It’s no hard sell to convince most people of the benefits of long term relationships. The intimacy, the shared experiences, the knowing winks and nods in crowded rooms, the quasi-telepathic unspoken understanding, and the cosmically unfathomable depth of love that seems to stop time — there is no better feeling in the world than sex with a woman you love who loves you back with equal fervor. The moment you slip into your lover and simultaneously lock eyes with her is an unparalleled intensity of pleasure that no one night stand, fling or fuck buddy, however passionate, can match.
But it is not an unalloyed good. With the tremendous good comes the risk of treacherous bad, always conniving and usurping to corrode your love and the presumed impregnable strength of your relationship. You must be on guard against these foul subverters at all times if you want to avoid the saddest fate of avoidable heartbreak.
LTRs will make you and her fat and lazy.
The same feeling of comfort and contentment that long term relationships gives to lovers mischievously robs them of the things that helped bring them together in the first place. Satisfaction quickly morphs into self-satisfaction, and the double-edged sword of comfortable monogamy turns its poison-dipped blade on its wielders. Food becomes central to your shared life, sustenance for the heart as well as the body. The powerfully endorphic love you share blinds both of you to encroaching dilapidation — a few pounds here, an aloof demurral to exercise there, an apathetic dismissal of a suggestion for a night on the town — and pretty soon she’s getting fat and sloppy and you’re getting boring. Your dick shrivels, her pussy desiccates. Soon, even the love follows the same tragic descent.
Prevention is simple, if laborious. Mentally frame any relationship as a continual process of falling in love, and every night together as a first date. This will, of course, be easier to do if you have inspiration. Such inspiration comes primarily in the form of your girl keeping herself as hot as she was when she passively wooed you that night you approached her. A woman, as the sex naturally inclined to embracing the herd mentality, will quickly fall in line with a stringent exercise and eating program if you make yourself an example to her. You do this not only by flaunting your self-discipline and your masculine physique, but by allowing other women to flirt with you and to engage the women around you with a charming effrontery that dances along the line between seductive impudence and naive chatter. Pepper conversations with subtle references to your exercise progress and the high you get from feeling and looking so good. Don’t be afraid to be a little cocky.
As the man, you have to lead in this department. If you let yourself go, physically and mentally, she will either follow suit or she will lap you around the race track, in preparation for the day, coming soon, when she cheats on you or leaves you for the man worthy of her 0.7 waist-hip ratio and 21 BMI. Either result is death for the LTR that means anything. You stop wanting to have sex with her or she stops wanting to have sex with you.
LTRs make Jack and Jill dull lovers.
Creativity is the KY that lubes the limbic system. You remember how clever you sounded when you started dating her, and how much effort she put into dressing sexily and acting womanly? The things in our control that make us sexy are a function of our creativity. Over time, your cleverness atrophies from disuse, and her careful consideration of dress and feminine manners dissipates. You become a machine beeping trivialities and trite observations, and she becomes a billowy sweatshirt-wearing task master. You and her are in love, and love eventually subdues the pressure to impress.
A little bit of pressure keeps a relationship fun and fueled on its own momentum. Stay desirable to women besides your lover, and she will be sure to keep herself maximally attractive to you. Don’t fall into dispiriting patterns like taking vacation in the same locales, eating at the same restaurants, buying the same styles year in and year out, gossiping about the same bullshit that 7 billion other dullards gossip about. Again, as the man, you must lead here. Start with the sex. Instead of the usual routine kiss on the cheek when you come home from work, sidle up behind her when she’s in the kitchen, hike her skirt and fuck her from behind. Fuck her in the park. Fuck her on a boat. Fuck her at the top of a ferris wheel. One night of crazy fucking like this is worth ten years of couples therapy.
LTRs will make you and her codependent.
The lament is universal, a staple of sitcoms. “I don’t see my buddy anymore now that he’s got the ol’ ball and chain.” Love is dangerous in one important respect — it will divert a man from his mission(s) in life. His attention now solely focused on his lover, the hobbies, ambitions, social circle and side projects that made him so attractive to her begin to wither under the onslaught of the time-consuming LTR. Like a centrifuge, his self-made identity spins and jettisons away from him, to be replaced by the newly forged identity within the LTR.
Now you can’t do anything without her, and she you. In the beginning, this is a necessary process to build the level of trust and bonding that distinguishes the LTR from any run of the mill fling. But it morphs into a hermetic pair-bond cocoon, a soft escapable prison that shields from the outside world more than it protects. Increasingly consanguineous, the LTR alienates friends and slackens ambitions.
You will have to learn to make time for friends or hobbies in a way you never did as a single man, when friends just appeared and stuff happened. Try to recapture the spontaneity of the single life, and don’t sweat it when your lover wants to do the same with her own friends. Time apart with separate social groups, doing different things, is a battle cry asserting individuality and independence. A woman as much admires and desires the independent man as she fears and envies him. You will never see a brighter twinkle in a lover’s eyes than when, coming home from a night out with your buddies, you regale her with tales of manly impropriety, but then, just when her heartbeat has reached a fevered cadence, you offhandedly muse that you thought about her during the night.
LTRs are monogamous.
Monogamy. The word rouses yearning and trepidation in the male mind at once. A romantic blessing! Or is it a prison? Back and forth it goes, until the typical man resolves the issue by refusing to choose, allowing the choice to be made for him by dwindling options and headstrong harpies.
