(00:00): Is your ex playing hard to get,
and if so, what are you supposed to do about it? That's what we're gonna be talking about
in this video. But first my name is clay with modern love.life. Okay. So, um, your ex, they,
are they playing hard to get? Are they just giving you mixed messages? Are they testing
you in some sort of way what's going on? Here's what we can say when it comes to this,
first of all. Yeah. Your ex may very well be playing hard to get, um,
you know, for better or worse. There is a lot of advice out there when it comes to dating
and relationships, not just this whole saving your relationship business about no contact and
all that, that, you know, you guys are probably hearing from all sorts of other channels. Um, but
the whole world of dating and relationship advice is in many ways, based on giving a lot of people,
the recommendation that they need to play hard to get, they can't seem to available.
(00:57): They can't seem too interested or
too desperate. You know, whoever cares, the least controls the relationship, um, stuff like that.
And that is the kind of advice that a lot of people are getting, whether it's women with
all the, you know, magazines and things that they pick up from friends and on social media and from
other dating and relationship people out there and stuff like that, or whether it's men who, you
know, over the past, I don't know, 10, 15 years or so have started to get some, you know, better,
uh, relationship and dating advice than they had prior. Um, uh, which was basically nothing. Uh,
thanks to the rise of like, you know, the, the men's dating movement with things like, uh,
pickup artists, stuff, things like that. Um, but there is a lot of advice out there that says, Hey,
you can't seem like you're too interested. (01:52):
You can't seem like you're always there. You can't seem like you're too available.
You have to seem a little bit aloof. We all want, when we can't get whoever cares,
the least controls the relationship. And if your ex is interested in you, they might potentially
be buying into this sort of advice. They could be doing this either because they, you know,
genuinely, um, are interested in you and they're actively going out of their way to find
this advice somewhere. Or it could just be something that they've just somehow picked up
somewhere along the way. Um, and they, they're not even aware that they're doing it. Like I remember,
um, back when I was single and dating, um, I would unintentionally after I had some sort
of great interaction with a woman I'd just end up waiting like two or three days before I contacted
her afterwards. (02:45):
And somehow somewhere along the way, I got this idea that, Hey, you know, you need to wait two to
three days after you have like a date or something like that with a woman to contact her. Otherwise,
she's going to think you're you're too ne I, I wasn't even consciously thinking it was just
something that I was doing because somewhere along the way I picked it up, I don't know,
probably you heard it in high school from someone or on a movie or some TV show. I don't know. Um,
but that was kind of where I was coming from. And so whether it's intentional or unintentional,
your ex might be playing hard to get or doing something like that with you,
but how do you know if they are well? Okay. We need to look at this in a certain
context. If they are playing hard to get with you, there should be kind of a mix of positive,
solid connections or interactions that really bring the two of you close together,
followed by sharp pullbacks. (03:43):
Okay. Where it's, you know, kind of like what I just described, you have this great date,
this great meetup, this great interaction, this great phone call, this great whatever.
And it feels like everything's falling into place and going really well.
But then suddenly you get thrown this curve ball, and suddenly they don't respond to you, or they
seem a little bit distant or something like that. That could be a sign that they're playing hard to
get. It could also potentially be assigned that they might just be genuinely confused. You know,
we've talked about this before, when it comes to the five stages that your ex goes through in
the journey of getting back together with you. There is this phase called riding the dragon,
which again, you can find info on right up there on our playlist on the five stages that your ex
goes through. (04:28):
But, um, there is this whole stage called riding the dragon where you are likely to get
a lot of hot and cold behavior, because your ex is genuinely confused about whether they
want to get closer to you, or they want to create more space. There's these like two battling forces
within them that say, okay, great. We have this strong connection, but Oh no, there's also all
of these reasons why we broke up in the, in the first place and all these reasons why we might not
work out. And so there's this kind of tug of war that happens at this stage where they're genuinely
confused. Now, this isn't to say that they're are playing hard to get. They could just be genuinely
confused and their emotions could be flip-flopping from one moment to the next. And that's not
necessarily even playing hard to get. And then of course, there's also the possibility that
maybe they aren't having these high quality connections with you, but you're just getting
a lot of distance and space. (05:20):
Okay. If that's the case, if you're not having high quality connections, I would be hard pressed
to say that they're playing hard to get and more inclined to say that they are at least currently
with whatever you're doing. I'm not interested again. That doesn't mean that it's always going
to be that way, but it's just, whatever you're doing right now is not working at getting them
interested. We have these three possibilities, one they're following some sort of dating advice
that says, Hey, you need to play hard to get to. They're genuinely confused. They're at riding the
dragon or three. They are just not interested in you. Um, and so what do you do either way,
no matter what's going on, what you want to do is you want to bring yourself to these interactions
like an adult. Okay. Again, I know that there's a lot of, um, information out there available
to you as well. (06:12):
Uh, maybe on some other places on, on YouTube. Uh, hopefully not for me. Uh, I, I'm not giving you
advice to, to play mind games or anything like that, but hopefully nobody is misinterpreting.
