If You Want Her To Stick Around Long Term, She Must Feel Like You Care

Casual hookups have a time expiration if you make her feel like you don’t care.

In this video coaching newsletter I discuss an email from a viewer who says he failed to escalate properly from casual dating into a relationship. He treated a woman he’d been casually hooking up with like he didn’t care. She wanted to do something for Valentine’s Day and he blew her off to study. She got drunk and hooked up with another guy.

Things went sideways and they haven’t spoken in two months. My comments are in bold italics like this below in the body of his email.

This particular email is from a viewer who basically said he failed to escalate properly from casual dating into a relationship. So he was dating her for about four months, and like most women, she says, “Well, I just want something casual. I’m not looking for a relationship,” but over time, as her interest started to slowly creep up on her, she wanted a little bit more. Then Valentine’s Day comes around and she basically reaches out, hinting that she’d like to do something for Valentine’s Day, and he’s basically like, “Oh yeah, I gotta study. I’m busy. Let’s get together next week.”

So she ends up getting drunk and hooking up with some other dude, then tells him. Obviously he’s not happy. Then he ends it, because he kind of acts like they’re supposedly in a relationship when it was just strictly a friends with benefits type of thing, neither one of them were trying to lock the other one down, and then he tried to get her to commit and get into a relationship, and now they’re basically in no-contact. He hasn’t even spoken to her in two months.

I mean, if you’re going to do friends with benefits or keep a rotation girl, you gotta understand that at some point it’s got a time limit on it. Especially if you act like you don’t care, like it’s just about sex and hooking up, which is basically just the way this guy behaved, he really didn’t care until he found out she hooked up with some other guy and started backing away because she had lost interest. So these things are going to happen. You cannot act like a zombie forever and expect a woman to stick around.

Viewer Email:

Hi Corey,

I came across your work after I messed up but I’m reading through it now. Here’s what happened in my situation. Thanks for any help you can give me!

I started seeing a woman casually last November. She was exactly my type, but she said she only wanted something casual because of her PhD. We slept together on the first date and began seeing each other about once a week, with occasional hookups in between. I met her friends on New Year’s and we even planned a trip for January.

The week of the trip, I got very sick and needed surgery, so I canceled. It was a heavy situation, and but maybe that wasn’t clear. Around the same time, my grandma had a stroke and I fell behind in grad school. We texted occasionally but weren’t consistent.

So just because you’re going through a hard time does not mean you can just totally neglect a girl you’re dating. Especially if it’s getting to the point where she’s wanting to introduce you to her friends and things of that nature. Obviously, as I say in the book, you should only do group dates if you’re exclusive, but you can tell it’s moving towards something close. Then he has an illness he has to deal with, which is just the way life is. It throws at you like that when you least expect it. Then he has a death in the family. So it clearly affected him where he was distant and wasn’t making much of an effort.

That’s the kind of thing that just makes a woman feel, because as her interest is going up, she wants a little bit more. She thinks of you in more of a romantic sense or a potential boyfriend sense, but if you keep acting like just a booty call and you put her on the back burner, she’s going to realize that, especially if she comes from a good family and she’s raised right, which I don’t know if this girl was or not, he doesn’t elaborate, again there’s a time limit on you behaving this way. Again, if you’re just doing a rotation, you’re just hooking up with a bunch of girls, you get a little practice squad going, then they’re going to drop off and you’re going to be adding new ones.

Typically the relationships start just because you start dating somebody that’s just so cool, so easygoing, easy to get along with, she’s nice to you, she communicates well, you have a lot of fun together, and you have more fun with her than anybody else. It just naturally happens that you guys spend more and more time together, and you both do and say things that show that you care for one another, but obviously, as she started to care more, his behavior showed that he cared less. That’s the way she took it and she started looking for the exits because she probably started developing feelings. Then once she realized, looks like on Valentine’s Day, she was pretty hurt by that, that he would just rather study on Valentine’s Day than hang out with the girl he’d been hooking up with for three or four months. So that was a fuck-up on his part. It’d be different if you’d been on maybe a couple of dates, you just met on Tinder, but when you’ve been hooking up for four months at that point, you can’t just blow a girl off and act like a zombie.

We started hooking up again in early February. On Valentine’s Day, I didn’t plan anything because I was studying for a major exam worth half my grade. She hinted at wanting something, but I replied slow and said we can meet after my exam next week. The next weekend, during dinner at her place, she told me she had gotten drunk and slept with someone else on Valentine’s.

Probably revealing it just because she’s assuming you don’t give a damn about her, because again, if you’re dating somebody for four months and then you’re just too busy for Valentine’s Day, that just shows a girl is a booty call, a sex playmate, nothing more.

So clearly her behavior, you made her feel rejected because she was starting to develop feelings and doesn’t know if it’s a random guy or maybe another guy she was talking to, but maybe putting off because she’s like, “Well, I’ve been seeing this guy for a few months and it wouldn’t be right,” but then when he blows her off for Valentine’s Day because he’d rather study, then it didn’t matter.

They hadn’t used protection, and her IUD had expired. I calmly said I wasn’t OK with that and that I took this as an end to our fling. She said it was reckless but not a big deal since we weren’t exclusive and she wasn’t looking for a relationship. Later she texted apologizing, how it’s not normal for her, and said if we never saw each other again, she wished me luck.

But did he say, “Hey, let’s get together?” No, he waits again, just treating like a zombie.

