Reply to S/O What motivates men to string women along for years?

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Reply to "S/O What motivates men to string women along for years?"

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[quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

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