So you met a man that is handsome, successful and seemed interested in you initially, and you told your best friends that are on cloud nine because you met mister perfect. But somewhere between dates one and ten, you sense that the honeymoon buzz is already wearing off. Slowly, it dawns on you that your mister perfect is backing off not getting closer. Phone calls have turned to texts have turned to less and less frequent texts. But he still responds when you initiate, and he still sees you even though he is busy, right? So you convince yourself that there is still hope. Sorry to burst your bubble but here are a few facts about men that you might want to consider. It can help you realize that you may be making excuses for someone who has for all intents and purposes opted out of taking you seriously.
Commitment and Intimacy
Some of us learn the hard way that having a great romantic relationship does not a commitment make. In fact, men can be intimate with you and love it yet be no more into a relationship after those encounters. A romantic interlude feels good, it is a moment in time, and they wonder when it will happen again but it does not imply that your relationship is getting serious or heading in any direction other than just, physical. Men can completely compartmentalize their emotions from their romantic behavior. If your relationship consists solely of intimate encounters and texts, it is unlikely that it will ever lead into anything serious or committed.
Internet dating means less leverage
Part of the casual relationship phenomenon may not even be your fault. Internet dating has made casual intimate relationships easier and easier for men to find without requiring them to make an exclusive commitment. A man could get into a relationship with you while meanwhile remaining perfectly geared up to a continuation of his current dating pattern. One down one to go. Just because he is having intimate relations with you does not mean he has any intention of getting off the internet dating sites. If you have a man you are involved with who still has an active dating profile, you are in a casual relationship. If you find yourself in this situation and push for more commitment and push for more contact and push for attention by sending him text messages, he is more likely to opt out and find another willing girlfriend than he is to commit.
A man who is single, handsome and having fun meeting women on the internet is going to be reluctant to seal off his romantic options by getting exclusive with you. If he senses he is sliding in towards exclusivity with you then its at that point that he might attempt to dilute things with you by adding another woman or two to date on the side. You could wind up feeling very hurt because its right at the point that you are seriously falling for them that they realize they need to back off in order to avoid losing their freedom. They sense you are falling hard and that’s why they are backing off. Internet dating feels like a buffet of dating choices. A new possibility is just a profile click away and some men find this entirely too enticing. If he doesn’t feel like you are the perfect woman for him he just won’t stop what he is doing which is dating. Timing becomes important, because a player like this will only be ripe for commitment when he starts to tire of the internet dating scene and that won’t be for a while.
Some men can go on for years in this mind set. They vow to meet plenty of women before ever decided to commit to one particular one again. A string of women will likely get hurt in a mans dating wake so don’t feel so bad. Especially with internet dating you will probably regret becoming intimate with a man before getting an exclusivity commitment with him, getting him to take down his profile, and spending substantial time with him doing activities together. That is the ideal situation but if you let chemistry and desperation get you carried away and into intimacy without a solid relationship foundation, its 20/20 hindsight. You blew it and now you need to quit getting intimate prematurely and do damage control. Especially with internet dating, it is absolutely imperative to take things slowly. Never get carried away. Exercise self control and self respect.
Texting him makes you the pursuer, hunter, aggressor, which is not good
If you pursue a man you are in a casual relationship with by constantly texting him and trying to push yourself into his life and thoughts more, it won’t work. He wants to be the hunter by nature. If he wanted to be with you nothing in the world would stand in his way. If he wanted to pick up the phone and call you nothing in the world is preventing him from making a phone call. But if you take the pursuit completely away from him and text him every how ever many hours a day, the pursuit and the desire to call you is gone. He’s just going to show up when he bored or looking for variety, period. Never take away a man’s desire to pursue by being too available.
