Today we have a special guest post by Graeme and Natz from the CoupleonCouples Relationship blog. Enjoy!

1. Making the Girl the Most Important Thing in Your Life

No girl wants to be everything in your life. Stop projecting.

This happens all the time. Guys, seriously – as soon as you’ve made her your priority, you become useless to her as a leader who has direction, masculinity, clarity, purpose, and other qualities that she’s actually looking for in a man. I know there’s a tendency to want to treat her like a little princess, but she can’t be the reason that you’re alive, consuming your thoughts and feelings throughout the day.

Women feel disgusted by men who treat them as the most important thing in their lives. Think about Harrison Ford going off to fight a war for his country – he doesn’t want to, he loves his woman, but he knows that his duty is more important. How lame would that movie have been if he was like, “Okay babe, I’ll just sit here at home with you, because you are more important to me than anything else.” That doesn’t mean it’s easy, it just means that you should look beyond the boundaries of your relationship to give you meaning in your life.

2. Repressing Anger and Hurt

This is the most reactive thing a guy will do in a relationship, without even knowing he’s doing it.

Sometimes your girl doesn’t do what you want her to. You want to protect her from something, and so you tell her to do this or that, and then she doesn’t. It feels to you like she’s being disrespectful, like she doesn’t care. You feel enraged, you feel hurt – your expectations of her as being so loyal have been violated. But what are you going to do about it?

It’s not like you can kick her ass for disrespecting you. Sometimes girls just do that, sometimes they’re testing you, pushing those boundaries. And sometimes they can just see past your insecurities and will do what they know is right regardless of what you have to say about it. When you repress your frustration about this, that anger stays there. You learn to back down. You hypnotize yourself to think that what you say doesn’t matter. After years of this, men realize they have no backbone left – and by then it’s too late.

Work out your emotional problems with yourself. Your woman isn’t your therapist, so don’t sit and try to talk it out with her, find other solutions. What do you need to do to make sure that no matter whether your woman follows you or not, you will always have respect for yourself and the freedom to let her do what she wants. A lot of this is about trust and letting go. Learn to trust her, and let go of wanting to control her experience (as if you ever could). Just because she doesn’t do what you want doesn’t mean that she doesn’t trust and have respect for you. The girl has to learn some time, so set her free to do that – it’s your role to lead, not to control.

3. Too Much “Out-Alpha” Behavior

When we’re in the dating game, we practice and, in a way, get addicted to showing our value to be higher than the guys around us. When you’re out in a nightclub chatting to a girl and she’s into you, if another guy comes up and tries to snake her from you, you pick her up and carry her away from him. You make fun of his stupid shirt. You tell your girl that he’s weird and that you should leave. Most of the time this behavior is way inappropriate in a relationship.

Girls have guys as friends. When you’re in a relationship you need to respect that, and you can’t be trying to out-perform those friends whenever they’re around. When you know that one of her friends has feelings for her, the instinct is just to remove him, to eclipse him as best you can – but she’s not going to understand that. If you’re insecure about the situation, she’s going to see through your attempts and feel the jealousy underneath it. If you’re just doing it out of habit, then she’ll get angry at you for trying to isolate her and it’ll come across as possessive. Furthermore, those guys will start to complain about you to her whenever you’re not around. Out of their own neediness, they’ll call you needy and frame you as over-protective. I understand that this is a major problem for guys transitioning from the player lifestyle to a relationship, I’ve definitely been there.

4. Lowering Your Emotional State to Cheer Her Up

Girls get upset, they cry. Sometimes it’s funny to see a girl you don’t care about get hysterical about something, but when it’s your girlfriend who you love, it’s easy to get caught up in that too. In order to bring her out of that, the tendency is to lower your state to get onto her level. You want to show how much you care, and you do that by becoming sad or upset yourself – but ultimately you’re just weakening her perception of you, and that is counter-productive.

Sometimes girls will cry in front of their boyfriends just so they can feel vulnerable in front of them. It’s a huge turn-on for girls to feel like they can collapse and a guy will be able to strong enough comfort them and endure that. But if you’re collapsing yourself whenever she goes there, even in order to show how much you care, she’s just going to feel like you don’t have any solidarity and clarity. She’ll end up not trusting you. She doesn’t want you to be the one who’s looking up to her and telling her how much you care, she just wants you to be stable enough to love her through that, with humor and freedom. So stop making yourself weaker whenever she freaks out. Stand on your own two feet.

