The Cost of the Chase

I · Two Versions of the Fire

In 1993, the psychologists Roy Baumeister, Sara Wotman, and Arlene Stillwell gave seventy-one students an unusually balanced assignment. Each was asked to remember unrequited love twice: once as the person who had wanted more, and once as the person who had declined to provide it. Eight students supplied only one account, leaving the researchers with a hundred and thirty-four stories. The pages did not describe opposite sides of the same encounters; they were separate memories, selected and reconstructed by mostly middle-class students in their early twenties. But the contrast between them was so orderly that it resembled two genres.

The would-be lovers wrote of apparent mutuality, encouragement that later became inexplicable, and refusals that had never quite arrived in a complete sentence. Their stories contained misery, but also the pleasure of longing: anticipation, idealization, the private cinema of what might yet occur. The rejectors remembered less enchantment. They wrote of guilt at causing pain, of efforts to remain morally innocent, and of pursuit that had become irritating or intrusive. One side had to explain how a hope so vivid could end without meaning. The other had to explain how causing hurt could coexist with having done nothing wrong. The pursuer repaired self-esteem; the rejector managed guilt. Each made the other mysterious.

This is almost exactly the work performed by the American phrase getting burned. Merriam-Webster preserves two slang senses around the ordinary image of injury. A burn can be a remark meant to humiliate; to be burned can also mean to be deceived, tricked, or taken in. The romantic usage draws from both. It says that a person invested trust, attention, money, time, or face and came away damaged. In New York one might hear, “He chased her for months and got burned.” The dictionary does not mark the expression as New York speech; the city supplies the tempo and the audience, not the definition.

Grammar then does moral work. “He got burned” reports an outcome while leaving the flame unattended. Perhaps she misled him. Perhaps he mistook courtesy for a promise. Perhaps both lived inside a provisional relationship without agreeing what it was. “She burned him” is stronger: it assigns agency and suggests that she knowingly caused the loss. Everyday speech slides between these sentences because disappointment prefers a villain and guilt prefers an accident. The facts may justify either account, or neither.

The passive form also offers a culturally acceptable confession. It lets a man disclose that something penetrated his defenses without quite saying that he was vulnerable, attached, or wrong. The vocabulary is damage assessment: trust extended, position exposed, cost incurred. “Heartbroken” places him inside a love story; “burned” places him inside a transaction or a contest. The second may be easier to tell at a bar, and much harder to examine afterward.

There are also boundaries to the phrase. A cutting insult can be “a burn,” and sexual-health slang can make the word mean something medical. Neither is the subject here. Nor does “chasing” name one stable behavior. It may mean making the first move, continuing through uncertain interest, or refusing to accept a clear no. The first is ordinary courtship; the second is a coordination problem; the third is no longer courtship simply because the pursuer still calls it that. American slang compresses all three into motion, then compresses refusal, deception, and humiliation into flame.

The useful question, then, is not whether getting burned hurts. It is what the hurt can prove. Pain is an experience. Blame is a judgment about another person's conduct. They often arrive together, but psychology gives no warrant for treating them as synonyms.

II · The Body Keeps the Refusal

The easiest way to become foolish about rejection is to deny its physical force. In a 1998 study, the psychologist Mark Leary and four colleagues asked a hundred and sixty-four people to recount an occasion on which their feelings had been hurt, either as victim or perpetrator. The incidents differed, but their common message was what Leary called relational devaluation: another person seemed to value the relationship less than the participant wished it to be valued. Distress tracked the feeling of rejection, particularly when the source was someone familiar or close. Hurt was not merely sadness with better publicity. It mixed anxiety, hostility, and a sudden revision of one's place in another person's world.

Romantic pursuit makes that revision unusually severe. A refusal does not answer only “Will this relationship occur?” The injured mind hears answers to adjacent questions: “Was I desirable? Did I read the situation correctly? Was the time I spent ridiculous? Did other people see me misread it?” A person may lose a hoped-for partner, a flattering picture of himself, and confidence in his own social perception in the same afternoon. “Burned” is attractive because it gathers these losses into one bodily word.

What hurts, on this account, is not solitude alone but asymmetry: discovering that the same connection occupied a smaller place in somebody else's life. The injury is comparative before it is clinical.

Neuroscience briefly appeared to make the metaphor literal. In 2011, the psychologist Ethan Kross and colleagues recruited people who had recently endured an unwanted breakup. Inside a scanner, participants looked at a photograph of the former partner while recalling the rejection; in another condition they received painful heat. The authors found activity associated with both the affective and sensory dimensions of physical pain. The finding gave exquisite laboratory dignity to the sentence “It hurts.” It also acquired a much larger public life than its design could support.

Three years later, the neuroscientist Choong-Wan Woo and seven colleagues asked a more exact question. Sixty recently rejected adults viewed former partners and friends and experienced painful heat and warmth. At the broad anatomical level, pain and rejection again occupied some of the same territory. But multivariate classifiers—methods that ask whether distributed patterns can identify a mental state in a new person—distinguished pain from rejection. They identified physical pain at ninety-two per cent accuracy and social rejection at eighty per cent, but a classifier trained on one performed at chance on the other. The experiences shared a map while leaving different footprints.

This correction matters. “My brain treated it like pain” is a defensible shorthand for distress. “Therefore someone injured me” is a moral claim no scanner can establish. Neural tissue does not subpoena the rejector, inspect the messages, or distinguish a broken promise from an unwanted answer. It records the person having the experience, which is precisely what subjectivity means.