A few telltale signs your relationship is casual, Texting being #1
There are some obvious signs that your relationship is casual, though you may be in denial. What often happens is that women get into casual relationships and they are in a fantasy that they man is really into them like they acted in dates 1, 2 and 3 when they were calling and taking you out. Then, the butterflies wore off perhaps intimacy already happened and good as things appeared to be going, the dates and phone calls seemed to peter off. When the dates and phone calls peter out the relationship has got off its initial buzz and established itself as casual. That’s when the woman starts making excuses for him to deny what is really going on which is that fact that he doesn’t see it going into a full blown relationship but is still willing to continue to be intimate with her once in a while if she’s agreeable and naïve enough for that. Once the girl agrees non exclusivity either knowingly or unknowingly, she becomes the doormat he loses respect for and rarely can get her footing back with this man.
What happened she thinks? We liked each other so much on the fist dates – we really clicked. I have news that on the first few dates men can be incredibly good actors. They might like you enough to pursue and they are going to go through the motions to get romantic. They can fully pretend they are the exclusive type knowing full well that they are not. It’s deceitful but men do it to get play time with a woman. They’ll pretend its going somewhere for a few months to get what they want out of the relationship (which is romantic experience with a brand new attractive woman) and only then they will actually start to give a relationship consideration. If she doesn’t meet his standards after he got romantic with her, he will execute the fizzle. The fizzle from dates, to phone calls, to text messages, to too busy for even that.
If the man you are dating is still on the internet with an active profile and especially if they log in daily and periodically update their photos then rest assured they are still meeting other women. Don’t believe for one second your relationship is going anywhere serious with them. You might be the 10th women they’ve meet on the internet, been romantic with and had as a three month fake girlfriend then fizzled. How would you know? Communication by text message mostly, a still active profile, days if not weeks of disappearing for business, nights when the person can’t be reached, screened calls, your call going to voice mails, flaky plans, cancelled plans, and lots of single women friends on facebook are all signs this person is completely single and not going to be with you. You might be casually dating them, but they aren’t with you.
Text only communications is the number one red flag that your relationship is casual and going nowhere. If that isn’t warning enough there are other obvious signs. Does this person ever spring for a piece of pizza with you? The horrible economy aside, this man has to eat. So if your dates never seem to involve getting a bite to eat you are a goner. Likewise if its always him coming to your place or you going to his place, its casual. If he has never introduced you to a single person he knows its casual. If you catch him in small lies its casual. If his cell phone rings late at night and he doesn’t answer it then its casual. If he’s getting texted when he is with you and private about it and protective of his phone its casual.
So what do you do about it to turn things around in your favor?
For one thing, stop pursing him. Forcing yourself on a man and trying to force exclusivity on a man after the fact is a waste of time and it won’t yield favorable results anyways. Constantly bombarding him with messages will never get him to be exclusive with you however it may get him to block your number or stop talking to you. Instead, do the opposite and let your pursuit and text messages fall totally silent and completely opt out of aggressing after him. Just drop it like a barbell. Then, you wait. If he bothers to realize you left, then he might start to wonder what’s up. He’ll still attempt to wait you out if he knows you, figuring if you stew for a weeks you will eventually cave in and text message him. Don’t cave in to text. Just do your own thing and become indifferent to him and see what he does.
If your man does eventually text you up or call you wondering what has been going on with you and acting nonchalant about it then you have a choice to make. Do you even bother to share a man that isn’t into a relationship with you and won’t take his profile down and stop meeting other women? If you want to bother, then start doing things on your terms and when its convenient to you. Draw a line in your mind how long you are willing to share him to see if it goes anywhere. See if anything changes and if it doesn’t then opt out. Another thing you could try is to put in effort to make your romance with him more connected and see if he bonds to you that way more. At least you will be able to surmise if he can emotionally bond to you when you are intimate. If you don’t sense that he is getting closer to you then even if he is the man of your dreams why stick around for him when you are just an option to him? The sooner you walk away without looking back the sooner you’ll see if he is going to follow you or just vanish off into the distance. Most likely he’ll vanish. You’ll be sad if you really liked him but better to be done with these go nowhere relationships as quickly and painlessly as possible. Better to be in a relationship going nowhere for a few months than for a few years. The best way to see if a man truly likes you is to back off and then see what he does.
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