How to Force Men to Chase You Like a Video Game

You Are the Reward: Build the Level System

In a video game you start at level zero, complete challenges, and level up: better weapons, better tools, more access. In this game, you are the reward, in totality, so access to you is the leveling system. He completes a challenge, he gets a little more access. Do a little, get a little, in a constant cycle. And the balance is everything. If he takes you on one nice dinner and you sleep with him that night, you've handed a level-zero player the level-100 reward that people work a year for. Sit down and think about what happens to a game after that: cool, I got everything in five minutes, this game is boring as hell now. Nothing given too quickly ever earns appreciation.

Neediness breaks the system the same way. If you're hoarding him, begging him not to look at other girls, panicking that he'll find someone better, you're rewarding him for doing nothing, for just existing. It's like overfeeding a dog treats when he's good, when he's bad, when he's sleeping. You end up with a fat, spoiled dog that doesn't act right, because rewards that come 24/7 for no reason teach nothing about which direction to move in.

Reward What You Want Repeated (No, Not That Kind of Reward)

When I say reward, some of you immediately think the only reward available is between your legs. Take a chill pill. The most powerful rewards don't require you to touch him at all, because all men have big egos, and the deepest reward you can give a man is making him feel like the man. When he's respectful, takes you out, holds doors, moves like a gentleman, put concentrated effort into acknowledging how much better a man he is than the rest. That's a positive feedback loop: he does what you want, he feels like the man, he wants that feeling again, so he does more of it. Treat your man like a dog you're training. Good behavior gets rewarded, so the connection forms: if I do right, I get rewarded.

Here's the technique in full. Say he knows you worked a 12-hour shift with a big test coming, and you come home to a spotless house, incense going, a bubble bath running, your study notes laid out. Enjoy it, appreciate it. Then the next day, this is the most important part: phone off, TV off, sit him down, hold his hand, and tell him exactly what he did and what it meant. Name every detail you noticed, down to the crust he wiped off the counter, and show honest, genuine appreciation for the man he is. I know it sounds over the top. Try it and come back to me. Treat the moment as seriously as you would a serious talk, because that praise releases the dopamine that makes him chase the feeling of being appreciated by you, over and over. It feels good to give. It feels far better to give and be praised for it.

Scheduling: Anticipation Is the Addiction

When a man is addicted to a video game, every moment away from it is spent thinking about the next session. I can't wait to get home and play tonight. That's the state you want him in about you, and scheduling is how you create it. When he has to plan time with you, compare schedules, figure out Friday afternoon works but only for three hours, solve the puzzle of where to take you, all of that thinking is time spent on you, building anticipation for the reward at the end. The planning itself is a challenge he overcomes to earn access.

So two hard rules. No unannounced pop-ups, and no saying yes to last-minute, disorganized hangouts. If he can have you whenever he's bored with a single text, if you show up at his door like DoorDash, he will never spend a second anticipating you, because there's nothing to anticipate. Chocolate is interesting partly because you can't have it all the time. Make it always available with no consequences and nobody daydreams about it. There should also be real competition for your time: friends, work, passions, hobbies, your girl tribe. A man who senses nobody is fighting for your time concludes you must not be that desirable, and he stops fighting for it too.

And here's your warning sign that the balance is off: he describes you as chill. Chill is not a compliment, it's a report on what he feels around you, which is nothing. Do you think any man describes the woman he's obsessed with as chill? Chasing is intense, all-encompassing, it takes up brain space. If he's chill, he's getting everything without working for any of it.

Challenges: Not Too Easy, Not Impossible

I know some of you are saying, this is games, why can't I just be me? Because we're here to get men to chase you, and that takes techniques. Those infomercials with the suffering kids are shot by a director with a $20,000 camera and a boom mic precisely because eliciting emotion gets people to act. Everyone who gets what they want uses technique. So: make it challenging to access you, challenging to see you, and very challenging to get your Squirtle. Keep just enough friction in the dynamic that nothing feels handed to him. If being busy isn't true yet, build the hobbies and passions that make it true, and worst case, be busy anyway.

But balance it, because the ratio matters in both directions. Game developers could easily build an impossible game, and you'd think impossible means people play forever. The opposite happens: when it's all failure with no sense of progress, people quit. If you never respond, never text back, never answer, he doesn't think, what a challenge. He thinks, she's not interested, and gives up. The game has to be hard but beatable, and you tune the difficulty to the man, the same way players pick the hardest mode they can actually progress in.

One technique I want you to write down: whatever the planned length of a date or hangout is, cut it short by 20 or 30 minutes, and make leaving non-negotiable. Especially early on, he should never leave you feeling satisfied and satiated. He should leave feeling like that wasn't enough time, because the first thing that feeling makes him do is text you: when can I see you again? The moment he leaves thinking, I'm good off that for a few days, you've lost the loop. It's the same reason the guy who gets everything on night one doesn't text for two weeks. He's satisfied. Satisfied men don't chase.

Level Down: Failure Has to Cost Him

The last piece of every real game: you can lose progress. If he doesn't complete the challenge, breaks a boundary, does the wrong thing, then it's mission failed, minus 1,000 points, level down. And since the reward is access to you, the level down is less access to you. He needs to feel that his actions made him less of a priority in your world, that his spot is not guaranteed, that someone else could come along and outrank him.

I know how this sounds, but hear me: you want him to carry a healthy amount of fear. Not fear of you, fear of consequences. The fear of falling behind, of losing his place, of no longer being number one, is what makes him focus and do the right thing in exactly the right way. We all need a healthy fear of losing a partner we value, in both directions. The problem is when all the fear lives in you, so you spend the relationship terrified of him leaving, rewarding him for nothing, and never letting him feel a single consequence. Get the balance right, reward, challenge, and the real possibility of leveling down, and he will chase you the way he chases the game he can't stop playing: because there's always another level, and losing you would feel like deleting the save file.