Old Flame, New Game

An interesting scenario for Game-aware Men has developed in the last 12 years in that, with our new level of connectivity and virtual social communication, now more than ever before it’s not only convenient to reestablish a connection with a previous lover, it’s far more likely. Even if you’ve moved on from a lover more than a decade ago and live thousands of miles away, they’re still as close as a google search or facebook friending away from you now. This presents an interesting situation for Men who’d previously been left by a woman in their ‘beta’ mode of thinking, only to reestablish (or have the old lover reestablish) a connection with the potential for a fresh intimate affair.

The temptation to prove something to an old lover is a very strong impulse in Men, and particularly if the former relationship resulted in his being dumped for a mindset in himself that he now realizes was the cause. Pair this need for vindication with a woman who’s initiated the contact after her last LTR failed, and you can see how consuming this opportunism might be for a guy. Considering all this, it’s very difficult to assess the real situation and the motivations for such a reconnection.

Rebound Guy vs. Sure Thing Guy

Rebound guy is defined by being a fresh prospect, coming around conveniently at the end of an LTR. The rebounder is also generally an emotional tampon rather than (but not limited to) a sexual release for a girl. Status as a rebound guy is usually based on how involved her LTR was prior, and the terms and circumstances of the break up. For instance, if the old boyfriend / husband cheating on her was the catalyst for the break up, then there’s a good chance you’ll be rebound fucking her as both retribution and an ego-preservation function for her. If she split with the guy due to her own indiscretions, or the guy was simply too beta for her to endure any longer, depending on your Game and Alphatude in comparison, you’re probably rebound fucking her. If the former lover was himself an Alpha (based on her perception) and she’s become his leftovers, then you’re probably in for a long haul down the emotional tampon highway – or at least if you permit it – and the end result will be frustrating.

However, the far more entrapping situation is being the ‘sure thing’ in this episode. AFC guys resort to ‘sure thing’ thinking constantly, but it’s not uncommon for women too. What tends to happen when we find ourselves at the end of an immersing LTR is that we look for what rewarded us prior to our involvement with the monogamous relationship. Naturally, monogamy requires the lion’s share of our attentions, so when that attention is freed as the result of a break up, the automatic response is to seek out what had previously rewarded us with good feelings (sex). So we return to the ‘sure thing’; the person, habit, behavior, that rewarded us before. It’s really just subconscious deductive reasoning. When you lack options, the tendency is to go back to what worked before. It’s the path of least resistance, because the perception is that it will be easier to return to that sure reward than to generate new rewarding situations (i.e. fear of rejection). The inherent problem with this is that, although this might work in the short term, what had been rewarding before  has fundamentally changed.

All of this now has been compromised by the ease with which we can now reconnect with our past intimacies. We still consider the person using the same metrics we had when we knew them 5-10, maybe 20 years ago. Our rational minds might, logistically, take into account the time and life changes that have occurred in that span, but our emotional perception is still one of the idealization we held for her. Maybe it was regret for having not invested more, or self-resentment for lacking the understanding of  how the Game fundamentally works at that time, but the emotional reaction competes with the rational observations.

Your rational side will see the physical ravages of time and the post-Wall desperation for provisioning a woman endures, but your emotional fights this with the decades old perception of the girl you knew and loved and wants for that to be reestablished, and particularly under the auspices of your now enlightened view of how women’s game really works. You know you could make it work now because your eyes are opened! Who wouldn’t want to go back in time to run Game on the girl who crushed his soul, or get back the girl he knew he was too beta to keep around?

As seductive as all that sounds, it’s very important to keep this dynamic in perspective. There’s not a lot of profit in revenge, nor is there any realistic way to right the past wrongs. You should always move forward. It’s hard not to take a little personal pleasure in having an old flame seek you out while your SMV is ‘out of her league’ – the reverse of how it was in the past – and you may think it some kind of karmic justice in just entertaining her, but in reality you’re just grabbing at shadows and wasting time.