Tips on How to Keep a Girlfriend

Searching for tips on how to keep a girlfriend? Well, are you sure you have her? If so, then lucky you.

If you are interested in pursuing tips on how to keep a girlfriend, you will find no shortage of materials replete with no-brainer advice. Listen to what she has to say-really listen. Make time for her. Sure, these indeed are key tips on how to keep a girlfriend, but they are so obvious.

Come on, we don't have to review a bunch of stuff that we should already know. Therefore, you should look at things from a different perspective.

So much personal relationship advice is self-centered, as though people spend hours each day just on this category. Instead of living the relationship, they constantly contemplate and question it. There is a bigger world out there, and your personal quest for how to keep a girlfriend is part of it.

Consider the soap operas. Virtually all of the characters are into their own dramas all the time. You don't see many soap opera characters, for just one example, who have to care for a loved one with a disability, much less soap opera characters with their own disabilities. It's mostly about selfishness.

Be a Good Person
This may seem like an odd piece of advice for how to keep a girlfriend, but start by being a good person. Be one not just to her, but to everyone you encounter in life. If you already are a good person, strive to be a better person.

The girlfriend you intend to keep will notice not only how you treat her, but how you treat others. Is everything just about you-or just about you and her-or do you see a bigger world? If you have a parent or grandparent or other loved one who is ill or lonely, how often do you visit that person? Do you help to coach a youth sports team or volunteer as a reading tutor at a school? On a simpler level, are you kind to waitresses and store clerks and other service workers?

If you are a good person overall, then this will come into play when you have the inevitable spats. She will pause after a spell and know that whatever the case, you meant no harm. Of course you will perceive the same in her.

Once you have established this, then you are in a stronger position to keep your girlfriend. You have truly earned the right to your selfish time together, for whatever your favorite self-fulfilling activities might be.

Realize You Don't Need to be Together 24/7
Look for a balance in these self-fulfilling activities. Consider five categories:

1. Stuff you really like to do together-true mutual interests.
2. Things in which she takes the lead role and you're interested because she's interested.
3. Things in which you take the lead and she follows along.
4. Stuff you like to do on your own or with the guys.
5. Stuff she likes to do on her own or with the girls.

There are some fellows who may reject this wide-ranging agenda for how to keep a girlfriend because only the first involves intensive mutual interests. Indeed, some lovey-dovey couples do succeed when they find themselves totally absorbed in this manner. But with this girlfriend whom you so dearly intend to keep, do you really want to be exactly like one another? Don't you want to have some differences?

No doubt in life you have observed a couple who stunned their family members and friends when they broke up. The common observation would be, "They were so in love, they were always together, they would be the last couple you would ever expect to split." Hmmm, maybe that was the seed of the eventual trouble?

You and the girlfriend you intend to keep can always be 24/7 in one another's thoughts, but you probably don't want to be 24/7 in one another's company.

The Rest
Let's lighten our extended Ann Landers session with a few assorted smaller points:

• Open doors for her? Some modern women say they don't like this. The best strategy could be to open the doors but don't make a big thing of it. Also, chivalry possibly is more important for the door to a building than the door to a car.
• Valentine's Day, yes. Sweetest Day, no. Tell her you are not going to be held hostage in October by the marketing ploys of the greeting card companies, the candy makers and the flower shops. Next thing you know, they will try to promote Christmas in July as mandatory. Besides, you will have given her so many small gifts on nonholidays that she already will know she is sweetest. While you explain this, flash a smile so big that she can see all of your bicuspids.
• Go Dutch on dates? Not unless she really pushes it. Maybe she could just leave the tip?

There are no right answers. In fact, you and your girlfriend might enjoy some fun moments in chewing the verbal fat over questions such as these.