Even the best relationships end sometimes, but there’s a big difference between finding a guy who has the best of intentions with you from the beginning and one whose only intention is to use you as a way to pass the time. If you’re seeing a guy who displays these tell-tale behaviors, get out now before your heart is inevitably broken.
- He’s scared of labels. This guy will tell you that he doesn’t believe in terms like “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” or even “partner.” He might tell you this upfront or you might not find out until you initiate the “What are we?” talk, but once he tells you this, don’t expect him to budge on it. Refusing to call you his anything is going to make it that much easier for him to break things off with you—or worse, hook up with other people while you’re still seeing each other and brush off your feelings because according to him, you were never actually together anyway.
- He goes through girls like tissues. Does he have a dozen photos of him looking couple-y with 12 different girls on his Instagram from the past year? Are you constantly losing track of all the exes he mentions in his stories? Some people really do just have bad luck in love but if there’s any indication that he jumps from relationship to relationship, you’re probably not going to last very long with him either.
- He calls you by every name but your own. Calling your partner by a pet name is cute to some people, but if this guy never refers to you by anything other than “babe,” he doesn’t intend on sticking around very long. He might be worried about calling you by another girl’s name or maybe he doesn’t want to accidentally call his next girl (or side chick) by your name.
- He won’t introduce you to his friends or family. Meeting a guy’s loved ones is an important milestone, so of course it’s not unusual if he hasn’t brought you around his buddies after just a month of hanging out. But after, say, six months, something is fishy if he’s the only person in his social circle that you’ve interacted with. Even after all that time, he doesn’t consider you significant enough in his life to have you meet the people closest to him, which means he’s either biding his time until he finds someone “better” or you’re the other woman.
- If you do meet his friends, they don’t make an effort to get to know you. We all have That Friend who seems to be dating someone new every other week, and after a while, it gets kind of old being introduced to their current flame. If it seems like the friends of the guy you’re seeing don’t have any interest in including you in their group, it might be because they’re just tired of having to keep track of all the girls he brings around.
- You never hang out in public. We all know by now that if a guy only hits you up at midnight, he’s probably not hoping to settle down with you. But don’t be fooled by his daytime texts that always, always end up with you two hanging out at each other’s houses and never stepping foot outside. A guy who’s planning on discarding you when he’s tired of you isn’t going to risk being seen with you in public—what if another hot girl sees you two together and thinks that he’s taken?
- He leaves you on read repeatedly and never explains why. We all get busy, and sometimes stuff happens that leaves us unable to respond to messages for hours at a time. Still, if this dude disappears for long stretches of time and doesn’t even offer you a half-assed “Sorry, I fell asleep” to explain his absence, you know what’s going on: you’re either not the only woman in his life or carrying on a conversation with you is extremely low on his list of priorities.
- He doesn’t ask you questions. When you really like someone and see potential for something long-term, you probably want to know everything you can about them. If this guy doesn’t care about learning about your childhood or even your favorite color, it’s because you and that information aren’t valuable to him. There’s no way he’s going to make all that effort to get to know you when he knows he’s just using you to get what he wants.
- He moves way too fast. It might be tempting to think that a guy who immediately wants to lock you down is really into you, especially given that a guy who isn’t into you will usually try to keep his distance. But a man who’s asking you to move in with him after the third date isn’t in love with you—he’s in love with the idea of love. You’re someone who fills a woman-shaped hole in his life, and it’s only a matter of time before he realizes that you’re not what he wants and dumps you for the next girl he wants to walk down the aisle with.
- He hides his phone from you. If he’s tilting his phone away from you and never even sets it down anywhere but inside his pocket, it’s probably because there’s something or someone on there he doesn’t want you to see. It’s a bold move to be texting another woman when you’re with the person you’re dating, but there are lots of guys who have no qualms about doing so. It’s not healthy relationship behavior to be going through your partner’s phone or reading their messages over their shoulder, but if he seems paranoid that you’ll do it anyway, you can figure out why.
