#WTF: Kevin's Kephalonomancy is Kontagious

Playing Hard To Get/Easy To Lose: Science Isn't A Fan (Part 1 - The Courtship Phase)

<editorsnote> Nerds, meet Kevin. I found him on craigslist, kinda like how I found that half eaten bag of pretzels, and last Friday's booty call. Casual encounters, FTW! He's hilarious, and smart ... and little elves dance in his footprints as he walks. For the record, I've made two of those facts up. </editorsnote>

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Kevin Herman

Most of the shit I’ve written about thus far has revolved around psychological findings normally touting one bit of folksy wisdom over another after a very boring, lab-controlled or qualitatively observed grudge match between two hulking, clumsy axiomatic giants (“opposites attract vs. birds of a feather” --- FIGHT!) duking it out in the archives of civilization’s collective wisdom for the title of reigning champion o’ truth.

I didn’t remember until this morning that I’d forgotten a series of studies whose hypotheses didn’t resemble that at all --- no, they were more like if David ambled up to the Goliath - in this case, a widely accepted, undisputed cardinal rule of courtship - loaded a dinky stone into his sling, noticed that he’d brought a proverbial knife to a goddamn Giant fight, and proclaimed “shit” before going to Plan B and just launching a motherfucking cruise missile (of SCIENCE!) from a nearby naval destroyer instead. But once the smoke cleared...well it was a lot like in Independence Day when they tried to nuke the spaceship from the outside: the big bad notion of ‘Playing Hard To Get’ was still just chilling, totally unfazed, shrouded by some sort of direction-sensitive force field that conspicuously resembled back-issues of Cosmo and every romance movie or novel ever made. While a sort of disgusting number of studies have repeatedly debunked the myth that women should play hard to get, that shit seems to be as pernicious and eternal as the herp. Also much like the herp, the majority of women aren’t actually figurative carriers of the strategy, but some still mistakenly swear by it.

It’s sort of understandable, although also kind of disastrous: men and women are cognitively not nearly as different as a no talent, inexperienced hack with a mail order PhD from an unaccredited university who thinks the golden era of gender relations was the 1950’s would have you believe, but boy’s and girl’s minds aren’t exactly carbon copies of one another either. One of the big goals of psych research into interpersonal relationships and attraction is teasing apart the vast similarities from the unexpected differences, and then figuring out just what “different” even entails from quirk to quirk to overcome that nigh troublesome male/female communication barrier. Problem is that most people don’t read scholarly literature or peer-reviewed journals, and a lot of the info is too dry, obtuse, or clashing with conventional wisdom to distill for mass consumption. So instead, we humans tend to deal with unknown or uncertain situations by looking to others for cues or just filling in the blanks with something similar or analogous that we *do* know --- it’s quick and dirty, but most of the time it’s good enough.

Fact: when a GUY plays hard to get, it’s actually pretty effective. It doesn’t seem like a huge stretch, then, for a girl to assume that if it works one way, it’ll work the other. Or maybe she has no idea what to do, but her co-worker Sheila - a self-proclaimed expert on men and devout reader of Cosmo - tells her what will ‘drive a man wild,’ and she’s like well shit, at first glance that sounds pretty reasonable.

The problem with said girl’s ‘just reverse the polarity’ logic is that, as about a few major studies per decade since the 1970’s have pointed out - *this* is one of those crucial differences between men and women’s perception and reaction to certain social stimuli.

Basically - in experiments, when dudes played it uninterested, mysterious, and emotionally unavailable, this had the forbidden fruit effect of actually augmenting a female participant’s interest. In different experiments where the sexes were reversed, chicks were instructed to act either ‘easy to get’, ‘selectively hard to get’, or ‘always hard to get’ (this last condition being the equivalent of the dudes in the aforementioned experiments). As one might expect, the chick that implied she had interest in pretty much every dude ever came in last with 7% of the guys’ thumbs up. So what about the always hard to get chick? A whopping 8%, and was characterized not as ‘mysterious’ or ‘intriguing’ but ‘cold’, ‘aloof’, and I can imagine at least one ‘probz a gay’. O-Oh, Sheila... what hast thou *wrought*. Even the two women who had *no information provided for them whatsoever* came in with 10% and 15% approval rates, which is kind of a slap in the ladyballs for the hard-to-getters. Miss Selectively Hard To Get? 60% ftw.

From a collection of summaries, the take home points: First off - this obviously only really works if you’ve actually decided on one dude that stands above all the rest in your mind and you want him specifically. The “selectively hard to get” woman is the one who may be superficially flirty with other suitors but ultimately turns them all away (which is to say plays legit hard to get) while being naturally (read: not clingingly) receptive to the attention and woo-age of Dude Prime --- this has the effect of making it clear that the girl is appealing and in demand, but has opted to grace said guy and said guy alone with the privilege of her affection; the effect this can have on a dude is...intoxicating, very touching, and consistently boosts and/or maintains his interest. Guys like to feel special too; this accomplishes that quite handily. Additionally, women who play selectively hard to get are characterized as having the positive traits of the ‘easy to get woman’ and none of the bullshit of ‘hard to get women,’ -- namely that they come off as “popular, warm and easygoing, but not demanding and difficult.”

When faced with a consummate hard-to-getter, I’ve either just assumed they weren’t interested and taken my business elsewhere - or worse, realized they *did* have some interest and that I was an unwilling participant in a goddamn mind game for the benefit of their self-worth, ego, or powertrip and huffily taken my business elsewhere because fuck them. Maybe I need to just “sack up and play the game, man” but I have neither the time nor the inclination, not to mention I do have a modicum of self-respect (a strange condition many are afflicted with) that prevents me from wanting to play doormat.

But hey - what about that 8% of dudes who loved the hard-to-get chick? What about those guys who routinely rise to the challenge and get off on being endlessly spurned and made to work incredibly hard for their prize? Well, when you use terms like “challenge” and “prize,” it starts to sound a lot like a conquest, which I assume is bad.

Thing is, you’ve met this guy many times or heard your friend crying about him being “only in it for the thrill of the chase.” For these guys, the thrill factor is directly proportional to the challenge, and the hard-to-getters are the goddamn D-Day invasions of courtship. Even worse, sometimes when they *do* stick with a relationship, they can be emotionally abusive, manipulative, and volatile because - oh shit! - they love mind games, much like the one they gleefully played to get the hard-to-getter in the first place. Or maybe he’s not that guy at all - maybe he actually *is* just a masochistic Hollywood-type protagonist that will weather the rebuffs and emotional punishment for his uninterested dream girl, which...in real life comes off as less romantic and more just creepy and/or pitiful.

[Next week: why inducing jealousy or acting aloof even past the courtship stage is a tactic still heavily favored and - due to similar crucial sex differences, doesn’t work out exactly as planned. Which sucks, because *in* a relationship, the stakes are much higher and the consequences can be...brutal.]

#nerdsunite

For more of Kevin’s politically incorrect verbal incontinence, follow him on Twitter or check out his like, completely legitimate astrological operation at Fiehard.