Relationship Game Week

Around the four month mark you’re going to start taking your girlfriend on weekend trips, unless you are a beta, in which case you will be planning romantic weekends before you’ve even kissed her. Romantic (read: nonstop bedroom pounding) getaways include bed and breakfasts in the mountains, oceanview hotels or beach house rentals, horseback riding, ski chalets, quaint cottages in Tuscany (if you’ve got discretionary cash and you like her so much that you don’t mind wasting a trip to Italy on her instead of pursuing the local Italian women), and camping if she’s the outdoorsy type.

After your first romantic weekend, give her at least two days space once you’ve returned home. That means don’t call her. The reason for this has to do with a fundamental difference between men and women in how we perceive romantic gestures. To men, a romantic weekend away is an opportunity to share uninterrupted pleasure with a chick to whom we have deemed worthy enough to devote an entire weekend. Men value romantic weekends based on the pleasurable benefits we anticipate for ourselves, in order from most eagerly anticipated to least: Sex, affection, low stress, and good dining. The “relationship” and “where it is heading” comes in a distant tenth, right after rejoicing that we came in under budget.

To women, a romantic weekend away, particularly the first romantic weekend with a new lover, is only peripherally about pleasure. Everything in a woman’s life must have a “deeper meaning”, and this goes double for a romantic getaway with her boyfriend. Since women are more practical than men, they cannot live in the now as easily as men do, and are always contemplating the future. This is because pregnancy and kids are never far from a woman’s subconscious thoughts, so every experience can’t just be enjoyed on its own; it has to be dissected and analyzed to determine the man’s fit into the larger picture of house, husband, children, divorce theft bonanza.

A woman’s emotions will be turbulent after a heady romantic weekend together. If you had a good time, she will need a couple of days to process the weekend, and your place in her life. The hamster in her head will be running itself to death. It’s best to stay clear of her during this time, which usually lasts a couple days (add a few days if she’s PMSing), so that she can complete the transition from emotional entropy to steady state equilibrium without your presence and your words potentially fucking up the transition for the worse. I recommend playing it safe and avoiding all contact with her until her emotions have calmed.

If you call her right after the romantic weekend, you might be surprised to find she doesn’t pick up her phone or, if she does, she sounds weird and snippish. Don’t let this throw you; it’s just her brain settling down after you powerfully jostled it from its humdrum routine. Calling too soon means you risk getting ensnared in her confusion. But by waiting a couple days to make your post romantic weekend followup call, you’ll find she has returned to normal and is happier than ever to hear from you.

Remember, a woman in emotional upheaval is not sparring you, she is sparring herself. The best thing you can do is step the fuck aside and let her come to peace with her overworked head hamster. She’ll either convince herself she loves you even more than she thought she did, or she’ll freak out and leave the country. Either way, you’ve saved yourself some unnecessary bullshit.