“Dear Orna and Matthew,

I’m a weekly reader of your Love Notes and have found much value in your advice. I’ve learned a lot but I’m still struggling because something happened and he stopped chasing me. I don’t know why he’s not pursuing me anymore.

Overall I find that the men I’m interested in seem to lose interest and stop pursuing me. It’s like I’m left holding the bag. Not exactly being ghosted, because if I reach out he’ll respond, but he’s no longer initiating contact.

This has happened enough times that I am seeing it as my pattern, but now I don’t know what to do with that information. So what’s next? How do I get a man to pursue me? Looking forward to your advice.”

Dear Jame,

Thank you so much for your positive feedback! We can tell you feel hurt because as you wrote, “Something happened and he stopped chasing me,” and now you don’t know what to do.

One of the first steps to creating change is to identify the patterns you are stuck in. We understand that you want to know, “How do I get a man to pursue me?” It’s good that you know what your negative pattern is, now let’s see if we can give you some tools to shift it.

Ultimately men are relatively easy to understand if you pay attention to their behavior instead of the words they say. Men show you what they want and what is important to them by what they do.

A man doesn’t hunt unless he’s hungry.

So in the beginning a guy could pursue you simply because he is lonely and desires companionship.

You’re left thinking, “He stopped chasing me,” but in reality, he simply has the casual, convenient, non-committal relationship he went out to get. He’s not hungry for anything more.

If a man is giving you mixed signals, then he is feeling conflicted or ambivalent about what he wants. If a man is pursuing strongly at the beginning and he stopped chasing and stops pursuing, then he isn’t really serious about wanting a commitment.

For the most part men are obvious with their intentions. If he is interested in being exclusive with you he’ll be asking you for a commitment, it won’t be a secret.

When you’re left wondering, “How come he stopped chasing me?” that means you’ve been leading the relationship, making things happen, not him. Moving the relationship forward is the guy’s role. He needs to see you as The Prize!

If a man isn’t pursuing you for a commitment there is nothing you can do to manipulate his behavior.

So much dating advice is about “how do I manipulate a man to pursue me,” instead of “how do I find a man who actually wants a relationship with me.”

Instead of sharing some advice on how to get a man to pursue you by manipulating him into thinking it was his idea, we’d rather go deeper into the actual issue that will change everything for you. When you understand this, you’ll stop wondering, “Why he stopped chasing me,” and discover a new way to find lasting love.

You wrote in your question, “The men I’m interested in seem to lose interest and stop the pursuit.” We’re curious about the men you are not super hot for… do they pursue you?

This implies that you are attracted to men who aren’t interested in a relationship with you.

If you are continually attracted to guys that are interested in convenience and companionship rather than a real committed relationship and are not interested in the guys in hot pursuit of you, that is a subconscious block to love. This block makes it appear as if there are ONLY two kinds of men in the world.

We would guess that you’re only dating guys that you are highly attracted to. This will limit your dating experiences and give you a skewed view of the kind of men available to you.

When you allow yourself the opportunity to fully engage in Dating To Discover™ you will experience what it is like to date a guy who really wants a relationship with YOU!

Once you experience dating a guy who is pursuing you for a relationship, one who is attentive and kind, you will never settle for the guy who is just looking for companionship and physical intimacy.

Give our dating strategies a go and discover if you still find yourself only attracted to the guys who fall by the wayside. This will inform you that you’re stuck wanting what you can’t have.

You’re stuck because of how you experienced love in your family of origin.

Perhaps you had a critical parent (or two) that you could never please. Or maybe you had an emotionally absent father. Or another possibility could be that you felt invisible in your family of origin because a sibling needed, or simply received all the love and attention.

As a child, we have to reconcile the difference between the love we desire from our parents and the love we actually receive. This childhood wound becomes the blueprint of what is familiar to your subconscious and how it identifies “love.”

Ultimately you are attracted to what is FAMILIAR!

Your subconscious mind is responsible for keeping you alive. It is part of the system that controls your heart rate, your blood pressure, and your body temperature, among other things. If any of these systems are outside of a very narrow range, then you will die.

Not to be dramatic, this is simply how your subconscious functions. And it does the exact same thing with your behavior. What is known is considered “safe.” What is unknown is considered “unsafe.”

