The Honest Reason Why You Are His Placeholder

This must be because of some issue within him and not us, right?

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Matheus Ferrero / Unsplash

Why wasn’t it me? This is the burning question on our minds when we are discarded by a man that we really wanted things to work out with. Whether they disappeared, failed to deliver all the things we hoped for or passed on us as they set their eyes on someone else, we can’t help but to ask ourselves why we fell short.

While people say everything happens for a reason, and this might give us temporary relief or turn out to be true in some situations, when it comes to men it’s usually pretty cut and dry. If you aren’t with him the way you want to be, you are not their Game Changer.

We as women have been programmed to rationalize men’s behaviors. Seeing something magical in ourselves, which we can easily fake and overestimate, we have a hard time accepting when someone we were interested and invested in did not chose to wife us up. This must be because of some issue within him and not us, right?

We sit across from men on dates wearing our best waist slimming bodysuit and ass hugging jeans, with a perfectly contoured face and balayage hair listing our many accomplishments, successful careers and our exaggerated sense of independence. We hide our insecurities, pretend not to need or want love and we say that we aren’t in search of something serious and are cool with wherever this is going to go. The main goal is to convince him that we are worthy and not like the next bitch.

What we are actually doing is basic-ing the fuck out of ourselves.

No matter how unique or worthy you think you might be, if you don’t truly believe this inside yourself and back it up with behavior that sets you aside from other women, what you’ll find is a man who listens intently pretending to be impressed while seeing through you all the basic things about you that are no different from the last girl. Immediately he knows you won’t be the one. This doesn’t mean that he won’t see qualities in you that he likes or wants to entertain and it sure as hell doesn’t mean he won’t want to fuck you. What it means is you aren’t their Game Changer. What you then become is their placeholder.

The Game Changer is a woman that locks a man down and secures his love. Despite the lies we tell ourselves about why a guy screwed us over, there is no such thing as a man who doesn’t want to commit or is afraid to get tied down. Most men do want to settle down and fall in love, the difference is that they fear settling down with mediocre. Men who are confident know that the one woman who can break them will come eventually. If it’s not you, but you come close, you’re good enough to join their team for a while as a placeholder while they wait for her to show up.

While spending increased time with him, you may start to feel and think he’s falling for you. Yes, he’s taking you out, he’s listening and eating up everything you say, and he compliments you and makes it no secret how bad he wants you. There’s nothing wrong with him doing that. The issue lies within us in that while we as woman tend to read into what all that means, envisioning our future together, he’s over there taking it day by day just killing time until his real person shows up.

And until the dreaded “where is this going” conversation happens, we can’t blame him for that, what we should blame is our tendency to be so trusting and eager to lay all our cards out on the table just because a qualified player showed up with their poker face.

Because of this, most women do not even know that they are in the placeholder status and don’t realize it until it’s too late and they have vested all their time and energy into a man who eventually dumped them because they didn’t want a relationship. Only to find shortly after that he’s blissfully committed to someone else.

It doesn’t matter how much of a catch you think you are, how many other people want you, how successful you may be, how good you look or how good you sexed him, if it wasn’t you, it wasn’t you.

Looks and lust may get you through the front door, but they don’t give you the master key.

As a placeholder, those things may have earned you value as a sexual object that he can keep around because you’re good enough for now to pass time but you lack complete long term value-and once he has decided this, there is nothing you can do to change it. He may have seen something in you, not a future but an opportunity to fill a void and get the benefits of a girlfriend whenever he feels like it without the commitment or pressure. This is much easier than him having to put in the effort in to go hunting for something else while waiting around for his Game Changer to arrive.

Time spent that you thought was meaningful was really just boredom and a connection that you imagined was really just convenience.

When someone says they aren’t capable of giving you what you want or can’t make the necessary sacrifices to keep you, but they can do it for someone else, the bottom line is that you are only an option, a placeholder. Because the person who wants you as their first prize winner, won’t award you runner up status in their life.

Men don’t want an average self-proclaimed bad bitch. Even the baddest bitches can one day become the girlfriend or wife who tries to change him, keeps him away from his friends or family, makes him sacrifice the things he loves and stops giving him head. Men are smart, especially the ones who are still single. They stayed this way for a reason. Most importantly, they’ve seen and had your kind before. What they are looking for is something that they find in you that they haven’t found elsewhere.

Whatever this is varies from man to man, but one thing that all Game Changers have is true confidence. Whether that confidence is within her ability to keep her options open, her intuition to spot and not put up with bull shit, autonomy to do her own thing, or courage to ask him more questions and to prove himself before she invests anything- she doesn’t just speak of her worth, she conveys it in her behavior. It’s more than just being sexy, or being a good listener or fun to be around. You may be all those things, but if you can’t really get him to let his guard down enough to see who he really is and make it a priority to do so before you make a decision about what you even want out of him, AND he recognizes this, your value has immediately gone down.

No man who feels that you were meant for him will ever let you get away. There is no such thing as the right woman at the wrong time. If you are the right woman, timing is of no concept. Obstacles become obsolete and barriers become a welcome challenge.

You’re never going to be the right woman for any man if you don’t first see and treat yourself as capable of changing the game instead of just sitting the bench looking good in your uniform like everyone else. So instead of asking yourself why it isn’t you, take a closer look at who he is and decide if you even want it to be you in the first place. Then go out and make it be you. Thought Catalog Logo Mark


About the author

Marcey Rizzetta

With her raw sense of humor and counseling psychology background, Marcey tells it like it is in her blog “Everyone Thinks It But I Just Say It.”