If you’re a regular at the frat house on Friday nights, or are a fan of a little MTV show called “Jersey Shore,” then you know all too well that guys can be quite manipulative in order to get in a girl’s pants. These are the guys that watch the party from a dark corner and survey the room, searching for the perfect girl on which to pounce. However, if you’re not careful, it can be easy to get fooled by a guy’s good looks and smooth moves. And trust me, I know from experience (see my previous article College Dating Tips from a Reformed Serial Kisser). On the bright side, I’ve put together this guide so you know just what behaviors should send off red flags in your brain to avoid these heartbreakers.
1. If he’s over-complimentary: As sad as it is, guys like to play on girls’ insecurities. I mean, who doesn’t like being called pretty, especially if you’re not feeling so hot that day. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t trust any compliment you receive from men from now on, but if he keeps going on about how beautiful you are, how he could stare into your eyes forever, or how that sexy dress you have on would look better on his floor, he’s probably just pulling those lines out of his bag of tricks. (Not that those things are actually lies, because look at you, you’re gorgeous!)
2. If he’s appealing to your emotions: If within the first conversation you’re having, he tells you something that makes you go “Awwww,” he’s probably told the same thing to a few girls before. Typically, guys save deep conversations that involve more serious emotions for when they feel comfortable around a certain girl. So if he’s using it now, he’s trying to seem like a sensitive person to make himself more relatable to you since females are, by nature, the more emotional of the genders. If he tells you about a hard time he’s recently been through or shows you his tattoo “commemorating” a deceased person, be on high alert for anything he says after that.
3. If he wants you to make a decision right now: These misogynistic guys want what they want, when they want it, no negotiations. If he asks you to leave the party with him to go somewhere else and you don’t give him a straight answer right away, he’ll keep asking and rush you to make a choice. This is because he wants to know exactly how interested you are in him so he won’t waste valuable time he could be using to find another girl. If a guy’s pressuring you to make a quick decision, get rid of him fast. Luckily, that’s relatively easy to do, just say no.
If you run into a man who fully employs these tactics, the most you can expect of him is a one night stand or an occasional booty call when he can’t fool a new girl into bed that night. However, there is still hope for the male population. The most common complaint I hear from other girls is that there’s no “good guys” around. But, I have recently found that this could not be further from the truth. Good guys are everywhere; you just may not notice them or think they’re interested in you because they’re not trying to impress you with speech littered with sexual connotations. They’re the guys that actually try to get to know you as a person while consequently ending up in the dreaded “friend zone.” Chances are, you already have a few guys like this in your life. So why not pull them out of the friend zone for a bit and reconsider them in a new light? The worst that could happen is that you find out you and him actually aren’t right for each other, but that’s better than wondering what might have happened later in life when you find out he had a secret crush on you way back when. So take a risk with a different kind of guy that’s not just trying to get some. It just might be the best thing that’s ever happened to you.