# Two Hunters

> *When a thing is pursued long enough after its purpose is gone, the pursuit becomes its own purpose — and two people can spend years hunting each other without either one ever being what the other was truly after.*

**Language:** EN
**Source:** wecome1.com - Transparent Awareness

---

Why do people pursue and play hard to get in relationships?
Watch two people who are attracted to each other, and beneath the surface you will often find something older and stranger than attraction going on. A pursuit. A circling. One advances and one withholds; one performs interest and one performs indifference; one is trying to win, and one is trying to be won. It has the shape of a hunt. And like most hunts, the hunters rarely stop to ask what, exactly, they are hunting — or whether the thing they will catch is the thing they actually wanted.

To see clearly what this is, begin with what it once was.

There was, long ago, a reason for the pattern, and the reason was in the body. Coupling could produce a child, and a child was not a small thing — it was, for one of the two, a year of vulnerability and years of care, an enormous and unavoidable investment. And so nature drew the two roles unequally: the one who would pay more became the one who chose, and the one who would pay less became the one who competed and pursued. The withholding and the wanting, the selecting and the striving, were not games then. They were the machinery of survival, tuned over an immensity of time. One held back because the stakes of not holding back were written into the flesh; one pressed forward because pressing forward was the only door.

But look at what happens now. Two people meet with no thought of a child at all, no intention of building anything, no shadow of that ancient investment. The purpose that once justified the whole pattern is simply gone. And yet the pattern remains. The withholding remains, the pursuing remains, the circling and the performance and the strange arithmetic of who wants whom more — all of it continues, fully intact, in service of a purpose that has quietly vanished. This is the first thing to understand, and it is the key to everything that follows: when a behavior outlives the reason it was built for, it does not disappear. It finds a new reason. And the new reason is almost never named.

So what is being hunted now, if not a mate, not a child, not a future?

Strip the thing down and you find that the real quarry has become a feeling. For the one who pursues, the prize is not the person at the end of the pursuit — it is what catching them will prove. *I was able to win them, therefore I am enough.* For the one who is pursued, the prize is not the pursuer either — it is what being wanted confirms. *I am desired this much, therefore I am worth something.* Neither one, if you look closely, is actually hunting the other human being. Each is hunting a verdict about themselves, and using the other person as the instrument that delivers it. The beloved is not a destination. The beloved is a mirror, held up in the hope of seeing one's own worth reflected back.

And a feeling cannot be possessed the way a person can be met. This is why the hunt never ends. The one who needs to prove they are enough will need to prove it again tomorrow, because the proof does not keep; it fades, and the hunt must be restarted, and a new pursuit begun, and another after that. The one who needs to feel desired will need the same confirmation again and again, because it too drains away and leaves the same emptiness it briefly filled. The window seems to close, and then it opens again, and the same game runs one more time — not because the person was not caught, but because the person was never what was wanted. What was wanted was the feeling of catching, or the feeling of being caught, and those are appetites that no single acquisition can satisfy. The hunt is not a road to somewhere. It is a wheel, turning in place, and calling its turning progress.

Now watch what this does to the thing it claims to be reaching for.

It makes real closeness almost impossible, and for a reason worth stating plainly. Closeness requires being seen as you actually are — it requires the lowering of the guard, the removal of the mask. But the hunt requires the opposite. Each player must perform a role: the desired one, the striving one, the one who is not too eager, the one who holds a card back. And a mask, worn long enough, becomes a wall. Two people can circle each other for a very long time, each performing their part flawlessly, and never once meet — because the performances meet, and the persons behind them never step out from behind the performance at all.

It breeds, too, a strange contempt for whatever is caught. The prize that depended on being unattained loses its value the moment it is attained; the hunter, having won, finds the won thing curiously dull — because the pull was never toward the person, it was toward the not-yet-having, and the moment of having dissolves the only quality that made the person shine. This is why so many of these pursuits go cold precisely when they succeed. The catch is devalued by being caught. And underneath it runs the quietest damage of all: each person, having located their worth in being desired or in desiring successfully, slowly stops developing the worth that would come from within — the character, the mind, the actual self — because none of it seems to matter next to the verdict of the game. The value is sourced entirely from outside, and so the inside is left to go hollow, until one day the outside supply is cut — by age, by circumstance, by a room that no longer turns to look — and there is nothing within that was ever built to stand on its own.

And here is where the pattern, pushed far enough, begins to break itself.

For when the pursued raise their price high enough — when being hard to attain is played as the whole of one's worth — something predictable happens on the other side. The pursuers begin, quietly, to do the arithmetic. So much effort, so much time, so much uncertainty, and no guarantee of anything at the end of it. And a growing number of them simply conclude: not worth it. They withdraw. Not because the prize became more precious, but because the price became absurd. There is a bitter irony folded into this, and it belongs to no single person but to the logic itself: the strategy of raising one's value can, past a certain point, produce not scarcity but irrelevance. To be very expensive is not the same as to be very valuable. Sometimes it only means being left on the shelf.

But do not mistake this withdrawal for an escape. The ones who walk away have not seen through the game — they have only lost patience with it. They still see the other as a price to be weighed, a cost against a benefit; they have simply judged the cost too high and closed the ledger. The seller priced the goods out of reach, and the buyer declined to buy — but both of them, to the very end, were treating a human being as goods. This is the deepest part of the whole affair, and the hardest to see: the problem was never the price. The problem was that there was a price at all. Two people looked at each other and saw a transaction — one setting the terms, one deciding whether to meet them — and whether the deal closes or collapses, the tragedy is the same. Each had already reduced the other from a person into a thing with a value attached.

And underneath even that, if you follow it all the way down, is a thing neither hunter would ever admit: that the hunt is not really an attempt to reach the other person. It is a way of not having to. To pursue a verdict, to perform a role, to weigh a price — all of it keeps you safely occupied with yourself, and spares you the one thing the whole apparatus exists to avoid: standing, undefended and unperforming, in front of another human being who is doing the same, and simply being seen. The game feels like a way toward closeness. It is, in truth, an elaborate way of staying protected from it.

So is there a way out? Not for the crowd — let that be said honestly. The wheel will keep turning; the culture that feeds it grows only stronger, and no great collective awakening is coming to lift everyone off it at once. But the belief that there is no exit at all is worth examining, because it is the exact texture of a very specific kind of trap: the one where the door is open the whole time, and no one tries it, because everyone has learned that trying is useless. The helplessness is not a property of the situation. It is a lesson the situation teaches — and a lesson, unlike a locked door, can be unlearned, by one person at a time even when it can never be unlearned by all.

The exit is not to quit the field. The ones going cold and walking away have quit the field, and it changed nothing; they carry the same ledger to the same emptiness. The exit is stranger and quieter than quitting. It is to stop seeing a price. To look at another person with no filter and no calculation of gain — not as a prize to be won, not as a mirror to confirm your worth, not as a cost to be weighed against a benefit, but as a single human being, as real and as unrepeatable as you are. The moment you do that, the whole apparatus falls silent. There is no price, so nothing is too expensive. There is no game, so nothing is won or lost. There is only a person in front of you, and you in front of them, with the masks down and the ledger closed — which is the one thing the hunt was always, secretly, built to prevent, and the only place a real meeting between two people has ever been possible.

Almost no one will do this, and that is the plain truth of it. The wheel is easier, and the mirror is seductive, and the ledger feels like wisdom. But the door was never locked. It was only that everyone walked past it, so busy hunting a feeling that they never saw the person standing right there — waiting, as they were, to be met by someone who had finally put the weapons down.