When did the dating game get so complicated?
There was a time when dating was a matter of meeting someone you kind of liked, probably in high school.
If they liked you too, you’d go steady for a while, and before you knew it, you were married and moving to the suburbs to raise kids.
Those days are over. In lots of ways, that’s a good thing. When it comes to dating, we have far more options now than our parents and grandparents ever did.
But also, that can make things difficult.
These days, if a guy likes you, he’s not going to offer your father a few goats for your hand in marriage.
Instead, he needs to play a far more complicated social and romantic game.
And lots of times, for lots of reasons, men may hide their attraction to you.
Maybe you work together, and he doesn’t want to make things awkward in the workplace.
Maybe you’ve been friends for a while, and he doesn’t want to jeopardize your friendship.
Maybe he’s just shy. Or maybe he’s not sure how you feel about him and is embarrassed by the fear of rejection.
For all these reasons and more, men tend to hide an attraction to someone else.
But there are some signs that point to a man who has an attraction to you.
Let’s get into the psychology of a man who wants you.
1) He pays attention
When a man is attracted to you, you’ll pay attention to you.
That sounds obvious, but sometimes, it can be more subtle than you might expect.
We’re all supposed to pay attention to each other, and we all get pretty good at making it look like we are.
But there’s a big difference between the attention you pay to, for example, your boss or your barista, and the attention you pay to someone you are attracted to.
If a man is attracted to you, he’ll do more than just pay attention to the things you say. He’ll actually remember them.
He’ll think about them when you’re not around.
And he may surprise you by remembering dates that are important to you and even celebrating them.
When strong emotions are attached to a person, it becomes easy to remember details about them.
For example, check out this study which found that people are much more likely to remember things that are connected to the people they care about.
That’s why a man who’s into you may suddenly be fascinated by the things you say.
2) He makes eye contact
Eye contact is a huge part of all our social interactions. And it can provide some great clues to how a guy really feels about you.
It’s probably not a huge surprise to hear that guys look more at people they are attracted to.
After all, if he thinks you look good, why wouldn’t he want to look at you every chance he gets?
But pay attention specifically to how frequently and how long he looks into your eyes.
“Eye contact may be an important part of dating and relating, beyond simply getting a lover’s initial attention,” writes psychologist Jeremy Nicholson.
And as he points out, experiments have confirmed that people feel a closer bond with one another after making sustained eye contact.
While we’re on the subject of eyes, an even bigger sign that a man is attracted to you is that his pupils dilate.
The pupils of our eyes get bigger when we look at someone we like.
That’s true for both women and men, and because it’s an involuntary reaction, it can be one of the biggest signs that someone is attracted to you.
3) His body language changes
The eyes are crucial in showing a man’s attraction to you, but there are lots of other forms of body language that can also give away his true feelings.
For example, a man who is attracted to you will want to touch you.
He may place a hand on your arm or your shoulder, or make other excuses to make physical contact with you.
Another sign of attraction is that a man will mirror what you do.
This is sometimes also known as the chameleon effect, and it basically means that someone will copy your gestures.
So if you sit up straight, so will they.
If you brush your hair back from your face, so will they.
It can also happen as people adopt phrases used by the people they like.
This can be both a conscious and unconscious response, making it a great giveaway that someone is attracted to you.
Psychologically speaking, it comes from our mirror neuron system.
That’s the part of the brain that helps us to put ourselves in other people’s shoes, and it’s why we get scared when watching scary movies or excited by action films, even though nothing is really happening to us.
4) He gets protective
One sign of attraction that is much more common with men than it is with women is that they become protective over the people they care about.
There are some theories that argue this goes back to the earliest days of our species.
Because men are on average bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than women, they have an urge to protect those they care about.
These days, we are not as threatened by packs of wolves or sabertooth tigers as our ancestors were, but the protective instincts of men have not gone away, and they may reveal an attraction to you.
This protectiveness may manifest itself as:
- Walking you to your house or to your car
- Asking you to check in so he knows you got home safely
- Sticking up for you when others criticize you
- Encouraging you to take a self-defense class or see a doctor to protect yourself from health issues.
Of course, there’s a big difference between protective behavior and controlling behavior.
A man who is attracted to you shouldn’t try to control what you do.
But he may show his attraction by the strength of his protective urges.
5) He tries to impress you
This one may be a more obvious sign of a guy who’s attracted to you. In fact, once you notice it, it can be kind of cute.
We all have an urge to impress others, especially people we want to like us.
And because men have a tendency to define themselves more by their achievements than by intrinsic qualities, a man who wants you to like him may go out of his way to impress you.
He may do this by:
- Pointing out when he’s done something impressive at work;
- Telling you about his finances;
- Bringing the conversation toward his skills;
- Sharing a hobby he’s good at.
6) He makes plans with you
To put it simply, if a man is attracted to you, he will want to spend time with you.
And if he’s really into you, he’ll start making plans to spend more time around you.
In the early stages of a relationship, that may mean asking you out.
It may mean inviting you to social events he’s attending or to participate in his hobbies so that he can spend more time with you.
But as a relationship progresses, he may start making bigger plans for the future together.
This is a sure sign that he sees a future with you and wants to bring it about.
“One thing that successful relationships all have in common is that the couples in them make plans for the future, both near and long term,” writes psychologist Barton Goldsmith. “Making plans builds a bond and a stronger sense of security in our hearts.”
7) He’s happy to be around you
Do you ever notice that a guy always seems happy to see you?
That’s because being around people we are attracted to automatically lifts our mood.
In other words, if a man is attracted to you, he’ll be happy to see you. And just being around you may help to lift him out of a bad mood and put him in a good one.
8) He includes you in his life
As I mentioned earlier, a man who is attracted to you wants to spend time with you.
That means he’ll include you in his life.
Maybe he’ll encourage you to get into hobbies he enjoys.
Or maybe, even more significantly, he’ll introduce you to friends and even family.
This indicates he sees you as an important part of his life, and wants you to be part of it in the future.
“Evidence suggests…that even when partners choose each other, romantic relationships exist within an elaborate social system and different forces within this system can help (or hurt!) relationship success,” writes psychologist Teresa E. DiDonato.
That means that introducing you to important figures in his life comes at a risk. It’s something a guy will only do if he’s really into you.
Signs of attraction
There are all sorts of reasons why men may hide their attraction to someone.
But sooner or later, that attraction will show itself anyway.
Keep an eye out for these signs to know if the guy is into you.
Because if you spot them, it makes it much easier to know how he really feels.
