It can be a scary moment when you have to wonder if a guy actually wants a relationship with you.
As a woman, how would you know if he doesn’t want a serious relationship with you?
It seems like a simple question that should have a simple answer. But when you’re emotionally involved with a man, it can get confusing.
You may ask why he doesn’t entirely leave your life, yet it still feels like he’s not fully ‘in’ a committed relationship with you.
If you want the answer to that specific question, I also have an article on Why does he keep me around if he doesn’t want a relationship?
Are there signs he will never make you his girlfriend? As it turns out, the following signs will also give you the definite answer to this question.
After my extensive research in love, relationships and masculine feminine polarity as well as helping women for more than 15 years, I’d have to be stupid to not notice glaring signs that a man doesn’t want a relationship with you.
Table of Contents
Things You Should Know
- If a guy has rules around when you can see him or contact him, he doesn’t want a relationship with you.
- Guys are different to us women. They invest in the relationship when they’ve fallen in love romantically.
- If he hasn’t fallen in love, then you’ll never be his “one and only”. So you need to make sure a man is in love with you before pursuing something serious with him.
- If he doesn’t care about your feelings or offer you emotional support, that’s a good sign that he doesn’t want a relationship with you.
Related: Dating An Avoidant Man: What Is It Like? What Does He Want + FAQ.
Without further ado, here are the 6 burning signs he doesn’t want a relationship with you.
By the way, if you’d like to test and find out how serious he is about committing to you, you can do so with our free quiz. I’ve embedded it below:
Do the quiz: how commitment friendly is my man?
#1: You Have To Initiate Every Time & He Doesn’t Initiate Back.
Initiation of contact should be reciprocal.
It’s the most basic thing a man (or woman) can do when conversing with their love interest. The simple act of initiating in return.
Of course, at times you may initiate 60% and he 40%.
Other times, he may initiate 70% and you 30%, and so on.
The percentage can also depend on whether one of you has something going on in your personal life and needs to initiate communication more.
It really depends on whether one of you has more to say, or simply that one of you needs the other more at that particular moment in time.
That change of percentage is very normal, and you want to keep it that way; roll with it.
But at some point not long after you guys first become an item, there must be a balance that roughly equates to….you guessed it:
Reciprocal, responsive and equal initiation of contact.
If initiation of contact is not reciprocal, then that’s a possible sign that he doesn’t have enough romantic interest in you.
Here’s a video I made on the 6 Burning Signs He Doesn’t Want A Relationship With YOU.
If you struggle letting yourself initiate contact in a reciprocal way with men because of bad experiences in your past relationships, let me explain something to you quickly…
Here’s What A Lot Of Women Do When They Have Chased A Man Too Much
When women feel like they have chased too much or over-initiated in past relationships, they often take on funny rules and ideas to try to regain some feeling of control or self worth.
Some ideas or rules are good, but the vast majority of them are plain bad. Or even morally wrong.
Here’s an example of what women sometimes do. They try to ‘fix’ the problem of chasing a man by taking on the ridiculous 80/20 rule in their relationship.
The 80/20 rule or Pareto’s principle, was a rule for other areas of life (not in love and relationships).
But some women mistakenly use it to guide their initiation with men.
So what they do is they only initiate contact 20% of the time, while the guy is expected to initiate at least 80% of the time.
This will not work for you either.
As one man accurately said on one of my videos about this rule:
“The only men that this rule would work on is the men that women don’t want.”
If you feel like you’re doing too much chasing, then of course, it will pay to stop. You never want to chase a man blindly.
Instead, you should learn to initiate in high value ways. One of these ways is through the use of playful, high value banter.
Here’s an example:
You: “Hey, do you know what I loved about your outfit last night?”
Him: “What?”
You: “Absolutely nothing! [insert playful joking emoji]”
You can continue this conversation however you want, but the key is playfulness. And you make it clear you’re being playful by including playful emojis in the text.
Your intent is to initiate playful conversation, not to manipulate or talk about surface things.
Also, if you would like to get him to chase you a bit more, you can actually encourage him to chase you (but more importantly, value you). Here’s an article on How to Make Him Chase You & Value You.
Don’t Rely On Silly Rules To Try To “Make” Him Interested
If you decide to pull back and make him initiate in order to “re-set”, that can be ok, as a way to relax and initially change your chasing behaviour.
However, moving forward, there must be a sense of mutual responsiveness between you both.
Sometimes women heavily rely on the rule of leaning back with men, to try to make men chase them.
Leaning back isn’t wrong per se, but just like the 80/20 rule, leaning back has very clear dangers that you should be aware of.
You can never rely on the 80/20 rule of initiating contact with a man to have a successful romantic relationship.
