Our short answer was: level the playing field.
In our experience, the average man is a lot better at playing hard to get than the average woman. You exchange numbers with a guy on your kickball team and he sporadically returns your texts. You go on one date with a guy and it takes him a week to get back to you.
Women, on the other hand, are often eager to shower their love interests with attention. They text the guy they met at Local 16 last weekend at noon to say how his day’s going, because they wish he would do the same for them.
Men, on the other hand, seem to realize that, if you want a girl to pay attention to you, your best bet is to ignore her.
The more a guy ignores you and the more that you question whether or not he likes you, the more you tend to convince yourself that he’s the one for you. The more time and energy you put into pursuing and/or fantasizing about someone, the more your brain (which has a tendency to assume that we really desire things we put a lot of effort into) thinks, “I must be in love with this person.”
The harder we work for something, the bigger the payoff. So when you finally snag the guy you’ve been pining after for months, it feels great.
If both sides could play hard to get and take it slow, the buildup would convince each side that he/she was in love with the other. And when they finally got together, overall happiness/satisfaction would increase because they’d finally be getting something they wanted for so long.
Of course, passion and desire aren’t going to make a relationship last. Compatibility, which we basically boil down to shared values and common interests, goes a lot further than a fluttering stomach. But it’s harder to evaluate compatibility when you’re drunk on lust.
In the end, we’re not sure what we’d change. Perhaps it’s better to learn how to work the current system so that it all works out in your favor.