This part of you is programmed to keep you alive, however, it cannot judge. (The ability to judge is only in our big prefrontal cortex – our conscious mind.) Therefore, your subconscious does not know if you are alive and miserable, or alive and blissfully happy.

Your subconscious is only concerned with keeping you alive and it functions by bringing you the same circumstances again and again and again (like those guys who stopped chasing you). It leverages the Law Of Association and assumes that by bringing you more of the same experiences, it will continue to keep you alive.

Ultimately the issue is that what is familiar and what you desire are not in alignment, they are not in harmony – in fact, they are at odds with one another.

We would guess that the men who do pursue you, the ones who are chasing you because they think you are really amazing and would love to be in a committed relationship with you, are the men you don’t find attractive.

The men who would pursue you (if you gave them the opportunity) do not match what “love” is in your subconscious mind, so they are not appealing to you. Or you simply don’t see them at all… as if they do not exist.

We call this system, Your Love Imprint^®, and it is made up of your limiting beliefs, your emotional patterns, and your behavioral strategies for giving and receiving love.

One of our clients grew up with a father who was emotionally explosive, often times without any warning. She never knew what would set him off. He was also dismissive of women and their opinions. Even though she was the oldest, her younger brothers would often get more credit for their accomplishments than she would.

She never felt safe with love and struggled to find lasting love in her adult life. She also found it difficult to express her feelings authentically. It was easier to adjust her behavior to try and please others.

Her journey to love was about finally feeling safe in the world to express her truth, no matter what anyone else thought.

Another client was raised by a critical mother who was also a therapist, so she would diagnose her daughter’s behavior. Her father was her hero but he was also alcoholic and somewhat distant. This client grew up to be an anxious adult who was afraid to get emotionally close to men.

She chose men who weren’t available or who didn’t value her. These men reflected back to her a combination of her critical mother and her distant father.

Her journey to love was about taming her inner critic and discovering what it felt like to be cared for (and not just desired) by a man.

A third client grew up never knowing if her father was going to be around. He suffered from a heart condition and his doctors were constantly predicting that he wouldn’t survive the next 3 months. As it turned out, he lived through her childhood and passed when she was a young adult.

Her mother raised her to be humble and not make waves. It wasn’t proper for her to celebrate her wins or successes because her mother thought it would make others feel bad.

As an adult, she first married a man who always put the focus on himself and didn’t support her. Then, after her divorce, she found herself engaged to a very similar man who actively discouraged her and her career ambitions.

Her journey to love was about stepping out of the shadows and shining her light and ultimately finding a man who would support her in attaining her dreams and goals.

All three of these women were acting out a behavioral strategy that came from their individual wounding about love that they learned in childhood.

Most people mistakenly believe that their experiences shape their beliefs. The opposite is true – your beliefs shape your experiences. The world appears to you as you believe it to be.

Tracking your relationship history will uncover a pattern that you can trace back to your family of origin allowing you to see all the pieces of the puzzle.

This system existed long before you started dating and the reality is that this part of you is doing the job it is intended to do. It’s like plugging an incorrect address into your GPS. You could end up next door to your intended destination, or thousands of miles away. Either way, you’re not getting what you want!

There is no magic formula to get a guy that you find attractive to desire you, or to behave differently because the answer to your question of “How do I get a man to pursue me?” isn’t about using different dating strategies. The solution is transforming the concept of love to your subconscious mind so it will bring you toward what you desire.

So if you’ve never experienced the kind of love you desire you’re stuck at an impasse due to a misalignment.

The journey for you involves discovering why you are attracted to unavailable men and focusing on healing that wound. From there your dating strategies will certainly bring you much better results.

We can assure you that there are more than two kinds of men – the ones you are attracted to who are only interested in something easy and casual with you, and the ones who are attracted to you that you do not desire.

Once this impasse is resolved inside of you new kinds of men will show up for you to date and experiment with so you can have a whole new kind of experience dating a variety of men.

What you really want is a man who will stand by you – no matter what! A man who will have your back, who gets you, who will be willing to work through challenges with you, and of course one that you are also HOT for.

To have all that, you have to be willing to deselect the guys who just want to keep it casual and convenient and release the yearning of the familiar pattern of wanting what you can’t have.

Stop obsessing about why he stopped chasing, and how to get a man to pursue, and instead discover what is blocking you from the lasting love you want. Join us for a complimentary Soulmate Strategy Session so we can give you insight into how you can create a new approach to love, one with your soulmate.