3 Ways Bare Minimum Men Keep You Invested

When you start to notice how you’re falling into old relationship patterns, you will also see how you’ve accepted and might still be accepting the bare minimum from men.

They offer the absolute bare minimum because they know they can. They offer the bare minimum because they know you’ll accept it and never ask for anything more. Maybe you do this because you fear abandonment and want to keep them around. Maybe you don’t feel comfortable asking for your needs to be met and don’t want to appear needy or clingy. Either way, bare minimum men know how to manipulate and keep you invested. And this is how:

You excuse his bad communication skills.

Maybe he doesn’t text back for hours. Maybe he doesn’t text you back for a couple of days. Maybe he only texts you when it’s after 9 pm. Whatever it is, you make excuses for him. You convince yourself into thinking he’s just “busy” and he’ll reply when he can.

While that can be the case (sometimes), if you’re with a man who is already offering the bare minimum and he’s also really bad at texting, then there’s a good chance he’s not really busy and he just doesn’t care enough to try harder. Remember: if he wanted to, he would.

He avoids conversations out of “fear.”

If he avoids having deep or hard conversations with you, doesn’t talk about the future, doesn’t listen to you, and rarely expresses empathy or compassion when you talk about your feelings, then there’s a good chance he’s doing the bare minimum. And you eat it up!

It takes time for him to open up. He doesn’t talk about his feelings with just anyone. He’ll have these deep conversations when he’s ready.

Be honest with yourself. Will he really ever be “ready”? Does he even want to be this intimate with you? Stop convincing yourself that he’ll get there eventually, especially when he has never explicitly said that he wants a relationship — and a relationship with you.

He tells you how you “deserve better.”

“You deserve better,” he says, and you eat it up. This is not a compliment, though. While, yes, you do deserve better, this is a manipulation tactic on his part. This is his way of acknowledging the fact that he’s giving you nothing and will continue to give you nothing. So listen to him. Walk away. Do better.

If you recognize the signs of the bare minimum, then you should move on. You deserve more and so much better than that.