Playing Hard to Get Isn’t a Strategy. It’s a Demand for Justice.

For generations, women were taught that being endlessly available was love. Reclaiming your agency isn’t a dating tactic — it’s a feminist act.

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For nearly three years I made myself the most available woman Lukas had ever encountered.

I replied within minutes. I rearranged plans without being asked. I read his silences and adjusted accordingly — turned myself down when he seemed overstimulated, turned myself up when he seemed to need entertaining. I learned the precise calibration of myself that kept the temperature of the relationship comfortable. And I maintained it, daily, with the quiet discipline of someone who has been told, in a hundred unspoken ways, that her job is to make the experience of her as frictionless as possible.

I thought I was being a good partner.

What I was actually doing was running a service.

Constantly open. Never closed. No waiting period. No cost of entry. No requirement that he understand the value of what he was receiving before he received it.

When I finally left — one bag, shaking hands, a grey Tuesday morning, Marlene’s flat in Schwabing where I slept on her sofa for six weeks — the word that kept coming back to me in the silence of her living room at 3am was not heartbreak.

It was depleted.

I had given everything. Freely. Constantly. To a man who had never once been required to ask whether he deserved it. And the world — the culture, the conditioning, every story I had ever absorbed about what makes a woman worth keeping — had called that love.

It was not love. It was the oldest con in the history of gender.

They called it a game. It was never a game.

The phrase playing hard to get has always bothered me. Not because the behaviour it describes is wrong — but because of the word playing.

Playing implies artifice. Performance. A woman pretending to be less interested than she is in order to manipulate a man into wanting her more. It frames female unavailability as a trick — something she is doing strategically, something she does not actually mean.

And the moment you accept that framing, you have already lost the argument.

Because what gets called playing hard to get is not performance. It is a woman living her own life at full volume — occupied, purposeful, genuinely not organised around whether a particular man has decided he wants her yet. It is a woman who has not yet outsourced the management of her own attention to someone who has not earned it.

That is not a strategy. That is the baseline. That is what it looks like when a woman has not yet been trained out of her own sense of value.

The woman who is “hard to get” is hard to get because she is already somewhere. She already has a life. She already has standards. She is not sitting in an empty room waiting to be collected.

She is not playing anything. She is simply being a full person. And a culture that calls that a game is a culture that expected her to be an empty room — and is irritated that she isn’t.

The phrase “playing hard to get” was invented by people who believed her availability was their right. It was never a description of her behaviour. It was a complaint about her refusal to comply.

She is not hard to get. She is hard to deserve. That distinction is the entire argument.

You were not born available. You were trained to be.

Nobody tells a small girl directly: your value is in your availability.

They don’t have to. The lesson is delivered in smaller, more efficient doses over a longer period of time.

She is praised for being so easy. So accommodating. So good at sharing, at waiting, at making sure everyone else is comfortable before she reaches for what she wants. She is told that being difficult — having strong opinions, occupying space loudly, requiring effort — is unattractive. Unfeminine. The kind of thing that makes people not like you.

And she learns. Children are extraordinarily efficient learners, particularly when the lesson is attached to approval and the absence of the lesson is attached to rejection.

By the time she is a woman, she does not experience her accommodation as conditioning. She experiences it as personality. As generosity. As love. She has internalised the training so completely that the trained behaviour feels like the self.

She is not naturally available. She was made available. There is a difference large enough to rebuild a life in.

My first therapist — a trauma specialist in Prenzlauer Berg — said something in our third session that I wrote down immediately and have not stopped thinking about since.

She said: the woman who cannot say no without guilt has not developed a character flaw. She has been trained into a survival strategy. At some point in her history, her no was not safe. So she stopped having one. The question is not how to fix her. The question is who benefited from making her this way.

Who benefited. Let that sit.

Her availability was not generosity. It was the tax she was charged for taking up space. And she paid it for years without ever seeing the invoice.

The gold that put itself on sale — And why nobody bought it at full Price.

The Gold Analogy

Gold has held its value across every economic collapse, every currency crisis, every civilisational upheaval the world has managed to produce. Not because it performs. Not because it adapts itself to whatever the market wants from it on a given Tuesday.

Because it does not negotiate its own worth.

Gold does not reduce its price to attract buyers who seem uncertain. It does not make itself more accessible to people who haven’t decided yet whether they want it. It does not discount itself in the hope that a lower price will make it more appealing to someone who was never going to understand its value anyway.

