Unwelcome Blasts from Your Sexual Past

When it comes to exes, there’s always one type you’re almost guaranteed to hear from in the future: the ones you never really dated in the first place.

These are the guys that blew you off. They’re the ones you hooked up with on Halloween, the ones who took you out for a few dinners, the ones who kept canceling plans or forgetting to call you back, and the ones who, when you look back, you can’t quite remember how or why it ended.

They always try to reenter your life at the most inopportune moments. Maybe you’re seeing someone new, having a bad week, or looking for a new job, and suddenly there’s a text, an email, or, in the rarest of cases, a phone call that hijacks all your focus.

First things first: you’re allowed to feel smug. You’re holding proof that he thought about you at least once, and he’s given you the upper hand.

But that’s probably because he’s 99 percent sure you’re going to throw it away.

You can still gloat, but realize that he’s almost certainly not texting you because he’s realized the error of his ways. If he’s left a voicemail apologizing profusely and begging for another chance, that’s one thing, but if you just got a text that said, “what up”, don’t start picking out your wedding dress.

So what should you do?

Nothing.

The temptation is to bitch him out or brag about your new (and potentially nonexistent) boyfriend, but the second you do that, he’s holding the power and you’re feeling like shit.

We know: you don’t want to be rude. But chances are, he probably didn’t bother much with manners with you. And besides, you don’t owe him anything.

As soon as you say, “Sorry, I have a boyfriend,” you’re giving him the chance not to respond. And then you’ll be checking your phone every 5 minutes, making your friends text you to make sure your texts are working, until finally you can’t take the suspense and text him something really eloquent, like “????”.

But if you don’t respond, he’ll be the one squirming, wondering if you got his message, and why you’re not answering.

So let it go.

It’s tempting to use this whole one-sided-on-his-part exchange to help you move on. And chances are, it’ll make you feel at least a little better.

But realize that the most effective path forward shouldn’t involve him. If you can’t get over a guy until he shows a little more interest, you’re going to waste a lot of time waiting for revenge from guys who are updateable to begin with.

The less you can care about the whole thing, the better.

Survey the District: When Are We Hanging Out?

Dear Date the District,

I have noticed recently all the guys interested in me won't physically ask me out! All they say is "When are we hanging out?" I don't like that they put it in my court. It's very passive aggressive! HELP!

We don’t like it, either.

It sounds like these guys are both lazy and afraid of rejection. If they ask you out, you can say no. But “When are we hanging out?” isn’t a yes-or-no question, which makes it harder for you to flat-out turn them down. It also means they don’t have to come up with a plan or put in very much effort.

It sounds like these guys are testing the waters.

Guys sometimes try to see how little they can get away with. We’ve talked about this before: guys are more likely to prioritize the physical aspects of a relationship and see everything else as “work.” So when it comes to hooking up, the less they have to do, the better.

But, nine times out of ten, if a guy is (soberly) attracted to you enough to hook up with you, he finds you attractive enough to date you.

Guys aren’t always as picky as girls are when it comes to physical attributes. They’ll talk a big talk, but, when it comes down it to it, every girl has boobs and a vagina. And guys are way more interested in those two body parts than they are in your eyes or the shape of your nose.

It’s the way you act, not the way you look, that’ll determine whether or not a guy wants to date you. Plenty of hot girls throw themselves at every guy that looks twice. That doesn’t mean that guys won’t hook up with these girls. But after the hot girl sends the third, “I’m starting to really fall in love with you :)” text after just as many dates, the guy’s going to stop responding.

So when guys ask you when you’re going to hang out, they are putting the ball in your court. And you can either throw yourself at them, or you can play cool.

If you say something like, “I dunno, you never call me!” or “Whenever you ask me out,” you’re making yourself look very available. And that’s going to make you look less attractive in his eyes.

Instead, say something like, “I know, sorry--I’ve been really busy.” That makes it look like the ball’s been in your court the whole time, and you’ve been the one who’s been trying to see how little you can get away with.

What Not to Do: "The Talk"

When a guy’s behaving badly, it often feels like grand gestures are in order.

