When Men Lead Women On

Much is made of the idea of women leading men on. From a very early age, I absorbed the notion that you shouldn’t be a “tease.” Before I even knew how to manage my sexuality, I knew this. There are countless movies and TV where you see women “using” their sexuality to get things out of men, or expressing interest but not “following through.”

And yet, for years I didn’t feel like it was in my power to make the first move or to let a boy know that I had a crush on him. I had to wait to be chosen, to be doted on. I waited around for years, confused about why I never had a boyfriend.

When I got to college, I was sure all of this would change. I met a boy, who paid attention to me. He asked me questions and sought out my company. We would meet up late at night and go for long walks. He’d come over to my dorm room and play me the music he loved. He also did theater, and we’d sing along to our favorite tunes. We talked extensively about sex, what we each liked, and what we wanted from a partner. All in general terms, but I was sure that this was all a prelude to something more. He didn’t look like the kind of person I ever thought I’d be into, but my attraction to him grew. I waited and waited for him to kiss me, sure that it had to happen sooner or later.

Whenever I saw him walking around with other girls, being intimate in the same way that we were, I felt jealous and sad. Maybe it was all really in my head. Maybe there was nothing actually going on and we were just friends.

But there were moments that definitely indicated something more was going on. Over that first winter break, we talked all the time, chatting online and calling each other on Skype. There was the small typo one of us had made that became shorthand for “I love you,” his idea. We never actually said those words to each other, but we knew what was beneath everything. He told me that he’d showed a picture of me to his parents and they said I was beautiful. One time, we were watching a movie and he started performing an odd show of pseudo-cunnilingus on the bottle, in an effort to…turn me on I guess?

I was going insane with all the pressure of this relationship. The not knowing. We spent so much time together, he clearly liked me. Why wasn’t he making a move? He knew that I was sexually inexperienced and wouldn’t be the one to make the first move. I finally told him that I liked him and that I was hoping for something more. He was very kind but told me that he just simply didn’t want to be in a relationship right now. That he was feeling overwhelmed, because there were apparently a few women who wanted to date him, and he didn’t know how to deal with it so he figured it was just best not to date anyone. He apologized and I think he cried a little bit, sounding genuinely torn up about the situation. I was devastated and confused. It was crushing to hear that I was just one of many that he had this type of relationship with and I didn’t stand out from the others enough to date me. I was convinced, as always, that it must be because of something wrong with me. The way I looked, most likely. He wasn’t sexually attracted to me. That must be it.

Still, we kept talking, I wasn’t prepared to lose him as my friend. I changed my flight to head back to school a few days early to spend time with him at his parents' house in New Jersey. I slept in his little sister’s room. He and his dad picked me up at the airport. His parents were quirky and sweet, and so welcoming to me. I still held on hope that we had a chance. This trip would be what changed everything right?

Then things started to unravel quickly. I learned that he’d had another girl come and stay with him earlier in the break. Nothing had happened, he said, but it minimized how special this trip was supposed to be. When we got back to campus, I didn’t see him as much anymore. A friend of mine confessed that he’d kissed her, sort of on a dare, and I felt hurt and betrayed. She was angry both on my behalf and because she had not wanted him to kiss her.

And then he told me he needed to talk to me. We met up late at night as we usually did and he told me he’d started dating someone. I was floored. What happened to not wanting to be in a relationship?

She’d basically given him an ultimatum, he said. Date me or we’re not friends anymore. He’d chosen the path of least resistance. To add insult to injury, this girl and I had very little in common. She looked nothing like me. She was punky, with short, dyed blue hair, dark-complexioned. I hated her immediately, but I was determined to be ok with it. He had never made any promises to me. We’d never even kissed. We’d barely touched. He was honest with his feelings. I was ok with it. I had to be. And just to show how “ok” with it I was, I hung out with him and his new girlfriend a few times. I felt awkward and uncomfortable, but at least I was being “cool.”

I remember that we ended up being alone together and she asked me if we were still hooking up. I was shocked and confused. I told her that we’d never hooked up. We’d barely touched. But that wasn’t the story he’d told her. He had led her to believe that we were hooking up this whole time. I was infuriated that this was what was going around when I’d still never been kissed. He’d also made a point of telling her that he was into curvy blondes (which described me) whereas he’d told me his type was brunettes.

Slowly the pieces started to come together. He had just been lying to both of us about so many things. The more we hung out and the more information we shared, the clearer the picture became. Finally, I began to feel anger at the whole situation, and pulled back, extricated myself from this toxic vortex. I remember when I heard that another girl he’d scorned had slapped him in the face in the dining hall, I rejoiced. A few months later that same girl told me some hideous rumors about him, and I gleefully told everyone I knew. I wanted him to suffer, I wanted revenge. (They dated a few years later. She got over it, I guess).

