Why playing hard to get doesn't work, and a better understanding of what's going on.

I’ve been lurking on here for a while, and I’ve seen a lot of discussion about how being an asshole works so well, about how not caring about women brings them to you, etc. What I don’t see is a discussion of WHY that’s the case, so I thought I’d offer my perspective.

Part of it has to do with the human tendency to want what we can’t have. That’s probably the most common explanation I’ve seen offered on here, but it doesn’t fully explain what’s going on. Most importantly, playing hard to get only works up to a point. As men, we’re expected to take the lead at a certain point in the seduction of women. Few women will become the pursuer of sex – the nature of male/female dynamics is that women get chased, while men do the chasing. If you NEVER take the lead, eventually a woman will assume you’re just not interested and give up. Women neither want nor know how to take the steps to progress from flirting to sex.

So at some point, you’re going to have to take the lead, and that means you’re going to have to give up the frame that you’re uninterested. For a lot of women, at that point the prize has been achieved, and there’s no reason to proceed to having sex.

I’ll give an example. There was a girl I sat beside in one of my classes in college. She was on the track team, and she had a very tight, athletic body, but I didn’t think she was all that pretty, so I just kind of ignored her. She’d try to start conversations, and I’d kind of tease her, insult her, and ignore her, and she ate it up. She got real flirty and touchy-feely with me, always trying to get my attention; she’d brag about how many guys were trying to date her; she’d show me pictures of her doing underwear modeling; she told me she was dating a pro baseball player (an all star player who you’ve heard of – I have no idea if she was lying or not); and eventually she asked if I would help her study for the final. We made plans for her to come to my apartment the night before the test to study. Game on, right?

No. She got tied up in a meeting that went long, and when she got out it was pretty late so I said alright, whatever. I acted like I didn’t give a fuck, but really I did – by this point I wanted to fuck this girl. But now the class was over, and I’d missed the opportunity to “study” with her, so what the fuck could I do? We texted after the final, and I invited her over, but she said something like “my boyfriend wouldn’t like that” and wouldn’t come. I tried to persuade her, but no dice.

What happened? How could a girl who’d been eating out of the palm of my hand not pan out? When I dropped the “uninterested” frame, she got what she wanted (my approval and validation) and lost interest. This was almost bound to happen – if she had come over and I’d made a move, we might have made out, but she probably would have stopped me short of having sex with her. I’d built her attraction to me too much on being uninterested.

Playing hard to get like this turns into a trap. You’ll find girls who like it, and it feels good to see how attracted they are to it, but it becomes a real challenge to close. This is especially true for picking up girls in bars – approaching in and of itself largely undermines any “hard to get” frame you might want to establish, let alone asking for a number, setting up a date, or just asking a girl to come home with you. So what’s the solution to this seeming paradox? I’m not saying you should go back to pedestaling, but going to the opposite extreme won’t work either.

The solution is honesty, authenticity, or being “real.” For a n00b, being real seems like being an asshole. So, to an extent, trying to be an asshole is the correct approach. But until you realize why it really works, and what’s really going on, you won’t be as effective.

To explain why being real is effective, I’ll use an analogy of a car dealer. I hate shopping for cars, because I hate dealing with salesmen. I want to buy a car based on the merits of the car – pressure sales tactics are bullshit and a pain in the ass to deal with. And if a salesman really pushes it, if his game comes off like an act, if it seems like he’s trying to get me to buy a car based on his charm or the fact that he’s personable, I might begin to think he’s hiding a flaw in the car.

Being a woman is like shopping for a car. Women want sex, just like I want a car, but they want to pick their mate based on the merits of the man, just like I want to pick a car based on the merits of the car. Pressure tactics are going to be a turn off, and anything that seems like an act is going to be viewed as an attempt to hide flaws in the product.

THIS is why being a nice guy is such a disaster – being a nice guy is an ACT. You’re trying to get a woman to like you by coming off as nice. This might actually work if you were genuinely nice, BUT YOU’RE NOT. Hardly anyone is. So when you ACT nice, you’re going to be viewed as disingenuine, like you’re covering up flaws. Thus, nice guys are viewed as lacking in confidence, because if you’re confident, you have nothing to hide. And as we know, being pegged as someone lacking in confidence is the true death knell in dating. And finally, if you happen to be one of the unlucky souls who is just genuinely nice, you’ll encounter the same obstacles, because girls will assume that no one is actually that nice.

This is something you need to accept, especially to get past the Anger phase of the Red Pill – when you were a nice guy, you were in fact acting, and thus you were being manipulative. It’s not that women don’t like and appreciate niceness per se, it’s that women don’t trust niceness.