5. Losing Your Polarity to Get Consistency Or Excitement Out of the Relationship

Oftentimes guys will see their girl when she’s in a “busy” mood, unexcited and taking things too seriously. You want to cheer her up and feel that radiance of hers, so you try to be bright and radiant yourself. This is extremely unattractive. A better method is to “outdo” her in the seriousness. If you don’t understand this, it’s because you haven’t got a good enough grip on sexual polarity yet. Guys aren’t meant to be the sunshine in their woman’s life, they’re meant to be the rock and the stable lover who she respects. If you’re taking the sunshine role, you’re actually flipping the polarity, and making her feel like she needs to be the more stable one.

Sometimes femininity is scary to a guy. When a girl’s emotions are changing all the time, you feel like you need to control that. You can’t just accept it as it is. Well, in that case you’re actually just reacting to her behavior, and it’s making her feel like she can’t be herself around you. Then when she’s with you she actually does try to be more stable, because she feels like you can’t handle that more passionate side of her. This is the greatest way to bring all of the excitement out of your relationship. If you want a girl to be a consistent friend to you, go find someone else besides your sexual partner.

If you’re doing this stuff, you’re going to miss out on the greatest pleasure that a woman can give you, which is from her feminine beauty. When she smiles it makes you feel amazing inside – there’s something akin to light emanating from her. If she’s not exciting you, it’s probably because you aren’t being that grounding energy that she needs to have in her life in order to feel that way.

This is a guest post written by Graeme and Natz, from the Relationship Blog, CoupleonCouples.com.

The above graph represents the results of the Attraction Triangle Game.

Essentially, the game is to pick two out of three signs of attraction in a potential mate at the expense of the other; with the outcome having three possible choices as listed below and shown in the Attraction Triangle:

• Good Looks and Emotional Stability, but NOT Intelligent
• Intelligent and Emotionally Stable, but NOT Good Looking
• Good Looking and Intelligent, but NOT Emotionally Stable

The point of this particular experiment was to find out which preferences in a mate that an average man or woman would prioritize over others. From here we could then infer all sorts of different theories on attraction and mate selection.

Of course, if one could have their way, a person would obviously choose to have the perfect mate, one that exhibits all of the best signs of attraction that could be possible. However, this game, and life in general will not always provide you with the best possible choice. Sometimes, in our dating and relationship lives we all have to make priorities in the various attraction qualities that we are willing to accept in a long term relationship.

Men’s Preferred Attraction Qualities in Women

There’s no doubt that men are visual creatures and the results of this survey only goes to prove that further with over 80% of the men choosing the two options that include “Good Looks.” As much as we’d like to think that ultimately looks don’t count in the long run, it is certainly a high priority for those men in the selection process. Though this shouldn’t be much of a surprise as we already know many of the biological reasons in which men would prefer looks over other qualities; it is simply in our DNA.

Also, it appears that many men are willing to forgo intelligence in favor of good looks and emotional stability. Basically, the average guy wants a woman who is attractive with little drama. Not too surprising.

Women’s Preferred Attraction Qualities in Men

What’s interesting is that even though both genders prefer emotional stability in their mates, the women had the complete opposite of men in terms of choosing intelligence over looks. With over 60% of women choosing intelligence and emotional stability, I think it’s safe to say that looks really aren’t that important for men; it’s really more about matters of intelligence, confidence, etc.

These results also seem to match up with evolutionary theory, in that women tend to focus on mate selection based on the ability to help in child rearing.

However, I tend to wonder what the results would be like if the survey wasn’t based on long term mate selection, but rather a short term “hook-up.” My guess is that their preferred signs of attraction would switch to “Good Looks and Intelligence,” but who knows. What do you guys think?

Sources and Data

Nervous that my data would be skewed, for whatever reason, towards those that read seduction and pick up artist blogs, I paid for a bunch of traffic from StumbleUpon to the survey in order to get more responses from average men and women.

