This article is more relevant for girls than guys. It’s worth reading either way, though, because guys will understand their actions better when chasing a girl, and also why they quickly lose interest once they’ve gotten them. 

One of the many bizarre tips for girls to achieve romantic success is to play hard to get, make the guy chase, or make him wait. They all mean the same thing, namely that you have to deny your sexuality until some random condition has been met. It could be the amount of days or weeks that has passed since you first met him, the number of dates you have had, or the hours you have spent together. 

While it is true that many guys want what they can’t quite get, and enjoy the chase the same way your cat loves chasing after mice, it’s not the whole story. If you let a guy wait for an artificially long time and give him some breadcrumbs here and there, he may want to go after you even though he wasn’t really that into you, because you are now being a “challenge.” However, what do you think will happen after you finally sleep with him? Wrong! Instead of riding off to never-never land on a unicorn, he’ll never call you again. 

I’ll explain to you why this happens by example of another activity guys enjoy. No, not drinking beer or watching porn. Playing video games! Recently, I dug out my old Super Nintendo and got myself a puzzle game with the title Puzzle Bobble. It’s called Bust-A-Move in the USA. It is quite fun, but some design choices make it a bit annoying to play. The worst is a certain randomness that can make the same puzzle either incredibly difficult if not impossible to solve, or very easy. It’s a game of matching colors, but sometimes, you just get bubbles of a color you just can’t use. 

As you go through the 100 short levels in the single player mode, you keep playing because the frustration is always manageable. Until level 50 or 60, I only rarely needed more than one try per level. But then the game ramps up the difficulty level, but without being completely skewed. That’s probably like texting the guy back after every second or third message he sends you. If you completely ignored him, he wouldn’t bother anymore. Likewise, would Puzzle Bobble give me bubbles in colors I couldn’t use all the time, I would have stopped playing. It’s a delicate balance. 

The single player mode turns downright unfair in the final level. Suddenly, the margin of error is extremely small, but the worst part is that you may end up with bubbles of a color that make it impossible to beat that level. The worst aspect of it is that you see it coming long before the “game over” screen comes up. Nonetheless, I kept going. The main reason was of course that I was very, very close to beating the game. I had invested a few hours already and wasn’t going to quit now.


Another reason was that the randomness of the game added to the motivation. You felt as if you were tricked into continuing to play it, probably not unlike a gambler who puts “just one more coin” into the one-armed bandit. Victory just seems so close, even though it may be out of reach. Eventually, I beat the final level, and guess what I then did? I turned off the console to probably never again play this game. 

But now compare this to how a guy views the interaction with a girl that’s playing hard to get: He meets her. She likes him, he likes her, and the two seem to hit it off. Then the girl then remembers her “rules” and decided to let him wait. Consequently, the guy will enjoy spending his time with her much less. As the girl keeps playing games, of course metaphorically, the guy loses much of his original interest in her, but because he has invested time and money already, and thinks he is close to “winning,” he keeps chasing after her. 

You can probably already see where this is going. Once the chase is over, the fun is gone. Just like I’ll probably never again play Puzzle Bobble because I’ve beaten it once, so will the guy who has had sex with a girl he was chasing for weeks lose interest after sex. Sorry, girls, that’s a fact, and nobody seems to be telling you this. The chase may be fun, but it’s more fun to play a game that’s rewarding all by itself.