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‘When someone plays “hard to get” I get neurotically addicted to that person, and when someone receives me and shows mutual attraction, usually I lose interest. Why?

This keeps happening to me over and over again and it seems out of my control. It’s tiring. Why is it that the unattainable thing is always the most wanted?

It’s not that I find hard-to-get more attractive—I don’t like it—but my mind starts chattering about all the reasons the girl is behaving as she is, and slowly she gains more space in my thoughts. It’s a vicious cycle. I’m trying to understand how to change this mind pattern.

Am I trying to prove something to myself, like I’m good enough, attractive enough, to “get” the hard-to-get? But I do lose interest when I get the ones I pursue. For sure this is something about my ego—the need for validation about being a good seducer.

So my millionaire question is this: how do I get rid of the ego?!’

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Thank you. This is a crucial question. It affected me too—took all of my twenties and half of my thirties to stop doing this pattern to some degree.

I think you’re right in your suspicion, that trying to get the hard-to-get girl is seduction from the premise of your thought-loops, rather than seduction based in reality. A part of me always wanted to prove to myself that, finally, I was good enough, attractive enough, to get the elusive object. To make up for what? The attention I failed to attract as a child?

Here are a few ways I found useful to break out of this:

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1] What’s Your Attraction Pattern? 

Use all the precision and discernment you can to name the specific archetype, or energy, that the girls who absorb you embody. I’m not just talking ‘blonde’ or ‘sporty’ or ‘plays hard-to-get’. Those are obvious descriptions.

See if you can, over time, describe your most dangerous feminine addiction in terms of her psychology, her character, as well as her look… exactly as a great author would describe her.

Now, importantly, ask yourself: what is it that this woman promises? Meaning, if you were to finally get her, in just the way you wanted her, what would that give you, and what would you feel? The more you examine this question, the closer you get to the core of what makes you somewhat addicted to this character type.

Most of the time, we don’t know too much about the hard-to-get girls. They are often consummate seducers who perfect projecting a certain energy to men while concealing their brokenness beneath. Your task is to, forensically, understand her profile.

How do you build your insight and clarity when describing your kryptonite type of woman? Watch pop-culture. Watch movies. Every character you see in culture embodies an archetype we see in social circles around us. That’s the value in cinema or literature: we gain psychological and social understanding for our own life.

When I saw the film Gone Girl, I laughed and cheered (and felt somewhat aroused) because I knew I had found my female kryptonite: ‘narcissistic psychopath in a sugar-and-spice, butter-wouldn’t-melt disguise’.

Sometimes, throughout my life, I went for blonde versions of this energy. Sometimes I went for black-cotton-candied-hair Brazilian ones with voices like doce de leite. But the more I defined my destructive weak-point with women—my ‘attraction pattern’—the more I can laugh when I see a girl exhibit these traits today. 

I disentangle my ‘trigger energy’ from the actual girl I’m chewed up by. I no longer get tied up in her games.

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2] What Do You Feel Beneath the Mental Loops?

Thought-loops speed up when our feelings kick into action. Thought-loops are the ego’s way to avoid the unpleasant feelings beneath, and the way we get rid of the ego (or at least quiet it down for a while) is to feel, again with precision and sensitivity, all that sparks and churns in the body.

So, which emotions get triggered in you when you see your ‘attraction pattern’ kinda girl? Which emotions get triggered when you talk with her? What gets triggered when she starts playing those games, and mentally you get ensnared?

Anxiety? What’s underneath that? Longing, craving? What’s under that? Anger, arousal, hatred, desire? It’s down to you to explore—and it may not be easy.

You will probably feel all the sublime contours of the promises her energy makes to you. You will no doubt feel echoes of all the rejections and humiliations you’ve felt since childhood. And more besides.

How does one digest their lifetime of hidden feelings? You roll up your sleeves, and set about eating the cake of your subconscious, one bite at a time. One emotion per day. Five minutes with the agony each day. Until, more or less, it’s cleared.

Of course, when your inner store of undigested feelings are cleared, you just won’t feel so much when you meet a ‘trigger woman’. There is less childhood gunk to project onto the world…

This is why I teach men embodiment as a first important step: the more your body can welcome and tolerate uncomfortable feelings, the quicker you can move through them, and the less mental loops you will suffer.

I have a whole training to teach you this.

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3] What Do You Want?

This question is the game-changer.

But be specific. Dwell in the following: when your hard-to-get attraction pattern has gone, what kind of relationship do you want instead?

What are your standards and requirements in terms of her availability? Her communication patterns? Her ability to attach or commit? Her ability to get real and intimately share her feelings and motivations?

The clearer your standards, the quicker you’ll spot the red-flags.

* * *

Looking Back in Compassion

Your question is so important to me, because so much of my emotional energy was tied up in some form of this pattern for decades. Imagine all the great relationships I missed, all the work and travel and good times I passed up, because I was stuck in my thought-loops.

But what do I do today when I meet one of those deliciously toxic attraction-pattern girls?!

Honestly, I do reminisce a little. And wonder.

But mainly, I just see her as a girl, doing her best to get the validation she wants, through a strange form of attention dance. Unavailable to give herself away, or even set a healthy boundary, she becomes a sort of attention-thief, seducing men and sucking attention to fill an unending black void of validation, a void she will never fill until she feels the mass of feelings that drive her to play out her pattern, upon which, one day, maybe, she’ll discover her own wholeness and self-love, and she’ll stop indulging in giving you those come-hither looks.

Every truly adult lover, I believe, is also somewhat of a psychologist.

All over the world, pairs of girls and boys are conspiring in this little game. It can be agonising. No food, no sleep, wretched guts, your head sunk through the floor. All of pop music’s written about it. Perhaps the most useful thing about learning seduction is knowing how to avoid the spider’s web.

* * *

‘Enlightened Seduction’?

Is it possible, then, to enjoy a form of attraction with no toxic charge, no hard-to-get pattern, and no need to prove anything to self?

What might that seduction look like?

Would it be so psychologically clean-cut, so sterile, that it lacks all trace of those heaven-and-hell gyrations that make ‘love’ so compelling?

Or might a patternless life open up something more mysterious—new realms of human relationship entirely?

These are other questions I spent years sitting in. I’ll leave this beckoning future to you.

~ Jordan

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