My friend gave me the best girlfriend advice ever when I complained of a guy I was seeing who never seemed to be available on the weekends and had the never-ending but at the time believable busy with work, startup company, mini-retreats, and business related stuff excuses. Her advice was this: Check to see if he is on the dating websites as that’s the most plausible reason why he never or rarely has time to see you.
So you find out he has an active dating profile on Plenty of Fish
Odds are, that if he’s unavailable, he’s either with someone else or he is active pursuing others. Once you stumble across his dating profile you will probably not be surprised, but nevertheless you will be hurt while meanwhile understanding the real reason he can’t see you since he’s seeing other women. His, I’m single, available and looking for a long-term relationship profile is staring right back at you in the face from the world-wide web.
When you bring it up with him, which you will probably do spitefully, he knows he’s busted so he will probably just disappear as a means to avoiding the whole confrontation thing. That is the way of being of a man who is into the whole Internet meat-market mode. He will just be showing up for fun when he’s in the mood, then disappearing right back into the Internet woodwork the rest of the time. So he is being consistent in his behavior, but you just didn’t know why he was behaving like he couldn’t think straight or keep a plan with you, until now.
So what do you do when you find out that he clearly doesn’t care about you much because he’s on the web everyday actively clicking boxes and emailing women? I suggest you do nothing except just this one thing: don’t contact him again. If he does contact you again, tell him it’s over. Let him know that now you are aware of why he ignores you most of the time because he is shopping for other women so obviously you are just a fill in doormat girl until he finds one (or many) he likes better. If he tells you it’s your fault because you do x, y or z, forget it because he’s just trying to turn something around on you. You aren’t functioning normally because you have a cheater at worst or player at best, plain and simple. Cheaters make you crazy and it’s not your fault or your personality, it’s just the natural result of having a guy one foot out the door and the insecurity behavior that causes. More than likely, he is dating lots of women at the same time already but you didn’t know it, and at this point now you have new information. If you have self-respect and boundaries, you probably don’t want to be one of his current herd.
Why getting intimate with men who have active online profiles is a bad idea
When you find out someone who you’ve been getting intimate with is actively pursuing strangers on the web, or if you met him on the web and he is continuing in actively pursuing strangers while meanwhile getting physical with you, it can feel like you’ve been literally robbed (of intimacy) and it can make you feel so bitter. Chances are that once you are intimate with a man who has an active Internet profile, you will never feel secure again and never trust him again and your relationship just won’t work out.
Here is the crux of the matter. A man who is interested in you will have zero problem jettisoning out his Internet dating profile to get to know you and/or be lovers with you. If he doesn’t, he simply isn’t interested in you for anything other than a physical connection. Now if you make the mistake of thinking you are special because you met him online and he is seeing you only to find out he refuses to get offline after you’ve hookup up with him, that’s just naive of you. You should never ever, ever assume you are someone’s one and only when they see you rarely, disappear a lot, black out their weekends from you, and most importantly still having active dating profiles.
That description almost perfectly fits the profile of someone who is dating more than one woman, or is just flat-out using you for a physical connection until they find a woman they actually do like enough to be a steady girlfriend. Have you ever met someone who dating you while refusing to get offline, but then started dating someone new, and got offline for her? That’s because he didn’t like you enough, and because he liked her enough to get off for her. Either that, or she wouldn’t get involved while he was on there so he got off.
The saddest thing is when you did know he was online, and had you known that you would have stopped seeing him. If you discover he was aggressing online, but you had that choice taken away from you because you had no clue he was online and he of course he didn’t tell you, it really bites. People who do this will lie to keep their game going. If they are getting free intimacy from you and are dating online and you aren’t even aware of that do you really think they are going to tell you? No, they are not. They are having their cake and eating it too and they figure what someone doesn’t know can’t hurt them. The way to avoid being sucker-punched like this is to check to see if your guy is active on the dating sites just in case. It’s not being paranoid its being smart.
When a guy is using you, they don’t inform you of it. They use you until you figure it out
There are certainly men who want a good woman, in fact most men do. If they find someone they really are into they will take down their profiles in a heartbeat! They will act like boyfriends in a heartbeat! But those same guys are also interested in exporing with various people and open to having interactions with women they aren’t too serious about just for the variety and experience, so they will lie to get what they want (variety and new experiences) from the women they aren’t truly serious about.
You could have the same guy using you and treating you like dirt, who meanwhile is wining and dining some other girl who they view as girlfriend material, and treating her well. This is why you can’t just look at his general boyfriend potential. You have to look at how he treats you in particular. Just because you know he would make a great boyfriend, doesn’t mean he will make a great boyfriend to you. If he is not truly interested in pursuing a relationship with you, he won’t be great at all. Don’t judge him on potential, judge him on how he treats you in particular.
A man is only going to be good boyfriend material towards a woman with whom he envisions himself having a relationship. To everyone else, he is pretty much a user who is passing time while looking for the one. That’s why he will never get offline or do what you want if he is passing time, because he doesn’t care. He’s just using you and he is going to continue to pursue other women regardless of what you do or say, because has no intention of being with you.
