Will He Ever Be Your Boyfriend? 8 Signs You’ll Never Have A Real Relationship With Him

If there’s one thing that forces a person to overthink, it’s an emotionally unavailable man. Particularly when he’s a narcissist and doesn’t care about you. Your relationship has no future, but that’s easier to say in the abstract than to actually see. When it’s happening to you, you never see the signs. I’m here to help clarify the situation so you can stop wasting your time on a guy who will never commit. It’s time to face the facts: he’ll never be your boyfriend.

  1. He always cancels on you. It’s one thing to have a scheduling conflict or a last-minute family crisis come up, but it’s quite another to have someone play you for a fool. If they’re always bailing on you or abandoning date night, they aren’t respecting you or your time. They expect you to be waiting around for them without any consideration to what you have going on. If you feel like you have to drop everything for a guy who gives you inconstant affection, that’s not love. That’s addiction.
  2. You always have to ask him out. Again, I’m all for women taking the driving seat in dating rituals and mixing things up and asking the guy out, but you have to at least reciprocate the effort. There’s nothing quite like the chase, but when your partner is so reluctant to spend time with you, it’s a bit of a hint. He needs to show you that he’s interested too, and if he doesn’t do the bare minimum, he’s hardly in it for the long haul. He’s using you if he never takes you out.
  3. He doesn’t introduce you to his friends. There’s nothing quite like feeling like you’re being kept a secret. It quells the passion, a little. You wonder if he’s ashamed of you, or of his friends, but either way, he’s not sharing his life. He’s keeping everything separate and at bay. It shows how emotionally unavailable he is. Unwilling to risk his own emotions by getting close to you.
  4. He never talks about his family. How many siblings does he have? What do his parents do? Where is his hometown? You realize that you don’t know the answer to these questions and suddenly you don’t know him at all. He’s a shell of a man and hasn’t shown you any of his vulnerabilities. This is how you know he’s never going to be your boyfriend. He isn’t invested.
  5. You feel insecure around him. He is so focused on his own life and narcissistic behaviors that he can’t be bothered to account for your insecurities. He isn’t willing to grow and be intimate with you. Honestly, he just wants the attention and validation. Don’t expect to get any in return.
  6. He points out your flaws constantly. Do you need a kind friend to occasionally remind you that you have spinach in your teeth on picture day? Yes. Do you need the person who supposedly cares more about you than anyone in the world telling you that you could stand to lose a few pounds? God, no. These are the people who use narcissistic honesty as a way of feeling better about themselves. They aren’t trying to help you or develop you as a person, they’re just elevating themselves. It’s a superiority complex, and these people don’t care about you.
  7. He corrects your grammar in public. If there’s one thing that boils my blood it’s a man with a philosophy degree that makes sure everyone in the tri-state area knows it. I know that technically speaking, grammar is important, but there’s always a rule of ‘when in Rome’. This means that if it sounds right, that’s close enough. Therefore, when pretentious people correct me to ‘whom’ in public just to put me in my place and elevate them, they’re lucky if they avoid a slap. Don’t dismiss women in public just because you think you’re more educated than them. If your guy does that, he’s embarrassing you. Don’t let him.
  8. He makes you ask for directions when you get lost. Or, he gets you to call AAA when the car breaks down on the highway. He’s insecure in his masculinity and more interested in protecting that than respecting you. He sees you as a customer service representative — there to serve him rather than have a relationship with.

It sounds stark when you see it all laid out on the page like this, but these are the harsh lessons we all need to learn. We owe ourselves better than someone who is not in it for the long haul. Trust me.

Hannah has a Masters degree in Romantic and Victorian literature in Scotland and spends her spare time writing anything from essays to short fiction about the life and times of the frogs in her local pond! She loves musical theatre, football, anything with potatoes, and remains a firm believer that most of the problems in this world can be solved by dancing around the kitchen to ABBA. You can find her on Instagram at @_hannahvic.
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