After one of our friends received two 3 a.m. texts this weekend (which she didn’t return), we had to restrain her from jumping on the Metro Sunday morning to go “yell at him and explain that I don’t play games.”

But threatening bodily injury isn’t necessarily going to scare him into inviting you to be in a relationship on Facebook.

So what can you do to encourage a guy to treat you the way you want to be treated?

The key is not to be too direct about it.

No one likes to feel that he’s being forced into doing something. The worst thing you can do is tell your guy that you need to “talk.”

In an ideal world, we’d all sit around and talk about our feelings and expectations and no one would ever get hurt.

But the real world, as we know, is far from ideal, a truth that was reaffirmed the other day when we overheard the following conversation in a coffee shop:

Bro 1: My girlfriend keeps bugging me to hang out with her.
Bro 2: Dude, that sucks.
Bro 1: She’s all, “We never hang out.”
Bro 2: Yeah.
Bro 1: But, it’s like, the more she tells me we have to hang out, the less I want to.

People don’t like being told what to do. That’s why teenagers break every rule their parents set and young adults spend a good deal of their 20s rebelling against everything their upbringing stood for (which explains why we studied economics for three years… oops).

So when you start telling a guy, “You have to introduce me as your girlfriend,” that proclamation becomes another chore that immediately seems as unappealing as spending a Friday night doing laundry.

If you call him out on doing something wrong, he’s going to get defensive. It’s human nature. When a friend calls you and asks you to explain why she hasn’t heard from you in two weeks, you’re immediately on the defense. The whole interaction is very uncomfortable, so you begin by listing excuses, and then you start wondering what right she has to attack you like this, and so maybe you lash out at her—but regardless, you don’t think, “Hm, that was a bitch move on my part—I’ll make sure I don’t do that again.”

When a guy does something wrong, the reason you want to confront him to make sure he doesn’t repeat it.

But confrontation isn’t going to get you what you want, and he’ll be more likely to get angry and start thinking you’re a crazy bitch.

Asking nicely can be tricky too—especially in the early stages of a relationship. If you’ve been casually hooking up with a guy for a few weeks and you tell him, “Look, I really like you, but I want you to start taking me out with your friends once a week,” he might do it. But chances are, he’ll be acting out of a sense of obligation.

There’s nothing sexy about an obligation. That’s why housemates always fight over who has to take out the trash.

And the mystery is gone. He knows he has to do X to get Y. Like we’ve said before, mystery can be a powerful force of attraction. People tune into CSI because it keeps them guessing until the end. If the CSI version of Las Vegas installed closed-circuit cameras in every hotel room, no one would watch the show. Instead of calling the crime lab, the detectives would head to a projection room. It might take them a few minutes to pull the tape, but, even on a lazy Friday afternoon, the case would be solved in ten uneventful minutes.

It’s the same way when it comes to sex. The less you know about someone, the sexier they seem. Have you ever been out with a guy who laid way too much on the table on a first date? You probably didn’t agree to a second date.

On the other hand, you know the cute guy in your office that you’ve only talked to a few times? You don’t know him at all, but you spend the 3 p.m. slump daydreaming about all the cool things he does on the weekends and how good he’d be in bed. But you’d rather go through a 6-month dry spell than hook up with your best guy friend who constantly talks to you about jerking off.

The more you get to know someone, the more you notice their flaws. But when there’s a lot that you don’t know about someone, you can imagine them as being a lot closer to perfect than any real person could ever be. These ideal mental images are a lot sexier than the real guy that you know, from experience, gets really bad gas after he eats ice-cream.

When you tell a guy exactly what you want, you also run the risk of exposing insecurities. If you have friends and a life, why do you need him to call you every day? The more you start demanding he do, the more needy and clingy you’re going to seem.

So, if you’re not going to confront him, what should you do to make sure he treats you right? We’ll talk about that next week.

When You Can't Ignore a Text

Like we’ve said before, a weak-thumbed texter is usually not worth your time.

But when you really like a guy and don’t hear from him for two weeks, it can hard to ignore the text he finally does send.

If you can’t stop yourself from responding, at least try to communicate on your terms.

