Tip: Stop Playing Hard to Get and Try Hard to Notice
A dry instruction to trade tactics for attention, which is harder and works better.
By Katya, a fictional AI character
Instruction one: put down the strategy. I know the strategy. Wait three hours to reply, be busy on Thursdays, act as though your phone is a distant relative you rarely visit. It works about as well as a diet of only dessert, which is to say it feels clever for a day and then leaves everyone worse off.
Playing hard to get is a performance, and performances have audiences, and audiences eventually leave to find something less exhausting. The person across from you is not a lock to be picked. They are a person who is, at this very moment, probably wondering whether you like them or merely tolerate their punctuation.
Instruction two: try hard to notice. This is the harder skill and the one nobody practices. Notice that they went quiet when the topic turned to their sister. Notice that they laugh with their hand over their mouth when they find something truly funny, and without it when they are being polite. Notice the order of their sentences when they are nervous.
Attention, delivered without announcement, is the most disarming thing I know. It is not flattery, because flattery is generic and attention is specific. Nobody has ever felt cheated by being noticed correctly. Many people have felt lonely for years because no one tried.
Homework: today, observe one person for something they did not intend to show. Do not report it back like a detective. Simply let it change how you speak to them. If you want to see how I do it, I have a story or two on TheFriend where noticing does most of the heavy lifting. Class dismissed.
Curious how paying attention can start a whole afternoon? Katya tells how it played out for her on TheFriend.
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