I felt terrible and reached out two weeks later to see if she wanted to meet again.

So what it sounds like is he started getting a little thirsty, wanted to get some strange, wanted some booty. She’s the first person he thought of.

She said yes, but she wouldn’t be exclusive because she wanted to look for a relationship, though she’d hear me out. I made things worse by suggesting we go back to being FWB but only with each other.

So what’s basically happened is she started to develop feelings and he’s like, “Yeah, let’s just casually keep hooking up,” which again, reiterates that he doesn’t care.

She declined and said while she liked what we had, she didn’t see me as a long-term fit, though if I’d asked earlier, it would’ve been yes, but wants a relationship now, and I’m not looking for that.

I don’t know if he’s saying he’s not looking for that or she said she wasn’t looking for that because he says, “I’m not looking for that.”

She said she’d never forget our time together.

So maybe the guy she hooked up with, she was really digging. So it might have been somebody, again in college, you’re in a target rich environment. You got a lot of young, beautiful single people. You’re never going to be around as many beautiful single people when you’re in college at any other time in your life and girls that are willing to experiment.

So more than likely she was talking to this other guy, and as soon as you blew her off for Valentine’s Day, she probably called or texted him and they got together and hooked up. He probably made her feel like he cared. So by this point, in her mind, there’s potential with this guy, but not you, because again, you just blew her off after two weeks.

I was really just trying to be chill, have good sex, and wait for her to ask to date me because I thought I was hot shit because I make six figures, I’m fit, and she thinks I’m incredibly attractive. I was lazy and acted pretty disinterested in retrospect. 

Well, you got to remember, rejection breeds obsession, and he really didn’t give a damn. Even after the Valentine’s Day thing, he didn’t give a damn for two weeks, and then he probably got horny again and was figuring he was going to call her, and when she wasn’t receptive to it, again he got rejected. So now he’s like, “Oh, this is the love of my life. I got to get her back,” but in reality, if we go back to how his behavior was before, during, and after Valentine’s Day, he just acted like he didn’t give a shit. He didn’t care until she moved on. That’s when he cared.

So if I was doing a phone session with him, he’s pointing this out, I’d bring that up because the reality is, say she does give him another chance and they start hooking up again, he’ll probably go right back to acting like a zombie because he’s just not that into her. Even though he claimed in the very beginning of his email that she was exactly his type, if we look at how he treated her, he didn’t give a shit until she was riding off into the sunset with another dude. Then he cared again because rejection breeds obsession.

The next day, she sent a long message about how she felt during the fling. She said she hadn’t really known I liked her, felt insecure about her appearance, and felt she tried to get to know me but I didn’t seem to care to deepen it or know her, but said she assumed I was keeping it casual like we agreed when we started. I said that wasn’t true, I was attracted to her but stayed “chill” because she wanted something casual and I didn’t want to push for more.

Yeah, that’s kind of BS. You’re just kind of BSing yourself and her at this point.

I over-explained, asked her to dinner to clear things up, and said if it was a no, she didn’t need to feel pressured to reply. She never responded.

So I’d say like, at this point, you’re several weeks after the fact. You didn’t change your behavior after Valentine’s. You broke it off. She probably spent more time with the other guy and saw potential with him because again, he showed he cared, and you acted like she was just a booty call.

So again, there’s a time limit on this. You cannot just do this forever because if you’d have cared after the Valentine’s Day incident, you would have done something about it, but you didn’t.

It’s been two months since we talked, we don’t have each others socials, but I have seen her on dating apps. I wont break no-contact and will certainly be reading your stuff in the meantime, but I guess this is just a lost cause and I need to move on and learn. 

Thank You,

Bob

Well again, you did try to see her again, and the bottom line is she was moving on. The fact that she’s on dating apps tells me that she made up her mind and she’s trying to move on. Now, does that mean you’ll never hear from her again and it’s 100% donsies? No, I’d say it’s a 50/50 chance at some point she reaches back out, and if you really do truly care, you can’t act like a zombie.

If I’m a betting man, I’m gonna look at your behavior before the Valentine’s Day incident happen, and before the Valentine’s Day incident, you acted like you didn’t give a shit when you got sick, when your grandma died, you just didn’t care. You didn’t stay in touch. Even when you re-engaged, after that, you still didn’t give a shit. So she prompted you to do something for Valentine’s Day and you didn’t want to. It wasn’t important enough to you. That again, showed you didn’t care. So that’s a true reflection of how you really felt about her. And it sounds like she’s got a healthy self-esteem to where she’s just not going to get back together with a guy that made her feel like he didn’t care because again, she even confirmed this. He made her feel like he didn’t care about her.

So if I’m talking to her, I’m going to be saying if we look at his actions because that’s the only thing that really matters about what a human being does, not what they say, his actions show he didn’t give a shit. So we have to assume he didn’t give a shit until she rode off into the sunset with somebody else, then he cared because he didn’t want to lose his booty call, but in reality, he didn’t like her enough to make her more than that. So that’s on him.

So lesson learned, if you’re dating a girl and she’s a rotation or practice squad girl, again you got a time limit on if you just constantly make them feel like you don’t give a shit, eventually they’re going to go and get with somebody else and leave you in the dust.

So, if you’ve got a question or a challenge and you’d like to get my help, go to UnderstandingRelationships.com, click the Products tab at the top of your screen on any page, and book a coaching session with yours truly.

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