This is normal. You don't need to over analyse it. There will always be something you could have not done or could have done better to stop a break up but actually plates almost always break.

Its a crap deal for women. They get no benefit but sex and frankly they know in their DNA that they should be getting comittment and side benefits for sex. It makes them feel crappy. At first they are captivated but then they realise isa all glimmer and no gold. They may be messed up and wanting attention or too busy with education or career to bother with a relationship but these are one hopes for their sake a temporary state.

The guys I have seen who do manage to make it work out long term only make it work out long term on and off on a take or leave basis. They are also usually in the woman's social class or friend group. They are someone she can trust ad the woman is usually a bit weak and not great at relationships. She will look Chad up when she needs some attention. 90+ % of heated affairs that the participants feel they can't live without burn out or implode when they contact reality. Plate spinning is not even that heated.

Its doomed. Its just a mechanism to persuade women into putting out up front rather than after commitment has been secured due to perceived high value in the man and there being no consequences to sluttery in the west today. -Nothing to lose so she will have a punt at some chad attention.

There are no good solutions. Its a limited shallow game and most guys don't want to play it for too long, even though it can give some joy for a time.

I've been spinning plates for a while now and I really want to test my sanity or if I'm just biased/doing something wrong.

For context I'm 29 and the women are between 22-26.

So the pattern I keep running into: meet a girl somewhere > hook up > she wants to see me again > see her ~once every 10 days. I like treating women well - making them cum, replying to their texts, following through on plans, just being a nice decent guy etc. Past the two-month mark they either start prodding for commitment, or when I act like a total asshole (flakey etc) they generally cut it and move on. The genuinely (attractive) indifferent plate who'll take occasional sex, stay low-maintenance, and not care that I'm spinning others is a unicorn, maybe 1 in 10 if that, and usually only in that state temporarily (slammed with work/school, or fresh off a breakup that gutted her).

What I want narrowed down two hypotheses, which is:

1 Is it me in the early stages? Am I signaling more than I mean to, LARPing boyfriend without intending to, so she reasonably updates toward "this is going somewhere," gets invested, and the commitment-prodding is a rational response to a false read I handed her. i.e. it's a comms/intent error on my end, fixable. But do understand that I am (in my view) playing it as non-commital as possible without coming off like an asshole. So if they treat me well, I will reciprocate their behavior to a degree (2/3 golden rule) but I never do shit for them out of the blue or verbalize any sort of commitment etc.

2 It's value. She'd run indefinite low-investment casual happily — for a hotter/higher-value guy. With me she won't surrender her own sexual strategy because I'm below the threshold where access-on-my-terms is worth it to her, so she either converts to commitment-seeking or exits. >> But even then, in my experience if they really see you as a catch they will just avoid verbalizing any commitment talk for longer if they suspect you will reject it. But eventually they still implode and it ends the same.

Which one matches your field experience? And for those of you who do hold long-running plates with zero commitment pressure — was it #1 you never signled commitment or flat out told her you were not interested in it, #2 she didn't want to lose you regardless of her hurt feelz, or something else?

I guess my question is, is it possible to have attractive, low-maintenance plates, who are not giving you STDs and who will stick around for a 'long' time? Or are those indeed just a temporary unicorns and is the reason you must keep recruiting new plates simply that 'bitches aren't planets, can't spin them forever'?

It's just funny when I hear women talk about 'just' being FB/FWB with a guy but in my experience it rarely ever is, their hamster is just confused/delusional