It seems silly, but the reasons behind why men lead women on aren't always obvious or logical. In fact, it's quite complicated and ultimately trying to understand why a guy is leading you on will get you nowhere. Plus, if you overthink it, your actions might end up making the situation worse.

Instead of wasting energy trying to figure out what these guys are thinking, or taking their actions personally and getting really upset about them (which can only make matters worse), let's educate you on how to know if he might be leading someone on.

1.  Lack of Respect

The truth is a lack of respect, it’s a hard pill to swallow but think about it this way if a man doesn't respect you, he certainly isn’t going to invest in you. If you don't invest in yourself, if you don't focus on yourself (we’ll touch on this in number two)  he's not going to respect you. Now what often happens is you end up putting men on a pedestal and you do that because you think they're so much smarter, better looking or more accomplished than you, and then you jump through all the hoops to get their approval. Don't do that because he's going to breadcrumb you. He’ll think, “oh, i don’t even have to do anything she already decided on the be-all, end-all.” 

Additionally, he’s not going to trust you. That lack of trust comes from the fact that he doesn’t take the time to get to know you because he sees that you’ve already decided on the type of person he is and you’ve put him on a pedestal. In that case, he believes it’s pointless to invest in the relationship if you’re just going to end up disappointed anyway. At some point he will fall off that pedestal, he’s not perfect. So, don’t do that.  

Leading Someone On

2. Other-Focusedness

What happens is, especially when you are little and you have narcissistic or emotionally unavailable parents, you become other-focused. What that means is you focus on other people all the time, you enter their energy field, you think about their emotions. The main issue with this is that, again, he feels like he doesn’t have to do anything because you already focus on him all the time. If you don't invest in yourself, you don't focus on yourself, you're teaching him that the energy moves away from you so he breadcrumbs you. The tension and the awareness moves away from you and so his attention is also going to move away from you to another thing; a hobby, work, friends, coworkers, whatever the case may be. The last thing on his list is going to be you because you hand him an emotional resume on the first date. Don't believe me? 

Imagine yourself on a first date and you notice that you don't really have his attention on you. So, the minute the attention is put on you, you ask him more questions or you laugh when something isn’t funny. You leave yourself, your truth, and your authenticity. Then, of course, this causes him to not trust you. He’s like, “I don't know about that. I'm not going to invest too much time and energy into this because something is off.” So he's going to breadcrumb you. 

3. Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

What do I mean by that? Well, this is where what happens and occurs in our reality is directly proportional to our unconscious expectations. You see, the brain sees what it's expecting to see, there's lots of research on that. What then happens is we delete, distort and generalize our reality based on that unconscious expectation. So if you're unconscious, I'm visualizing Gigi in the movie He’s Just Not That Into You, her unconscious expectation was that he's not going to contact her. 

You see, when you know that someone is going to contact you or that tomorrow is Christmas, you're not getting anxious about it. There's a certain confidence, a certain knowingness that is inside of you. If you didn't have that experience as a child of fulfilled positive expectations, then what starts to happen is you expect men to let you down. You can feel when it's going to happen, you can smell it, you can see it in the way they phrase the text messages. You see, when you have an anxious attachment style, you're mostly a master tracker. You are masterfully tracking the consistency in which your man shows up or doesn't show up but you are doing that because you have the unconscious expectation that at some point he's going to stop showing up and that then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

Why Men Lead Women On

4. Daddy Issues

To summarize what this means, visualize yourself as a little girl, younger than 5 or 6 years old, and you desire to have the tension, the love, the affection of your dad. It’s often the parents of the opposite sex that carries a different weight – we say, mommy’s boy or daddy's girl. So this is a special bonding that occurs between the daughter and the daddy, he's also the first male role model. He is the first sample, the male sample of humanity to the little girl. So how dad treats her is how she unconsciously expects the rest of the men will treat her as well. So if daddy is emotionally unavailable, unattuned, overwhelmed, working all the time, absent, what's going to start happening in your nervous system is it’s going to feel very disoriented. Why? Because when you’re reaching out your hand and want to have certain needs met and instead the need is going to be missed. You’re not going to get your needs met. 

What's going to start happening is the myelin sheath that wraps around the axons right around the neurons is going to get repeated more and more and more and more. It becomes a habitual expectation that you’re not going to get your needs met but before that happens you go through existential anguish. So you go through this disappointment over and over, the cliffhanger is still there, you still haven’t had your needs met. The reach is still there. What we do, because we are smart human beings, is we project that need onto the next male sample that we come across. That's usually a man who has a similar profile, energetic profile, emotional profile to our dad. The hope here is that you’re finally healing your daddy issues. Now, of course, that doesn't happen. 

Instead, you attract men into life who breadcrumb you because it gives you the same experience that you had with your dad because your dad also “breadcrumbs” you and leaves you with all those questions. Did I do something wrong? Did I ask for too much? What is wrong with me? So it's going to leave you with all those unconscious messages. So what you need to do is heal from those daddy issues. First and foremost, you need to let go of that hope. That hope is not good for you at that moment, that your dad is going to turn around, and that causes grief, anxiety,  fear, all of that. I promise you, it's just going to be short-term. Again, we're going to talk more about this in my Magnetize Human Live Experience. Also, if you haven't done so already, join my FREE Magnetize Your Man dating support Facebook group by clicking the button below!

5. He’s a PLAYER

This is the one that you probably already guessed, he is a player. So he doesn't give you more attention because he doesn't have more attention to give. He is already focusing on all the other women and he needs to keep his story straight and his schedule light, there are only so many hours in a day. He can only have so many thoughts to connect and so much energy he can give you. 

It’s easy to cut this out of your life and do the healing, why did you attract this guy in the first place?  What is it about him? Often it is related to the dad. It is related to the profile that the dad has the unconscious expectation that you carry around men and how they're going to treat you. 

Why Men Lead Women On Conclusion

All right. So if you haven't taken my free quiz, click the button below. This is it for today!


Antia & Brody Boyd
Antia & Brody Boyd

Antia & her husband Brody have been helping thousands of elite single women all over the world for over a decade to attract the right man for them to share their life with & be happier ASAP without more loneliness, trust-issues or wasting time attracting Emotionally Unavailable Men! They've also been featured experts at Google, the Harvard University Faculty Club, ABC Radio & Good Morning San Diego.

    1 Response to "Why Men Lead Women On: Stop The Bread-Crumbing!"

    • Steve

      Women do this to men all the time. When called out in it , they say: ‘Oh! I was just being friendly.’

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