Men and women
How You Lose A Guy By Not Playing On The Hero Effect
The biggest driver in a man’s pursuit of a woman is the chase and unpredictability in her behavior at the beginning of dating.
It’s clear to me by now that men have just as much sensitivity to the environment as women. They need the love, support and nurturing of a woman just as much as they need the chase and the independence. But one of the things that are harder to quantify is to what extent their ego will interfere with their ability to admit they need all that. This is where the “hero effect” comes into play. Matthew Hussey — the famous British dating coach — says that the hero effect is one of the most powerful tactics to get a man interested in a woman. Using it though can be quite delicate. It’s not as easy and straight forward and it requires genuine presence and commitment from the woman’s side first to get the other one committed as well. Basically,
even if you “play it by the book” it won’t work unless you genuinely care about the guy in order to put in the effort and invest in all these tactics the time to learn how to use them.
Also, the positive side is that once you learn them with one guy, even if you do lose him, you will know how to apply this in the future once the feelings for a new guy bloom again.
The laws of attraction
The dopamine released along with the chase is by far the biggest thrill he gets, but as that initial spark starts to wear off and your transition to a relationship, the number one indicator of success in a relationship is when a man feels he is valued by his partner.
You see, men are wired from hundreds of years ago to go hunt and bring the prize back home to the woman who will see him as the hero and savior because their family will now have something to eat. In modern times though, the hero effect is harder to keep because women no longer need this type of codependent relationships and it’s harder to be a hero when the woman is independent. If we look at the Nordics and western cultures in general, where women emancipation has reached the peak, we can see why many men in these cultures look for women from abroad who will be more feminine thus more prone to idealize and look at them as a hero. The more codependent the woman, the less the man needs to find its self-worth without having to rely on the relationship to bring him the validation he is looking for. It also applies when men become more sensitive from heartbreaks in relationships with women who come off too strong and independent and leave a scar on their heart which ultimately leads to their choice to stay away from such women in the future.
The more women learn how to offer genuine love and attention with the real intention of becoming a committed couple, the more likely they can maintain the level of validation and attention men need to feel valued.
But coming back to why this hero effect works, let’s look at what sabotages this and how do women manage to do it even if they are not aware that they are doing it.
Subconscious patterns women have that sabotage the hero effect:
1. Undermining their self-confidence
One thing that I did wrong in my relationships is that I wanted to help and brought awareness over areas of improvement in a way that created discomfort. The moment you start putting pressure ( or keeping them accountable) over the things they said they would want to improve and work on, they start pulling back and eventually, this leads to a breakup where he says something like „I feel you see more flaws in this than me”. It cultivates self-doubt about themselves which is uncomfortable to live with. Women who do this are women who have a problem with their self-worth, and I admittedly wrote about this problem I had in another article where I talk about the inner critic. I was applying pressure on my partners to change because I needed to work on how I evaluated myself and my inner critic. That brings me to the next point.
2. Making them doubt themselves
Cultivating an unpredictable environment where he can’t feel a consistency about your appreciation and support will lead to doubt about whether they do well in the relationship with you or not. To be fair, most women who make their partners feel doubt about their own life and values are themselves anxious, insecure and unhappy with their own life and project that on their partners. I once heard a very relevant story of a guy who told me he broke up with his future wife just months before the wedding because she was going through a very bad time in her career and was projecting her self doubt on to him. He tried to convince her to not push him to change jobs and go to a small town where she would feel more comfortable just because he wasn’t ready to give up his high paid job and move to a suburbs but she insisted that his job is not bringing him as much happiness as he claims until he started doubting it himself. As a result, the conflicts escalated until they broke up and he gained a lot of weight in the coming years because of the planted seed of self-doubt. Being negative will lead to becoming poison to your partner regardless of gender.
3. Not appreciating them for their effort
As much as we love getting attention, we should be aware not to take things for granted. Our partners are not there just to fill in our love tanks and satisfy our needs. They have needs as well. And every time they invest in us, we should be able to feel gratefulness for having such energy from them to cultivate our love for them. The more we can genuinely notice and appreciate the efforts our partners put into the relationship, the more healthy the relationship will be.
