Why We’re Just Not That Into He’s Just Not That Into You

We spend a lot of time throwing quick punches at the book all women were reading 5 years ago, He’s Just Not That Into You.

Today, we thought we’d finally explain why we don’t like this book, and why we think it does more harm than good.

Our problem isn’t with the message, which is, in its most condensed form, is basically this: if he’s not actively trying to make you his girlfriend, he doesn’t want to be your boyfriend.

That’s solid advice—too many of us spend hours obsessing about what a text means, trying to explain away the fact that he isn’t calling, texting, or telling you he wants to get serious. Sometimes we are wasting our time and energy on people who, for whatever reason, are never going to change their minds.

The problem is that this is where the message stops. He’s not into you, so get over it and move on to someone who is. And, most importantly, it’s not you—it’s him.

This isn’t always true. Sometimes it is you. Sometimes you’re clingy, or text too often, or talk about your ex, or tell him you’re on a diet, or engage in a variety of other behaviors that don’t reflect the awesome, amazing, self-confident person that you are.

HJNTIY would say, “Fuck him—wait for a guy who loves your neuroses!”

That’s certainly one solution, but a better one might be to behave in a manner that’s attractive to men. To make yourself less available. To project a friendly, confident, and independent personality. To make a guy work for your affection.

There’s definitely a point where you need to forget him and move on. But HJNTIY focuses exclusively on this point—not the before and after, which are usually the more important parts. The before is your chance to seduce, and the after is usually easier said than done. If getting over a crush were as easy as saying, “Oh well, he’s just not that into me!”, Facebook wouldn’t have expanded beyond Harvard.

It’s easy to obsess and hard to break the habit. It’s easy (once you know what you’re looking for) to figure out when a guy isn’t interested. But it’s much harder to avoid having to give yourself the HJNTIY pep talk in the first place.

Making a Guy Jealous (Part I)

Dear Date the District,

Do you think there’s an advantage to talking about dudes/exes to make a guy jealous?

First, we’d like to commend this reader on her brevity (not that we don’t love those of you who write in with page-long questions).

And then we’d like to dash her dreams of one-stop seduction with a resounding and unequivocal no.

It sounds so good in theory! How many times have you seen your cute coworker chatting up the girl from accounting and spent the next two hours plotting new and improved ways to get there first? Can’t you use that to put him in the same mindset?

 Here’s the thing: when it comes to crushes, guys can be a little more practical. That’s not to say that they don’t pine over one-true loves or spend hours looking at their exes’ Facebook photos, but if they haven’t made an investment, they’re more likely to abort mission if you seem taken.

Girls are more likely to develop crushes and obsess, spending hours trying to analyze what that nod at happy hour meant, why he asked them about their plans for New Year’s. Once the train leaves the station, it’s not going to stop, and it becomes really hard, if not impossible, to hit the brakes on those feelings.   

Guys, on the other hand, usually don’t spend as much time fantasizing about their 60^th wedding anniversary—they’re more interested in the here and now. If a girl’s cute and she’s single, great! If she’s cute and she’s taken, it’s easier for guys to nip a crush in the bud before he gets attached.

If you try to bring up potential competition too early on (e.g., before he’s even asked you out), you could scare him off—not because he’ll assume you’re not interested, but because he realizes the odds are not in his favor.

This doesn’t mean you should make yourself seem available—definitely don’t bring up the fact that you’re single, looking, whatever. He probably won’t assume there’s a boyfriend if you don’t mention one, so there’s no need to reassure him that he’s on the right track.

If you drop masculine names, you also run the risk of looking too focused on finding a relationship. We’ve already talked about why using the term “ex-boyfriend” isn’t buying you anything, but there’s also the fact that the most attractive people are the ones who seem totally self-sufficient, satisfied with their lives, and over any past relationships.

When you start hinting at guy friends in what you want him to think is coded language, you’re opening yourself up to interpretations that aren’t conducive to great relationships.

For starters, you’re basically inviting him to assume that you’re dating other people.

Yes, it’s probably advantageous for most single 20-somethings to be dating several people at once if the opportunities present themselves. But drawing attention to your jam-packed dating schedule is more sleazy than sexy. We hate to have to drop this line again, but it’s the whole lady-in-the-street-freak-in-the-bed thing.

If you take it back to biology, it’s really important for men to find faithful partners because that’s the only way they can be sure to pass on their genes (when a woman sleeps around, she still knows she’s the mother of her child). There’s obviously more to it than that, but the bottom line is that most men aren’t looking for women who seem promiscuous (regardless of how committed they might be to their own promiscuity).

