S/O What motivates men to string women along for years?
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Anonymous
Cat lady thinks it's "weird" for a woman to propose marriage. |
Anonymous
I got the sense she was moving in, but was questioning the wisdom of doing so. She reached out to DCUM to see what people had to say about her situation. That's wise of her, despite her age. Maybe she doesn't have the kind of friends to give it to her straight. I think DCUM for the most part (with a couple of troll exceptions) gave it to her straight. |
Anonymous
Dcum is never a good place to get advice. Too many bitter old women looking to share their misery. |
Anonymous
| She lets him. A man will treat you how you allow him to treat you. |
Anonymous
Often the are but the women think they can change their mind. |
Anonymous
Life isn’t a Hallmark movie. This shit rarely happens in real life. No guy realizes how good they had it and comes groveling. That’s just weird romance novel fantasy. |
Anonymous
+1 Lame OP question. Must be a slow troll day. |
Anonymous
| I dont understand being strung along. If your goal is to be married after a year or two of dating, then move on when that doesn’t happen. What am I missing? Being strung along makes it sound like women are passive and have no control of their own destiny. Don’t blame the man for your inability to move own. |
Anonymous
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Man here: there are a couple of scenarios of which I am aware. There is the straight-up string-her-along-on-purpose guy, who has no intention of ever marrying her and is intentionally taking advantage of the situation. This happens but is relatively rare. The mindset of most men in this situation goes something like this, I think: marriage is not particularly on his mind because dating-to-get-married is not the way most men think about dating in their late 20s and early 30s; the relationship is good and working for both parties; he’s not thinking about kids yet; and often the woman does not bring marriage up, waiting for him to propose. So this situation can sit a long time. Most men in the situation feel justified, because they usually have expressed ambivalence or worse about the institution of marriage many times, and when the situation blows up as it always does, he’s often blindsided: i told her a lot of times i wasn’t sure about marriage, why is she acting surprised and hurt?
From my perspective, stringing a woman along in this manner in her late 20s and early 30s is one of the worst things a man can do, but we don’t really have the vocabulary to condemn it anymore: both sex and dating have been decoupled from marriage, so there is no uniform set of expectations that both parties understand; the major focus is on consent these days, and the hapless man in this situation often thinks, “what, I told her I wasn’t sure about marriage and she stayed in the relationship voluntarily even so, how did I wrong her?”; and I do think dating at that often involves people who have been hurt a lot before and are kind of one-foot-out anyway a lot of the time. But not every long dating scenario is stringing along, sometimes there are real issues in the relationship to work through before marriage. |
Anonymous
| Unless a man is very good looking or rich, dating to get sex is a hassle, so they are content to stay in a good-enough relationship as long as they can get away with it or until they meet someone they like better. They don’t have to worry about a biological clock the way women do. |
Anonymous
They want to continue the benefits (not just sex) for now and think the woman will be better behaved if she thinks a proposal is coming. I’m not guessing, I’ve had men tell me this about their gfs. My cousin let a woman put him through grad school (tuition and living expenses) and then move him across country to a better job market because she thought he would propose once he had a good job. He told her that he couldn’t support a wife and kids without the degree and job. He left out that he was already divorced and had five kids by 3 women. She invested the better part of her 30s with him. Three months after he’s settled in the new job market, she quit her job and moved out there only to find he was already dating someone else. I guess he found it really hard to cook his own meals and do his own laundry. |
Anonymous
| A lot of things - a lot of times it’s financial, maybe he isn’t where he thinks he should be yet. |
Anonymous
| Don't act like men haven't heard all of the (partially to mostly true) horror stories about women pulling back on sex once married. Sex is the most important part of a relationship, why upset the apple cart? |
Anonymous
This is the best nugget of wisdom in this thread. Most men have zero clue what women want and can’t articulate their own feelings. It took me way too long to go after what I wanted. Prior to my now-wife, I was sliding in and out of relationships that were not right for me. I’d stay way too long because that was the easiest thing to do. I had zero clue what I was doing with life. -A Man |
Anonymous
Bottom line, this is a simple communication problem. If a woman wants a proposal, either propose yourself, or ask your man to propose to you. If he says he doesn't know or isn't ready, figure out a time period that you are willing to wait, and tell him to figure it out by that date. If he hasn't figured it out, move on. The man that wants to be with you will figure it out immediately, because that will be one of the most important questions in his life at that time. |