You're always going to mess up a lot in Relationship #1.
You don't know what you're doing, everything's new, all the emotions you're feeling are really raw, and you tend to overemphasize the importance of things. Even if you're a devoted student of relationship game and you've studied all the best stuff, you will still screw a bunch of things up.
For my money, one of the biggest things guys mess up in that first relationship is the screening. You have no relationship experience and usually limited dating and sexual experience when you dive into relationship uno. Often it's with whatever girl seems like she's "pretty good" and is available for a relationship.
So, you'll get attached, won't want to let her go, but then at the same time some part of your brain is also thinking this probably isn't the most perfect match you could ever get. The dissonance leads to some difficulties though ("Do I keep her or let her go? I've been trying to decide for nine months now!"). You will typically refine your tastes a lot more as you gain experience.
Another thing guys do is screw up the expectations, for both themselves and the girl. They can make big promises, or they imagine themselves growing old with her, and behave like the two of them are soul mates (à la
@J Wick's moving too fast too soon). But sometime later when the girl starts wanting them to commit or get off the pot, they begin to realize they really aren't ready to commit so soon and all those big promises and expectations they set, whether explicitly or implicitly, they are going to have to break.
A final one is this: they work too hard.
It's a bit paradoxical, but guys will both
fail to lead (
@Derek da man's and
@Will_V's points) while also working their tails off to do things they think the girl wants/needs to be happy. They will be running her around to different activities, or trying to make sure she's entertained when she comes to their place, or trying to always make the sex extra-special good, and just generally putting loads of pressure on themselves to please her. Girls do the same thing, btw... most girls in their first few relationships work a lot harder trying to please their man than they do in subsequent relationships.
Often they end up setting loads of
very resource-hungry relationship precedent early on, then discover as the relationship progresses they cannot keep up with the precedent they set, which ultimately makes the girl feel like they don't love her the way they used to because they used to do all these things with her and now they don't anymore (whoops).
Anyway, it's very hard to be a leader while you are also trying to be as pleasing as can be. Even your attempts at leadership turn into a form of mild supplication ("I have to lead because I want her to stay happy!").
I don't know that any of this is really avoidable though...
- You can't refine your screening until you've already experienced relationships and begun to learn what you like and don't like
- You can't set realistic expectations until you've learned through experience what kinds of expectations you CAN realistically set (vs. not)
- You can't relax into a relationship and run things in a relaxed, confident way until you've tried a bunch of things and figured out what's really necessary to keep the relationship running vs. what isn't
So... you can keep an eye out for these things.
However, you are still going to have to go through them anyway in that first relationship.
There's not really any way around it. A rite of passage every young man must pass through
Chase