Breaking Up Like A Man

Break
Br
ing Up
eak
Like a M
Lik
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Break
Br
ing Up
eak
Like a M
Lik
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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 first 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 find 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 finish reading this book, walk outside, find
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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you're going to make mistakes. Maybe you'll be in a monogamous
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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.
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 finding 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 finds
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 terrified 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 difficult 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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selfish. You must leave any relationship you are not happy in. No
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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.
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 selfless 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 find 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 find 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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improving while you were together. Perhaps you were too jealous, or
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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.
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 confident
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 find 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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her transition. This is what it all comes down to: do you want to be
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happy in the short term and sacrifice your chance for happiness in
the long term? Or do you want to have a greater chance of being
happy in the long term at the expense of short term happiness?
In most cases, the best way to give a relationship a chance to work
out in the future is to end it now while leaving the door open for
a later reunion. Allow her to change and grow, and if you're still
around when her transition is finished you can begin a relationship
again. You will only take steps up after ending a relationship - one
relationship tenet that you can never forget is that the girl you date
next will always be better, in one form or another, than the one you
just dated.
The difference between a good break up and a bad one lies in
communication and acceptance. To break up well, you must tell a
woman why you are ending a relationship, but must accept her and
make her feel wanted during the process. Break it down as much
as possible. If you can do this, you will have a successful, positive
break up. Refusing to do one or both of those things will devastate
the break up process every single time, I guarantee it. Unfortunately,
you might occasionally find that a relationship ends badly even if you
know you both gave acceptance and communicated well. Cut your
losses and move on if this ever happens to you. Life isn't always
perfect.
The key to a successful break up is to be logical during the process.
It's very, very difficult to be logical at a time when you are feeling
emotional, but you must override your emotions if you want to end a
relationship on a positive note. As we discussed earlier, only one half
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of your brain works at a time. If you're thinking with your emotional
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brain, your logical brain will be completely overwhelmed. That
means that you need to learn how to increase the influence of your
logical brain at times when you are feeling emotional.
Instead of trying to calm yourself down (which doesn't really work),
focus on thinking about the situation in a logical manner. When you
cannot control your mind directly, you can often use your body to
control it for you. Arrange your body so that it's in a position that
makes you more powerful and allows you to have more control over
your interaction and over yourself.
You have to be careful with this because your emotional brain will try
to trick you into thinking you're being logical when you aren't. Your
mind will start forming excuse processes, which seem logical because
your emotional brain trains you to think they are when they actually
are not.
Before I go into more detail about that, I want to take a moment to
talk about divorce. Hopefully you haven't and will never have to go
through a divorce, but there are valuable lessons to be learned from
the experience. Many, many men make mistakes that unnecessarily
make an already-difficult situation even more difficult.
One of these common mistakes is that divorced men have a tendency
to attract women that are the exact opposite of their former wives.
When you first get back in the game, your focus should be building
your skills back up, not trying to find a replacement for your ex. If
finding a replacement is your goal, you'll end up attracting women
who have all the same positive qualities as your former spouse, and
exaggerated versions of her negative qualities. The big problem here
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is that you've found yourself another extreme, and you'll be just as
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unhappy with the new woman as you were with your ex.
Don't repeat history. No man wants to revisit his problems over
and over again, yet it happens often because we are responsible for
creating the problems in our relationships. It's a man's job to frame
and balance a relationship, so if the relationship goes awry a man
who is playing the male gender role can only blame himself. If you
don't learn how to frame a relationship so that it is successful, you
will keep repeating yourself...multiple divorces, multiple breakups,
countless failed relationships...
That can't happen. You won't live long enough, even if you live to be
200 years old, to have a healthy relationship in spite of continuously
repeating the mistakes of your past. Learn from every mistake, or
all of your actions are nothing more than wastes of your money and
time. A mistake is worth it if your take a useful lesson from it.
At one point in my life, I worked as a day trader. Though I knew
nothing about the stock market in the beginning, I did very well.
After a while, however, I feel victim to a scam that was popular in the
industry at the time. I lost $15,000 in the span of two days. When I
looked at the situation, I realized I could frame it in one of two ways:
I could either think of it as losing $15,000, or I could think of it as
learning a $15,000 lesson.
Was there a lesson to be learned from my mistake that was worth
$15,000? Absolutely! I learned that I affect the market. I'd never
realized before that when I was trading, other people could see what
I was doing and made decisions based on what they saw. I realized
how passively we tend to look at life. When we walk into a bar, we
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pay attention to almost nothing. We don't notice that everyone else is
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reacting to the things we do and say.
People aren't always what they seem. A guy who is obnoxious may
just think the whole world is out to get him. If a monster had a
session with a psychiatrist, he would probably say "I don't know
what's going on! Everyone in the world is afraid, and lonely, and
weak. Everyone hates everyone else. They're all terrified of talking
to other people. What's going on?" A monster would have that view
of the human world because it's all he sees. When humans encounter
a monster, their natural reaction is to scream and run away, not
befriend him! What the monster doesn't realize is that he is affecting
the behavior of the humans, and that's what creates his reality.
You might not realize that you are always affecting the market when
you're in a relationship. Everything you do causes your partner to
react, so instead of just reading the reaction you have to be aware
of what you did to cause it. You'll never know how to control an
interaction if you can't do this. That lesson was worth $15,000 to me
because without it, I never would have learned how to calibrate my
businesses so that I never made that mistake again.
In neurolinguistic programming, there are two theories regarding the
types of control you can have over yourself. One school of thought
claims that if you lead your body, your mind will follow. If you make
your body act a certain way, your emotions and your mind will fall
in line with those movements. The second theory states that if you
lead your mind, your body will follow. You can control your body by
controlling your mind.
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For the sake of discussion, we're going to refer to losing control of
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your mind as "losing your mind" in this chapter. When you lose your
mind, you have to find your body. You can use your body to regain
control over your mind by putting your body in a position that will
trigger a thought process that will link an emotion to the way your
body is moving. The simplest example of this is that if you force
yourself to smile, you'll actually start to feel happier.
The opposite is also true. If you're acting weak, you can remind
yourself to feel stronger and your body will naturally assume a more
dominant pose. Normally we have more control over our bodies
than we do over our minds, so checking in with your body during
a very emotional time like a break up is very important. You must
have dominant, confident body language when you are ending a
relationship because you will lose your mind otherwise.
There are a few things you must do before you begin the process of
breaking up with a woman. The first thing you need to do is clear up
a large amount of time, because breaking up usually take four times
longer than you think it will. You can't break up with a woman and
immediately leave, or you will leave her in an emotional state in which
she feels unaccepted and abandoned. A horrendous storm might
follow, but a badass will sit through it. Budget a couple of hours for
this process.
Next, make sure that you have something quiet to do post-break up,
preferably with a friend. After a break up, you're going to experience
an intense series of emotions. In the beginning you'll feel free and
relieved that everything is over with, but after a while you'll starting
feeling alone and scared. Because a part of you had an emotional
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