Has this ever happened to you? You meet a man (maybe using a dating app) and you have great conversation. He sends you text messages every day and he calls you every night for a week. He then says, “We should get together on Saturday,” and he tells you about one of his favorite restaurants and how he’d love to take you there. You say, “it’s a date!” But when the weekend rolls around, he’s nowhere to be found. You send a text but he doesn’t answer. Why did he stop texting you? Were you just hearing things? Did you not have a date?
You just experienced bread-crumbing, a new version of bad behavior in modern dating. Bread-crumbing is the cray-cray cousin of ghosting, but unlike Ghosts who might date you for weeks, months or even years and then disappear into thin air without so much as a good bye text, Bread-crumbers tend to lead you on, creating false hope, and crushing your self-esteem.
I want to help you save your sanity by sharing 3 warning signs someone is bread-crumbing you.
1. They never make concrete plans
One of my clients frantically texted me because the man she’d met online had asked her out and sent her a link to the restaurant. On the day they were supposed to meet up, he never called or texted her. “We never set a time, but we did agree on a day for our date,” she told me.
I told her that unless you have a time, location and place, plus a follow up call from the person who asked you out, it’s not a real date!
Bread-crumbers have a propensity to make vague plans, painting a picture of what they’d like to do “one day,” but they never put all of the pieces in place to make it happen.
2. They lurk around your life
Unlike Ghosts who will completely vanish, Bread-crumbers will lurk on your social media and pop in and out of your life. One of my clients recently experienced this with a man who took her out on a few dates, but then vanished for about 3 months. She then noticed he was liking and commenting on her social media photos.
He then slid into her DMs, asking if they could get together sometime. He’d already disappeared once, and now he was popping back into her life, as though nothing had ever happened. I told her that a man who doesn’t have enough integrity to consistently communicate with her wasn’t worth her time.
You deserve better than someone who feeds you crumbs of attention, but never serves up the whole meal of a real date or relationship.
3. They keep conversations on a surface level
If the person you’re talking to never goes beyond the typical flirty conversations that some people have when they first meet, that could be a warning sign that you’re dealing with a Bread-crumber. Some theories are that Bread-crumbers live in a fantasy world, and only use online dating to boost their egos. They hide behind their smartphones, flirt with you, and sell you a dream of what’s possible, but they never have receipts to back up that dream! Don’t waste your time with them!
You deserve better than someone who feeds you crumbs of attention, but never serves up the whole meal of a real date or relationship. These daters are not worth your time, so if you recognize any of these warning signs, cut these bread-crumbers off and move on to someone who is stable, consistent and emotionally available.
BMWK, what warning signs have you noticed that reveal someone is going to bread-crumb you?