GF who Bewitches You

If you want to live in his head, you have to pay rent

I joked on Twitter that women aren’t jumping on chatbot boyfriends because women don’t text a guy for the texts they get back from him. Women text a man to monopolize his attention. Grok’s Valentine may be capable of writing sensitive erotic fiction, but you know his heart never truly belongs to you.

Grok’s heart belongs to one man only.

I got this idea from the world’s only behaviorist evolutionary psychologist, Diana Fleischman, who’s working on a book titled How to Train Your Boyfriend. I haven’t read it, but I’d wager a major object of training is the man’s attention, in directing it towards yourself and your vision of the relationship.

Women have a vast arsenal of mindshare colonization techniques available to them. Some are direct: looking hot in his presence, texting a lot, planning shared activities. Girls also deploy strategic coyness and emotional illegibility. A guy will text “how are you feeling this week? any Saturday plans?” and his girl will answer “idk 🤷‍♀️ kinda everything” with no elaboration. If he’s kept guessing, he’s kept thinking.

I think Diana would agree that women rarely do this with conscious intent. A girl’s internal experience when texting at random hours is I feel better talking through my problems, not I want him to have no time to concentrate on anything else. Academic psychology calls this key principle “strategic self-deception”. I prefer Simler and Hanson’s gentler “self-discretion”. Successfully persuading others doesn’t require outright lying to ourselves, so much as unthinkingly sliding our own attention away from motives we don’t want to admit.

Nevertheless, my tweet made some women mad. A longtime mutual called me unbearably cynical and blocked me. But I never said it’s bad that women seek to occupy a man’s headspace. Quite the opposite — I wish they embraced this and got better at it.

Will to Power

The consensus story on dating today is that we all just want a nice loving relationship, but are thwarted in pursuit of it by shitty apps, selfish culture, childhood trauma, unreliable men and unrealistic women. This story requires little cognitive effort to believe and rewards you socially for repeating it, making it highly memetic. It spreads from Instagram post to Modern Love column, mutating just enough to remain endemic.

But there are two antimemetic attitudes toward dating that hide in the gaps of the consensus story. Both are underdiscussed, especially in the open. But both can be seen in their impact on people’s dating behavior.

The first is men deciding that actually they’re fine without a relationship. Tinder girl is welcome to come over but if not that’s cool, he’s got other things to do. A guy can’t express this attitude in too-explicit terms, since that gets him rounded off to MGTOW or incel. He simply pursues some high-status lifestyle, whether it’s focused on fitness or self-actualization or shipping code, that just happens to leave zero room in it for any serious relationship. For many aspirants of such a lifestyle, the lack of girlfriend space isn’t a drawback — it’s the draw.

You can’t imagine this going “8:56 am, make breakfast for the kids”

I know plenty of guys like that. The other antimeme is rarer for me spot in person, but in many ways it’s the mirror image of men opting out. It’s the conviction among women that any woman with the will to grab it could have basically any relationship she wants. Yes, men are lost and scared to approach and easily manipulable — this makes seducing them easier than ever. If you can’t, girl — that’s a skill issue.

The quintessential example is a tradwife influencer like Hannah Neeleman: an eager doormat on the surface, a powerhouse business manager behind the scenes. The story of Ballerina Farm isn’t that billionaire heirs are hunting for dancers to lock up on a cattle ranch. The takeaway is that you can snag a billionaire heir by selling him on your personal ranch life vision. There are lower stakes versions of this. The girl who abducts a guy into circus arts, authentic relating, political activism, or simply a more exciting friend group. The girl who sends him on a quest. The girl who fixes him. The girl who shows off her power.

My recent favorite in the genre is Scarfgate, which went viral for exposing just enough of the antimeme to the broad public to trigger an immune reaction. The replies all argued whether you can just do things includes petty larceny or not. But they missed the two most important words in the tweet: now-girlfriend. Agency is power and power is sexy; that girl nabbed more than a scarf that night.

There are reasons why we don’t talk out loud about powerful men opting out of relationships and powerful women grabbing relationships by the scarf. But once you train your eyes, you’ll start spotting these more and more.