So when you mention your trip to the movies with your friend who just happens to be named Adam, you’re implicitly giving him the go-ahead to keep things casual (and a lot of guys are looking for any invitation to do just that), and you’re also drawing attention to your own lack of innocence, which, as unfair as it may be, makes you seem less desirable.

The bottom line is, if he finds you attractive, he’s probably going to assume that other guys do too. Reminding him that your powers of seduction work on other people does more harm than good.

That being said, there is a but. After you’ve established a relationship (i.e., you’re officially “dating”), it can be advantageous to mention other men—as long as you take steps to desexualize it. More on this tomorrow.

Favors

Yesterday, we talked about the complexities of exchanging gifts with a newly acquired BF.

But lavish presents aren’t the only pitfalls when you’re stuck in that gray area between dating and committed relationship.

There are plenty of other nonsexual favors that might seem like better ideas than they really are.

When you start dating a new guy, it’s natural to want to prove your worth. You want your guy to know that you can cook and clean, and if you keep bringing small presents over to his apartment, he’ll want to keep you around to keep the treats coming. Right?

Maybe not.

Favors are like anything else. If a guy’s not really working for them, he’s going to wonder why he’s getting them. And he’s probably going to conclude that you’re so desperate to date him, you’ll do anything to be with him.

But these things sometimes appear to be fairly innocuous.

Take, for example, our friend Julie.

Julie dated her boyfriend all through college. They broke up after graduation, but they now live in the same city. After a period of not talking, they became “friends,” and now Julie thinks they’re heading back towards rekindling their relationship.

But Julie’s also worried that there might be other girls in the picture. She’s particularly concerned about one Facebook wall-to-wall with a younger girl.

Julie wanted to send her ex a Valentine’s Day card, because she thought if she didn’t send him one and the other girl did, she’d have no chance of getting back together with him.

But if she sends him a Valentine’s Day card, she might as well make her Facebook status, “Robbie, will you take me back?”

If there’s one thing you never want to be, it’s a sure thing. And when you offer to clean his apartment and make him dinner, you might not think that’s the message you’re sending.

But think about it from a guy’s perspective. Guys, more than anyone, know how much cooking and cleaning sucks. While they might think it’s awesome that they’re getting a cook, maid, and sex slave for nothing, they’re not going to want to go out of their way to date you. If they’re getting all they want and you’re not even in a “real” relationship, why should they bother taking you out for Valentine’s Day?

And when you send your ex a Valentine’s Day card, you might think you’re sending a message you can’t afford for him to miss. After all, if his Facebook friend sends him a card and you don’t, he might think that she’s interested and you’re not. And he might ask her out instead of you.

Except he won’t. Guys aren’t looking to date girls who seem like sure things. They want to date the ones who seem out of their league, the ones who they’re not sure they can get. Yes, we’re starting to sound like a broken record, but it’s worth repeating.

If you go out of your way to do things for him and show him how much you care too soon, he might think “Hm, this is convenient,” but he’s not going to think, “Wow, I don’t know what I’d do without the fresh cookies and handmade cards and cleaning service—I better keep this one around.”

Guys don’t need an impeccably clean house. When they’re in college, the puke on the frat-house walls isn’t enough to make them move out, and when they settle into the 20-something routine, they rarely invest in vacuum cleaners.

If you want to impress him, act like you’re so cool and desirable that you don’t need to put on a housekeeper’s uniform to attract a boyfriend.

Gender Equality (Or Lack Thereof) in the Dating World

We spent most of last night in a heated debate about gender equality in the dating world.

In our opinion, it doesn’t exist. And here’s why:

From about the age of 0, girls start hearing the same message. They watch Disney movies, and later sit coms and chick flicks, they read “young adult” books, and later romance novels, and they all say the same thing: a woman’s goal in life should be to find the most handsome, charming, and desirable man she can, and the best way to snag him is to “fall in love” with him.

But it doesn’t work like that. If a guy thinks you’re in love with him before you’ve even gone on a first date, it’s going to scare him off.

Furthermore, these messages encourage women to base a lot of their own self-worth on their marital status and/or partner. Single? There must be something wrong with you! Do other girls think your boyfriend is kind of awkward and not that cute? They must think the same thing about you too!

Your love life (or lack thereof) becomes your primary focus. That’s not to say you can’t hold down a job or keep up some semblance of a personal life. But, when push comes to shove, this idea of “love” is the ultimate pursuit. Worth leaving your job for, worth transferring to a different city, worth putting everything on the line.

The truth is, life probably is easier and more enjoyable when you have a partner to share it with. But “love” does not a successful relationship make. Things like trust, mutual interests, and shared values will take you a lot further than lust that feels like something more.

