Hard to get

How emotional unavailability became the modern flex

There’s a certain kind of exhaustion that comes with modern dating—the mental gymnastics of seeming interested but not too interested, the performance of caring just enough but never too much. We’ve all become players in a game we never signed up for but somehow mastered anyway.

I’d been that girl—single for a decade, perfecting the art of being the “cool girl,” convinced I had to play along. The girl who doesn’t ask for too much, doesn’t seem too emotional, doesn’t have expectations. I’d allow behavior that didn’t align with my standards, and when things didn’t go my way I’d claim I wasn’t really looking for anything serious anyway. The usual “I’m busy too.” “I’m always traveling.” My fear of being rejected kept me from ever saying what I actually wanted. Looking back, it’s pretty foolish that I believed playing it cool was how things would work out. But I had to lose before I learned the game was rigged from the start.

Games weren’t always this complicated. As kids, our lives were built on play with clear rules. Legos scattered across the living room floor. Monopoly battles that lasted for hours. PlayStation controllers sticky with determination. “Tag, you’re it!” called out on playgrounds where everyone knew what they were playing and how to win.

Then somewhere between collecting coins in Mario Kart and spending coins to fill a grocery cart, the games got complicated. We traded innocent play for mind games. The blame game became our specialty – “He said he’d text me but he never did” — while conveniently forgetting our own participation in the dance.

In my experience, this isn’t really about dating. This is about survival.

If you rarely got what you wanted when you were younger, you learned to downplay your expectations. Your brain, trying to protect you, made a note: Wanting things hurts. Try wanting less. So we learn to expect nothing, to act like we don’t care when we desperately do.

By the time we’re dating, we’ve perfected the art of emotional self-protection. It’s tag, and we’re always it – always chasing, never quite catching, because actually connecting would mean we could get caught too.

We’ve all been there. Every woman I know has that one friend (or we’ve been her) who after a great date was dying to text but had friends stage an intervention. One says, “Give it a couple days.” Another insists, “Let them make the first move.” And you, reluctantly, agree to play the part.

I’ve been both—the friend giving that advice and the one receiving it. But there was this one “oh shit“ moment during my single years that slapped me across the face when I watched one of my friends execute the playbook flawlessly.

She had a crush on this guy, so she liked his Instagram story. When he texted her, she didn’t reply. Instead, she posted a thirst trap and look, there’s nothing wrong with posting when you feel like a hot commodity, do it for you — but this wasn’t that. When he commented, she ignored it. I watched her whole energy shift. She had this confidence, because he played into her game but I knew it was performance art — calculated, exhausting, and completely disconnected from what she actually wanted.

“I can’t seem desperate,” she said, carefully crafting her next move.

There’s a universal cruelty in dating advice: everyone has the secret formula, but no one’s playing by the same rules. We say “Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” but it becomes harder to accept when we don’t love the player we’ve become. Because the player who thinks they’re winning is actually losing. 

In the age of modern dating, we became so good at protecting ourselves that we forgot what we were protecting: the ability to connect, to be seen, to let someone else matter to us.

Of course it’s easy to doubt ourselves when our phones come with invisible rulebooks we never agreed to follow, but somehow live by. Scroll long enough and you’ll find the commandments of modern dating — the three-month rule, the “if he wanted to, he would” — the whole premise of He’s Just Not That Into You. In so many ways, I agree with it. But also… if she wanted to, she would too, right? These rulebooks make dating sound like a strategy instead of actually getting to know someone.

And then there’s that advice, that one line we’ve all heard that used to make me roll my eyes to the back of my head: “Just stop playing games.” I’d think, “Easy for them to say when they’re happily coupled up and haven’t been in the dating trenches for years.” But I get it, when you’re so deep in the culture of strategic dating, when everyone around you is operating by these unspoken rules, how do you just... opt out? It feels like showing up to a chess match and deciding to play checkers.

You know the ones: the hot and cold, the breadcrumbing, love bombing then ghosting, the mixed signals, the “I’m fine“ when we’re not, they’re just grown-up versions of hide and seek, except we forgot the seeking part. We just hide.

I spent years overthinking what to say, when to respond, rewriting messages, sending screenshots to my friends like they were proofreading college essays. After a while, I got so good at pretending that the witty responses rolled off my tongue with zero vulnerability. All that effort just to avoid seeming like I cared.

It wasn’t until I stopped calculating response times and performing disinterest that I met the love of my life. For the record, I had spent that year manifesting, writing in my journal, describing my ideal person over and over again like it was going to solve everything. And yes, there’s comfort in surrender and power in knowing you don’t need to chase love to deserve it. But even if the universe delivered exactly who I asked for, I would’ve lost them without realizing that love is a two-person game that makes no sense to play alone.

The irony? After a month of knowing each other, one of the first things he told me he liked about me was that I didn’t play games. If he didn’t text me for six hours because he was working, I didn’t wait six hours to respond just to seem equally unavailable. I just showed up as myself — interested when I was interested, unavailable when I had plans, not when I was performing busy.

The thing about games is we get to decide which one we’re playing. Are we playing against our person of interest, or are we playing to win it together?

The game we all learned to play was never about winning someone else; it was about protecting ourselves from losing. But you can’t win love by refusing to play for real.

The scariest game of them all is the one where we stop playing games at all. 
That’s where real relationships begin.

Game over? 
More like game on.