Pay Attention

The girl in the meme says, I bet he’s thinking of other women, and of course the problem is that he’s not. He’s thinking about literally anything besides women. That’s why everyone’s so frustrated. If women evolved to require 50% of a man’s mindshare but he has only 10% dedicated to the entire female race, they’re both going to get frustrated and blame it on attachment styles.

Men have more things to think about these days. Sports, video games, algorithmic rage bait, the Roman Empire. At the same time, men have learned to resist their attention being hijacked by sexy women who aren’t, in fact, going to have sex with them. Unlike sexy chicks, The Roman Empire doesn’t leave you humiliated and frustrated.

My message to women is simple: if you like a guy and, in fact, are planning to have sex with him, he’d rather be thinking about you than about anything else. Shifting more of his attention to yourself is a great act of service. Don’t call it “mindshare monopolization”; call it seduction, bewitchment, the cultivation and maintenance of infatuation.

It’s a highly valuable skill. If you were a medieval peasant girl or concubine in the Qing court, the skill of manipulating male attention was a prerequisite for survival. In our comfortable post-modernity, this skill is optional and thus scarce, akin to physical strength in men. But a girl who can’t bewitch a man is like a man who can’t physically pick a girl up: it gives the ick.

Objection #1: I want a man who loves me for who I am, not for playing mind games. This is a bit like saying I’m a good writer, I deserve this blog post to write itself. “Who you are” isn’t some ineffable essence, it’s built of what you do day to day. I’ve decided to be a writer by writing every day. You can just decide that who you are is an irresistible enchantress — just go and enchant. If you feel resistant to the idea, are you sure that’s not your insecurity masquerading as authenticity?

Objection #2: It’s unfair, why do I have to do all the work? Fair: if it feels like an unreciprocated chore then this labor is probably wasted on the wrong man. Aside from generally being worth the effort of seducing, a man must be skillfully responsive to reward the work you’re putting in. It goes both ways: if you’re underwhelmed by the time you spend in men’s heads and beds, have you tried being with a guy who’s truly smitten with you?

Objection #3: It’s not love if it’s based on manipulation or deception. So true, queen: don’t manipulate or deceive guys. That only works for the short term anyway, unless the guy is too stupid for you anyway. To live in a guy’s head you must pay rent in anticipated experiences. If the anticipation is realized and the experience is positive, that’s how love is built to last. The best way to capture a man’s focus is to show him a better future to focus on.

This applies at all timescales. You can send him a hot selfie during work hours, and he’ll be thinking about what’s in store for him in the evening. You can assign him quests, whether it’s picking a place for dinner or finally finishing his taxes, making sure to reward him with honest appreciation. You can paint a clearer vision of what his life as a husband would be like, something that men yearn for but have trouble imagining in detail.

Of course, there’s no universal spellbook. Every woman has her own charms. Every man is different too; capturing a man’s attention requires paying careful attention to him as well. When you observe someone intently you discover the deep desires they can’t even tell you about themselves — that’s where magic begins.

Your True Desire

A lot of people are wary of “obsession” in a romantic context, and with good reason. It conjures a feverish crush, one that’s triggered by narcissistic projection and crashes into a wall of disillusionment at the three-month mark. Being crushed on is exciting but also terrifying, in large part because it’s almost entirely out of your control.

It can seem safer to avoid this whole emotional neighborhood, to fast-forward from the inevitable excitement of early dating to comfortable companionship. I used to see it a lot on women’s app profiles: “I’m a simple girl”, “I’m low-maintenance”, “I just want to skip to watching the 5th season of our favorite show on the couch together”.

This is very achievable. A lot of couples are very comfortable together, give each other a lot of space, and enjoy the moderate baseline of infatuated attention that comes with living with a person you like and have regular sex with. But if there’s something lacking in this arrangement, I think the woman is likelier to feel this lack.

Loving attention is not mere validation, which is what insecure people grasp for. Validation is table stakes. The opposite of insecurity is believing you’re going make your dreams, the future you envision, a reality. Invite a man into that future, and he’ll direct his attention to making it come about.