If you continue to date a man like this, you are literally setting yourself up for heartbreak. You just need to look closely at a person’s behavior and not their words or your assumptions about how much potential they have, to see what the truth is. An honest man who is actually interested in you will have words and actions that will match up. He won’t be disappearing, checking out for 10 days, not showing you where he lives, and not returning your texts. He will see you in the breathing air and sunlight. He will spend time with you. He will text you.
A man who heartlessly claims you are a girlfriend but rarely sees you or really only sees you only for hooking up is someone who wants only a physical connection and not you as a girlfriend. Women often get used for months before they wake up to the truth, and even years when they know the truth but just won’t accept it and can’t break things off. The women who are able to weed user men out of their lives quickly and efficiently do much better.
Rest assured that finding him on a dating website as active will give you a more accurate explanation of his intermittent dropping out of sight and never bringing you around to meet his friends and family. That lame “work’s been so busy” excuse he was giving you works so well. When you find out you’ve been deceived you’ll basically want to kill yourself because then you know you’ve been used and have had affection stolen from you under false pretenses. Going through this even once really jades you but it does teach you some valuable lessons in screening new men. The damage unfortunately, is lasting.
The dangers of Internet dating, not just physical, but emotional too
Internet dating is literally rife with potential to emotionally damage yourself. If you are going to Internet date as a means to meet people, you need to not get involved with them quickly. Get to know them extremely well first. Then if they do not wish to invest time with you offline, just don’t date them. You need to be extremely protective of yourself. Being damaged by a man, and then hating yourself for allowing it to have happened, can be a devastatingly vicious cycle which takes years to heal from.
That gorgeous guy that you had a fling with from online to bring excitement to your life and then watched him continue to date online as if nothing happened with you, can take years if ever to really heal from. If you’ve been fed the busy bologna and bought it hook line and sinker you need to have your eyes opened up. It can really bite to learn he’s out there hanging out on the Internet meat market. If you find out he is, that which has been seen can no longer be un-seen.
A good policy is to opt out of physical involvement with men who are still active online. Trust me every day you see them log into their Internet profile you are going to cringe and be hurt by it. If you find yourself stalking his profile, checking to see when he is online, making fake profiles to see if he approaches you, checking out the women he might be emailing to in your area, and so forth, then you are treading into very dangerous emotional territory.
Anyone who has been with a cheater before knows this. If you value your dignity and self-esteem, you won’t have anything more to do with him at all so long as he is pressing those boxes and buttons. A relationship will never work out with a man who will not get offline for you because you’ll be turned into a text stalking lunatic trying to stomach watching him be online. It is not worth it.
Any woman who has dealt with a cheating ex will tell you that their words and actions simply didn’t match up, and they either failed to see the signs or hung in there deluding themselves that he would eventually stop. It’s a super harsh lesson to learn, but having been used can serve you well in the future if you decide to learn from the experience and make better boundaries for yourself. The lower your boundaries are the more you can get used. Sadly, some women who are naive and have never been played before can have very innocent low boundaries and they can get hurt the most of all.
The sad fact is that there are a lot of liars out there, most of whom are hanging out online. And they lie for a reason because even though they aren’t interested in you, they may still want the chance to get cozy with you! They figure that if you don’t have the boundaries in place to stop them, then it’s your fault. Men will cry the whole it was two consenting adults story. He never told you that you were exclusive and use that excuse to hurting you without accepting any responsibility. And to an extent, they are right. If they never said they were exclusive with you, wanted to be your boyfriend, or planned to get offline for you, then it’s your fault for getting intimate with them or hooking up with them under those conditions.
Men can be calculating liars because they can test-drive a woman for up to six months and even longer in the honeymoon phase where you may not have expectations of them as yet so they get their mileage out of you. They do it for as long as they can, and when you finally rage quit over it, they simply shrug their shoulders, call you drama, and move on. They rationalize it as, you should be aware that it’s a dating situation, and you should know what you are getting into if you never even had a talk about exclusivity with him. It’s good to be a trusting and innocent person but you should always pay attention to a mans actions. When his actions and words don’t match up that is a humongous red flag.
Heal yourself from the lies, or your naivety
Given the opportunity most men will cheat, or at the least they will not release information that they do not have to. If they met you at a party and you date for a few months and start getting intimate, do you really think he is going to inform you that he gets online every day of his life and emails 10 new women at a time? No. He doesn’t explicitly lie but then again he isn’t kiss and telling either. And if you never discussed exclusivity he’s got the perfect excuse because he never promised you a thing. When you go into shock looking at the singles profile of a man who is also with you claiming to be into you, it’s quite a shock but should be no surprise.
There are very few women who haven’t been played by at least one or more men. Some women give up on worrying about it, and just take the crumbs of affection they get, while rationalizing that at least they have a gorgeous guy to be with on occasion. It’s depressing but accepting crumb relationships will keep you temporarily warm but also cause emotional damage that makes it harder for you then get a real boyfriend later.