Otherwise, if one of you is far more invested than the other, it’s a recipe for heartache in the long-run.
No man will genuinely fall in love with you that way, because for two people to fall in love, there must be hyper-attunement.
The 80/20 rule does not model any form of attunement. It’s just a rule to try to curb your own uncertainty or fear.
Here’s why the 80/20 Rules of Contacting A Man will Likely Make You Lose Him.
Do the quiz: Which of these 8 feminine archetypes am i?
#2: He’s Got Unspoken Or Blatant Rules To Ensure You Cannot Take Too Much
…or have too much of him.
This kind of behaviour should send an obvious signal to you: that he doesn’t care about having a relationship with you. Period.
If he’s setting all these rules for you to ensure that you can’t ask much of him, or get too exclusive with him, that’s a sign to take note of.
If he has a bunch of rules about when, how, or why you should talk to him or contact him (whilst you have no rules for him), that’s a clear sign that he doesn’t care.
This woman’s post in our facebook group sums up this particular phenomenon very well. Have a read of it:
Ask yourself: does it feel like I could break up with this man today, and he wouldn’t care a whole lot about me breaking up with him?
Take note of his response. Be honest with yourself about it.
Ask yourself: does this man’s unspoken or blatant rules make me feel like our “relationship” is not a safe place for me to go to when I need him?
Ask yourself: does this man’s unspoken or blatant rules repeatedly make me feel undervalued, isolated and ignored?
Maybe you could simply tap into your gut feeling.
Your gut knows when something is up. So, listen to it.
(Sometimes it’s even more accurate than looking for signs he doesn’t want a relationship with you!)
#3: You Feel Like There’s Always A Distance Between You.
You try to get closer, but he is unresponsive to your attempts to get closer.
Do you feel like there’s an emotional distance, or a gap between you that is never closed, no matter how hard you try?
Maybe you’ve experienced lots of physical intimacy with him, but not much emotional intimacy?
It’s important to note that not all of us women go about trying to get closer to a man in the right ways.
In fact, some of us push men away with the wrong strategies of trying to get closer to a man.
However, if it always feels like you’re wanting to connect and he couldn’t care less about connecting with you (never responds to your attempts to connect), that’s a red flag.
He also may be emotionally unavailable. Here are the signs he’s emotionally unavailable and how to deal with emotionally unavailable men.
Some men will keep you around – yet they will always make sure that there’s enough space for a new woman (or perhaps an ex) to enter into his life.
Some men will keep you around, but always make sure that you are feeling empty of his presence.
You can call it breadcrumbing, or you can call it using you – whatever you call it, how long can you continue in such a relationship?
A man who has at least an average level of intelligence and cares about you, will feel it when you need him.
He may need a little time and experience to understand your needs, but you’ll feel him trying. And he will do his best to respond if indeed he wants a serious relationship with you.
A Man Who Doesn’t Want A Relationship With You Will Leave You Feeling Like This…
A man who doesn’t want a relationship with you will leave you feeling:
- Angry
- Hurt; and
- Lost from the lack of emotional intimacy between you
It’s simple. Listen to that anger and that hurt. Don’t ignore it.
Zoom out a little, and see the truth of the matter: he doesn’t care, no matter how much he says he does.
If you are feeling unsure about how much your man cares, here’s something you can say to him that will let you regain your high value whilst capturing his attention:
#4: He’s Only There When He Wants Something.
You get lots of booty calls from him, but no “just checking in on you” calls.
He never invites you anywhere with his family or friends, because you’re not that kind of girl/woman to him.
Instead of being the woman whom he wants to involve in almost every aspect of his life, he’d rather have a casual relationship, keeping you at arms length.
….And basically keep you as the “available” woman whom he can constantly take value from.
And he will keep extracting value from you for as long as you allow him to.
So here’s the reason for this:
He either just never really felt any real emotional connection and emotional attraction between you…
Or he sees you as an easy woman who he can push around and dominate in order to satisfy his own desires.
We’ve all had at leat one friend or at least one guy in our lives who was annoyingly value-extracting in their behavior.
They only call when they want something. Yet when you need something, there’s minimal effort on their part to add value back to you.
Feel that annoyance and that anger. Because the last thing you want to do is to be desensitised to these feelings. These feelings are there to help you, to guide you.
Don’t ignore them!
If you ignore these feelings, you can (and will) end up emotionally attached to the wrong man.
And it’s imperative to attach to an emotionally healthy man – not to a man whose toxic habits will eat away at your esteem and happiness, causing you to become unable to attach to emotionally healthy men in the future.
On the topic of attachment, you may want to find out your primary attachment style – Why is this important? It is because your core attachment style largely dictates and influences what happens in your relationship. Thus it’s imperative you understand your core attachment style!
