How Men Create Bad Relationships With Bad Decisions
A lot of men end up in bad relationships. These relationships either end badly or worse, they get stuck in an unhappy relationship for years or even for life.
You might think that this is not common, and you would be wrong. All you have to do is look at modern divorce rates, and you know something is seriously wrong with how men and women end up in relationships.
If you want to dig even deeper, then go and ask some of your friends about their relationships. And what you will notice is that a lot of couples have mediocre relationships, it’s like they got trapped in their current relationships and just slowly started to accept that this is as good as it gets.
But how does this happen, how do people end up in a sexless and loveless relationship? Well, let’s go to the beginning and see if we can find an answer to this question.
Let’s take a look at an average man, let’s call him Pete. So Pete works an average job and he makes average money. He makes enough to live comfortably but not so much that he can travel to Europe twice a year. He is in average shape, but he could improve his appearance a lot if he gets in the gym and looks after his diet.
In the looks department, Pete is average, but again he could look a lot better if he did some work on himself. Pete works during the week and drinks a few beers with his work friends every Friday after work.
When he goes out with his friends, he struggles to meet women. He isn’t very confident and feels self-conscious speaking to women. For the last 5 years, he has only been on a handful of dates and it never seems to work out well for Pete. So Pete feels lonely, and he would love to have a girlfriend. But the more he struggles with dating, the less confidence he gets.
One weekend, Pete goes out alone after work, and he starts talking to a girl at the bar. Her name is Lizzy. The 2 of them have a good conversation, and they end up going to Lizzy’s apartment and spending the night together. The next morning as Pete walks home, he starts thinking that his luck has finally changed. Pete walks and tells himself, “She’s not exactly my type, but what a fun night.”
So Pete goes back home, and Monday he goes back to work. Monday evening, he gets home after a long day and turns on the TV, but soon his mind starts drifting toward the weekend. He feels kind of lonely and decides to give Lizzy a call, and she ends up at his place and spends the night with Pete.
The next morning Pete again tells himself that she is not exactly what he wants in a woman, but it’s better than being alone. For weeks he keeps meeting Lizzy for drinks and then ends up at Pete’s place or, some nights, her apartment.
After about a month, Pete thinks it’s been a fun month, but a part of his mind keeps telling him,”She is a nice woman, but we are not a good fit.” But Pete ignores this part of his mind and decides just to have fun and enjoy the time with Lizzy.
After 3 months, he meets Lizzy again for a drink, and they end up at her apartment. Tonight, she seems different to him and less talkative. So Pete asks her, “What’s wrong?” Lizzy hesitates for a second and then asks Pete, “What are we doing, are we in a relationship?”
Pete didn’t expect this, he felt surprised, but he knew he needed to answer, so he did, “I guess we are in a relationship.”As Pete says these words he hears the voice in his head telling him “Why are you doing this? She is not what you really want.”
Pete decides to ignore this voice again and tells her that they are, in fact, in a relationship. Because the truth is they are in a relationship. Suddenly Lizzy’s face lights up with a smile, and she hugs Pete. So the weeks pass by, and soon six months go by.
The voice in Pete’s mind is getting louder and louder, telling him to break up with Lizzy. He thinks she is a nice woman, but on many levels, they are not compatible, and they want totally different things in life. But the comfort of a warm body and someone to speak with is too much for Pete to give up. So he keeps his head down and stays in his comfort zone.
After about nine months, Lizzy comes home one night and asks him, “Where is this relationship going?” Pete has no idea what to say, he feels cornered, and by the expression on Lizzy’s face, he knows she is very serious. Pete looks around and says, “I love you let’s move in together.”
A year after that, Lizzy tells him she is pregnant and they decide to get married. The only problem is Pete is more miserable now than ever before. They hardly ever have sex, and they seem to get into arguments all the time. Pete, for the first time, realizes he is trapped, but it’s too late. He is not alone but feels depressed and unhappy.
This is a fictional story, but it’s played out by thousands of people around the world. “Pete” is many men out there. Men end up in miserable relationships because of the choices they make. But let’s look at this situation objectively.
Dating, Decision Making And Bad relationships
Let’s start with Dating and decision-making in general. When a man and a woman meet for the first time, the woman is the gatekeeper. She is making the decision to either reject the man asking her out, or she can accept his invitation. Let’s look at 2 simple examples:
Example 1:
I walk up to a girl in a bar and start talking to her. Suddenly she rejects me. That is her choice.
Example 2:
A guy asks a woman out on a date, and she says yes, and they go for drinks at a bar. They end up at her place, and again, she is the one making the decision. She can either accept or reject the guy’s seduction effort.
In both of these examples, the woman is the decision maker. She makes the choice if she wants to be with this guy or not. Up until this point, she is the gatekeeper.
Now, let’s assume a guy gets the green light from a woman. For example, he asks her out at the gym, and she agrees to meet for coffee. That is the Green Light. He walks her back home, she invites him in, and they spend the night together. That is a second green light. So both decisions were made by the woman.
