the theory of playing hard to get

have you read this already? well, scroll down to see the updated text in purple.

if there was one thing i never understood, it was the theory of playing-hard-to-get. why in the world would anyone do something so silly? why waste time like that? i tend to avoid those kinds of mind games like the plague.

that is until now…

in the last couple of weeks i've had an epiphany.

there's this guy, a fellow blogger, (who i'm relatively certain doesn't read my blog, so i think i'm safe talking about this. if he does read it, really, that's fine to, i'm not here to slam the guy or anything, especially since it has been interactions with him that have led me to this epiphany, which means i learned from him, and learning is good.) lets call him bill (obviously not his name, so you bills out there, don't worry, i'm not talking about you...), who i've been emailing with of late.

i don't really know how to describe bill, but let me try.

bill is nothing particularly special. (my little after-the-fact update here, i had yet another epiphany - apparently bill is good for triggering epiphanies for me - the reason bill doesn't seem particularily interesting to me has nothing to do with whether or not he is actually interesting - in fact, i'm sure he is interesting - but that's not the point, it has everything to do with the fact that he has hardly told me anything about himself, about what makes him tick, none of kind of things you tell someone you're trying to see if you want to start a friendship with them. bill isn't interesting to me because bill has been so closed off that he is basically a non-entity to me.) okay, that's horribly unfair. i don't really know bill, certainly not well enough to say something like that, plus, i really do believe that everyone is special in their own way. soooo... lets put it another way: there is nothing about bill that leaps out at me. there is nothing about bill that makes me think 'ooh, i want to get to know that guy'. there is nothing about bill that particularly piques my interest. except one thing. one little tiny thing. ready for it?

he could care less about me.

yep, you read that right. all the signals i'm getting from bill are that he wouldn't notice if i dropped off the face of the earth, and that his infrequent replies to my emails are out of politeness and nothing more. which means essentially, that bill feels the same way about me, as i do about him. which should be perfect, right?

except, for some psychotic reason, the fact that he doesn't like me (nor, i think, does he dislikes me, i think he's just ambivalent towards me) makes me desperately want to make him like me.

what. the. fuck. is. that.?

i mean, seriously people, what, am i in grade 9? (as a total aside, i just about wrote 'the 9th grade', apparently i slipped into the USA wormhole momentarily, weird...)

here's the truth... and oh boy is it going to sound like i am one stuck-up bitch, but anyway... the truth is, i'm not used to people not liking me. as a general rule, people like me. they may not want to fuck me, but they sure like talking to me and drinking with me. i'm a likable person. so, sometimes, when someone doesn't like me, it throws me for a loop. it get wrapped up in some highly convoluted web of thoughts where i'm doing something wrong and i need to fix it. (hey, i said people generally like me, i didn't say i was mentally stable...)

this is where the lesson comes in. this is how i learned that sometimes, playing-hard-to-get works...

bill ignores me. even though i don't find bill particularly interesting, i am suddenly and inexplicably dying for his attention. the more he ignores me, the more i want the fucker to send me an email.

now, who knows. maybe bill and i would get along like a house on fire if we ever met. maybe we'd be jumping on each others genitalia like there's no tomorrow (gotta get a big rude jake quote in where ya can... even if it confuses people because it suddenly sounds like i want to fuck the guy, when really i’m just talking friendship). but really, from our email conversations, where he has been less than engaged and certainly lacking in lustre, i wouldn't be putting big money on us becoming best friends or anything.

so, really, i shouldn't care. at all. in any way, shape or form.

why does his disinterest interest me so much?

that part i don't have an answer for. the epiphany was only a one part deal.

the epiphany was the sudden understanding of the appeal of someone who is playing-hard-to-get. although i would never use it as a ploy to attract someone (pretty much opposite to my personality, i’m a much more come-and-get-me kind of person), i can, i suppose, see why others upon occasion do - because sometimes it might just generate results.



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i feel it important to point out here that i don’t think bill is, in any way, playing hard to get, i think his disinterest is genuine. i’m not accusing anyone of playing mind-games here.

also, i guess since i'm putting in addendums i may as well say (because i imagine someone will ask), the reason i started talking to bill was two fold. first, because his blog did pique my interest and even once we started emailing unexciting things back and forth i held out hope that we'd meet and have a pint and more of the blog would come through than the email and maybe i'd have a new toronto friend. and second because i had a friend who told me that they thought bill and i would in fact get along like a house on fire. they later retracted that saying that upon further reflection that might not be the case, but the first statement stuck with me.

and finally, i think part of what this is about (this just dawned on me as i was typing the bit above for some reason, it has something to do with the retraction of the the idea that bill and i would get along like a burning building) is a challenge. i think sometimes there is a natural attraction to a challenge. making bill like me is a challenge.

oh, and, because this entry *obviously* isn't long enough yet, before anyone asks, yeah, i have stopped emailing him. right around the time i had that epiphany in fact... but if he starts emailing me again, i suspect i'll write back. if he wants to go for beer, i suspect i'll go. i am the eternal optimist. i still think it's worth a couple hours at a pub to find out if he's friend material, but i would probably go without high hopes.