Let’s set up a great analogy so you can see how this ties into game.
The nation’s top law schools all have the same complaint. “We, Stanford, are the number 4 law school in the nation. Why do only 45% of the people that we accept, decide to accept our offer?! We spend all this time falling in love with an applicant, only for them to ditch us for another, better school that accepted them”
It’s a game theorist’s paradise. The college wants an applicant to fall in love with their school, who dreams of Stanford. But the applicant looks around and realizes that all of the top schools, Stanford included, only accept 7-13% of all the people who apply.
No matter if they initially LOVED Stanford, every applicant has to play the numbers game and apply to 4-7 schools, to guarantee acceptance. The schools enjoy playing up that they are extremely selective… which actually encourages applicants apply to more schools.
Say you’ve got a pool of 1000 applicants that all applied to the top 5 schools. When all of the schools look at their OWN applicants, they don’t see where else they’ve applied. They simply pick the best applicants, the ones who sparkle. And what happens is that all the schools pick the same 200 people to accept. Most of the best applicants will have 2-5 offers from top schools.
Our Stanford dreamer applies and tries as hard as possible to convince Stanford of his love, but of course, every other applicant is doing that too, no matter their real preference. But he has a strong background, and so he gets accepted! However, because of that background, it turns out he also got into Harvard AND Yale.
So now, he’s got a decision he didn’t expect. To make it, he starts looking at information he never looked at before. At Yale, the prestige factor is higher, the starting salary is higher, there are better recruiting opportunities. And so he’s too afraid to miss out, and chooses Yale.
If Stanford hadn’t been so picky, or they had communicated to him that, despite their low acceptance rate, he stood a good chance of getting accepted, then he may have only applied to Stanford. Or if they had gotten back to him with a yes/no decision before he put the other applications in. It’s not like our guy wanted to put the effort into 5 applications when he only wanted Stanford.
Women Are Just as Picky!
This is EXACTLY how the dating marketplace works. The girls are the schools, and the guys the applicants. Girls become more and more choosy, and make guys respond by spreading the field. This means that, if a guy isn’t willing to wait to see if he MAYBE gets picked, he has to ‘apply’ to a bunch of girls at the same time. He has to act like he likes all of them, because he doesn’t know which one is going to accept him.
Say a girl is an 8.5, and she’s got tons of guys wanting her. But she eventually picks a guy that she likes. The only problem is, the very fact that SHE wants him likely means that other girls that he has ‘applied to’ want him too, and have already or will soon accept him. The bottom 80% of guys get rejected by all girls, and the top 20% get multiple acceptances.
A guy initially liked her, and would have dropped everything and dated her, had she let him know early on. But he strung her along, so she could be selective and maybe try for better, or to make him ‘prove himself’ to her. That uncertainty made him throw in another 20-30 applications (hit on some girls). And since he’s a catch, now he’s got a 9, a 9.5, and another 8.5 who is absolutely hilarious. Early on, he would have picked this girl no doubt, but now that he’s got options he didn’t know he had…. he picks Yale.
The results in a huge amount of heartbreak that girls blame guys for. “He led me on! We’ve been talking for 6 weeks and he’s been all into me, and then he just blows me off!” The truth is he is only responding to the incentives she provided him by making him wait.
Interestingly, if our girl actually had a catch in this guy, by waiting she only guarantees that she loses him. But if she waits and the guy puts up with it, it means he must have got rejected (or assumed he would get rejected) with other girls, and that she is the absolute best he can get. Thus, she is getting the lowest quality guy a girl of her caliber could get. (or he’s talking to so many other girls he really doesn’t mind waiting).
There’s no other way for her to get a guy that is out of her league than to move quick. When you’ve already been accepted to Harvard or Stanford, you aren’t applying to slightly lesser schools. But if a slightly lesser school gets to him and accepts him first, he can be persuaded to take the sure thing and not put in tons of extra effort for girls that only accept 5% of guys anyways.
Yeah, a girl could accept the guy and him turn around and break her heart. But that can happen if she makes him wait too. Here are the options and results:
Ashley makes him wait/gives him uncertainty
Result 1 – he talks to other girls as he waits, then bails for his best option, breaking her heart
Result 2 – he talks to other girls, and realizes Ashley is the best he can get
Ashley either loses a great guy with options, or gets a guy without better options.
Ashley decides quickly and doesn’t make him wait/give him uncertainty
Result 1 – she accepts him and he breaks her heart
Result 2 – she accepts him and she gets a guy that she otherwise would have lost to a higher quality girl.
Ashley either gets a great guy with options, or she loses him.
It’s heartbreak vs mediocre guy, or heartbreak vs. above par guy. Either way, she is better off with moving quickly.
INSIGHT
Girl’s have a tendency to base their behavior based on application numbers. “Sooo many guys are hitting on me, why would I NOT be picky! I’m a hot commodity!” This is like the 20th ranked school thinking its prestigious because it gets thousands of applications – because it is a safety school. That school, when it decides to accept, may only get 5-10% of the people that applied, and those are all the ones that couldn’t get into a better school.
It’s important that the safety school (or safety ‘girl’ ) isn’t delusional. It doesn’t start thinking it is a premium school simply because it is getting premium applicants. Even hot guys will hit on or have sex with a lower quality girl. It’s important that she realize the difference between applicants and likely offer acceptances. In other words, there’s a difference between what a girl can get temporarily, and a guy that she can keep… usually about a 2 point difference in guy quality.
A girl’s options deteriorate much faster than she expects, and it’s hard for her to tell. If she drops from being an 8.5 to a 7, she may still be getting lots of approaches and interested guys, but the likelihood of them accepting drops exponentially. It’s hard to tell a girl 7 who has been making out with and hooking up with 9-9.5 guys that the best guy she could get is a 7, but it’s likely the truth. This is because she is only seeing herself, and assuming the amount of times she’s getting hit on (applied to) give her power. She doesn’t account for all the other girls each guy has been hitting on/talking to also.
Either way, the instinct is to blame guys, when guys are simply responding to the incentives that are attached to girls’ tendency move slow, make guys work for it, etc… All of those create adverse incentives to higher quality guys. It’s not like guys want it to be hard… the easier the better. Who doesn’t want to only have to apply to one college? You notice that lots of older women have figured this out and try to move the decision forward as much as they can, whereas it’s the younger girls that are flakey and delay.
For Players Only
Choosy girls that make you wait are your bread and butter. They are usually hotter, more naïve, and it gives you scheduling flexibility. When you are playing the field, the absolute worst thing you can have is a girl that gives you an early ‘now or never’ offer. I made a living off of girls that thought they were in total control of me because they only ‘let’ me see them once a week… when that’s exactly what I wanted so that I could fill up the rest of the week with my other girls. They’d string it out until they were like, ‘ok NOW we can date, you passed the test’. By that time, there was no WAY I would date them, I haven’t been taking them serious for the past 6 weeks, plus I’d have to sacrifice my hard-earned weekly line up. Easier just to replace that day with someone else. But if they had moved quickly, when my infatuation for them was strong, I probably would have taken that offer. Then that would have spurred me on to create a sustainable relationship with them.
