The Year I Stopped Chasing Women I Didn't Actually Like

For three years I confused “she’s hard to get” with “she’s worth getting.”

For three years I told myself I was being “selective.” That was the lie I needed to believe so I didn’t have to look at what I was actually doing — which was confusing the difficulty of getting someone with the value of having them.

The pattern was always the same. A woman would be slightly cold, slightly unavailable, slightly busy. I’d interpret her distance as proof of her quality. The harder she was to reach, the more I’d convince myself she was special. By the time she actually let me in — if she ever did — the project was over. I wasn’t interested anymore. I’d already moved on to the next person who didn’t quite want me.

The lie I needed

The lie wasn’t that I had high standards. The lie was that I had standards at all.

If I’d been honest, I would have admitted that my “type” was, structurally, anyone who treated me with measured indifference. The content didn’t matter. Her values didn’t matter. Her actual personality, the things she liked, the way she spent her Saturdays — none of it factored in. The qualifying signal was the resistance.

I called this taste. It wasn’t taste. It was a mechanism for keeping myself in motion so I never had to ask whether the motion was going anywhere.

What broke it

What broke the pattern wasn’t a girl. It was a Tuesday afternoon in late September when I realized I’d been thinking about the same person for six weeks and I couldn’t actually name three things I liked about her that weren’t reactions to her not liking me back.

That sentence took me about three days to write down. Once I’d written it down I couldn’t unwrite it.

I wasn’t choosing women. I was auditioning for them — and calling it taste.

I’d built a personality around being someone with refined preferences in a world full of guys who would settle. But my “preferences” had no positive content. They were entirely defined by what wasn’t available. If she liked me, she wasn’t my type. If she didn’t, she was. There was no underneath.

The thing nobody tells you

The thing nobody tells you about this kind of pattern is how much of your life it eats while you’re inside it.

I’m not just talking about the time spent on women who didn’t want me. I’m talking about the second-order costs. The energy diverted into rumination. The friendships I underinvested in because I was always half-distracted by some woman I was tracking from a distance. The work I half-did. The years that passed while I was conducting a private experiment in being chosen, with no end condition, no scoring system, and a research question I’d never explicitly asked myself.

It’s hard to describe how exhausting it is to live like this. You wake up tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep. You’re metabolizing the wrong fuel.

What I tried first (and what didn’t work)

When I finally noticed the pattern, my first instinct was to fix it through willpower. I’d just stop chasing. I’d be a different kind of person — the kind who doesn’t get hung up on people who aren’t hung up on them.

This worked for about four days. Then I’d meet someone interesting, she’d be slightly hard to read, and I’d be back inside the spiral with more force than before, because now I was also angry at myself for being inside it.

What didn’t work: telling myself the truth about the pattern. What didn’t work: reading more about anxious attachment. What didn’t work: deleting the apps. What didn’t work: deciding to “work on myself” — which mostly meant reading books and feeling like I was making progress while making none.

What actually moved the needle

What moved the needle was something smaller and more boring than any of that.

I started writing down — every time I caught myself thinking about a specific person — what exactly I was reacting to. Not what I imagined about her. Not the version of her in my head. What had she actually done or said in the last 72 hours, and what was my response?

The exercise was humbling. About 80% of the time, I wasn’t reacting to her. I was reacting to a story about her that I was telling myself in real time. The “her” I was obsessed with was, almost entirely, a function of my own narrative engine running on whatever sparse data I had.

Once I could see this, I couldn’t see it any other way. The chase wasn’t really about the person at the end of it. It was a structure I was running on whoever happened to be there.

The unsettling part

Here’s the part I didn’t want to say but probably matters most.

When I stopped chasing, I didn’t immediately become healthy. I became bored. The chase wasn’t a malfunction overlaid on my regular life. It was a significant percentage of my regular life. Without it, I had to figure out what I actually wanted to do with my evenings, what I wanted to think about in the shower, what I wanted my inner monologue to be about when there wasn’t a project of being chosen running in the background.

This was, in a strange way, the harder problem. The pattern was painful, but it was full. It gave me a thing to do with my attention. Removing it created a vacuum, and the vacuum was uncomfortable in a way that the pattern, for all its dysfunction, hadn’t been.

I’m still figuring out what fills the vacuum. Some weeks it’s writing. Some weeks it’s a project I’d been postponing for years that turns out to take exactly the kind of attention the chase used to consume. Some weeks it’s nothing — just the quiet itself, which I’m slowly learning to be in without immediately reaching for something to break it with.

What I’d tell someone three years ago

If I could send one note back, it wouldn’t be advice. It would be a question.

The question is: what would you do with your life if no one was ever going to choose you in the way you’ve been waiting to be chosen?

Not as a fatalistic premise. As a thought experiment. If that whole project were taken off the table — not because of failure, just because — what would your days look like? What would you make? Who would you call? What would you stop tolerating? What would you start?

The strange thing is that almost no one I’ve talked to about this has a ready answer. We all have an answer for what we’d do if we got the thing we want. We don’t have an answer for what we’d do if the wanting itself stopped.

That gap, I think, is most of the work.