You can find out your primary attachment style by doing this quiz below:
Do the quiz: What is my attachment style?
#5: He’s Not Invested In Your Emotions
….(Therefore he doesn’t get to know the people you care about).
A man in love will invest in you and in your emotions.
There will be no doubt that when you have emotions, he’ll be there a lot of the time.
No matter how difficult or how wonderful your emotions are, he also feels them and is affected by them.
A man who is mostly nonchalant about your emotions isn’t invested in you.
If you’re wondering whether a man wants a relationship with you, it helps to understand the signs he is falling in love with you.
A crystal clear sign that a man does want a committed relationship with you is that he will care about the people that you care about.
This is because he’s invested in you.
When a man is invested in you, he will also invest in the relationships that mean a lot to you.
He will want to get to know these people, understand your relationship with them, and potentially even befriend them himself).
So if your mother or father dies and you are grieving, then he will feel empathy for you.
Of course, he may not be there physically as much as you wish.
(In fact, this may be because he is a man, and masculine men often grieve by creating more space around them in order to process it. As such, some men make the mistake of projecting this value onto the woman in their life, and automatically disappear when you need them the most).
It may be because he has to be at work, or perhaps he doesn’t know how to solve your problem.
However, even if he’s not physically there with you, you’ll get the feeling that he feels a bit of what you feel.
He may not fully relate, but he’s trying. That’s what matters.
#6: He Dodges Any Attempt to Define The Relationship
Does he dodge every attempt to define the relationship with you?
If so, beware, because you could be in a situationship.
Does he avoid the relationship talk or run away?
In general, I recommend women approach the relationship talk with caution. This is because a lot of women try to have it way before the man feels ready.
And sometimes, they try to have the talk even when the man was never interested in a serious relationship with her to begin with.
See:
As women, seeking a serious relationship comes naturally to us. It doesn’t for men.
When it comes to relationships, remember this:
Men aren’t women, and women aren’t men .
That’s because we have different reproductive agendas.
Those differing reproductive agendas can overlap, but only when a guy is in love with you.
This is why it’s imperative that you figure out whether you’re both on the same page or not.
By “same page”, I mean you both clearly want a serious relationship and both of your actions are clearly showing that shared commitment to each other.
Being on the same page only really happens when one crucial element is present for the mean:
Romantic love.
Simply put, he has to be in love with you, because it is when he’s in love with you that he will place you in his “one and only” basket.
Otherwise, the only other basket he can place you in is the “one of many” basket.
If you’d like to learn the secrets to have every man you date see you as “one and only” material, these secrets are inside of my program “Becoming His One And Only”.
(The promise of this course is for you to have your chosen man fall in love with you & beg you to be his one & only by embodying these 5 feminine secrets, even if he’s been distant, avoidant, or losing interest…)
BONUS SIGN: He Tells You He Doesn’t Want A Relationship With You.
If he says it, he means it. This is not something that us women intuitively “get”.
Basically, men don’t communicate like women do.
Men usually mean what they say. If he says “I don’t want a relationship with you.”
It doesn’t mean:
“I don’t want a relationship with you, oh I dunno maybe. Perhaps in 2 hours or two weeks I will want a relationship. Actually, let me just think about it and I might turn around and say something different in two weeks.”
No.
It means he does not want a serious relationship with you.
This is one of the more obvious signs that he won’t make you his girlfriend, and doesn’t want a relationship with you.
Men And Women Are Different…
As women we have a wide range of emotions. This wide range of emotions comes through in our communication.
As such, more often than not, our communication depends on how we feel during that moment in time.
Sure, sometimes men say things they don’t really mean in a moment of anger or hurt. But not nearly as much as women do.
This is because men who are masculine at their core are far more consistent.
They’re more consistent due to the fact that in order to maintain this masculine equilibrium, they don’t want to increase drama or emotions, they prefer to decrease them.
Emotions don’t always serve in the realm of the masculine. The masculine is an unchanging energy. Here are 5 insights on men that will ease your worries.
It is not the ever changing and flowing energy of life.
They want to be empty. Being empty allows them to solve problems, move forward, get the kill, and escape from the chaos of life.
So expect that if he says he doesn’t want a relationship, that he has made up his mind already and won’t change it.
Don’t second guess it unless you have an outstanding reason to do so!
Should I Cut Him Off If He Doesn’t Want A Relationship?
Most people would advise you to cut him off if he doesn’t want a relationship. But I know not every relationship is that black and white.
The fact is that if you really love the guy, you may still want to try a few things before you give up completely.
I support that – but only if you genuinely love him and if you, for whatever reason, believe in the relationship.
