Queens Do Not Chase!

Something peculiar happens when you really like a man who is not quite giving you enough. Instead of noticing that he is standing over there doing very little, you may suddenly become extremely busy.

You create movement. You create openings. You provide warmth, encouragement, invitations, little bridges across the gap. Before long, a perfectly intelligent woman has somehow left the palace, abandoned the throne and is running through the ornamental gardens after a peacock.

The peacock, naturally, is delighted.

The Peacock Has an Excellent Arrangement

Chasing rarely looks ridiculous while you are inside it. It looks hopeful.

Perhaps he is shy. Perhaps he moves slowly. Perhaps he needs time. Perhaps the general lack of forward motion is merely temporary and everything will become wonderfully clear once the universe has finished whatever mysterious paperwork it is currently doing.

So you keep the whole thing alive.

And every new attempt creates another opportunity to feel rejected.

That is the exhausting part. The person doing the chasing experiences every hesitation, every vague response and every little absence of enthusiasm because she is the one continually moving toward the answer.

The peacock experiences something quite different.

There he is, perched magnificently on the fountain, receiving attention, admiration and repeated proof that somebody finds him terribly interesting.

His feathers have never looked better.

Suddenly, He Is a Rare Bird

The really funny part is how quickly pursuit can inflate the importance of the person being pursued.

A man who began as perfectly pleasant and worth getting to know can, with remarkably little effort, become an exotic creature of enormous romantic importance simply by being difficult to reach. His reluctance starts making him seem more special, as though ordinary availability belonged to the sparrows while this particular peacock had to be admired from a respectful distance.

Before long, he is mysterious, elusive, perhaps even complicated, when sometimes he is merely standing still looking decorative.

And that is where the chase quietly changes the question. You stop asking whether you particularly like what is happening and become absorbed in whether you can make him like you enough to finally start moving toward you. A man you were simply getting to know has somehow become something to win.

That is quite a transformation.

The original question was, “Do we enjoy each other?”

Somewhere along the way it became, “Can I win?”

And nothing turns an ordinary romantic situation into a competition quite like one person doing all the pursuing while the other remains beautifully positioned beside the fountain.

The Queen Is Now in the Shrubbery

This is the point where the whole scene deserves to be viewed from a little distance.

The queen is running.

The peacock is not.

She is creating momentum, offering chances, keeping hope alive and occasionally performing the emotional equivalent of crawling underneath a hedge to see whether there is any sign of movement.

Meanwhile, the crown is somewhere behind her.

The strange thing about repeated pursuit is that it can make his response feel more valuable than her experience. His attention becomes the prize, while whether she is actually enjoying this increasingly lopsided arrangement receives remarkably little attention.

The spotlight stays firmly on the peacock.

Nobody appears to be interviewing the queen.

And yet she is the one doing most of the work.

The Most Comfortable Person in the Story

There is also a small injustice hidden inside chasing: the two people are not having the same romance.

You may be experiencing hope, doubt, anticipation, embarrassment and rejection in rotating shifts.

He may simply be experiencing attention.

This does not necessarily make him cruel; plenty of people will happily accept pleasant things that arrive without requiring much from them. Admiration is agreeable. Being wanted has traditionally tested rather well with the public.

The peacock may honestly have no idea why the garden has become so emotionally complicated.

From his perspective, things are rather nice.

Someone keeps coming to see him.

The Crown Was Never the Problem

The phrase Queens do not chase can sound grand if taken too literally, as though a woman should recline on velvet while romantic developments are delivered to her by footman, but that is not really the interesting part.

A queen can initiate. She can flirt. She can make it wonderfully obvious that she likes someone. She can cross a room, suggest something, open the door.

The comedy begins when she has to keep supplying all the movement because nothing much comes back.

That is no longer a bold romantic gesture.

That is palace maintenance.

And perhaps that is why chasing can feel so strangely diminishing after a while. Not because reaching toward someone makes you less valuable, but because repeatedly reaching toward someone who remains comfortably where he is can make you forget that there were supposed to be two people moving here.

At some point, the whole magnificent scene becomes almost impossible not to notice: one person is doing the pursuing, interpreting, hoping and recovering, while the other has somehow become increasingly desirable by mastering the ancient art of remaining exactly where he was.

Eventually, even the most magnificent peacock is still just standing in a garden.

And the queen has a palace to get back to.