There is no doubt that men are programmed down to the cilia in their cells to desire sex with a multiplicity of attractive, fertile women. Variety is the spice of life, spread the seed, hogamus higamus etc. Some men have stronger urges to variety than other men, but in all men it is there in lesser or greater degree. The LTR, filled with the bounty of love, nevertheless thwarts a man’s genetic script to seed the wombs of many seed-able women.
For men with low compunction to promiscuity (provider betas), the monogamous relationship is a sweetheart deal: they give up something they weren’t all that gung-ho to pursue anyhow, for something that brings them much joy. Men with a raging libido and a wandering eye (caddish alphas) more or less suffer indignities under the LTR regime, and their predatory lust must be either squelched or sated, the former apt to inflict psychological and testicular distress while the latter a sure destruction of the intimate love that cannot tolerate infidelity except in the most feral societies.
The problem, all too familiar to readers of this blog, arises from the fact that the LTR-pursuing betas are less likely to tingle the ginas of LTR-loving women than the lustful alphas who must be dragged kicking and screaming into monogamous obligation. What a cruel joke nature has played on us all! To tempt men and women with a prize they both want, but to establish a set of playing rules that subverts the very prize to be won, and handicaps the players most invested in the game.
Many PUAs and gurus claim that this circle can be squared; that is, that the skilled seducer can have his cake and eat it, too. He can enjoy the love expressed in an LTR while getting some action on the side.
I have heard these stories, and even seen it play out in real life. But my opinion remains negative on the enterprise. For the overwhelmingly majority of men, from high to low station, game to gameless, it is an unrealistic and mostly unattainable trick to lock in a lover for the long haul while openly satisfying his sexual need for variety. Sooner or later, it will come to a head; the LTR will evaporate into divorce or loveless airs as the repeated insult of open infidelity scours his lover’s emotional bond, or the mistresses will remain discreet behind a wall of lies and resigned toleration by the put-upon woman, the way the French do it.
Naturally, the more alpha a man is, the greater his chances to pull off this pseudo-polygamous hat trick, owing primarily to the fact that women are quicker to forgive the vices of an alpha lover than a beta lover. But even alpha has its limits, and a woman who was once enthralled by her lover’s sexy but risky enticements will someday age both psychologically and chronologically, lose her estrogenic steam, and collapse under the weight of the betrayals. A man can love more than one woman at once, but a woman cannot love more than one man at once. She, at best, can only sex more than one man concurrently. She, ultimately, finds the fullness of her love manifest in the singular, unshared love of one man to whom she is faithfully devoted.
And so for this last part I have no answer. You, as a man, will have to choose what is more important to you: transcendent, unpolluted love, or visceral sexual pleasure. You may attempt to hide your mistresses, and that may work for a while, but it may also not work, and you will have to live with the little lies of omission for as long as you and your lover are together. Some men, particularly the ones most desired by women, are devoid of the moral sense, or sustain a cartoonish, wilted version of it, and can live side by side with lies and not give it a moment’s doubt or self-reflection.
You can also try your hand at an open relationship, wherein your lover knows you seek novel pussy on the side and you, presumably, allow her to do the same with novel cock. But realistically, most men will not be able to abide a lover’s infidelity, no matter how contractually agreed upon. The thought alone of a girlfriend or wife fucking another man, however many mistresses that man himself may indulge, will drive him to a fever. Men by nature and given a free choice would collect concubines and prefer those lovers guarded by eunuchs, not by virile male competitors.
Finally, there is the long shot of the one-way open relationship, aka the royal harem. She remains sexually and emotionally loyal to you, while you get to screw around whenever the feeling hits you. No lies, no subterfuge; everything is out in the open. In my experience, this can be done if your game is incredibly tight, BUT…
It won’t work forever. It won’t even work for a year. A few months is closer to the reality, and odds are it will end in a huge flame-out rather than a genial handshake. Some top PUAs love to crow about their ability to tie down girls into one-way open LTRs, and I have no reason to speculate about their honesty, but I do doubt many of these master seducers are pulling anything like this for more than a few months at a time. (Exceptions exist, but seriously, how long did Stephane Hemon’s threesome LTR last?) Women are certainly capable of swooning unreasonably for a truly charismatic alpha male, and agreeing to arrangements against their interests which in regards to any lesser man would strike women as laughable propositions, but to play kept woman in a real harem rather than a de facto harem shrouded in the mists of plausible deniability, exciting and drama-fueled as it is, is a contrivance guaranteed to end badly when the intoxication of labial lust wears off.
No matter how hot, young and vivacious your LTR lover is, your eye will someday wander, because it is in your nature as a man to want to fuck every sweet piece of ass who crosses your line of vision. To accommodate this visceral desire, you can abdicate the pursuit of LTRs and stay a single poon hound, you can enjoy an LTR while shooting for strange under cover of night, or you can make peace with your urges and learn to abide them unsatisfied as part of the LTR deal. Many men — most men, in fact — accept the latter, and do so without too much regret. The trade-offs, it seems, are worth it.
The choice is less a moral one than a practical one, inasmuch as animal desires supposedly bequeathed us by god can’t be said to have moral underpinnings. What do you prioritize? What gives you the greatest happiness? There’s your answer.
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