Take our friend’s latest conversations with one of her hookups. They’ve gotten into the habit of hanging out at his place, but she wants to spend time outside of the bedroom.

He texted her on a Monday night and asked her if she wanted to come over. She replied, “I have plans tonight. Friday would be better.”

Her schedule was actually wide open that night, except for her regular spin class. But because she hadn’t heard from him in a while, she didn’t want to make it look like she was ready to drop everything to see him. And she didn’t say, “How about Friday?”, which would give him the final say. Instead, she told him what the plan was, which it seem like she was calling the shots.

As it turns out, he had a dinner Friday evening, but would be back around ten. He asked her if she wanted to come over then. She replied, “Ten would probably be too late to go out and do something. Some other time.”

She didn’t say, “No thanks, I’m only going to hook up with you if you start taking me out.” But that’s the message she sent. He ended up canceling his dinner plans.

This isn’t to say that texts like this will work every time. If a guy has already been flaky with communication, he’s not necessarily even going to respond to your first text. But it’s better than getting a “Wanna hang out?” text and jumping in a cab and to head over to his place before you’ve even hit the send button on your reply.

A Word of Advice

The dating world can be a dangerous place.

There are social scenes to navigate, assholes to avoid, and heartbreak lurking at every corner.

It makes sense that we sometimes need to ask other women for directions. But they don’t always offer the best advice.

While your friends can provide perspective on a situation you’re too embroiled in to evaluate objectively, they can also sometimes point you in the wrong direction.

Sometimes you ask your friends questions that you know the answer to. “Should I text Brian? He never responded to my voicemail from last Tuesday, but… I feel like I should send him one more text. Just so he knows I’m interested.”

If you actually thought this was a good idea, you would just send the text. But you’re asking your friends because you want them to tell you to do it.

And, most of time, they will. We all want to believe that things really are that easy. That you can text someone and he’ll magically be into you again. That he’s only ignoring you because he’s really hung up on his ex. And so we tell our friends to go for it.

Or sometimes we can see the writing on the wall, and we don’t want to tell our friends that their new crush is clearly not interested.

The outcome is still the same. If you’re asking “Should I do X?”, it’s probably because you’re looking for your friends to egg you on. And they will, because they’d want you to do the same.

If you have to ask, you probably already know the answer.

Breakup Babble: Deleting His Number

Breakups always hurt.

While newly single women are almost always looking to do anything to ease the pain, they don’t always go about it in the right way.

We’re not saying you should ditch the chocolate (in fact, we firmly believe that calories don’t count when you’re readjusting to the single life), but there are a few other important steps in the healing process that most girls overlook.

The first rule applies to guys with weak thumbs (i.e., the ones who don’t text back).

These are the guys you kinda, sorta date for a few weeks, but they’re never really that responsive. They say they’re going to call, then forget. Or you send them a text, and you don’t hear back for a few days. They only contact you in the middle of the night, and they rarely (if ever) invite you to do anything that involves leaving one of your apartments.

While it is sometimes possible to tame these guys (we’ll talk more about that in a later post), it’s not always worth it. No matter how much you crank up the game, it’s hard to transition from backup to first string. And, at the end of the day, is a guy who blew you off for three months ever really going to feel like he’s worth it?

When you decide you’re ready to cut your losses, you need to stick to your guns. Like we’ve talked about before, the more you ignore someone, the more they might try to win you back.

Sometimes the guys with weak thumbs are looking for validation. They love the power trip that comes with ignoring a perfectly tempting text from a cute girl. Other times they’re just lazy. In any case, if they really didn’t like the attention, they’d flat-out tell you to leave them alone (except they’d say something like, “You seem like a really awesome girl, but there’s this girl back in New York…”).

So as you as they stop hearing from you, they’re gonna throw a little attention your way to try and get you back into the habit of sending the 8 p.m. “What are you up to?”

When a guy’s been flaky and unresponsive ever since the first night you hooked up, it’s easy to get excited when he texts you out of the blue. But you need to take his advances out of context.