You can view the data here for those of you that want to do your own number crunching. Note that results might be slightly different do to the fact that I am continuing to collect data for future use. Thus the charts in this post represent approximately the first 110 men and 110 women to respond.

What Do You Think of the Results?

So what do these results say about men? What about women? Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Let’s play a game.

The above triangle represents a spin-off of the classic Project Triangle used in engineering and business circles in which one is forced to prioritize certain qualities of a “project” at the expense of another.  The difference here is we are substituting those qualities for that of desirable traits in a long-term mate.

For the purposes of this experiment, let me define the above qualities for clarity sake and to make things a little more interesting:

Intelligent:

For this trait we assume that your mate has a high I.Q., the ability to have great conversation and a strong witty humor.  Since they are intelligent we also assume that they have the ability to get a decent job and thus are financially stable, making well over $100,000 a year or is highly regarded/influential in whatever field they excel.

If you sacrifice this option your mate will have annoyingly low intelligence and will be lower-middle class in income level.

Good Looking:

If we were superficial enough to rate your mate on a 1-10 scale they would be an 8 or 9.  Thus for women, the guy would be in good shape, not fat, have a chiseled chest, nice butt and masculine good looks.  For guys, your woman would be thin, in good shape, attractive, with whatever preferred physical qualities that you desire, like big breasts, firm ass, etc.

Sacrificing this option results in your mate being a 6 or less on your attraction scale, where the person is generally out of shape and does not pay much attention to how they look.  For guys, this could mean your girl being overweight and/or ugly.  For girls, this could result in your guy being shorter than you and/or overweight.

Emotionally Stable:

This option refers to how down to earth your mate is, having the ability to be calm and willing to work things out rationally during tough times in a relationship.  Also, they have unconditional love for you, will always be faithful and stick by your side through thick and thin.

By sacrificing this option, your mate has some minor psychological issues in which they tend to be irrational at times.  For guys, your woman will throw temper-tantrums from time to time, may be argumentative and have self-esteem issues.  For girls, your guy is either too masculine as in having anger management/control issues or is insecure with himself with some tendencies to let people walk all over him.  Both genders would have a 50% probability of being unfaithful.

Let the Games Begin

Which two qualities do you choose?  Which one do you sacrifice?  Put your answer in the survey below and please explain your game theory and analysis in the comments.

Update: You can view the results of the survey in the follow up post, Preferred Signs of Attraction in Men and Women.

Thanks to Kiss and Blog for bringing this to my attention.

Also, it’d be cool to get as much data input on this as possible from both men and women, so please feel free to spread the word.

“Umm, so you only want to have sex with me and that’s it?” she asks.

It’s ten o’clock in the morning, I’m sipping my coffee and had just sat down to write. Hovering over me is a half naked woman. She just woke up after a night of amazing sex and now she wants to talk about the status of our relationship. This is Shy Sandy.

I had been seeing Shy Sandy in a casual relationship over the past month and for the most part it was just sex. It was what a lot of people might call a friends with benefits relationship.

Not expecting such a blunt comment, I take a sip of my coffee to buy some time and compose my thoughts.

“Listen, Sandy, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t really see our relationship going any further than it is now. I’m a busy guy…I have so much stuff going on right now that I can’t really do the whole boyfriend girlfriend thing. I’m sorry.” I say

She just stands there in an awkward silence.

“Is that ok?” I ask

“Well, I can’t just keep doing this. I want to be in a real relationship eventually.” she says

It’s at this point that I begin to feel like shit. What have I done? I start to realize that our casual relationship probably wasn’t that casual to Sandy. Her view on the last four weeks of sleeping together was simply the beginning of a longer term relationship. Basically, we had different expectations going into this and I shouldn’t have been so naive to think that a pure sexual relationship could be maintained without some sort of consequences.

“I don’t really know what to say… maybe we should just end this whole thing right now.” I say

“Are you sure?” she asks in a sad voice

“Yea, I think that’d be best for the both of us.” I reply

“Umm, ok.” she says

She silently walks back to the bedroom and gets dressed. She grabs her coat and looks at me.

“I’ll see you around” she says as she walks out the door.

I still have a lot to learn…