What People Are Really Doing When They Play Hard to Get

We’re all afraid of wanting the wrong things.

To paraphrase René Girard: we set out in search of the one thing we think we truly want, which we believe must be hidden under the one rock that is too heavy for us to lift. If we get something that we wanted, we believe we must have wanted the wrong thing. We go in search of a new model.

This is why most of us spend our lives on a never-satisfied search for the next object of desire. There is always another model somewhere making us wonder if what they want, we should be what we want, too.

The non-stop comparison game that Maximizers play usually makes them miserable. We could say that maximizers are more driven by mimetic desire than the “Satisificers”—those who are satisfied with finding “the right fit” rather than needing to maximize every outcome.We not only want the things that we can’t have; we don’t want things unless other pe... See more

The truth is that we want most things according to how other people model the value of those things to us. These people are models of desire.