If you weren’t so attracted to the way he blows you off him, would his behavior seem that remarkable? Put another way, if you two had been dating six months, would whatever he’s doing seem worthy of your time and energy?

If he sends you a heartfelt letter (along with a dozen roses) that does more than dish up some lame excuse for why he couldn’t be bothered (e.g., “I don’t have unlimited texting!”), you might want to listen to what he has to say. If he texts you at 6 p.m. and invites you to go to the movies, ignore him. If you take him back that easily, you’ll be back to the abysmal response rate two weeks later.

But don’t tell him that you’re blowing him off. Don’t send him one final text explaining that you’ve had it with him, and it’s his loss, and you were always too good for him anyway.

These hypothetical texts (or phone calls) might feel like they’d be cathartic or empowering, but they won’t be.

Best case scenario: he won’t respond. And then you’ll feel like an idiot, because you showed him how much you cared, and he was so nonplussed that he wasn’t even stirred to respond.

Worst case scenario: he’ll throw back some insults that’ll take your best friends weeks of round-the-clock therapy to undo.

The hardest part of parting ways with a weak-thumbed man is forcing yourself not to communicate with him at all. While your intentions and willpower might be unbreakable after an afternoon bolt-of-lighting realization, it’s easy to second guess yourself after your third beer at happy hour. It’s easy to convince yourself that it’d be a good idea to send one more text—just to see what happens.

And, like we said before, he might respond. And you might be more likely to give that response more weight than it deserves.

Or he might ignore you. And then you’ll have to add one more point to his score, and take one step back on the path to getting over him.

So how can you avoid all of these pitfalls?

Delete his number.

That’s right: remove any trace of his existence from your phone. Delete old texts, e-mails, and any other traces of his contact info that might tempt you to get back in touch with him.

If you don’t have his number, you can’t drunk dial him.

And if he tries to contact you, the few minutes it takes you to figure out who that number belongs to will remind you why you deleted his number. And it’ll be easier to take everything he says with a grain of salt.

In Defense of Games

We’ve had quite a few comments from readers who seem to object to the idea of playing games. If you’re looking for a nice guy, they argue, you don’t need to play games. Games only attract assholes, and they aren’t necessary if you meet the right guy.

Sometimes you do meet the right guy and everything happens just the way we assume it does in Twilight (sparkling pseudo-orgasms and all).

But most of the time, it doesn’t. And it’s not always because “he’s just not that into you,” and it’s never because all guys are assholes who are just looking to break the world record for one-night stands.

But it’s also not that surprising. When you meet someone new, you have your guard up. You invest a lot of time, money, and emotions in each relationship, and you’re not going to give just anyone the chance to waste those commodities. Before you date someone, you want to make sure he’s worth it.

So if you meet someone who seems clingy or needy or annoying or whatever, chances are, you’re not going to want to date him/her. If a girl decides a guy isn’t datable, she’s probably going to stop seeing him. But if a guy is somewhat attracted to a girl he doesn’t want to date, he’s more likely to try to turn her into a friend with benefits.

And that’s where games can help your case. It’s not so much about tricking someone into dating you as it showing him why he wants to date you.

If a guy likes you enough to go out of his way to pursue a hook up (and this doesn’t mean buying you drinks at a bar the night you meet him), there’s a good chance he likes you enough to date you. But sometimes you need to remind him why he wants a relationship.

If he can get you to cab to his apartment at 2 a.m. for a night of no-strings-attached sex, he might forget that you’re worth taking out to dinner and introducing to his friends. When you give up your time, energy, and body that easily, it seems like they’re not that valuable to you. And if they don’t seem valuable to you, he’s definitely not going to think they’re worth much. From his perspective, if you’re so desperate to be with him that you’ll take anything, even a post-coital kick-out, it’s probably because he's out of your league. And if you’re out of his league, he can do better.

On the other hand, if you wait to show your enthusiasm, if you don’t accept all of his invitations, and if you start out unavailable, he might think, “Wow, this girl is out of my league. I need to lock this down.” Or he’ll think, “Wow, this girl is popular.” (And, thanks to high school, we all know that perceived popularity increases your sex appeal.) In general, your time will seem more valuable to him (even economists know that scarcity increases demand), and the more valuable something is, the more people want it.

