A woman named Sandra came to see me about eighteen months ago. She was forty-three, had recently ended a long marriage, and had been dating again for about a year. She was not struggling to meet men. She was struggling to keep them.
“They like me at first,” she said. “Then something shifts. I don’t know what I do.”
I want to tell you what Sandra was doing. Not because it will make you feel bad. Because once she understood it, everything changed.
Sandra was doing what most caring women do. When a man showed interest, she matched it. When he pulled back slightly, she leaned in. She texted to check in. She offered to be flexible. She made herself easy to be around. She was warm, generous, engaged. She was doing everything she had been told a good relationship requires.
And every man she genuinely liked eventually drifted.
The reason has nothing to do with Sandra’s value as a person. A man does not fall for a woman the way she might fall for him — through closeness, through connection, through giving. He falls through reaching. Through wondering. Through not being entirely sure he has her yet.
When Sandra made herself easy to have, she removed the one thing that was building his attachment to her.
The woman a man stays with is not the one who mirrors his energy perfectly. Not the one who is always available when he calls. She has things she cares about that have nothing to do with him. She is warm when she sees him and completely at peace when she does not.
When he is with her, something is happening in him that he would not be able to put into words. He is thinking: she has her own life. She is happy to see me. And she would be okay without me.
That last part is the one men do not tell women. It is not that she seems indifferent. It is that she seems whole. A man does not feel urgency around a woman he thinks is incomplete without him. He feels urgency around a woman who is already complete. He is not trying to rescue her. He is trying to earn a place in her life.
Believe me, the shift in him when this happens is not subtle.
He starts reaching first. He makes plans instead of waiting to see if plans happen. He asks questions about her life, not to fill silence, but because he actually wants to know the answer. He starts telling her things he has not told other people. There is a version of a man that only comes out when he has to try a little. Sandra eventually saw this version. Not because she played games. Because she stopped giving more than he was giving.
That is a harder thing than it sounds. For women who are warm and generous by nature, holding something back feels wrong. It feels like withholding love.
But it is not.
Men do not bond by receiving. They bond by giving. When a woman gives everything freely, she removes the most natural route he has for building his attachment to her.
When Sandra stopped running her life around whether a particular man was going to text her, she became a different person to be around. Not colder. Warmer, actually. Because her warmth was no longer anxious. It had nothing to prove.
She met someone about six months after our first conversation. He texted first. He made plans. He brought things up from conversations they had had weeks earlier, because he had been thinking about them.
She did not change who she was. She stopped hiding the part of her that did not need him.
He is never going to tell you this. Most men do not have the language for it. But I have sat across from men who talked about the women they stayed with. They say things like: she had something going on. She was not needy. Being with her felt like winning something.
He just cannot tell you that. So I will.