Looking back, this boy was just the first of many men in my life to utilize me in this way. Pouring all of their sadness and emotions into me like I was a neverending well, waiting to be filled. I have never had much success in dating. I have only been in one relationship, which was complicated, to say the least. For me, long, deep, conversations are how I connect with someone, and when I begin to cultivate that kind of intimacy with men, feelings start to bubble up.

I’ve fallen for this more times than I would like to admit. I really thought I’d learned a lesson from this boy in college, but looking back on my dating history, there have been far too many men that I developed intensely intimate, non-sexual relationships with and I have never been able to understand why they didn’t want to date me. Sure, men and women can have intimate, non-sexual relationships, but what has always confused me is the mixed signals and the lines that were crossed that I would never cross with my female friends.

There was the man from Colorado who I fell into a friendship with shortly after a devastating breakup. We would talk for hours on the phone, before we even met in person, about all of our most intimate details. He asked me so many questions, probing deep into my psyche in a way that made me feel like he really wanted this relationship to go somewhere. We would talk a lot about dating and sex, he was more open than any other man I’d ever met. When he described the type of woman he wanted to date, it sounded like he was describing me. He would tell me all the time about his foot fetish and asked me to send him pictures of my feet. I asked him what our relationship was and he assured me that he would be interested in asking me out if we lived in the same city, but he just wasn’t interested in long distance. I wasn’t either.

Not long after that, we ended up living in the same place, and it quickly became apparent that he had no interest in dating me and I was not unique. He had relationships like this with countless women in his life. When I asked him about it, he said he just didn’t feel that way about me, despite thinking that I was very attractive (his words), interesting, smart and that he loved talking and hanging out with me.

There was the boy in England during my master’s degree, who, admittedly, I did have sex with. Some of the best first-time sex I’ve ever had, but who disappeared and freaked out completely after we had sex. He said he was immensely attracted to me and would message me late at night to sext, but refused to ever make plans to hang out with me. The only times I saw him were at campus events or if I happened to swing by his office. He would text me when he was feeling sad and tell me about all the things that were going wrong in his life. He even told me about falling in love with another girl, and all the things he did for her and bemoaned to me that that that he didn’t understand why they couldn’t be together.

Nothing is more sexy to me than emotional vulnerability, but there’s a difference between true vulnerability and just using me for emotional labor. I want to be open, to not jump to conclusions. I am sick of being single. But all that being open has gotten me is lots of wasted time with people who wanted to take from me. Take my time, my energy, my love, and my devotion and give me nothing in return. What I saw in them were beautiful, flawed human beings who I could spend time with and get to know and have real physical and emotional intimacy. I have no idea what they wanted from me. Maybe it really was friendship and it only got complicated because it involved two straight cis people. Or maybe men struggle to have intimate relationships with women without bringing sexual attraction into play in some way. Or maybe these men just enjoyed being desired by me and were too weak to cut it off when they realized they didn’t reciprocate those feelings.

I know I’m not alone in this experience, and yet we rarely talk about the ways in which men lead women on. I think it’s less common that men “tease” women, and more that they utilize them for emotional labor they don’t know how to get anywhere else. I truly don’t believe these men intended to do me any harm. I think they enjoyed the intimacy but just didn’t want to date me. That isn’t a crime. But they also enjoyed my interest in them. They reveled in feeling liked, in feeling desired. I have been on the other side of that coin, and I found it agonizing to keep my true feelings to myself. I made it known quite quickly that I wasn’t interested in dating that person, by creating distance or simply by telling them that that wasn’t where my head was at. Yes, I’ve lost friends but if they wanted to be more than friends, we were headed for disaster anyway. These men led me on for months and months, ignoring my clear and obvious interest, and that is where I think the problem lies. They didn’t want to give up the emotional support, probably because they don’t have many other outlets for that in their lives. With some of these men, we’ve been able to salvage our relationships and remain friends by talking, but most of them have disappeared from my life.

We need to be better at encouraging men to talk to men. To cultivate intimate friendships, devoid of any sexual connotations. I also need to stop thinking that just because a man is nice to me and has deep conversations with me that that means he wants to date me. I am not trying to negate my part in how these relationships went wrong, but am merely trying to parse through what they mean both for myself and for the way in which men and women relate.

The fact is, as women, we are taught that if you express sexual desire in a man, he will want to fuck you because men want sex all the time from anyone. By spreading this around we teach women unrealistic expectations and get rid of male agency. Men have preferences and desires that are just as complex as women. There might be a million different reasons that a man says no to sex, just like there are myriad different reasons women say no to sex. But by perpetuating the notion that it’s because “you're not hot enough” we are creating a toxic sex culture. Women internalize every “no” and men find it harder to say no (because what man says no to sex, right?)

It’s also important to be better about communication. If these men had just been able to talk to me and explain that all they wanted was a friendship, we both could have thought about that meant for us and maybe created better boundaries. The fact is, both men and women can lead someone on, and it is up to each of us as individuals to do our best not to fall into the trap of keeping someone around just because it makes us feel good.