And so our society sets women up to want a partner more than anything else, but doesn’t give them the tools to find one.

Guys, for whatever reason, seem to instinctively understand how to play games. They don’t return calls, they keep you guessing, and they seem less interested in couplehood to begin with.

Girls, on the other hand, watch a women on TV turn down Stanford to follow her crush to NYU and end up getting the guy after she confesses all this to him.

In the real world, this would be a major turnoff. But no one ever explains this to us.

So women are set up to want a partner more than (almost) anything else. But they’re also conditioned to behave in ways that would send most potential matches running in the opposite direction.

This doesn’t mean that women are doomed, but it does mean we have to work harder to overcome the urge to call him when he’s not responding.

And above all, it means women need to be more savvy about the dos and don’ts of dating. And it means we sometimes need to show each other the way—for example, by not encouraging our friends to drunk-text guys they want to date.

It’s not enough to tell yourself that things never work the way they do on TV and in the movies. You have to understand why they don’t work that way, and what does work in “real” life.

Projection

At some point, we all need to accept the fact that all’s fair in love and war.

Some girls don’t want to play games or engage in behavior that might seem manipulative. But if you’re the only one playing by the rules, you’re more likely to get hurt.

When you’re going out with a new guy, he probably doesn’t have your best interests at heart. And why should he? He doesn’t know you, and if people don’t look out for themselves in the dating world, no one else will.

And until a new guy gives you a reason not to, you have to make yourself your number one priority.

This brings us to today’s dating strategy: projection.

When you meet a new guy, you need to hold him to the highest standards, especially at the beginning. At the beginning, everyone’s trying to make a good impression. Which means that as the relationship progresses, his behavior is only going to get worse. If you’re seeing him at his best on the first date and he gets blackout before dessert, imagine what your third month anniversary will look like.

But sometimes guys don’t know better. Sometimes a genuinely nice guy will make a totally inappropriate comment about your best friend’s ass, because he’s nervous, or because he saw something on TV and thought he could pull it off.

You don’t have to blow him off after he makes the first mistake. But you do need to correct his behavior.

This is where projection comes in. Projection is, in its purest form, a nudge in the right direction. It’s a form of manipulation, but it manipulates a guy into treating you the way you deserve to be treated.

It works like this: When you’re interacting with a guy, you pretend that he does, in fact, have your best interests at heart. You pretend that he wants to date you, marry you, buy you a mansion in the suburbs and a brand new BMW.

But you don’t tell him any of this.

You keep it in the back of your head. And when he screws up, your reaction doesn’t stem from the fact that he’s being an asshole. Instead, you react as though you think he’s really trying to do what’s best for you, but his desires to please you have ultimately led him astray.

In short, you act like his motivations and intentions are pure, and while he’s trying to give you what he thinks you want, what you actually want differs from the image in his head.

Here’s an example: let’s say he makes plans to take you out for restaurant week. But the day of, he calls up, and, whoops, the restaurant lost the reservation. Do you want to just come over instead?

In reality, there probably never was a reservation. And he’s just trying to get you to come over and hook up. And if you react to that, you’re agreeing to play by those rules—even if you say no.

Instead, pretend that he genuinely is upset about the reservation being “canceled,” and he’s only inviting you over so that he doesn’t have to break plans with you. So your response looks something like, “Oh, bummer! That’s OK—we can just reschedule dinner for sometime next week.”

Let’s say he responds with a text that says, “Why don’t u wanna come over .” Now he’s clearly just looking for sex. But, again, pretend his motivations are virginal and pure. Pretend he’s worried that you’re mad at him. Your response needs to remove sex from the equation (which might mean throwing in a dash of emasculation). Say something like, “Aww, I wish I could, but I have plans .”

If you need a few more examples, check back tomorrow.

Projection doesn’t work when a guy is straight-up blowing you off. If he forgets to call or doesn’t show up for a happy hour he promised to go to, your best defense is silence. Don’t try to contact him, and ignore his first few texts.

But projection does work when his behavior’s just a little off. When he’s clearly making an effort, but his efforts might be more focused on sex than on dating you.

In Pysch 101, you learn that when you project a personality trait onto someone, they start to adopt that personality. So if you treat your coworker like she’s a bitch, she’s going to start acting like one.

We all look to the people around us for cues on how to act. It’s human nature. So if someone treats us like they think we’re a really nice person, we assume, “Oh, I must be nice,” and we act accordingly.

It’s the same for guys. If you treat a guy like you think he has your best intentions at heart, he’s going to assume that he does. And he’s going start acting like it’s all about you. And, at that point, what’s the difference?