Are Hard-to-get Women More Attractive?

Women who are hard to get tend to create obstacles during the love conquest. Traditionally, this attitude is believed to make men more interested in these women, so those women who are ‘too easy’ attract them less. Is this true?

First, let’s point out that there are no hard and fast rules in love and relationships. You fall in love with someone without making a list of reasons why this is happening.

During the flirting phase, however, there seem to be patterns that people seem to repeat over and over. These patterns indicate that women who are hard to get are actually more interesting to men, but not in all circumstances.

There is research on this topic. Rather than looking for the perfect recipe to win someone’s heart, experts explored how people respond to certain stimuli and how relationships grow. Let’s see what they have to say about it.

An old experiment about hard-to-get games

In 1973, Dr. Elaine Walster of the University of Wisconsin conducted a somewhat rudimentary experiment. She wanted to know if men were more interested in women playing that they were hard to get or not.

What Walster and her associates did was hire a prostitute to allow them to identify the ins and outs of the subject in the most basic of situations. They asked the prostitute to be arbitrary with some of her clients, and more affectionate with others.

They found that men were less interested in those circumstances when the prostitute was more affectionate. These men, as it were, immediately lost their interest.

They repeated the experiment with women from a dating agency and got similar results. The only difference was that in this case, men were more interested in women playing selectively as if they were hard to get, meaning they didn’t really want to hang out with other men but really wanted to be with them.

These studies show that this subtle detail changed the charm of the hard-to-get play. In both contexts, women were available to get more intimate with some men. It therefore didn’t make sense for them to create obstacles to something they were looking for.

Struggle and desire

Today in this society it is believed that the harder something is to get, the more valuable it is. This has also been shown in social psychology: people find it more important to be part of a group that is difficult to reach.

Some also say that men like challenges. Neuroscience indicates that women also like challenges because it gives situations a little extra excitement.

dr. Robert Weiss, vice president of Elements Behavioral Health, points out that both men and women use elaborate strategies to challenge their potential partners while flirting. However, said strategies are different in women and men.

Usually women play that they are hard to get by engaging in behaviors such as pretending not to be interested, not responding until hours after receiving a text message, and simply being unavailable from time to time. Men, on the other hand, prefer to make women jealous.

Women who are hard to get

If it seems like someone is unavailable, it doesn’t always mean that person is trying to flirt. Some people just can’t help but make things harder during that initial flirting phase. They behave this way because they are insecure and afraid of being hurt. Usually the other person notices this attitude and then tries to stay away.

Furthermore, a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that the “hard to get” paradigm only works if the person is already very interested in that woman. If it’s hard to get close to her, it increases interest, but doesn’t really create it.

Sometimes, however, there is no previous interest. In those cases, being hard to get tends to demotivate the other person. No one wants to put in the extra effort for something they’re not quite sure they want. In these cases it is coming closer together and available the spark that ignites the fire.