Alpha Mail: can you go home again?

Sensei asks if it is wise to attempt to go back and retrieve a situation that was previously lost:

Given a situation where you meet someone towards whom you have more than a passing interest, but with whom you failed to succeed due to ignorance of the rules of game, after some time has passed (at least two years) would you say that the principles of game can be successfully applied to make another attempt, or does the very act of "going back"/"trying again" itself violate the principles of game, and one should simply write off the loss?

I am more specifically asking whether in your judgement female psychology is susceptible to game once an opinion has already been formed, or whether the window of game's operational effectiveness is closed whether or not game was actually applied the first time around.

Thanks for spreading the game theory around, by the way. As a Christian I've generally misunderstood it to only be helpful for landing one-night stands, and therefore not much use to one who fears God. After your explanations, though, I immediately grasped the applicability to a much wider sphere of life, and have been profiting accordingly. To be honest, I think what you are describing actually goes somewhat beyond basic game theory and more closely resembles a path to recovering actual masculinity from the clutches of our half-ruined culture.

I appreciate the positivity from the non-predatory crowd. I would simply say that what I am attempting to do with Alpha Game is to apply the basic principles of Game more broadly to socio-sexuality rather than focusing solely on a particular subset of sexual relations as other Game bloggers do. My interest also tends to be more theoretical, whereas Roissy and Athol, just to give two of the more substantive examples, are both relentlessly practical in their applications of Game to pick-up and marital relations, respectively. This is not a criticism of either of them in any way, as I both appreciate and respect what both men are doing in their tangential areas of interest.

But my more theoretical approach doesn't mean it is a bad idea to put these theories into practice from time to time in order to see if the empirical results correspond with the logical conclusions. And as much as I dislike the myopic and literally navel-gazing topic of so-called Inner Game, it may actually be somewhat applicable here. If one is "trying again" due primarily to a bad case of lingering oneitis, then one should obviously not return to the scene of the previous failure since it will likely not only result in additional failure, but could well cause one to take several steps backward in one's exercise of Game.

If, on the other hand, one has a good grasp on precisely how things went wrong as well as what mistakes were made, and the situation is one of well-understood and low-hanging fruit, then it could be an excellent opportunity to test how far one's skills have developed during the interlude. For example, I know it was both mystifying and confidence-inspiring to hear, in eleventh grade, the very girl that completely rejected me three years before was telling people that we had "gone out" in the past. (This, by the way, underlines my previous point that for women, it is the pursuit that is the conquest, not the end result.) As it happens, I didn't look back because I was no longer interested, but the incident taught me a valuable lesson in the dynamic nature of female attraction as well as about female unreliability with regards to personal history.

The challenge here is that once behavioral patterns are formed, they tend to stay fixed. It was fascinating to attend a reunion at a school I did not attend and observe how the group's behavior still tended to fit the historical pattern rather than the one it would have naturally formed on the basis of who the people were at the time had they not been previously well-acquainted.

However, I detect danger in the language Sensei uses when he asks if "one should simply write off the loss". If he has not already written it off, if he did not do so as soon as it was clear to him that she did not feel a level of attraction to him similar to the one he felt for her, then he is probably too emotionally caught up in her and would benefit from putting her behind him. There are so many girls on the girl tree that it is totally counterproductive to spend two years or more wondering about the one that was out of reach.

My advice is to move on and not look back. If he happens to run across her and she provides legitimate indications of interest - and remember, her rank will be declining over time as his is increasing - then checking to see if there is anything there won't do any harm, so long as he doesn't immediately melt into a pool of supplicating BETAtude the moment she gives him a sign that she might be attracted to him now. He has to maintain his frame, and I have some doubts questions about his ability to do so with this specific woman for whom he clearly has a particular jones.