This post deals exclusively with how to maintain and develop an already ongoing long term relationship in hopes of achieving maximum happiness for both parties. I’m not exactly sure how TRP it is. I’m not exactly sure if it is alpha or beta it is but frankly I don't think that matters. The point is for the relationship to make you the best, happiest person you can be.

I am going to assume that you went LTR with this girl for a reason. She meets enough of your criteria that she has somehow found her way to the other side of the minefield of your former plates and one night stands, unblemished and seemingly worthy of an exclusive relationship. In short, my assumption is that you care for this person in more than a sexually desirous way. Now, you have been dating exclusively for a certain amount of time, everything seems fine, but you want to make sure you don’t fall victim to the pitfalls of contentment and the hypergamy that follows.

The obvious should be obvious.
‘You need to continually be practicing self-improvement to make sure you are the best you that you can be. The moment you let your SMV fall below hers, you are in dangerous waters. The grass is always greener, and if she sees greener grass she will jump at the opportunity to seize it.’

This is the logic that TRP has presented me with, and quite honestly, it makes a ton of sense. Everything I just said I do believe to be nearly 100% accurate. Everyone who has swallowed the red pill agrees with this. I do believe that by striving to maintain the highest SMV possible, the happier both you and your partner will be. However, if we want to have a real, deep discussion about LTRs we need to bring up the elephant in the room: they are not exclusively about sex. They are about things that don’t have anything to do with how Alpha or Beta your sexual strategy is (although they are still about those things too). Think about it. You have great game. You’ve banged your share of 8s and 9s and the occasional 10 you still secretly beat off to when you’re at a shitty hotel whose shitty wifi isn’t working because it’s shitty. So, there must be a reason, beyond sex, that you’ve chosen to go the route of an LTR.

That reason is intimacy. The thing you want is called intimacy, and you have found a girl that you want to be intimate with. There are 4 types of intimacy. There is physical or sexual intimacy. You know what that is. That is the banging. There is emotional intimacy. This is, if oversimplified and boiled down to one word, trust. Being able to confide in another how you truly feel about something, no matter how embarrassing it is, and having a partner who reciprocates this process. The third type of intimacy is cognitive intimacy. This is being able to openly express your thoughts and ideas and exchange them for others. Lastly, there is experiential intimacy, which is obtained by two people going through the same or similar experiences. Basically, the more time spent together, means the more experiential intimacy.

The reason I bring intimacy up is quite simple. Although increasing your SMV is an obvious way to secure the sexual desires of your woman, you can and should be doing other things to improve upon the non-sexual portion of your relationship, for 2 succinct reasons. Firstly, as you age you and your partner will, at some point, both go through decreases in sexual drive. This is just something that happens. Ps and Vs stop feeling the need to work after the childbearing years are through. When this happens, if your value is solely based on sex, that is to say that if your wife doesn’t really like very much about you but has always been overcome with a physical and sexual attraction to you that can’t keep her off your cock, that period of her life will one day end. And as her needs change and become less sexual, which they will, you will become less desirable to her. The 2nd reason you need to work on this non-sexual area of your relationship is simple: there is always a better flute player.

That is a little bit of a family colloquialism that I don’t think is widely known, so let me explain. Say in 4th grade you take up playing the flute. You have a natural gift for it, and you enjoy it, so you continue. By 6th grade you are the best in your school. Then you move on to junior high, where 2 other elementary schools feed in, suddenly there are triple the flute players, and you are no longer the best. You work harder and eventually become the best of them. First chair bitches. Then you go on to high school, where again the amount of players is tripled and you are no longer the best. Then you go on to college and so on. The question is: are you ever going to become the best flute player? I mean, I guess yeah somebody has to be the best flute player in the world, but is that somebody you? And if so, how long until another player becomes better than you? How long are you going to be able to maintain being the most Alpha of all the Alphas? How long until, eventually, she finds someone with more sexual power than you? Are you the sexiest man in the entire world? In your state? In your city? In the top 1% of her market? If you are, how long can you maintain that status?

By increasing your emotional, intellectual, and experiential bond with your mate, you are going to decrease the odds of being left due to sexual desire. Think about the family member that you are closest to in your entire life. Now think about a friendly acquaintance or co-worker that you met within the past year. Now, what would either of those people have to do for you to consider nexting them from your life? Is it the same level of transgression? Which would you instantly back in a fight regardless of circumstance? Imagine your celebrity crush is sitting on a bed naked begging for you to put it in her butt, but going through with it means you are never going to see the closest person in your life again. Are you going to do it? Is any decent human being in the entire world going to do it?

Point is, make your relationship stronger. Intentionally try to engage in activities that have no sexual connotation attached. Instead of a dinner date, go out for lunch. Find a video game or board game or card game that you both enjoy and play it together. Have conversations that are about things that are not directly about your life together. Do all the things that come natural to you when you are hanging out with a close friend who you aren’t having sex with. If your LTR has some sort of dilemma and her first move is to call her mom or sister or friend about it before talking to you about it, that’s probably bad. This means there are other people in her life that she considers herself closer with than you. Obviously there are exceptions where it’s something womanly or the like, but it should be easy to gauge if you are or are not the closest person in her life. Your goal should be to be the most important person in her life in as many ways as you possibly can be. At the end of the day, the only people who cheat on, or become disinterested in, or leave their spouses are the people who don’t value their spouse. At some point you are going to hit some sort of low. You might one day lose your job or suffer a horrible disfigurement or be publicly embarrassed within your community. These things are out of your control. But, if you've built a strong enough familial bond, it can serve as a placeholder which can substitute for or even supersede any unexpected lose in physical beauty, charisma, money, or status.