This brings us to the third scenario in this fictional couple’s evolution from being strangers to lying together in her bed. So let’s assume the guy is called Ryan. He wakes up after spending the night with a girl called Jenny.
Ryan walks home and then decides he doesn’t want to see Jenny again. He tells himself he had a fun night, but she isn’t exactly what he is looking for in a woman in terms of a long-term relationship.
In this moment, after they slept together for the first time, the decision-making power shifted. In general, this is the time when the man makes the decision to either see her again or never call her again. In general, this is the case in most dating scenarios. Sure, there are scenarios where women don’t want to see the guy again either, but in general, the guy is in a time window where he either stays in the current scenario or gets out and dates another woman.
And this brings me to how men screw up their own lives in this decision-making moment. Let’s take Pete in the fictional example I mentioned earlier. When Pete slept with Lizzy for the first time, he knew she wasn’t a good match for him. His heart was telling him to walk away, but he chose the selfish route, thinking that “It’s a nice warm body to comfort me while I look around.”And then, when Pete got even deeper into the relationship, he told himself, “I don’t want to hurt her, it’s been six months”.
So firstly, he felt lonely and thought it was comfortable having her around. So he decided to keep on seeing her. Then in the second scenario, six months later, Pete thought he might hurt her feelings if they broke up.
The irony is that loneliness was the reason for Pete stepping into this trap. And in the second scenario, Pete started thinking about her feelings, which ironically could have been totally avoided if he had listened to his true feelings the first night he met her.
Guys will sleep with a woman and realize they are not a good match but then stay with her because they don’t want to have a quick uncomfortable conversation with her. If you tell a woman you don’t want to see her again, it might be uncomfortable.And yes, it might hurt her feelings slightly, but she will get over it. But instead, guys have this insane thought pattern that somehow her feelings will be spared if you tell her the same thing six months later.
The reality is if you tell her six or twelve months later that you want to break up, it’s a thousand times worse. When you break up later, it’s not just her feelings that get hurt, lives get thrown upside down, and it’s a domino effect of chaos.
So it all comes down to bad decision-making that leads men into bad relationships. But why do men do this?
Why Do Men Make Terrible Short-Term Decisions?
1. They Live In Scarcity.
Men who struggle with women have a scarcity mindset. They think that if they dont lock down the next woman that they meet that they will be single forever.
2. They Fear Loneliness
In the modern world, smartphones and social media have connected human beings like never before, but somehow we ended up more alone than ever before. People live on their phones and tend to live past each other, so loneliness, especially in big cities, is common.
3. Low Confidence
Most men have average or low self-confidence. This low self-confidence leads them to avoid uncomfortable situations with women. They would rather go along into a nightmare for a lifetime than have an uncomfortable 5-minute conversation.
4. They Haven’t Done Any Personal Development Work.
Carol Dweck is an American psychologist who wrote the book Mindset. In the book, she has a theory about people having two types of mindsets. The first group is people with a Fixed Mindset. These people believe people are born a certain way, and you can’t change much about it. They believe people have certain gifts, and you should be happy with what you got. This fixed mindset is the majority of people on the planet.
But then there are people with another type of mindset. This Mindset is called the growth Mindset. This group believes they can improve all areas of their lives if they are disciplined and do the work. They take what they have and develop it. And the things they don’t have, they learn, study, and become competent in it. These are the people you see who have great success in life.
The reason I’m talking about these two types of Mindsets is to tell you that most men who struggle with bad relationships have a fixed mindset, and this is really reflected in their relationships. They believe they have to settle for what they have and just make it work.
How Do We Avoid These Bad Decisions?
There is only one way for us to avoid these bad decisions and that is to transform who we are as men. If you keep on doing the same things in life then you will keep on getting the same results.
So let’s take a look at the things you can start doing today to start having more success with dating and relationships:
1. Take responsibility for your current situation, then you can start changing it.
2. Start cultivating a growth mindset, and start believing that you can get better in all areas of life.
3. Start building a confident mindset by improving your self-talk and how you see yourself. Use visualization and affirmations to start transforming yourself.
4. Start taking control of your fitness and diet. This might sound cliche, but you must get to the gym and eat healthy food. The reality is that there is no better and faster way to build confidence and improve your overall happiness than to get in shape. If you look better, you will start to feel better.
5. Start cultivating an abundance mindset. Start rejecting the idea that there are not many women out there for you. Start believing that the more valuable you become as a man, the more women you will attract. If you dont think you are good enough for a woman, then why should she think you are good enough? You must start believing you are the man. This is not arrogance, it’s confidence.
6. Learn to make uncomfortable decisions in the moment. You must learn to walk away if you don’t feel a good connection with a woman. Don’t compromise with yourself and then pull a woman into a relationship with you that you don’t really want to be in. So don’t be a coward, rather, tell a woman you don’t want to see her again.
If you want to improve with women and dating, then you need to become a better man holistically. This is the only way to have long-term success with women and dating.
So now you know the mistakes to avoid and what you need to do to improve your dating life. The only thing you must do now is to start taking action and do the work.
