Playing Hard To Get?

Let's talk about the question of playing hard to get. My friend Harry Berkely* claims it is always a good idea. "The first rule of relationship fight club: Wait as long as he took to write before you reply to his email, and never write more than he wrote," Harry advises. "I think men who are achievers are always are enticed by women who are harder to 'capture.' If it's too easy, we doubt their worth." Kinda ... yuck, right? (FYI: Harry, 30, is a Harvard grad and writer, whose first novel is coming out soon.)

And yet another friend of mine, a 34-year-old playwright named Smith Sutton, agreed somewhat with Harry — but doesn't think that a woman should assume a completely passive role when she's playing hard to get. "If a woman ignores my text completely one day, yes, that does drive me crazy and get me more obsessed with her. But I like some push and pull. I like it when, on another day, she'll give me the full-court press: texting nonstop, saying she's thinking about me and can't wait to see me. I like it when I feel like she's in control, and I'm in full pursuit."

...

Some of my other guys friends were even more outraged than Drew about Harry's outlook on the romance game. Take my sexy-yet-sweet pal Kermie Ottawa, 31, who has a big job at one of the remaining investment banks — and is the most unusual finance guy you'll ever meet. He says it absolutely doesn't make him more interested when a woman plays hard to get or makes him do all the work. "In fact, if she seems to be only reacting tit-for-tat, I quickly lose interest," he says. That's the exact opposite of Harry, who recently told me he's been all the more "impressed" with a young woman he's courting because he can tell that she likes him but is refusing to make any moves, except in response to his.

Interestingly, Drew, Dan, and Kermie all said they thought that there was a good chance they'd mistake "playing hard to get" for "not interested."

Drew, Dan, and Kermie all said that they never like to get the feeling a woman is too anxious. As my bud Mike Parkwood, a 34-year-old professor, puts it: "It's a real attraction-killer if a woman comes off like she'll take whatever she can get — and you happen to be her current target. If playing hard to get works at all, maybe it's only because it sends an obvious signal a woman isn't desperate."

I think that one paragraph said it best: not to play too hard to get or else you'll give off that typical snobbish-I'm-a-princess vibe that so many LA girls have so stereotypically earned. To read the whole article by Maura Kelly at MSN.com, check out for all the details and quotes.