Why “playing hard to get” has survived 2,000 years of dating advice

Why Ovid, The Rules, and pickup artists all say the same thing about scarcity and desire

“Don’t call him back right away.” “Let him pursue you.” “Be easy to be with but hard to get.” If you’ve heard this advice, you’ve encountered an idea with a surprisingly long pedigree. “Playing hard to get” is often treated as timeless folk wisdom, but it has a specific origin point—and the book that first codified it is older than you might think.

The 2,000-year-old book that started “playing hard to get”

The advice traces back to Ovid’s Ars Amatoria—“The Art of Love”—written around 2 AD in Rome. This three-book poem was essentially the first pickup guide ever written, offering tactical advice on seduction to both men and women.

In my research archive, Ovid’s text stands out as the ur-source for nearly every piece of strategic dating advice that followed. Book III, addressed to women, contains advice that wouldn’t look out of place in a modern dating guide: cultivate mystery, don’t appear too eager, and let him wonder about your feelings. Ovid understood that desire intensifies when satisfaction is delayed.

The poem was so controversial that it may have contributed to Ovid’s exile from Rome by Emperor Augustus—one of history’s first examples of a dating book generating scandal. It was burned by Savonarola in 1497 and seized by U.S. Customs as late as 1930. Yet its influence persisted through medieval Europe, where scholars called the entire era the “aetas Ovidiana”—the Ovidian age.

Why mid-century dating guides surprisingly rejected the tactic

For centuries after Ovid, “playing hard to get” existed more as observation than instruction. You might expect mid-century dating guides—the 1940s through 1960s—to have codified the strategy explicitly. But when I searched my archive, I found something surprising: the advice from this era treats scarcity as a reality to navigate, not a tactic to deploy.

A 1940 guide called Why Be a Wallflower? addresses the issue from the man’s perspective:

If a young man finds that he does not get a ready acceptance to his invitations; that when he phones a girl, she invariably has another engagement; and that when he suggests a date three weeks from next Tuesday, that day by singular coincidence is precisely the day Aunt Minnie is coming from the country with her entire family—when these things happen fairly regularly, the young man had better take a good look at himself in the mirror and in the ledger of his accomplishments.

The book then reassures readers: “Girls do not turn down dates for the fun of saying no.” In other words, if she’s unavailable, it’s because she genuinely has other options or isn’t interested—not because she’s playing a game.

Guide Book for the Young Man About Town (1948) warns men about the “Prom Princess” who has too many suitors, noting ruefully that “human beings seem strangely attracted to members of the opposite sex who snub them, hurt them, or frankly have no use for them.” But this is presented as an unfortunate psychological quirk to be aware of, not a strategy women should exploit.

The guides from this period focus overwhelmingly on practical courtesy: how to politely decline a date, how to avoid misunderstandings, and being clear about arrangements. The Art of Dating (1968) devotes an entire chapter to “accepting or refusing a date,” emphasizing that “out of fairness to a boy, a girl should either accept or refuse—or else explain why she cannot answer immediately.” The ethic is transparency, not strategic ambiguity.

What’s notably absent is any suggestion that women should manufacture scarcity to increase attraction. The mid-century guides assumed women would be genuinely busy or genuinely uninterested; they offered advice on handling those situations gracefully. The idea that unavailability itself could be weaponized—deployed tactically regardless of one’s actual circumstances—was still waiting to be articulated.

How The Rules turned observed psychology into a million-dollar strategy

That articulation came in February 1995, when Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider published The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right.

The book became an immediate sensation. Its 35 rules included directives like “Don’t call him and rarely return his calls,” “Don’t meet him halfway or go Dutch on a date,” and “Always end phone calls first.” The authors were unapologetic: women should be “easy to be with but hard to get.”

What The Rules did was transform observed psychology into explicit strategy. Where mid-century guides noted that busy women seemed more desirable, Fein and Schneider told women to act busy whether they were or not. Where earlier authors advised courtesy when declining dates, The Rules advised declining dates as a tactic. The book sold over two million copies and numerous sequels, coaching programs, and endless debate.

The controversy intensified when Fein divorced her husband in 2001, six years after the book’s publication—though she later remarried a man she claimed to have attracted using The Rules.

Pickup artists flip the script: the male version of “don’t call him back”

Men, meanwhile, developed their own version of strategic scarcity through the pickup artist community. One telling example is the “artificial time constraint,” or ATC—a technique that borrows from marketing research and was codified in the early 2000s pickup artistry books.

The ATC works like this: when approaching a stranger, the man immediately signals that he’s about to leave. “I can only stay a second, but I had to ask you something.” “My cab’s waiting outside, but I noticed your necklace, and I want to know if it’s Art Deco.” The stated purpose was to reduce a woman’s anxiety about being trapped in an unwanted interaction. But the deeper function was identical to The Rules: manufacturing scarcity to increase perceived value.

A man who appears to have somewhere else to be—other friends, other options, a life that doesn’t revolve around this single interaction—signals higher mate value than one who lingers hopefully. The ATC was the male equivalent of not returning his calls: a tactical simulation of the busy, high-value person.

The parallel is striking. Both The Rules and the pickup artist playbook recognized the same underlying dynamic—scarcity signals value—and both developed explicit techniques to manufacture the appearance of it.

The real reason scarcity works, and why most people get it wrong

From a costly signaling perspective, “playing hard to get” has endured for two thousand years because it exploits a real dynamic—but not for the reasons most people assume.

The conventional explanation is that scarcity creates desire. There’s truth to this, but it’s incomplete. The deeper function of strategic scarcity is as a screening mechanism. A woman who doesn’t respond immediately forces suitors to demonstrate investment. A man who appears ready to walk away forces women to engage genuinely. Those who persist despite obstacles signal genuine interest; those who disappear reveal themselves as low-investment prospects.

The problem is that this only works if the scarcity is genuine. Performed scarcity—whether following The Rules or deploying an artificial time constraint—creates short-term effects but different long-term outcomes. Someone who is naturally selective because they have abundant options communicates authentic mate value. Someone following a script sends a signal that doesn’t match their underlying situation.

Genuine selectivity beats playing games

The persistence of this advice across two millennia tells us the underlying dynamic is real. Humans do respond to scarcity. We do value what we have to work for. Selectivity does signal mate value.

But there’s a difference between being genuinely selective and performing selectivity. The former flows from actually having options—from building a life interesting enough that you’re not desperate for any particular outcome. The latter is theater.

Ovid knew the difference. His advice wasn’t just “act unavailable”—it was embedded in a broader program of self-cultivation, of becoming genuinely desirable rather than merely seeming so. Two thousand years later, that distinction still matters.

The best version of “playing hard to get” isn’t playing at all. It’s becoming someone with enough going on that you genuinely are selective—and letting that authentic selectivity communicate itself naturally.

Andrew King is the author of Costly Signals: The Evolution of Dating Advice. His research archive spans over 500 dating and relationship books from the 1800s to the present.