Summary: LTR's are a fact of life and are still the best way to raise kids. Not every guy wants to be spinning plates into his Viagra years, or pass on his genes anonymously. With that in mind: To me, the biggest and most underrated factor in maintaining an LTR is maintaining mystery.

Your woman should never "get" you and, just as importantly, never be allowed to think that she gets you. Familiarity breeds comfort, comfort will sooner or later breed boredom, and boredom rapidly breeds contempt. Contempt quickly leads to her taking some other guy's load home to you in (at least) one of her holes. M/F relationships aren't like M/M friendships, where the more you get to know each other the better things get. For most guys in an LTR the graph looks more like a ramp headed in the wrong direction, with varying degrees of steepness. There's a reason we use the relationship term "honeymoon phase" for a variety of things, the implication being that it never gets better than the beginning.

Now, I'm not advocating actively blocking her from knowing anything. A dimly lit room, or a door left ajar, is intriguing. A brick wall is not. Nobody is going to fight forever to try and figure you out, so you obviously have to give a little. But you need to utilize the infamous method of Trickle Truth to your advantage. Instead of using it for your actions, like women do, use it for your abilities. Analogy Time: way too many guys use all their ammunition to attract a woman, then are reduced to using bayonets and buttstocks to keep her around. It's all well and good to utilize TRP to learn how to use your bayonet and buttstock more effectively, but far better to learn how to conserve your ammunition and even how to make more. Hence the title of this post. Because rest assured: all the hawt unknown quantities she interacts with on a daily basis are coming into her life with a full magazine.

Even RP men get old after awhile, because no matter how RP you act you're not perfect. The more she knows you, the larger those imperfections will loom. In a perfect world she would love you enough to look past those and stay true. But this is TRP: we know that's not how it works.

This is where the self-improvement aspect of TRP comes in, because self-improvement and "sexual strategy" (I hate that term but it fits) are ultimately connected. Have a full life outside of your relationship. Develop and maintain a mission, have multiple interests, and NEVER give up your G.O.L.F. time (G.O.L.F.=Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden). You shouldn't be with your woman 5, 6, 7 days a week every fuck-damned week. Even if you're married, you're screwing yourself if you get into a predictable work/home routine with all your "fun" time spent with her.

Don't worry about having a "neglected" LTR/wife. A woman only uses the neglect clause when she knows precisely what you're doing but you're not doing it with her. i.e. She knows you're at the office, you're playing videogames, you're on the computer, you're at the gym, etc etc. I'm talking about living a parallel life she's only vaguely aware of. I'm talking about her not always knowing exactly what you're up to, exactly what you're thinking, exactly how you operate in general.

It sounds counter-intuitive to men but 1) women are actually less likely to risk (let alone end) the relationship if they're not certain it'd break your heart or majorly interrupt your life and 2) the less she knows you the more attracted she is to you. That's because in both cases the power is not in her hands. In the first instance that scares her; in the second it excites her. She will of course throw shit tests and comfort tests your way to gauge whether or not you're out cheating on her. For all our talk about women being willing to "share an alpha," no woman wants to be played for a fool. How to handle those tests has been handled here, at TRP, many times. This isn't a post about Frame so I'm not going into all that.

Most dudes on TRP know that "open communication" is horseshit, and know to be situationally reticent when it comes to fights/conversations due to the fact that dumping your feelz will leave her drier than the Taklamakan. But I don't see quite the same widespread recognition that this principle doesn't just apply to your feelings. You should be just as guarded in all aspects of your life. Because, in the long run, dumping yourself onto her is just as panty-drying as dumping your feelz onto her in any given fight/conversation. Don't be complacent. I don't care how long you've been together. Unless she's no longer viable in the SMP, she's not your friend.

TL/DR: just because you're no longer an unknown quantity doesn't mean you have to become a fully known one. Shes' not yours, it's just your turn. But maintaining mystery is the best way to lengthen your turn (if you're inclined to do so).