What People Are Really Doing When They Play Hard to Get

A Lesson in Mimetic Relationship Dynamics

What’s really happening when someone plays hard to get? There have been plenty of psychological explanations, usually involving the person’s insecurity and lack of vulnerability. The primary reason that people engage in this behavior, however, is a fundamental law of human desire that is rarely acknowledged:

The desire that a person has for another person (or thing) is completely tied to how the desire for that person or thing is modeled to them by other people. 

In this article, I’m going to explain what that means.

If we understand how models of desire affect what we want, we can move through life with a better understanding of why we’re more attracted to certain people and things and not to others—and maybe even save ourselves from heartache. Most importantly, as we’ll see, we might begin to learn how to love better. 

What Pickup Artists Know About Desire

A book came out in 2005 called The Game: Penetrating the Secret World of Pickup Artists. The author, Neil Strauss, shares what he l…