The «come and get me» game switches a man into hunting mode. You fall for the mode, not the man — and after the wedding he returns to who he actually is.
Does a man have to win a woman over?
From childhood, society feeds a great many girls the idea that “a man is a hunter! He is supposed to conquer the girl he likes. So he needs to meet difficulty and resistance from her. Otherwise he will lose interest and leave for someone else.”
Some women also enjoy the process of being pursued. They bask in the heightened attention, play with him, put up artificial obstacles and watch how gamely he leaps over them and keeps striving toward her. It flatters a woman’s ego.
Some of them think this is exactly how you find out what kind of man is in front of you, how serious he is and how far he is willing to go for her. As if it were a reality check on his intentions.
Of all the harmful ideas about relationships, I consider this one of the most destructive.
What follows is my subjective view, and I do not claim it holds true for 100% of couples. If the two of you enjoy conquering each other and everyone is happy, I can only be glad for you. I am writing about most cases, not about every case.
I talk with a great many women who tell me, with disappointment, how after the wedding, or after the first time they slept together, or after some other milestone, the man’s attitude changed abruptly — even though before that he had pursued her so hard and wanted her so badly.
To understand male logic better, we need to see that a man can be in one of several states:
- His ordinary baseline behaviour
- He makes an effort and tries
- He is caught up in the hunt and has entered romantic pursuit mode
When a woman plays with a man and creates a “come and win me” situation, she is — without realising it — triggering exactly that third mode.
When a man gets turned down for a date in some intriguing way and his ego is pricked, hunter mode can switch on.
He may start showering her with flowers and gifts, making romantic gestures — in a word, entering romantic pursuit mode. Many women assume at that moment that this is simply who he is and that it will always be like this. After all, he has been following her around for three months doing everything he can to be with her.
But once the long siege ends and the “fortress” is finally taken (I am not comparing women to fortresses, I am just using it as an illustration), and you have become husband and wife — or simply ended up in the same bed — the woman gradually starts noticing that the man is cooling off and relaxing.
In reality he is simply returning to his first mode, his baseline behaviour. He is becoming who he always is. But she thinks he has fallen out of love, gone cold, changed.
If the idea of conquest distorts your real perception of a person so badly, does that mean a woman should be available and agree to everything? Of course not.
We simply must not confuse a person’s inner standards with the flirtatious game of “come and win me.”
When a woman has inner standards and holds to them, a man will respect them. When she says honestly, “I don’t like it when you are late. Raising our voices at each other is a red line for me. I don’t sleep with a man who is not my husband. It will be hard for me to respect you if you break your word” — a man will understand those standards and take them into account.
When you behave honestly and naturally instead of playing games and manipulating, you get to know each other for real.
You get to see his first mode — his baseline behaviour — and find out whether he is willing to shift into the second mode for the sake of your standards. Is he ready to start showing up for dates on time? Is he ready to keep his word? Does he want to take care of you and help you at the cost of his own comfort?
But you will see none of this if, instead of showing your real standards, you switch on “he is winning me over” mode, set artificial obstacles in front of him, and he tries to leap over them in the heat of the chase.
The dating stage before marriage exists precisely so that you can understand each other’s real patterns of behaviour — not so that you can manipulate and “conquer.”
The better you see your future husband before the wedding, the fewer surprises await you in the family you build with him.
That is why I consider the idea of a man conquering a woman a very harmful one. I have seen it destroy plenty of relationships that could have been good.
Do you agree that this idea is foolish? Or do you think, on the contrary, that a man should win a woman over because he is a hunter?
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