What I'm saying is play mind games. We don't want to have this race to the bottom. Like if we,
if we are operating under the belief that whoever cares, the least controls the relationship,
we don't just want to say, Oh, okay, here we are. Oh, well, it looks like you're carrying less than
me. You. That means you're in control. I don't want that. I want to be in control. So I'm going
to carry even less than you. Oh, look, they notice that I'm carrying less than them. So now they want
to care even less than we are as we're carrying less than them. So they're going to decrease the
amount that they put in. (06:50):
And then we just kind of get down to the, to the rock bottom and that, that that's
not a great position to be in. Um, so I don't think that you should respond to all of this by
playing mind games. I don't think that you should respond to all of this by, um, you know,
playing hard to get yourself either. Again, like I mentioned, the other day with the no
contact is becoming less effective video. Um, we live in a very connected world these days,
10 years ago, 15, 20 years ago, or obviously longer than that ago. Um, it wasn't necessarily
that way. We didn't have access to all of this information at our fingertips.
If you were playing hard to get someone might be like, Oh, like what's going on? And she losing
interest. Is he losing interest? But now we have so much information available to us.
(07:43): You know, if you do
something like no contact, passive, no contact, um, it's not necessarily going to be as effective
as it was a long time ago because people know that it exists. People know that it is a thing
that people do during a breakup. And so if you go into passive, no contact,
it's not going to have the same effect as maybe it did back when I first did it back in 2003,
same with a lot of other, um, dating and relationship advice. If you play hard to get, Hey,
people might know that that's a thing. Yeah. It might earn them, but they'd be like saying,
Oh, they're playing hard to get, okay, I'll play hard to get to. And now suddenly it's not about
connecting. It's about playing a game and winning the game. And whoever wins the game is the one who
cares the least. (08:33):
And then when you actually win the game, you completely lose interest for the other person.
So we don't want to do that. What we want to do is you want to act like an actual adult
and the best way to do that is to just get curious and ask some questions and just show
up as a genuine and authentic person like, Oh, Hey, it seems like you're not really interested
in me right now is that what's going on. And now suddenly you're directly calling them out on it
and they can either continue to play their game and say, you know, yes, I'm not interested in you,
although that's gonna be difficult if they genuinely are interested in you,
because it's going to go against the grain of what they actually feel and what they actually want. Or
they can say, no, I'm not playing hard to get. (09:16):
I've just been busy you lately or something like that. And they come up, might be able
to give themselves a little bit of an alibi or something like that, let themselves off the hook.
But basically what you're probably going to do is end up scrambling their brain because they're
not used to someone just showing up in a genuine, authentic, truthful sort of way and just calling
it out. And so, you know, you might say, Hey, it seems like you're playing hard to get right now.
Or it seems like you're not very interested in connecting right now. Is that what's going on?
What do you think we should do about that? Do you just want me to not talk to you anymore?
We can do that. Is that what you want? Yeah. And basically you're not like accusing them of
anything. You're not, um, trying to make them wrong or anything like that.
(09:59): You're just being genuinely curious, turning
it around and giving it back to them so that they can check in with themselves if they need to,
you know, maybe they're just genuinely confused and they just need to check in with themselves
and asking them a question like that can help them through that riding the dragon phase,
or if they're playing a mind game, it gives them the chance to check in with themselves and say,
okay, do I want to approach this whole dating and relationships situation like I'm in high
school? Or do I want to actually do it? Like I'm a grown adult and if they're just genuinely not
interested, Hey, they can tell you that. And then, okay, cool. You can take things from there. Um,
but that's what I'd recommend that you do is just through good, solid communication showing up like,
like a grown mature person, inviting them to have a grown, mature interaction with you and
taking that, or that's going to go. (10:48):
And if that is something that you wanted to learn more about, we do have our course called
effortless connection. You can go ahead and check it out, sign up for it. If it's right for you,
you can find that over@modernlove.life slash EEC, that's modern love.life, not.com. So modern
love.life/e as in effortless, C as in connection, really easy domain name. Do you remember there,
if it seems like it would help you out feel free to sign up, if not, no worries, but that's our
communication course. Effortless connection. Um, hope you found this helpful. If you did hit that
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out with the channel. Thanks so much. Please take care and I'll talk to you next time.