I’m often asked about “girl game” and whether it is something you should be worried about in a woman.

My stock reply is that there is nothing wrong with game — indeed, us men enjoy “girl game,” and we fall more for girls who have it. The issue isn’t the game itself, but what a girl’s intention is with it.

Does she use game to chew up guys and spit them out? Or is it a way to simply get them to value her more, so they can both build something real?

And yet, it needs to be said. Most girls with game do the former, not the latter.

A girl with game is dangerous. And if you are not experienced yourself — if you cannot parry her blows with your own game, or see past her facade — the practical reality is that she is likely to get bored of you… and after she eats you alive, leave.

The question is why girls do this. Why are the girls who are best at inducing your intimacy often the most emotionally avoidant? Why are the masters of love, the ones most afraid of it?

The first answer is that they are not really masters of intimacy or love, but of artifice. But the men who obsess over these women deserve everything they get. Because they are not interested in love or intimacy either. What they are interested in is someone to save them from themselves.

Love is not the emotional high of a fantasy. It’s not the rush of infatuation. Love is the result of gradual trust and understanding between you and another person. It is desire drawn from the well of experience — “I know this and I like it, let me savor it more” — rather than imagination.

Game, in contrast, is about control for most. Because when you game someone — whether “you” are a man or a woman — you create a perception of yourself for them, and you get them to fall for it. By making them crave this mirage, you own their heart. Which gives you power. But more than that, their addiction to your illusion stops them from being able to hurt you.

Which is why the only people who wield game in a neutral or even benevolent manner are those who no longer need it to protect themselves.

In other words, you cannot be hurting. Game cannot be your shield. It can simply be an awareness of the shadow side of men and women, and the dark things about the opposite sex we are attracted to… often in spite of ourselves. Something to play with — to add seasoning to the real intimacy — rather than a code of emotional combat to live and die by.

And the only way to get a woman with this level of integration is to become a man who can meet her where she is at.

Naive, weak men looking for a woman to escape into won’t fit the bill. Nor will guys looking to prove themselves — who are seeking conquest for ego.

You need to have done enough work on yourself that game doesn’t fool you, and you can call it out in its tracks — with a knowing smile. You need to “outgame” her so to speak, by transcending game altogether.

But you won’t be able to do this if you haven’t gone through the process yourself of gaming and getting gamed.

Which is why working with me is different.

Because while many coaches will either make game their god, or will tell you “game is manipulative!” — I do neither.

I understand game. I teach it.

Yet I also teach guys to move past it.

I put it in its proper place in the growth arc of a man: as a tool to attract the women you want, and as a study of the human shadow. As a rite of passage and requirement of discernment.

Anyway.

Don’t expect this to be an easy process. Growth at times is painful, because some things we only learn from pain.

But if you want someone to be there by your side through the process so you can move through it as fast and seamlessly as possible…

Apply to work with me here: www.patstedman.com/application

– Pat