4. Lack of validation words
Showing appreciation is a work of dialectics. We can show appreciation with words or with gestures that return, but the best way is to validate that what they did was meaningful for us.
However, validation is harder to give when our partners don’t show us the loving gestures we expect or want. How do we offer validation in such cases?
The ability to see beyond your needs and to see other people’s needs is not just empathy, but a sign of friendship. Because in a relationship, you are not always in a transactional agreement with a partner „if you do this for me, I do that for you”. You sometimes need to compromise and put yourself second for a bit to understand where your partner comes from. Maybe it doesn’t even have to do with you. It might be the past traumas that he carries and stops him from being able to react positively to your affection.
One of the most interesting aspects of validation is understanding what is the „normal” or baseline of the attention he usually gives to partners in relationships and sees if he crosses that baseline for you and does the extra mile. Once he is engaged in such an investment, even if for you that doesn’t seem like a big deal, you should be able to understand that for him it’s something that he already expects praise for because he went over his limit. We all need that validation in the end when we know we over-invested ourselves.
5. Not needing their help anymore
How we reach out to our partners to help us with ideas, advice, physical work and many more aspects shows the trust we put in them and their skills. To give you one example, back in my university years, I used to date a future architect like myself at the time who had an architect father. We spend a lot of time working together and not as much just dating. Our times were mostly split between time our with our friends and time alone but separately working on our projects from the same room. Our intimacy level was so low that we didn’t trust each other’s competences to ask for help unless we had a deadline and really needed the extra hand and even then, I sometimes felt he would go to sleep early just to avoid to have to give me the extra hand. As a result, I developed a coping mechanism that empowered me to never ask for his help with anything. On top of it, I would also sometimes criticize what he did for me when he helped because I was too frustrated with the times I did ask for help and didn’t get it. He never felt needed so eventually he cheated with a younger architecture student who valued his help more than I did.
I often hear this story especially from self-sufficient women who are independent and successful enough to not need the help of the men in their lives: they all struggle to find something they would need help with to allow the male ego to feel wanted and needed. However, the worst thing you can do when trying to supply this need of his ego is to fake needing help. I also have some examples like that where some girls asked for help from men and as soon as they left, the girls started commenting on the quality of the execution and changed everything from scratch because they only aimed at making the man feel useful.
The sweet spot between nurturing and independent
Well, if you’ve reached this far, you should know that the ingredients presented above are a must, but given the nuances and subtle nature of these other 2 qualities you need to cultivate:
- Nurturing
A woman who can take care of her self but also take care of the emotional needs of her partner will always be able to be more mindful of how the sensitive ego of a man will get hurt if you do the 5 mistakes above. Showing compassion towards yourself and your partner will radically change the way you are prone to criticize, blame or project things on your partner.
2. Independence
Of course, I was talking earlier about the fact that women who are too independent can be a turn-off for a man but not having enough independence also shows that you will be a burden and instead of him being your hero, he will be more like a savior. And that drains energy! The sweet-spot is o have just enough independence of your own not to need his presence all the time, ask for his approval, victimize yourself when he doesn’t give you enough time, belittling him because you have more pride, complaining about him to friends and so on. Being able to stand on your own two feet will allow you to talk to him from a place of confidence and high self-value which ultimately makes you irresistible.
Looking back at all the past relationships when I would undermine the hero effect in the men I dated, I see clearly where the fault was. Every time I was insecure about my position in life, I would project that through a passive-aggressive response or overreact to something undermining their power on me because I lack control over my situation. I am pretty sure we all do this in small bits with our partners on a regular base, but the problem is that the more often we do it without a proper balance of the transactions we start from this position, the more likely to wear off the relationship and effectively lose the guy. The nature of a relationship can change a lot throughout many years. The more we get used to someone, the more we forget that they still need us to perform these attractiveness strategies to keep them engaged and in love with us.