What Are Some Signs that You're Not in a Real Relationship?

My mother was one of those people who insisted that I was an embarrassment to her because I didn't get married right out of high school like she did. She was constantly pressuring me about relationships, since I wasn't serious about marrying. I developed an uncanny ability for selecting men who were even more not serious about being committed to a serious relationship than I. I realized this later. But it did give me a deniability with my mother. I'd just tell her that my current non-boyfriend didn't want to get married yet. So, yes, I did develop quite a list of their non-commitment towards me.

Then as I got more mature I found that I wanted a lasting relationship with that special someone and found that my results were mixed due to my previous non-relationship status. I learned that I'd developed bad habits of relationship so I needed to learn what they were so that I could go in the other direction. This is a list that I learned to observe to warn me about those who were just in it for what they could get without any commitment. These are some of the signs that there is Not a serious relation happening for you with this other person:

1. Even though you've been going together for several months or years, It's always been privately and not in public and most of what you do seems to be making-out with little conversation or the conversation always revolves around him and his interests.

2. Even your closest friends don't know that you're going together.

3. He avoids all personal public contact with you.

4. His gifts to you seem to be an afterthought since they go straight from the store counter to you, unwrapped and the price tags are still attached or they're consistently not your kind of gift. They just don't fit you.

5. Even though he romances you he constantly talks about other women that he's attracted to and has complementary things to say about them which he never has for you except as an awkward insistence that he does when you comment on his lopsided silence of your attributes.

6. He sees other women at the same time that he's seeing you and acts like you're the only one he's seeing or that it's quite alright to string you both along.

7. He gives more care to his car or his pets than he does to you.

8. He spends more of his free time with others than he does with you.

9. Even though he's included in your life. You're excluded from his, or if you are included it's as a casual friend or acquaintance.

10. He has no pictures of you anywhere in his home, nor in his wallet.

11. You are absent from his conversation with others.

12. He doesn't remember what you say and has difficulty remembering your name but has no problem relating full conversations with other women whose names are indelibly tattooed to the tip of his tongue.

13. You're expected to be available at his every whim. But he's usually absent for yours. He shows no lasting interest for your concerns, but expects you to be untested in his.

14. You're often the last person to know what's going on with him and his current life. You hear about it through the grapevine as if you're a casual, uninterested bystander.

Occasionally, some of these signs can show up in a committed relationship due to some stress being put upon it. Some of these, no matter when they appear, can be deal breakers, especially if several of them appear at the same time. However, if several of them are consistently present, and are a common theme throughout your relationship it's time to reevaluate if you actually have a relationship and whether it's actually worth fighting for or time for just moving on while you can. It can, also, be a clear sign that he's just marking time and not really investing in a genuine relationship with you. For each person, different ones of these signs are nonnegotiable
and each individual is the only one who can decide that.