Conventional wisdom teaches us that the way you get him is the way you’ll lose him. Here’s a new concept: the way you get him is almost never the way you keep him. The truth is that I’ve seen people who cheated on their girlfriend with their now wife. A few weeks ago I was on a panel and one of the fellow panelists said that all is fair in love and war. His point: if you cheat just be sure that the person you cheat with is the one that you really want to be with. I’ve also seen men who wooed their current girlfriend or wife away from her now ex-boyfriend. What I’ve never seen is a relationship last very long if it doesn’t evolve.
I’ve seen men attract women, court women and then get in relationships with them. They keep doing the same things they were doing during the courting phase and the relationship wanes. The reason being that you have to evolve the relationship to make it last. The things you do when you want to get something are not the same things that you do to keep them.
Relationships require much more work than dating. When you date, you’re trying to figure out if you like the other person. When you’re in a relationship, you’re trying to figure out if this will go long term. I know that in my past relationships I never expected to have to open up and let a person in when wooing them. I thought I could be the nice, funny guy without having to communicate my real feelings. I could avoid talking about the future. I didn’t have to deal with someone else’s issues. I could accept being impartial. But if I kept doing that when we got into our relationship that would be exactly how my relationship failed.
The reason people believe they will lose a man or woman if they get them under bad circumstance is usually because the behavior doesn’t change and people think they get the love of their life but they really get a cheater or liar. And if a person is inherently deceitful then they’ll never be able to change. One way that you can predict if the person you’re dating is moving to a better situation or is living in deceit is by looking at the patterns. If they’ve never been single long enough that their relationships didn’t overlap, that’s a good sign that the person is just a liar. I would advise that you cut bait if you think that the person has the ability to change. Patterns don’t change overnight, in fact, if that pattern has turned into a habit/trait it will never change unless something drastic happens.
However, outside the cheating circumstance (and let me be clear, I have seen people cheat and then their next relationship ended up working out) most of the ways that you meet a guy can lead to a healthy relationship if you’re willing to let the past be the past. But never forget that the way you get them is not the way you keep them. You’ll have to try harder than you ever did. That’s the way relationships work. Many people think that things get easier and most times it almost never is easier, it’s much harder. While you may be worried about preventing the way you got them from happening again, you may just need to realize that it doesn’t matter anyway. If you don’t change your behavior when you’re in a relationship, if you are not willing to step up, if you are content on rocking out with only what brought you together, prepare yourself for a breakup in the near future.
