Letters to the Editor
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Hello, and welcome to Dating Limbo
The idea of this game is for the man to see how low the bar for his behavior can go. It usually starts small and with things that seem, on the surface, to be perfectly reasonable. He's fifteen minutes late? Well, crap happens. No big deal. Also no big deal when you pay for the second date, maybe even the third. That's equality, right?
The problem is that instead of seeing you as someone who is kind enough to cut people slack when crap happens, he sees you as a doormat and starts pushing his limits. It goes from fifteen minutes once in a while to an hour most of the time. You're expected to pay for things, but he isn't. You're expected to cook and clean for him, but he won't reciprocate. You're expected to initiate contact two times out of three. You're expected to live at his place, but without having your own key, and you're expected to continue to pay rent on an apartment he can't be bothered to visit. You're expected to sit on his front stoop with a bag full of groceries, waiting for him to get done at the gym.
I assume there are women out there who do this, too, but I'm straight. I have no personal experience of it. I'm also not saying that I catered to it, either, only that it's been tried. I'm an extremely frustrating person to play Dating Limbo with.
There's only one thing to do: dump with no contact. The reason for the no contact is that once they're dumped, they will "make an effort", raise the bar a little bit so you're not bending over backwards quite so much, which makes you think they've seen the light. The problem is that as soon as you walk under the new bar, guess what they do? Yup, they lower it again, right back to the point where it was two seconds before you broke up with them.
These guys aren't looking for a partner, they're looking for someone they can use. They might be really sweet about it, and they might see getting things out of you as you loving them, but that's the upshot of what they're looking for, and the only thing to do is to refuse to play.
They won't feel loved when you do this. They'll whine at you about how they're not your #1 priority. They'll accuse you of being manipulative, the pot calling the kettle black. They'll try to guilt-trip you with stories about horrible exes and whatnot. Remember that they chose those exes, even kept the exes around when things started to get rotten. There's a reason for that, and it has nothing to do with you.
It's a free country. They can try to guilt-trip you. You are under no obligation to take it personally. You are also not responsible for their rebound bitterness. A wannabe user who whines about feeling used needs therapy, not sympathy sex.
When someone goes into a relationship with the idea of seeing how much they can get away with, you'll never have a relationship with that person. They're not in it for a relationship, they're in it because they feel all warm and fuzzy from watching someone else do the limbo. It makes them feel good to put people down, which is why they get all horny about it. They don't get hard for women who don't bend over backwards. You're not human to them. You're a fetish object.
If he doesn't want to give you what you need in order to be comfortable spending that much time at his place, then you need to do what you need to do in order to feel comfortable without that key. This isn't spite, even though he may call it that, it's taking care of yourself. If he won't take care of you and won't let you take care of yourself, he has a fetish, and a nasty one. He's not in love. He just gets hard when you're in pain.