TTOB bonus 03, The Tao of Badass
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]Breaking Up
Like a Man
Breaking Up
Like a Man
What happens when you realize that you need to end a relationship?
If you want to date like a badass, you’re going to have to learn how to
break up like a badass too.
There are a lot of rules that men need to follow during the break
up phase. The irst thing you have to remember is an important
paradox: a man will not be able to attract the right woman for
him until he’s worked out his insecurities, but he will not be able
to get rid of his insecurities until he’s dated a lot of women and
learned to overcome them. Like it or not, you will have many failed
relationships before you ind the right one. It’s impossible for
anyone to learn how to be in a successful relationship without having
experienced several of them.
If you’re expecting to inish reading this book, walk outside, ind
the woman of your dreams, and marry her, you’re setting yourself
up for disappointment. That’s not going to happen. This book is
teaching you skills, not an easily learned lesson. Like all skills, what
you learn here has to be practiced over and over again before you’ll
be able to do it well. You’re going to continue to date people while
you’re working on getting over your insecurities, and during that time
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Breaking Up Like a Man
you’re going to make mistakes. Maybe you’ll be in a monogamous
relationship with a woman you should have been in a polyamorous
relationship with, or maybe the timing will be off and your
relationship won’t be viable.
notes
Mistakes are an inevitable part of learning, so you’re going to have
to know how to handle them in effective ways. When you’re in a
relationship that you know won’t work out, you need to know how to
break up like a man and move on with your life.
One of the major rules that you’ll have to follow is that you should
leave every woman you date better than you found her. Let’s say that
every man in the world dates 4 women before inding the woman he
wants to marry (a very conservative number). That means that every
woman in the world will have 4 failed relationships before she inds
her ideal partner. Any time you break up with a woman in a negative
way, you make it harder for the man who should be with her to meet
her because she’ll become increasingly closed off to the ideas of
socializing, dating, and forming relationships.
We’re in this together – as a species, as men – so we need to do our
best to help others out. A woman should be open when she meets
the man who is perfect for her, not terriied that she’s going to have
her heart broken. If you keep breaking up with women in a way that
is negative and hurtful, you’re making them insecure and angry, and
making it dificult for the men of their dreams to connect with them.
So stop being a dick, and don’t do that anymore.
In addition to always doing your best to leave a woman better than
you found her, you must recognize that relationships are inherently
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Breaking Up Like a Man
selish. You must leave any relationship you are not happy in. No
exceptions. You can try to work the problems out, but if the woman
is not willing to budge on the issues that are important to you, you
have to leave.
notes
As humans, we enter relationships because they make us happy; never
try to fool yourself into thinking it’s only about making someone
else happy. If making a woman happy made you feel like crap, you
wouldn’t be in a relationship with her! We are motivated to do things
because they make us feel good. Even though giving money to a
charity or a homeless person seems like a selless act, we do it because
we like the way it makes us feel. If we felt like we were drowning
every time we gave money to charity, no one would ever do it.
Has anyone ever told you “the only thing that’s constant is change?”
Relationships are no exception. If you ind yourself in a relationship
in which your growth has stagnated despite your best effort to
continue growing, or in which there’s no growth on the woman’s part,
the relationship will either end because you will terminate it or it will
end on its own. The more time that passes between the moment
when you realize that a relationship is doomed and the moment it
actually ends, the less likely it is that she will ind the man who is the
right person for her.
Because change is the only constant, you can usually determine if
a relationship was good after you’ve ended it better than you can
determine its quality while you’re in it. What your ex-girlfriend
becomes after the breakup will tell you what you did with her that
was right, and what you did with her that was wrong. If she improves
in some way post-breakup, it’s likely that you held her back from
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Breaking Up Like a Man
improving while you were together. Perhaps you were too jealous, or
maybe you didn’t reward her. There are a number of possible ways
you could have been holding her back without realizing you were
doing it.
notes
If a woman lets herself go after a break up and ends up worse
off than she was within the relationship, she depended on you for
growth. In an ideal world, the woman you date should feel conident
enough after things have ended with you to move on and continue
growing. This rests entirely on
how
you break up.
A break up that places blame on someone (either you or her) will
end poorly for both people involved. It might seem easier to say
“It’s not you, it’s me” – and it might feel good to say “It’s not me, it’s
you” – but the truth is that neither of those explanations is usually
right. More often than not, either both people are responsible for the
dissolution of a relationship or outside forces are to blame.
Sometimes you might ind yourself in a situation in which you know
you need to break up with someone but you can’t handle the pressure
of doing so. Maybe you know that your relationship doesn’t have the
logical attraction that we discussed in the chapter on polyamory, but
it still makes you feel good enough that you want to continue it. In
that case, you have to keep this in mind: you can either be a part of
the transition in her life, or you can be part of her future. Without
logical attraction, you cannot be both. If your lives are going in
different directions, you must decide between two options. You
can separate so that she can change while you’re apart and have the
possibility of getting back together later on, or you can stay together
for the time being with the knowledge that you will separate after
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