Relationship Maintenance Game

There’s no question women need occasional reassurances from the men in their lives that they are

a. still attractive
b. still attractive compared to Jenna down the block
c. still attractive to that guy who lives with them

Reassuring women amounts to assuaging their fear that their looks are fading or that they can’t aesthetically compete with prettier women.

(Reassuring a man is mostly about complimenting his competence and leadership.)

Beta Reassurance Game is the largest hamster pellet you’ll feed to your LTR girls. A pet peeve of mine is when haters of any stripe caricature this blog as a dopey frat bro listicle of cringeworthy pickup lines. These haters are the finger-in-ears ignoramus equivalents of leftoids whose political insight starts and ends at HURRFLE DURRFLE ORANGE HITLER DRUMPPHPHHH.

The edgy pickup stuff that drives tradcons crazy — the negs, the DQs, the compliance tests, the teasing, the DHVs — is frontloaded in a courtship. This is the stuff that makes women curious about a man and willing to bed him. But as a relationship progresses and deepens (whether with a girlfriend or wife or mistress or Thai ladyboy), the kinder, gentler strategies come to the fore, helping to assuage a lover that she isn’t going to be tossed aside like yesterday’s trash.

This means occasionally, infrequently, reminding your girl of her beauty and feminine charms. There’s an effective way to do this without sounding like a slobbering supplicating soydicked betaphag.

A line I use to this end is,

“You’ll always be better looking than me, baby.”

A man should never stop angling for relationship hand, and that goes double for those times he has to show a little vulnerability and acquiescence to his woman’s needs. You want to be that sexy jerkboy she fell in love with instead of the uxorious male that most men morph into once cozily confined in a relationship.

My M.O. is that I never totally abandon my cad soul to take the easy peasy path of suckup sap. Any woman with me gets daily reminders, big and small, of my essential nature. The sack-saving subtext of that leetle bit of flattery I wrote above accomplishes my goal. One, it’s not a backhanded compliment (even if I were the ugliest man on earth, I’m still punching above my weight). Two, if we grow old together (chick crack tacit vow) I’ll never catch up to her looks so she will always own the lust in my heart. Three, it has juuust enough ambiguity to zap her with a drive-by tingle (“but HOW MUCH better looking?”, she thinks to herself).

Most importantly, the line isn’t more than superficially self-deprecating. All women know on an instinctive level that looks don’t matter as much to men’s romantic and relationship success, so a lover telling his girl that she’s better looking than himself isn’t self-incriminating nearly as much as suggested by the overt meaning of his compliment. In other words, the compliment is equal parts true, sexy, reassuring, and attitudinally alpha.