Why are men breaking up with me?

I am 27 years old. This year, I have lost two relationships. I'm quite worried because one guy said he had cold feet, but I later learned that he married. The second one left complaining about the ex and the fact that I allowed no intimacy in our relationship. I'm under the bus. Please help.

You don't say you lost a relationship. You simply say that the candidate didn't qualify. Relationships are interviews, not investments.

If marriage is the goal, character analysis must be the method. Anything other than that will always leave you torn and tired.

Neither should you seek marriage because you've grown old or because you're lonely. This will cause you to lower the bar very much just to find someone, and these types of people cannot stay over the long haul.

Rather, you should seek marriage because you have finished your preparations and you're ready. This way, you will have a checklist and a standard against which you'll be checking candidates. When people fail to meet your criteria you'll simply move on to check the next one because you're not invested in any particular one. This type of dating is hands-free and goal-oriented, and it's the only one that will lead you to quick results with minimal bruises.

Back to your case, why did the first guy develop cold feet or doubts about you and still go around and marry someone else?

People can change their minds about you simply because they got to know you better and, to their disappointment, you're not what they thought.

They might have discovered something they couldn't put up with, but one they were too embarrassed to communicate directly. The person they went on to marry simply satisfied their criteria.

To comfort you, though, they may not have left you for someone better. Sometimes people are intimidated by your good traits, and they leave you for someone who is less self-developed and less threatening.

This may be all about their insecurities. You didn't lose much. After all, do you want a person who can't communicate?

As long as you keep your cookie jar out of the mix, you have little to regret.

It's a good idea to keep dating in the boardroom, not the bedroom. You'll have fewer regrets at the end of the day.

About the second guy who complained about their ex, that was just a shallow cover-up to justify leaving. 'I have too much going on in my life right now. Let me sort them out and reach out afterwards.' This was just a softer way of saying, 'I need to go. Goodbye.'

What about that point of rejecting you because you didn't open your cookie jar? He would still have left even if you did. He simply didn't see your value beyond your body. He was just looking for a good time, not a good person.

Someone who wants you for a lifetime can not let you go because you're preserving yourself for your husband when he has the chance to become the husband.

Sometimes people are attracted to you because of your principles but then try to punish you for those same principles when they can not manipulate you. It's their loss, not yours.

People who want you for the long term always focus on what will matter in the long run. Things like your mindset and your values in life.

Men who want to marry you never obsess over laying you, and those who obsess over laying you will usually not marry you.

A genuine man also wants to maintain a no-strings-attached posture so that they can think straight and pick nuances that would be impossible to pick once people cross sexual boundaries.

Lastly, if you seek a happy marriage you should stop getting into exclusive relationships as a way to know people. They're generally tiring, and they leave you bruised every time they end. They can bring you fatigue and discouragement before you get to your ultimate goal of marriage.

Instead, you should switch to strategic dating. This means utilising dialogue for external evaluation and immersive interaction for internal evaluation.

External evaluation shows you someone's persona while internal evaluation shows you someone's personality.

One is about name and image, while the other is about a person's character.

How to use dialogue for external evaluation? Simply provoke as many conversations as possible from the time you hit it off as potential lovers. At the end of the day, sit down and jot down every piece of information you gathered that day.

If you do this right, it will take you not more than a week of these dialogues to make your decision as to whether you should proceed to the next stage.

Immersive interactions, on the other hand, are borrowed from immersive research where a researcher joined the community they wished to study.

In your case, you enter this person's life by spending longer periods together and joining them in events that involve other people and activities.

The goal is to watch this person in social action. It is to see how they live from a 3D standpoint.

This may mean visiting their family as a friend, joining their company events, attending a conference together or undertaking a project jointly.

Do not mistake immersive interactions for cohabitating - one of the worst mistakes a woman can commit if marriage is your goal. It gets you selling on credit which you can't recover should the borrower not pay.

It's a wise thing in life never to lend what you can't survive without if it's not repaid. Things like your time, your name, your reputation, your purity, your essence.