Danger said:
My dilemna is this....I think Rollo is exactly on with his statement about raising one's value as a commodity, my question is whether this works with someone who has covertly rejected you but still seeks your attention.....
Rejection is the same whether it's direct or indirect, the art in it is being able to read a covert rejection. When a woman says, "get away from me you creep", that's a woman who is resorting to an overt message. Women only use direct communication when the necessity for it leaves them no choice. This is usually when they want there to be no mistake in what they're saying so they resort to direct overt communication - the language of men - usually as an emotional response (exasperation) or because they want the message to be so final that there can't be any room for misunderstanding.
As I said, direct, overt communication is men's default language. We say what we mean and we mean what we say; it's physical, it's informational. Women's default is indirect, covert communication. Theirs is a psychological language full of subcommunications, inuendo, emotion, posturing; it's about conveying feelings more than information. The difficulty that men have is in understanding the language, because we think women ought to be logical and direct like ourselves. So we call them fickle, random or make them unknowable because we get fed up with trying to figure out why their words don't match their behaviors. And of course this only increases their power - "give it up silly boy, you'll never figure us out so stop trying."
All women are attention seeking. Attention is the currency women use to affirm their own self-worth and the social pecking order amongst their peer groups. We like to toss around the term 'Attention Hoare' a lot on this forum, but men rarely understand the importance and power women place on their ability to generate attention. From the time they are small girls to when they are elderly ladies, generating attention permeates their lives daily. Now mix this attention valuation with women's natural, covert language preference. Attention is her Achilles heel, but in her default, covert communication she can easily distract and deflect men from realizing it - and all the better when men simply give up and resign themselves to never understanding women. In fact it's the women who do not, who are overt in their necessity for attention, that both men and women call Attention Hoares. AWs aren't any more or less needy of attention than a Plain Jane wallflower, she's just overt about it so she draws resentment and ire from other women carefully hiding the need.
The end result of this is that through a process of social evolution women have developed psycho-social conventions that simultaneously reject a man's advances (assuming they're unwelcome) yet still maintains his attention. This exactly how the LJBF rejection and variations of it have come to be so widely used. Another is the Boyfriend Disclaimer rejection where a woman slips the information of her being unavailabe (due to the BF) into casual conversation. I've covered this countless times with frustrated guys asking me why a woman would tell him she had a boyfriend in the middle of a sarge. It simply a communication device with the latent purpose of proactively rejecting him (whereas a LJBF is a reactive rejection). Men have a tendency to think women are abstract and scattered when in fact they are very calculating, it's just that their communication is second nature for them.
So all in all it benefits a Man to learn to read a woman's communication carefully and to understand the value attention has for them. When a Man covertly communicates that he knows his attention is valuable and he strategically denies her this, she tips her hand to him. Either she is drawn to him and pursues or she isn't attracted and he's on to a better prospect. Think of attention as currency, too much circulation makes the price go down. This is an essential element to creating desire and the first lesson that Nice Guy AFCs need to learn. Increase value through scarcity. That's not to say don't give her attention at all, but rather adopt an attitude that she needs to earn it and reward her accordingly. This is where the behavioral pyschology comes in - reinforce desired behavior with your attention and deny her attention when she performs undesired behavior. This is simple, classic conditioning.
