaganda.
Whatever your relationship goals, there are some key points to keep in mind:
The type of relationship you have with a woman can and usually will change over time. In general, it’s easiest to move within a given Commitment level (from “Multiple” to “Open” Relationship or from “Dating/Undefined” to “Friends with Benefits” for example). Moving between Commitment levels is much harder. You can sometimes move up, but rarely down. Moving down usually requires a breakup first, and a period of no relationship. After that, you can try to re-establish a relationship, but often all you will be able to get is Friends with Benefits. This happens between ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends more than many people think.
While you can get away with trying to move to your desired relationship type after you’ve already had sex with her, this compromises your effectiveness in a couple of ways. For one thing, if she gets the sense that you don’t have much of an idea about what it is that you want, this could turn her off and you’ll never get to sex in the first place. In addition, you will be far more effective at bringing her to your desired relationship type if you are able to implicitly set the right expectations in advance. It’s not like she won’t think about it just because you’re not giving her anything to go on. She’ll think about it anyway, and she’ll let her conclusions be driven by her own assumptions and preferences. These will be a lot harder to change later.
It’s a cliche, but communication is key to a relationship. It’s not enough to act like you’re in a specific kind of relationship with someone; it must be communicated and agreed on by both of you, whether explicitly or implicitly. Again, playing the “ambiguity game” won’t help you much. Women want to know what’s going on. If you don’t make an effort to communicate this somehow, even indirectly, she’ll try to interpret (or end up misinterpreting) what you do communicate and you may well end up with differing ideas about where your relationship is going. Do I need to tell you that this is a bad idea?