Just know that there’s the risk of losing your valuable time if you choose to do this.
But you can also gain a valuable lesson if you try and it doesn’t work out.
If you’re interested in pursuing a committed relationship with him (but he doesn’t seem to be interested in that), you can attempt to build more emotional attraction and emotional connection.
That’s the best you can do in order to place yourself in his life as his “one and only” category.
When he feels enough of these two things, that’s when it will become effortless for you.
That’s when you’ll have the romantic relationship of your dreams.
But given that you’ve already been seeing this guy, there’s that risk that you’re in the “one of many” basket already.
This means he’ll only ever give you crumbs. Or the bare minimum.
There is some hope of getting out of that “one of many” basket and have him be serious about you.
But you have to be prepared for the worst and know that chances of that happening are lower than if you’d already placed yourself in his “one and only” basket from the beginning.
If you want to learn how guys fall in love, read this article by D.Shen on The 2 Traits of Women That Men Routinely Fall In Love With.
Frequently Asked Questions On Signs He Doesn’t Want A Relationship With You
Why Does He Keep Me Around If He Doesn’t Want Me?
Because it benefits him more to have you around than it does to let you go.
If you’re not causing trouble AND he can get sex and companionship from you, then why let you go?
Remember this: for men, having one woman in the background is better than NO woman at all.
Why Does He Act Like My Boyfriend But Says He Doesn’t Want A Relationship?
A few possible reasons:
- Because you tolerate the act (it fills a void), even if you don’t get the label of exclusivity with him.
- Because guys can gain more respect, approval and attention from others if they have a cute woman by their side.
- Because he’s afraid of spending more of his energy and time (which comes with having a long term relationship).
If he’s acting like your boyfriend in public but telling you he doesn’t want a relationship, that’s a red flag.
Specifically, it’s a red flag that he’s doing things for himself, and not for you or for the relationship.
How Do You Know If He Is Just Using You?
You have to not be taken away by him coming on strong (because men come on strong when they’re serious about AND when they’re just wanting sex) so you have to figure out which one it is.
And to figure it out, you need to test, test, test.
A lot of women get used by men because they’re afraid of acknowledging what they already know to be true in their gut, or because they’re afraid of testing in case it’s “manipulative”.
Let me assure you, it’s only manipulative if you’re doing it to abuse him and disrespect his time, energy and effort.
It’s not manipulative if you’re doing it to see if he’s willing to connect deeper with you.
Also, you may want to double check whether you might be his rebound girl or not. You don’t want to be the rebound girl! Here are 15 Signs You’re The Rebound (& FAQ).
How Do You Stop Chasing A Man Who Doesn’t Want You?
You can attune yourself to the reality of his indifference and/or dislike for you. You do that by looking at his actions, not his words. And you let his actions make you feel the emotions you need to feel.
When you feel these necessary emotions, then you can calibrate yourself better and walk away.
What Do You Do When A Guy Doesn’t Want You?
Let it hurt. Let it make you angry. Let this hurt and anger drive you in a direction that is better for your self esteem.
Remember: the longer you spend chasing the attention of a guy who isn’t invested in you, the more it breaks you down and ruins your energy and your value for the man who WILL value you.
By the way, if you want the process of having your chosen man commit to you be easy, I would love to help.
The way to make the commitment process easy (and to reduce a man’s commitment resistance) is by showing up as the one and only woman.
You can find out more about this concept of becoming his one and only in my new online study program “Becoming his one and only”. (The promise of this course is for you to have your chosen man fall in love with you & beg you to be his one & only by embodying these 5 feminine secrets, even if he’s been distant, avoidant, or losing interest…)
How Does A Man Tell You He Doesn’t Want You?
It depends on the kind of guy he is, but most guys will tell you they don’t want a relationship with you through their actions.
He can tell you all sorts of things that will make you think (or assume) he wants a committed relationship with you, but ultimately, he will tell you with his actions.
For example:
- He won’t just spend time with you, he’ll make time for you when it’s not easy for him to do so.
- He won’t only want physical intimacy, he will want to be close to you emotionally as well.
- He won’t be chasing multiple women, instead he’ll be spending almost all his spare time with you.
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Renee is the founder of The Feminine Woman & co-founder of Shen Wade Media where we teach women how to show up as a high value high status woman whom easily inspires a deep sense of emotional commitment from her chosen man. She graduated with a bachelor of Law and bachelor of Arts majoring in sociology and psychology. She has been a dating and relationship coach for women in the past 15 years and together with her husband D. Shen at Commitment Triggers blog, they have positively influenced the lives of over 20 million women through their articles and videos as well as 10’s of thousands through paid programs through the Shen Wade Media platform.
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