What is Dread Game to The Red Pill?

Example 1

Dread Game: To purposely set out to create an appearance that you would or could cheat on and/or dump your partner, unless they comply with your demands. You underline the replaceability of your partner. Some examples of this are creating dating profiles, going out without your partner to bars and clubs, sending flowers to yourself “from an admirer”, purposely seeking to pull Indicators of Interest from the opposite sex in front of your partner and so on. Basically anything you purposely do to make your partner feel a sinking sensation in the pit of their stomach that the relationship is heading to a very bad place, very soon, unless they comply with your demands.

Dread Game vs Reality Game

Example 2

RPer1: You need to be sure she doesn't think you're cheating or going to divorce her.

RPer2: That's exactly what you want her thinking. That's how dread game is supposed to work.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/comments/2l7pqe/comment/clsimdl

Example 3

"Dread" refers to the reactionary, biological and most importantly instinctual feeling of impending doom. In the context of relationships, dread is the gut feeling that your partner is not as emotionally invested in the relationship as you, that you're losing or perhaps have already lost control over your partner's interest levels, and that your partner is capable of and perhaps even susceptible to leave for better prospects that are voluntarily and abundantly made available to them as a result of them being a desirable sexual prospect. Dread is ultimately a feeling of helplessness and lack of control over another person.

Dread Game in the Context of RedPill & as a Tool The concept of Dread Game as discussed in the manosphere is essentially the cognizant manipulation and utilization of a biological instinct. As men, we are able to play on the female nature's susceptibility to dread (read: insecurity) and use it in our favor (access to a woman's body). Dread Game is keeping your plate or STR in a state of perpetual emotional stimulationexclusively attached to her solipsistic idea of you, in order to feed and facilitate her hamster running wild - creating and dwelling on the necessary fantasies (why isn't he answering his phone? where is he? is he sleeping with her? does he have a harem of beautiful women on rotation?) she needs to keep her emotionally and sexually invested in you for a long period of time. In short, dread is a constantly-channeled giddying booster-shot of giney tinglez and feelz that wards off or at least delays the inevitable resentment, repugnant familiarity and loss of attraction that women feel towards men who emotionally invest in them.

  • Regularly ignore phone calls (I simply don't care)
  • Regularly disappear for days on end (I don't need to explain anything)
  • Regularly fuck, speak to and flirt with other women (I am a man)
  • Constantly trivialize emotional discussion/shit tests (I don't care because I'm not invested nor operating within a female frame)
  • Call her out on her shit, tell her she's wrong, argue with her for the sake of it (drama injection, create fights for the fun of it)
  • Instigate pointless fights (bored, enjoy seeing her hamster)
  • Act completely indifferent/disinterested in person (am usually disinterested outside of bedroom anyway)
  • Occasionally reject sex (nuclear, advanced level and only to be used sparingly)

Understanding and Embracing Dread Game

Example 4

It’s all in the covert message you send. It’s the fear of loss that you subtly instill in her. If I would have sat her down and openly talked about how much I was frustrated with the lack of affection and sex in our relationship, things wouldn’t have improved. If anything, they would have worsened. Women do not react to such overt messaging.

Secondly, if I would have made it obviously clear that I was going no contact with her, it would not have worked either. I would have looked like a whiny pouty child. Instead, by subtly distancing myself from her, I let her own fears control her, instead of me trying to force them upon her.

And lastly, the plausible deniability/amused mastery of having another girl flirt with you cannot be underestimated. If I would have went up to another girl and flirted with her in attempts to make my girl jealous, it wouldn’t have had the same effect. But since she came up to me, and I neither encouraged it nor stopped it, it elicited the right amount of emotions/fear of loss in my girl that it put the onus on to do something about it.

I know this wasn’t Nuclear Dread Game that gets thrown around a lot, in fact, some of you might say this isn’t dread game at all. But I think you don’t always have to go nuclear to elicit your desired response. Sometimes it is subtle tweaks here and there that make the difference. In my mind, I basically redistributed my attention and focus from her to other projects and other people. The emotions that she felt (fear of loss) elicited a reaction in her that caused her to increase her attention/affection towards me to ensure she didn't experience that loss.

My use of dread game in a ltr

What research suggests about "dread" in a relationship

A fear of getting dumped kills romance and commitment

Perceived risk of a romantic relationship ending influences the intensity of love and commitment.

Can the fear of a relationship ending actually lessen love and cause a break-up? If yes, how does it happen? These were the questions that Simona Sciara and Giuseppe Pantaleo of the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Italy set out to answer in an article published in Springer’s journal Motivation and Emotion. Their research complements what is already known about how obstacles to a romantic relationship affect attraction and commitment towards a partner.

Study participants provided basic information about themselves and the state and dynamics of their relationship. The researchers then manipulated the participants’ perception that their relationship could end. Manipulation techniques included providing statistics about the failure of relationships to one group, and giving false feedback to some participants about the chances of their romantic affiliations ending. Participants were then asked how committed they were to their relationship, and how they felt towards their partner.

Sciara and Pantaleo found that participants’ romantic feelings and levels of commitment towards their partners were more intense when no mention was made about the possibility that their relationships could end. Romance and commitment diminished when they heard that there could be either a high or low risk of a break-up. When participants were told that there was only a moderate chance the relationship would end, commitment was stronger. The researchers also established that the influence of such manipulated risk on romantic commitment was fully mediated by feelings of romantic affect.

“This shows that, when faced with a ‘too high’ risk of ending the relationship, participants clearly reduced the intensity of their positive feelings towards the romantic partner,” explains Sciara.

Pantaleo believes it is important for psychologists, clinicians and counsellors to understand the causal role that perceived risk plays in the outcomes of their clients’ romantic relationships.

“Reduced relationship commitment, for instance, leads to dissolution considerations and, thereby, to actual relationship breakup. Relationship breakup, in turn, plays a critical role in the onset of depression, psychological distress, and reduced life satisfaction,” he adds.

Abstract

Drawing on emotional intensity theory (EIT: Brehm in Personality and Social Psychology Review 3:2–22, 1999; Brehm and Miron in Motivation and Emotion 30:13–30, 2006), this experiment (N = 104) shows how the manipulated risk of ending a romantic relationship influences the intensity of romantic affect and commitment. As predicted by EIT, the intensity of both romantic feelings varied as a cubic function of increasing levels of manipulated risk of relationship breakup (risk not mentioned vs. low vs. moderate vs. high). Data additionally showed that the effects of manipulated risk on romantic commitment were fully mediated by feelings of romantic affect. These findings complement and extend prior research on romantic feelings (Miron et al. in Motivation and Emotion 33:261–276, 2009; Miron et al. in Journal of Relationships Research 3:67–80, 2012) (a) by highlighting the barrier-like properties of manipulated risk of relationship breakup and its causal role in shaping romantic feelings, and (b) by suggesting that any obstacle can systematically control—thus, either reduce or enhance—the intensity of romantic feelings to the extent that such obstacles are perceived as ‘risky’ for the fate of the relationship.

What is your reaction to the article?

Do its findings deal a blow to the credibility of using "dread game" as TRP suggests, to make your partner worry about your investment in the relationship in order to elicit certain behavior (i.e. more sex)?