The reason manipulative, misogynistic, and narcissistic men who only want casual sex pursue women who they know want relationships is because they want power and leverage over women. They could easily find a woman who also wants a casual fling but they don’t want a detached woman — they prefer deceiving and coercing women who they think “like” them for an ego boost.

They dangle the future-faking carrot of romantic love and the illusion of potential commitment to make women chase them and lure them into precarious, undefined situationships to keep them around for sex, resources, labor, and ego validation.

Consent by deception is not fully informed consent. It’s a power play for a narcissist or psychopath to pull the wool over their target’s eyes and they experience “duping delight” when doing so. For them, nothing is as satisfying as the thrill of overriding consent whether through their charming false mask or false promises. They want to manipulate a woman who invests in them. They want to humble beautiful, empathic, successful women and view this “conquest” as a trophy to validate them.

If you are dating as a woman, it’s important to perform a cost-benefits analysis on the people you choose to date. Do not overexert yourself to be generous to men you barely know or give unfettered access.

You take on far more risk when dating, and this makes you more vulnerable to additional labor, risks, and burdens if you attempt to play fair in an unfair world when you already face a disproportionate amount of deception, violence, retaliation, stalking, harassment, and manipulation in the modern dating world. — Shahida Arabi, MA, Trauma Expert and Researcher, “Why Narcissistic Men Coerce Women Who Want Relationships Into Situationships.”