Its value is intrinsic. Non-negotiable. Established not by how many people want it on any given day but by what it actually is.

The woman who makes herself endlessly available has put herself on permanent sale. She has reduced her price in the hope that accessibility will be mistaken for value. It will not be. It never is. What is freely available is freely taken for granted — and freely discarded when something less available catches his eye.

I did this with Lukas. I ran a permanent sale on myself and called it devotion.

Immediate replies. Rearranged weekends. Opinions softened to avoid friction. Needs quietly shelved because his seemed more urgent, more legitimate, more worth the disruption.

And here is the part that broke something open in me when my third therapist finally said it plainly: the more available I made myself, the less he valued what he had.

Not because he was uniquely cruel. Because this is how perceived value works — in every domain of human experience, not just relationships. What we work for, we treasure. What is handed to us at no cost, we assume will always be there. We do not protect it. We do not appreciate it. We do not even particularly notice it.

I had made myself so consistently available that I had become background. Infrastructure. The thing that kept the lights on, not the thing worth coming home to.

You cannot simultaneously be the prize and the consolation. Pick one. The culture has been picking for you for a very long time.

The self-collapsing logic — how her availability produced exactly what she was trying to prevent.

Here is where the argument turns on itself. Here is the place I need you to stay with me.

The woman who makes herself endlessly available does it — almost always — because she is afraid of being left. She has learned, through experience or through the accumulated weight of cultural messaging, that a woman who is hard to access might be replaced by one who is easier. That her security inside a relationship depends on removing every possible reason for him to look elsewhere.

So she makes herself available. Completely. Constantly.

And here is what happens.

The man who was uncertain about his level of interest — who might have invested more if the return had required more investment — finds that everything is already given. There is nothing left to pursue. The question that might have driven him toward her has been answered before he had a chance to discover he wanted to ask it.

She removed the uncertainty to feel safe. The uncertainty was the thing that would have produced his investment.

She made herself available to prevent being left. Her availability created the conditions that made leaving easy.

The logic does not just fail. It collapses inward and produces the exact outcome it was designed to prevent.

This is the self-collapsing architecture of female availability as a survival strategy. It does not work. It has never worked. And the culture that sold it to her knew it didn’t work — because the culture was not trying to protect her. It was trying to keep her manageable.

“She made herself easy to keep. He treated her as easy to leave. The same quality. Opposite outcomes. That is not a coincidence — that is the design.”

The goal analogy — and why she should be the only target worth playing for.

The Goal Analogy

In football — in any sport built around a target — the goal is the organising principle of everything. The formations, the training, the strategy, the hours of preparation, the nerve held under pressure: all of it exists in relation to the goal. It gives the game its meaning. It is what makes the effort worth the effort.

Now imagine a game where the goal rolls into the net by itself. Where no skill is required, no nerve is tested, no sustained effort is demanded. Where the goal is simply given — handed over before the player has demonstrated he understood what he was playing for.

Nobody celebrates that goal. Nobody remembers it. It does not make the highlight reel or send the crowd to its feet. It is not a victory. It is not even interesting.

Because a goal that costs nothing means nothing.

You are the goal. Not in a passive sense — not waiting in the net for someone to find you. You are the goal in the sense that the entire structure of a genuine relationship should be organised around earning access to you. Around demonstrating, through sustained and specific effort, that the person pursuing you understands what they are pursuing and why it matters.

The player who is serious will find a way through. The player who wants the goal handed to him before he has learned to play — let him find an easier game. That game was never going to be worth your time.

Hanna — who left her own relationship six months before I left Lukas, who used to meet me at the café near Viktualienmarkt with our dark roasts and our steamed-up window and the particular exhaustion of women who have been fighting a war nobody else can see — said something the afternoon I tried to explain all of this to her.

She said: Gisela, you spent three years making yourself easier to be with. Did it ever occur to you to make yourself harder to deserve? Not difficult. Not cold. Just — yourself, fully, without the editing. And let him figure out whether he was up to it.

It had not occurred to me. Not once. Not for three years.

That was the extent of the conditioning. I had been so thoroughly trained to smooth my own edges that the possibility of keeping them — of being the full, complicated, inconvenient, specific version of myself and requiring him to meet that — had genuinely not presented itself as an option.

The editing was not love. The editing was self-erasure dressed in the language of devotion. And I had been doing it so long I could no longer see the seam.

