the most dangerous game

not a great title but i had to call this something

so this is how this guy i knew in college used to get girls. it is absolutely the most disgusting (not morally worst tho) way of going about it that i have ever encountered irl. i almost feel that i shouldn’t tell you about it bc most of y’all are probably men, but i also feel that i have cultivated an audience that is deeply ruled by shame so you are unlikely to be willing to try this. i was never an object of this & i have never tried this myself so i can only tell you what it looked like from the outside. which i am able to do bc women love confiding in me

basically he would tell girls he had a like world-ending painful crush on them, “i haven’t felt like this about anyone.” he would mostly act like it was true, texting them a lot, seeking out their presence, lots of emotional sturm & drang as well, doggedness in pursuit even in the face of rejection & humiliation…

BUT he always had several going at a time. who would never meet each other bc they were from different contexts. like one girl in the chemistry department, one girl from a nearby college who went to metal shows, a childhood friend, etc. it’s an almost sitcommish coincidence that i happened to run into & befriend enough of them to notice the pattern

when i realized that it was definitely concurrent—afaict he would never drop a girl once he started on her—i tried to tell them but to my surprise nobody wanted to hear it. i mean, it surprised me then. less now. we were (most of us) attending liberal arts college, a low gender ratio environment. & we were also being told by various sources not to seek actual relationships. so even though this guy was a fucking satyr, for some of these girls he was this kind of representation that they deserved pure romance, & they weren’t getting that from anywhere else.

i don’t think he ever got a girlfriend this way (i wonder if he really wanted one) but i know he got laid out of it at least a couple times. his hookups didn’t mess with the game he was running on other girls, bc no one he slept with was super interested in going public about it

what was going on inside his head? was he just purely lying, or did he really feel the things he told those girls he felt, at least when he was saying them? his patter could not all have been literally true, if the girls were accurate at all in what they told me—they loved to hit “he says he’s never felt this way before.”

it hardly seems worth it to me because it brought so much shame on him in multiple social groups, being the guy who would not stop going after whichever girl. i think that the shame was part of why the girls believed him tho

i keep wanting to say that it worked for him bc of texting, but really this is like 16th century game. write a poem called “a Plaint, on thee Cruelletie, of Cold Woman” & let several courtiers think you’re talking about them

i also find myself wondering how often men do this and no one ever knows