No, Men Do Not Like the Chase

I have a friend and I forgot how we got on the topic of conversation, but she said, "but don't you men like to chase the women? Don't you like it when we play hard to get?"

To which I answered her with a distinctive, "No, we don't."

Apparently the brainwashing she received from reading too many issues of Cosmo prohibited her from digesting and then installing the fount of information I just gave her and so she responded;

"Oh no, you guys like it."

To which I responded, "No, we really don't."

It took another couple minutes of conversation, but I finally convinced her that, no, indeed not, men do not like it when women play hard to get.

Alas, the difficulty I had in conveying this seemingly simple point to a rather intelligent friend of mine showed me that it is once again time for;

"The Captain's Dating Advice for Women!"

OK girls, here's the deal.

I cannot claim this analogy for it goes to another friend of mine (Spartan). Spartan said,

"You ever play a video game that was so incredibly difficult that after 15 or 20 tries you just inevitably gave up? Well, it's like that. After trying and trying and trying, and inevitably getting nowhere, you realize that it's not worth the effort to play the game any more, you turn off the Nintendo and you go outside and play."

And I think this analogy hits it right on the head.

No ladies, we don't like trying, infinitely and futilely to save the princess. And if it's too difficult we will turn off the video game and find something else to do. You've effectively made the game not worth playing and no amount of "points" or prospects of "conquering the game" will supersede the opportunity costs of doing something else.

Another aspect you must realize is how the patience for games precipitously drops with age.

I remember a video game when I was 13 called "Ninja Gaiden 2." It was a great game, but you got to this one point in the game where you just couldn't make this jump over a pit.

I tried and tried and tried, but inevitably, literally after 3 hours of trying, I gave up.

Now that was when I was 13. Today, at the ripe old age of 34, I don't give a game more than 5 tries. A perfect example is "Blazing Angels 2." You get to fly over Russia and fight off a Nazi invasion while co-coordinating not only a dogfight, but a ground assault and some Katusha rockets.

Good luck trying.

I tried about 4-5 times (each time took 10 minutes of separate game play), and after wasting effectively an hour, I said, "to hell with it" and sold the video game back to Game Stop.

The moral of the story?

The older men get, the less patience they have to play games.

Now, you can continue on reading books and magazines written by non-men about what men want and what they like. You can continue to play the games that were not only childish and NOT fun back in 1988, but continue to be just as childish and NOT fun AND have the added bonus of being "immature" today.

Or you can grow up, quit it with the mind/child/middle school-girl games and if you like the guy, go out with him.

As Keynes said, "In the long run we're all dead," and given the average life expectancy of a woman is 83 years, you really don't have the time in your finite lives to play something as stupid and childish as "hard to get."