Now that you know that there are a lot of players out there you should really know that when you have a good man on your hands, you need to treat him right because they are precious and hard to find. Some women even work through cheating because of that old “Keep the one you’ve got because the next one will probably cheat as well, if given the right opportunity”. Monogamy doesn’t seem to be in style these days and the whole Internet dating phenomenon has something to do with it because there are so many choices and opportunities just a click away.
In any relationship you are going to have to put up with a lot, or remain single. But to hang your hopes on someone who won’t even get off a dating web site for you, is seriously short-sighted. When you accept that little from a man (occasional dates spattered with disappearances and curtain calls, text crumbs instead of phone calls, never meeting his friends, watching him log in to POF every day) etc, that is exactly what you get. Men are going to fall to the easiest path so the least amount of work they have to do to keep you around if they aren’t truly interested is exactly what they will do.
Once you see the writing on the wall and realize a man is not ever going to become your boyfriend, it’s up to you to cut ties. He’s likely okay with the arrangement and will use you as long as you allow it, then when you put your foot down he will recede away from your life and you’ll be left with the bag of damage. At that point stalking his profile daily or wishing every day of your life for him to come back and realize how great you are, is folly.
If he realized how great you are he would have treated you well. I don’t know that looking at his online profiles or obsessing over the competition and the women he is probably emailing and meeting is really helping you at that point. Post-break-up, it would be to your benefit to pretend that he simply didn’t exist, try not to look, and just gut out the misery for a couple of months until you wake up months later realizing that your life will go on without him. If all you were getting was text crumbs, intermittent hookups, and busy excuses, the bottom line was that he didn’t really exist in your world anyways other than to use you as a proverbial hole.
If you can’t set a boundary and stop being used, you’re setting yourself up to be sucked back in and used some more. Odds are by that point you’ll be fighting over his player status and he will have locked you out of ever being his girlfriend forever more already, so there is little point in being involved. You’ll act crazy dealing with a man like that, then he will blame the non-relationship on your craziness. Men that are still willing to be intimate with you while never committing to you are great at keeping you baited in. He might soft next you for a while then come back around to use you again after you are bored and lonely, missing him and susceptible. He knows he can post a picture on his dating profile and that will set you off on a texting rampage with him, which gives him the opportunity to ignore you while having his ego boosted by your pathetic behavior.
The only way you will heal from his lies is to simply not have any contact with him. Staying together with a man who has already treated you poorly is a mistake. It really takes two in a relation so if he isn’t interested in making things worth, what you are doing sticking around? If you get lonely and crawl back he will still continue to lie to you, treat you poorly, all the while keeping you hooked for the next lie he tells. So choose instead to simply ignore him. Know in your heart that he’s broken the most fundamental basis for a healthy relationship which is trust. It’s way harder to get trust back than it is to start with it in the beginning. This is why relationships that go off track and booty-call weird are almost always not worth saving. Whatever poor relationship patterns got set, are likely to be returned to.
If you have been deceived or shocked to find out that the man you were dating is also logging into dating websites everyday and emailing dozens of women, it just goes to show you that you should trust your gut instincts when it comes to men. Think back because in may be the case that in your gut knew all along that something wasn’t quite right and not adding up with this guy. If your were on edge all the time with this guy but buying into his relationship stall tactics because you hoped for something to develop it’s beyond frustrating, and beyond repair.
Did you know they have entire pickup artist websites devoted to teaching strategies men use on how they can string women along and get mileage out of them by postponing and avoiding talks and gently keeping you at arm’s length giving you crumbs of hope for a relationship that never materializes? Some men even readily admit they are dating but try to soft-pedal the relevance of that saying comforting things like, we haven’t been dating long enough to be exclusive, or I don’t even get on that site, or whatever they need to say to downplay the fact that they are pursuing other women right in front of your face. They just call it dating and try to soft-pedal what they are doing, which can convince you to hang in there with a guy and let him test all your samples for free while meanwhile logging in to email women.
Eventually you are going to rage quit on a guy that is seeing numerous women or find yourself in a heap of depression. If you stumble on his active profile on Plenty of Fish or elsewhere, it’s a clear sign that this guy wasn’t being fully honest with you, or keeping his activities compartmentalized while feeding you stall tactic busy excuses. Learn to start listening to your gut instincts and intuitions. If the man you are dating is active online its obvious that he has no interest in a real relationship with you.
The fact that you found that out now, is actually good. And as you look back on your relationship you will have all your answers as to why he broke plans, wouldn’t give you weekend time, kept you isolated, and gave you only enough text message crumbs to keep you in the proverbial harem. A healthy relationship will never develop because at the end of the day, no woman is going to be able to stay calm and sane dealing with a man who doesn’t actually care about them and is hunting other women down. There are certain cases where being single, even being a bitter shrew for that matter, are better than being used by a man. If you aren’t hearing from a man you are dating for seven, ten, fourteen days or a few weeks at a time, check the dating sites. Don’t be surprised if you find him there, and now you know who he’s been texting, while being too busy “working” to text you.
Plenty of fish
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