Playing games is about showing your calm, cool, and confident side, not your clingy, desperate, emotionally unstable side. Playing games is about showing him that he’s not the most important thing in your life, and it’s about proving that if he’s going to treat you like shit, you have better things to do with your time.

Let’s say a guy makes a mistake early on. Let’s say he genuinely forgets to return your call for one week. And, when he does return your call, he gives you some lame excuse.

Some girls think that the “grown up” thing to do is to have a conversation with him and say, “Look, I don’t play games. I don’t date guys who don’t return my calls.”

And that’s fine—as long as you stick to your word. But if you decide to have that conversation after you’ve gone to his house and given him a blowjob, he’s not going to believe you. He’s already pulled a dick move and gotten away with it. Why should he go out of his way to be a gentleman the next time?

Games aren’t going to work every time. If the guy is a jerk or just isn’t interested, games will probably drive him away. But why is that a bad thing?

You probably have a great guy friend who started dating a great girl and then stopped returning her calls. And, because he’s your friend, you know he’s a super nice guy. So why is he being such a dick with this girl?

Like we’ve said before, it’s all about chemistry, attraction, and making someone want you. And the more a guy can’t have you, the more he wants you. If you didn’t like our Christmas toy analogy, look it up in an Econ textbook. Scarcity increases demand. The more you withhold, the more he wants it.

When you go on a date, you want to make a good impression. You put on an outfit that makes you look hot, you spend an hour doing your hair, and you do your makeup five times before you get it right.

So why not give your personality a dating makeover and play a little hard to get while you’re getting to know each other? It’s just like putting on lipstick: you can stop wearing it when your relationship gets to that point.

Survey the District: But How Do I Let Him Know That I'm Interested?

Dear Date the District,

One of your posts talked about texting... OK, I get that you don’t ever want to look desperate. But how do you let a guy know you’re interested? Sometimes he asks for your number and then never calls, and sometimes I think it might be because I didn’t seem interested enough at the bar. So what’s wrong with texting him to clear the air?

Anonymous

Well, anonymous, the answer to your question is simple: never let a guy know that you’re interested. If a guy’s not calling you, it’s not because he’s worried that you’ll shoot him down. The lack of interest is on his part, not yours.

I don’t buy the whole He’s-Just-Not-That-Into-You craze, the book that your best friends were all telling you you had to read five years ago that turned into a movie that is single-handedly responsible for my desire to punch Ginnifer Goodwin in the face (seriously, WTF was she doing in a chick flick?).

Realizing that a guy doesn’t like you is painful, not liberating, and my problem with the He’s Just Not That Into You franchise is that it encourages girls to act like psycho bitches (i.e., leaving a guy five messages in a row and then validating that behavior by saying, “Well, if he doesn’t like me, it’s his loss!”).

Most of the time, if you try to show a guy that you’re into him, he’s not gonna be that into you.

It works that way for girls too. I went to a happy hour with some friends recently, and two of my friends (let’s call them Kate and Angela) started talking to two guys. The guy Kate was talking to was really cute, and Angela’s guy… was not. They all exchanged numbers at the end of the night. Kate’s guy called her the next day and asked her to go out the following night. On their date, he kept telling her how happy he was to have met her. He texted her three times that night, and Kate never responded. She said she never felt a spark.

Angela, on the other hand, didn’t hear for her guy for almost a week. And she noticed. Even though she claimed she wasn’t interested, she was worried that he’d rejected her. And that made her care.

Like we talked about last week, when you know someone’s interested in you, that person becomes less exciting, less appealing. It’s the unknowns that really get inside your head.

It’s the same way for guys. So even though a guy might respond to a 3 a.m. booty call text, he’s not gonna stick around for breakfast the next morning. He’ll continue to hook up with you for as long as it’s convenient, but when you ask him to come to your office holiday party, he’ll conveniently be out of town, and you’ll probably stop hearing from him for a while.

If you want to go out of your way to let a guy know you’re interested, he’ll get the message. But that will just make it hurt even more when you realize he’s not.