"Picking up girls" skills and "long-term relationships" skills
I've said this in some different places but not headlined with it: "Picking up girls" skills and "long-term relationships" skills overlap, but there's a lot of non-overlap too. For picking up chicks, approach anxiety, initial comments, flirting skills, sheer physicality, fashion sense, logistics, dealing with shit tests, etc. are paramount. Guys should practice and build up those skills. For long-term relationships, emotional compatibility, lifestyle, money/money philosophy, ability to maintain sexual heat, long-term life goals, etc. are much more important. Guys can be good at both but there's a lot of distinction between the two and if you specialize in being a player you will likely hone the early skills and forget the later ones even exist.
If you are a young guy without a lot of experience with women you should concentrate pretty much entirely on short and medium term relationship skills. If you are an older guy you will have to evaluate your life course for yourself and think about what you seek over time.
Guys who are truly specialized in short term relationships may lose the idea that in the medium or long term, some of the "game" aspects go away... or change. Yes, women will still shit test over the long term, but sometimes the issues are real issues and not shit tests. Real issues that need to be addressed. Sometimes they are comfort tests, a topic that doesn't come up much because I think most guys don't get to that stage. Emotionally healthy and secure chicks will have needs that they will bring up, and consistently not meeting those needs will cause the woman to look elsewhere... if she is damaged she may become more attracted to adrenaline, drama, and not having those needs met.
I have made this mistake before.
A lot of the "Red Pill" stories you read from guys online leave out the part where the guy isn't providing the emotional or other things the chick needs. Not all of the stories. A lot of them are about guys marrying stupid/damaged/f**ked up chicks and then suffering for their stupid decisions and suffering by marrying a damaged woman. But there are too many stories about evil women taking advantage of good and innocent men for all of them to be true. Guys get in long-term relationships with broken chicks then post about how all chicks are evil crazy predators.... those chicks exist, no doubt.... but they are not all chicks.
Not all the skills are distinct... women in long-term relationships still like flirtatious energy from their partners, for example. They don't want low-energy guys who take them for granted (just like men don't like that from women).
Online there is a strong emphasis on game and the initial stages of relationships between opening and sex. There's very little about the later stages of relationships (among men). Among women, getting to sex is the easiest thing in the world and retaining attractive top men is hard, so the conversation's tenor differs. If you're a guy and you haven't been able to get the women you want then you should work on the opening stages. Don't worry about the middle and end if you can't do the beginning decently.
Rivelino just tweeted,
"I’ve seen many players sabotage their relationships with great girls who captured their hearts because they feared losing control under the chaos of being in love. A man can be alpha but if he doesn’t cash it in for the ultimate prize he’s revealed the beta at his core." -Roissy
I've been guilty of this. I might be guilty of it right now.
For most people small children are not compatible with being a player. Yes, you can make the two work with enough financial resources / family help, but that will be true for a small number of guys. It's also possible to make this work by abandoning kid/mom and f**king up the kid's life. I understand the temptations and I also understand, yes, how awful the family court system is in my western countries. I understand that the entire legal system and culture is set up to alienate fathers and use men for money/earning power, then deny men rights. That is all true but most normal and healthy women also want fathers for their children and want the relationship to work, especially when the child/children is/are young.
I don't want to dictate what men do. I do want men to have the skills and experiences that will allow them to exit a relationship gracefully and then find new partners. Maybe the biggest gap among guys is between guys who know they can find acceptable new partners... not necessarily instantly, but guys who are confident they can get laid live in a different world. Then there are guys who can't. If she leaves and you think you will never do better than her in your entire life, you are f**ked before you start. You depend too much on her. In any business negotiation, the ability to walk away from the table is the most important feature. If you can't leave the table you are probably f**ked before you start too.
That's why I'm a proponent for learning game and achieving high value even for guys who think they want to have kids or (very weird to me) be monogamous with a woman long term w/o having kids. If you have enough of it... you will always have an exit without the excruciating pain of thinking that you are blocked out of the sexual marketplace.
My default has also been to bail whenever things get hard. Always another fish in the sea, so I might as well keep fishing. This is probably not a good default for longer-term engagements, where disagreements are going to happen and sometimes there are going to be hard patches.