You are not a tool. You are not a service. You were not built to satisfy needs he never learned to manage himself.

Let me say this as directly as I know how.

There is a version of womanhood that has been sold to us as the ideal — emotionally available at all hours, sexually accessible on demand, domestically competent, professionally capable, physically maintained, and still somehow effortlessly natural about all of it. The woman who meets every need without making the meeting of it visible. Whose labour is so seamless it becomes invisible. Who gives so thoroughly that the giving stops looking like giving and starts looking like what she simply is.

This is not a compliment. It is a job description.

And it is one of the most poorly compensated positions in the history of human labour.

The woman in this role is not a prize. She is infrastructure. She is the thing that makes his life run — that manages his emotional world, carries the mental load, smooths the transitions, absorbs the friction — while he moves through the world with the unexamined ease of someone who has never had to think about what it costs to keep the lights on.

She is not there to be valued. She is there to be useful.

Being loved means being seen. Being useful means being used. These are not the same experience wearing different clothes — and any culture that tells women they are the same experience is a culture that benefits from her not knowing the difference.

The majority of men who cannot cook, who have never learned to manage a household, who arrive at adulthood genuinely uncertain how to care for themselves — these men are not helpless. They are the products of a deliberate arrangement. They were exempted from domestic training while women were immersed in it. They were pointed outward toward the world while women were pointed inward toward the home. And then, when the arrangement produces a man who needs a woman to function and a woman who is exhausted from making him function, the culture calls it natural. Calls it complementary. Calls it the way things are.

It is not natural. It is engineered. And the woman who understands this — who refuses to be the infrastructure, who demands to be the point — is not difficult.

She is awake.

“She is not hard to get. She is hard to deserve. And she has finally stopped pretending those are the same thing.”

Why this is not a game. It is the oldest political act a woman can perform.

I want to end here — at the politics of it — because I think the politics are the point.

When we call a woman’s unavailability a strategy or a game, we frame it as manipulation. As something she is doing to him. As a performance designed to produce a particular response.

That framing does something very specific: it removes the justice from it.

It makes her behaviour about tactics rather than rights. About winning rather than demanding what was always hers. About playing the game better rather than refusing to accept that the game was ever fair.

But a woman who refuses to make herself endlessly available is not playing a game. She is making a political statement with her behaviour. She is saying — in the language of her choices, in the daily texture of how she spends her attention — that her presence is not a default. That her time has value. That her emotional and physical labour costs something. That she is the point of her own life, not the supporting structure of someone else’s.

This is a feminist act. It is one of the oldest feminist acts available to women, and one of the least recognised as such — because it happens in private, in the intimate spaces where the personal and the political are most thoroughly entangled.

Feminism fought for women in the workforce, in law, in public life. All of it necessary. All of it hard-won and ongoing.

But the bedroom. The kitchen. The emotional interior of a relationship. The daily question of whose needs are treated as urgent and whose are treated as optional — this is where the deepest conditioning lives. This is where women are most likely to mistake their training for their nature. This is where the justice has been most consistently denied and most consistently unnamed.

When a woman refuses to make herself available on demand — when she requires investment before she gives access, when she keeps her standards intact instead of discounting them to seem more appealing, when she lives her own life so fully that any man who wants to enter it has to earn the right — she is not playing hard to get.

She is demanding what was always hers.

After I left Lukas, I moved into a small flat in Munich that smelled of fresh paint and silence. And I spent the first weeks doing something I had not done in three years.

I paid attention to what I actually wanted. Not what would reduce friction. Not what would make me more pleasant to be around. What I — specifically, inconveniently, in full — wanted.

I stood in the Rewe in Maxvorstadt genuinely uncertain what I wanted for dinner, because for three years the question had always been what Lukas wanted and I had long since stopped asking it about myself. It took weeks before the answer started coming easily. Weeks of practising the most basic act of self-knowledge — this is what I want, this is what I need, this is the version of myself I am not willing to edit down to make someone else more comfortable.

That is where reclaiming the prize begins. Not with a man. Not with a strategy. Not with a set of rules designed to make him want you more.

With that question. What do I actually want. Asked honestly. Answered fully. Before he enters the room.

You are not a strategy. You are not a service. You are not the consolation prize in your own life. You are the goal — and it is time to start requiring that the people who want access to you understand exactly what they are playing for. Not hard to get. Hard to deserve. There is a world of difference. And you have always been worth it.