The Game

slurred. I suppose it was difficult for any woman—especially a drunk one—to see the same routines that had ensnared her being used on another woman. And effectively.
    Katya leapt to her feet and stormed to the bar. Mystery followed to appease her. But when she refused to acknowledge him, he stomped out of the club like an angry child. Although Katya was bisexual, Mystery still wasn’t getting threesomes. He made the same mistake every time: He pushed too hard. He needed to follow Rick H.’s advice and make the experience her fantasy, not his.
    When I woke up, I took a plane home, leaving the two of them alone in the hotel room until their flight in the evening.
    A few hours later, I received a phone call: “Hey, it’s Katya.”
    “Hey. Is something wrong?”
    “No. Mystery wants to marry me. He got down on his knees at the Hard Rock pool and proposed. Everyone applauded. It was so sweet. What should I do?”
    The only reason I could come up with to explain Mystery’s desire to get married was so he could get a U.S. citizenship. But Katya wasn’t a U.S. citizen. She still had a Russian passport.
    “Don’t rush into anything,” I advised. “Just get engaged. Or, if you want, they have commitment ceremonies at the chapels there. Do that. Then spend some more time together and see if this is something you both really want to do.”
    Mystery grabbed the phone. “Hey, man, you’re going to get really mad at me. We’re getting married. I love this girl. She’s crazy. We’re on our way to the chapel. Okay, bye.”
    The guy was an idiot.
    That evening, Mystery carried Katya over the threshold of Project Hollywood humming “Here Comes the Bride.”
    They’d known each other for three weeks.
    “Look at my ring,” Katya cooed. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
    “Our rings cost eight thousand dollars,” Mystery said with pride. That was basically all the cash he had. Though he was raking in money from his workshops, he was a fan of man toys—computers, digital cameras, electronic organizers, basically anything with a chip.
    “This whole marriage thing,” Mystery told me while Katya was in the bathroom, “is the best routine ever. She loves me now. She gets off on calling me her husband. It’s like a time distortion.”
    “Dude, it’s the worst routine ever,” I replied, “because you can only do it once.”
    Mystery took a step toward me and removed his ring. “I’m going to tell you a secret,” he whispered, putting the ring in my hand. “We’re not really married.”
    If any other PUA had told me he’d gotten married in Vegas to a girl he’d just met, I would have known it was a joke. But Mystery was so headstrong and unpredictable that I had given him the benefit—or, more accurately, the detriment—of the doubt.
    “Yeah, after you left, we walked by a jewelry store in the Hard Rock and decided to fake our marriage. So I bought two rings for a hundred bucks. She’s such a good liar. She totally fooled you.”
    “You’re both great illusionists.”
    “Don’t tell Katya I told you. I think she’s really enjoying the role-play. On an emotional level, it’s the same as really being married for her.”
    Mystery was right: Perception is reality. In the days that followed, their entire relationship changed. They actually started acting like an old married couple.
    Now that he was living with a woman, Mystery didn’t feel the need to go out anymore. To him, clubs were for sarging. To Katya, though, they were for dancing. So she started going clubbing without him. After a while, Mystery hardly left his room or, for that matter, his bed. It was hard to tell whether he was just being lazy, or if a depression was coming on.
    There’s a pattern the pickup artists have called rocks versus gold. It’s a speech a man gives a woman he’s dating when she stops having sex with him. He tells her that women in a relationship want rocks (or diamonds)while men seek gold. Rocks, for a woman, are wonderful nights out, romantic attention, and emotional connection. Gold for a man is sex. If you give a woman only gold or a man just rocks, neither will be satisfied. There must be an exchange. And Katya was giving Mystery the gold, but he wasn’t giving her the rocks. He wasn’t taking her out at all.
    It wasn’t long before they began to resent each other.
    He’d say, “She gets drunk every night. It’s driving me crazy.”
    She’d say, “When I met him, he had all these plans and ambitions. Now