The Smart Dating Strategy that Worked for Katy Perry

By Jo Piazza for HowAboutWe

When it comes to relationships, games and BS are exactly that, BS! But there is a tried and true trick that can actually end up working in someone's favor in a relationship: Playing hard to get.

Don't believe me? Ask Katy Perry.

Back in March, after dating the gentleman who once described Jessica Simpson as sexual napalm for seven months, Katy Perry called it quits with singer John Mayer.



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The pair had begun dating shortly after Perry's divorce from a similarly unavailable man, Russell Brand. They briefly split and then went strong for more than half the year. They were so serious they even spent time with one another's families. Katy and John kept their reasons for the split close to the vest, but insiders speculated that Katy wanted something more serious and she wanted John to be a willing participant in that.

So how did Katy get what she wanted? Distance. Fast forward three months. Katy started hanging out with another recently single brooding gentleman, "Twilight" star Robert Pattinson. The pair even sparked speculation that they were dating when they crashed a wedding back in May. (To be fair, it may have a been a leap. I only crash weddings with gay male friends who want to dance to Madonna all night.)

The whole time Katy just kept her distance from John and played it cool. She played hard to get. Shortly after her jaunt with Rob, John came knocking again and soon the pair were closer than ever. They're cuddling in public, John can't stop cooing to the press about her and he even dedicated a song to her during the first stop of his "Born and Raised" tour in Wisconsin.

What caused this grand turnaround?

Probably a little distance.

My friends Tara and Scott had been dating for a little over a year when he got distant and moody. Then they stopped having sex. Tara tried everything. She bought sexy lingerie, she tried dirty texts. She put porn on while she was cooking him dinner. He treated her like she was his grandmother.

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So one day she just stopped trying. They didn't break up exactly, but Tara started being more distant, less available. She just got busy. She made Scott start to work for it again. Pretty soon they were doing it like rabbits.

"Hard to Get works well on men because they are primal hunters, and they feel they want to work hard to get their prey. Once they win her, they think of her as a real prize, with themselves as the victor," explains Dr. Gilda Carle, the 30-second therapist for Today.com.

Carle notes that for women the trick is to actually, really and truly be hard to get, not just play at it.
"I tell all females to immerse themselves in their passions, so they really are hard to get, rather than playing a game," Carle adds.

It's true. When Tara was in her hard to get phase she took up three new hobbies. She was doing Pilates, playing in a dodgeball league and got really into watching "House of Cards" by herself. She was actually truly unavailable as opposed to pretending to be unavailable while waiting for a call or a text message.

As Carle says, men can smell games and they can often smell bullshit, but the second you throw yourself into something new, they usually come back stronger than ever.

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