Discovering that someone is attracted to you is exciting, but it’s also scary. When a man sees you, he’s probably thinking about a variety of different things. Some of these thoughts are positive and some are negative, but most men aren’t thinking consciously about their response to you.
Instead, they’re thinking subconsciously and we have some ideas as to what they’re probably thinking. In order to understand what men are actually thinking when they look at women, we first need to understand why they do so in the first place.
All people have certain thought patterns that trigger them into forming certain responses when they see things that remind them of those thought patterns. Here are three commonly-held subconscious thought patterns men have when looking at women…
The Reward Pattern
When a man sees you, his brain is automatically searching for the reward he’s gotten used to receiving. In order to understand what this reward is, we need to look at how men’s brains work. Every second of every day, a man’s brain is receiving a flood of information about everything going on around him.
This information is constantly being analyzed for the purpose of triggering the release of certain chemicals like dopamine and opioids. Dopamine is a chemical we’re all very familiar with as it’s involved in a wide range of functions in the human body, one of which is the reward system.
When we get rewarded, our brains trigger the release of dopamine which causes us to want to repeat the behavior that brought us that reward. How do we form relationships, however, without being interested in all the other things going on around us? How do we know what to do without being told? We have to have a reward system that tells us what to do and dopamine is the reward for all of those things.
The Safety Pattern
Men are mostly concerned with the safety of the things they care about. This is why men instinctively want a woman to be “safe” for them. If a man wants a woman to be around him, he wants to make sure that she feels protected by him.
This is why men like to be the “dominant” member in any given relationship. Many men are turned off by women who are too “dominant” in a relationship. They want to feel protected but they don’t want to be told what to do.
Luckily, there are many ways to form a “dominant” relationship without coming across as threatening. One of the best is by setting aside time when you do the majority of the talking. If you want to be in a “dominant” relationship, you want to be the one doing most of the talking.