Being real and authentic isn’t the opposite of being nice, however; it’s the opposite of acting nice. Being nice is often the appropriate, authentic thing to do. I’ve read field reports on here where a guy calls out a woman out for acting like a brat, or walks away from a woman who acts like a bitch, and the woman responds positively to it. The writer of the field report takes away the lesson that women are gluttons for punishment, but that’s not the correct lesson – the lesson is that women, like all humans, respect people who are real. Being real means that you have boundaries and stand up for yourself, because you’re not going to supplicate to get someone to like you. But if you’re an ass to a woman when she’s being nice to you, make no mistake, you’re not going to get a positive response.

Edit:

Someone else asked me to explain what I meant by being “real,” so I’ll add that to the OP.

Being genuine, or being real, allows you to maintain a high value frame while avoiding the paradox of playing hard to get, and it allows you to express interest and take the lead without being desperate. It is, as I’ll explain, the third and highest level of game.

Being real means you’re not nice in an attempt to get girls to like you. It means you don’t buy girls drinks when you first meet them (if a girl is going to talk to me, I want it to be because she’s interested in me, not because I’m feeding her drinks all night). It means you don’t over-compliment girls, or give girls huge compliments (like telling a girl in a bar that she’s gorgeous). It means you don’t compliment or talk about a woman’s clothing – because come on, you’re a guy, you don’t give a fuck who designed her dress (you don’t care about her dress at all – you care about what’s under the dress). It means you stand up for yourself – when a girl walks up to you in a bar and asks you to buy her a drink, you say no; or, you say I’ll buy you a drink if you buy me a drink. It means when a girl you’re trying to get with starts flirting with a guy in front of you, you either walk away and forget about her, or give her an ultimatum – “do you want to talk to him, or do you want to talk to me?” It means if you don’t want a relationship, nothing in your game implies you do. You tell girls you want to fuck them, no strings attached, and preferably you do this very early on so you don’t waste your time on a girl who’s not DTF.

When you’re real, the underlying frame is “I want you, but I don’t have to do shit to impress you.” It allows you to establish that you are higher value, BUT you still want to fuck or date the girl. And as you can see, this allows you to express interest and pursue a girl without giving away your value and setting a frame that she is higher value than you.

This frame means that there are many game tactics that end up becoming two edged swords. Humor is the best example I know of – it’s painful to watch guys try to force jokes or make themselves funnier than they are. When you try to impress a girl by being funny, you lose; but oddly, being funny is generally a good thing. If you tell jokes from a place of self amusement, you’re gold. Similarly, having a good job is a good thing; bragging about your good job is a bad thing.

One common piece of advice on here is “put yourself first” or “you are the prize.” My advice of “be real” is essentially a different side of the same coin. I find it easier to remember "don't try to impress," because “be the prize” can end up making you play hard to get, which, like I said, is a trap.

Finally, I want to connect the dots on something that I didn’t spell out originally: often, the reason playing hard to get works ISN’T because of the phenomenon of scarcity; it’s because it appears genuine. Think about it – the most basic level of game anyone could think of is being nice, and it’s the most common way men try to seduce women. Whether guys try the indirect route and become friends with girls, or guys man up and hit on them, men are usually going to be nice in an attempt to get women to like them. As a result, women are very, very accustomed to men being nice to them to try to get in their pants. It’s so routine that women learn to not trust niceness – they know it’s a game.

But being aloof and an asshole are much, much more rare. This is basically the second level of game that men discover – “being nice doesn’t work? Ok, I’ll be mean.” It’s really not much more sophisticated than being nice, and it usually comes from the same kind of manipulative mindset. But it’s much more effective than being nice, for a couple of reasons. The first has to do with scarcity and sexual market value, which I discussed in the OP: we want what we can’t have, and we judge each other’s SMV relative to our own based on how interested they appear in us (here’s a great article on this phenomenon). But the second reason it works is because it appears genuine. From a girl’s perspective, a cocky funny asshole is far less likely to be running game, because he’s taking a pretty big risk that he’ll say something offensive and she’ll walk away. And that kind of genuineness is attractive, because it shows confidence and higher value – you’re so high value you don’t have to run game.

I point this out because, like I originally said, playing hard to get only works up to a point, and it’s basically completely useless in cold approach. But if we can extract a deeper lesson from what’s going on when you play hard to get, isolate it, and then use it, maybe we can get the benefits of playing hard to get, without dealing with the negatives. And that deeper lesson, I posit, is genuineness, authenticity – being real.