Splicetoday

Sex
Jul 11, 2008, 10:37AM

Cutting Diamonds

Guys know they have to put in work if they're going to impress the best women. But there's a fine line between dogged pursuit and an embarassing waste of time. Some men just have a harder time than others figuring out when it's time to throw in the towell.

A female friend of mine, whose opinion on such matters I always find accurate, has told me on more than one occasion that a woman has to give a man some kind of hard time or else risk being taken for granted: merely required, not desired. As I look around me at my married and unmarried male friends—and even at myself—I find there’s more truth to her words than I’m comfortable admitting.

In conversations, my friends and I regularly analyze the obviously stupid or pathological reasons why women don’t get how wonderful we are. But sometimes we get around to picking over some of our own motives for being attracted to hard-to-get or hard-to-please women.

A possibility is that the elusive lady serves as a means of self-improvement. That is, in choosing some particularly demanding woman’s acceptance as a prize and then going for it, we strive also for our own self-transcendence by measuring up to her (real or imagined) standards. She becomes a test we choose for ourselves to overcome our personal fears of inadequacy. But why pick a hard case? Well, by pursuing a prize perceived as difficult to win, we give ourselves the chance to exorcize a lot of anxieties and self-doubts. The harder won the victory, the more convincing the transcendence.

But there are risks to this therapeutic, Rocky-like psychodrama. I know.

Whether in seeking a romantic muse by which to achieve emotional liftoff or a surrogate ego through which to earn self-acceptance, a man must keep a woman at a distance, part fantasy of one kind or another. Perhaps a woman who deliberately plays hard-to-get actually plays right into the hands of the man who pursues her. But who’s really pressing whose buttons?

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