Nor do people enter the scanner, or the date, equally expectant. The psychologists Geraldine Downey and Scott Feldman described rejection sensitivity as an anxious readiness to expect, perceive, and overreact to rejection. Across four studies, participants higher on this disposition more readily inferred intentional rejection from ambiguous behavior; new couples carrying it became less satisfied. The concept is useful because it describes an amplifier, not because it diagnoses every person who suffers. A man may be rejection-sensitive and correct. He may be tranquil and wrong. The disposition changes the threshold at which smoke is perceived; it does not tell us whether anyone struck a match.

III · The Pursuit Script

Before an American man can be burned in a chase, somebody has to teach him that chasing is his part. In 1989, the social psychologists Suzanna Rose and Irene Hanson Frieze asked ninety-seven undergraduates—fifty-eight women and thirty-nine men—to list the actions that belonged in a routine first date. The students supplied a remarkably settled piece of theater. The man asked, planned, checked his money, arranged transportation, paid, initiated physical contact, and asked for another date. The woman prepared her appearance, waited, maintained the interaction, and regulated intimacy. Men occupied the public and economic sphere; women controlled access to the private one.

The study was small, Midwestern, collegiate, and of its time. Its value is not as a census of contemporary dating but as an X-ray of a script that remains culturally intelligible. A follow-up in 1993, among a hundred and thirty-five mostly white undergraduates describing hypothetical and actual dates, again found the proactive male and reactive female pattern. Apps have put both sexes behind the same glass rectangle, yet the inherited verbs still sort themselves unevenly: he pursues, wins, lands, or fails; she chooses, gives him a chance, leads him on, or turns him down.

A script solves awkwardness by distributing tasks. It also distributes exposure. If initiation is treated as evidence of manhood, a man collects the visible refusals. He must infer whether warmth is invitation, ordinary sociability, or reluctance to be blunt. If refusal is treated as a woman's task, she must decide how explicit to be, how early, and at what risk. She can be condemned for coldness when clear and for manipulation when kind. The classic script therefore creates two specialists: the man in possible humiliation and the woman in possible guilt.

Neither specialist is necessarily good at reading the other. In a 2020 speed-dating study of 1,226 people, the psychologist Anthony Lee and four colleagues asked participants to report both their own sexual interest and the interest they perceived from partners. Men tended to overperceive and women to underperceive. But the average sex difference became negligible once the researchers accounted for sociosexual orientation—how open a person was to uncommitted sex—and a simpler human habit: projecting one's own interest onto somebody else. The pursuer sees a smile through the light generated by his own desire.

This is an important demotion of destiny. Men are not biologically condemned to delusion, nor women to secrecy. Initiators of any sex possess more hope to project and more actions to interpret as progress. Gatekeepers of any sex know that ordinary friendliness may be entered into evidence against them. Gender matters partly because culture has not distributed those positions randomly.

The rejector also has reasons not to make every answer maximally crisp. In a registered 2022 study, the psychologist Gili Freedman and four colleagues examined direct rejection and ghosting. Making safety concerns salient increased the appeal of ghosting, although the predicted interaction with the target's gender was less clear in the main bisexual sample than it had been in a mostly heterosexual pilot. The honest conclusion is modest: indirectness can be motivated by safety, but neither sex nor silence alone reveals the motive.

That modesty disappears easily after the fact. The rejected man sees the weeks of friendly messages and asks why a no was not delivered sooner. The woman sees the same messages as the careful management of an advance she was still evaluating, or trying to end without provoking. Sometimes she was ambivalent. Sometimes she enjoyed attention without intending reciprocity. Sometimes she was afraid. Sometimes he was indeed encouraged and then abandoned. A cultural script supplies each side with a plausible story before the evidence arrives.

IV · The Invisible Contract

A chase becomes expensive by increments. There is the first drink, then the second restaurant, the taxi sent in rain, the introduction, the favor, the rearranged weekend, the long message written with the solemnity of a treaty. No single act creates a contract. In the pursuer's memory, however, they begin to form a ledger. What felt generous while hope was rising can feel extracted once hope is withdrawn.

Relationship science offers a mechanism for the ledger without endorsing its invoice. In 1980, the psychologist Caryl Rusbult tested what became known as the investment model. In a role-playing experiment and a survey of ongoing romantic relationships, commitment increased when the relationship was rewarding, alternatives were poor, and the person's investments were large. Investment included resources tied to the relationship and costly to lose: time, shared memories, possessions, disclosures, and social connections. The theory concerned relationships that existed. Applied to unreciprocated pursuit, it is an analogy—but an illuminating one. Investment can bind the investor before it binds anybody else.

A second mechanism is less romantic. The psychologists Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer demonstrated the sunk-cost effect in 1985 with theater subscriptions and decision problems: people became more willing to continue an endeavor after spending money, time, or effort on it, partly to avoid feeling wasteful. Their participants were not courting anyone. Yet the application is recognizable. After six weeks of pursuit, abandoning the hope seems to declare the six weeks foolish; one more invitation offers both romance and retroactive vindication. Effort becomes a reason to spend more effort.

The trap is conceptual. In an economic exchange, my contribution can generate your obligation because we agreed to terms. In courtship, my effort may generate my attachment without generating your debt. A dinner accepted is normally agreement to a dinner. A kind reply is agreement to a conversation. A kiss may be agreement to that kiss. None silently purchases the next event. The pursuer can accurately say, “I gave a great deal,” while the target accurately says, “I never promised the thing you hoped to receive.”

This is where American language often changes tense. Before rejection, the man “wanted to do something nice.” After it, he “did all that for her.” The preposition reveals the invoice. It does not prove that he was cynical from the beginning. People commonly discover their conditions only when they go unmet. Generosity and expectation can occupy the same act without being equally visible to the giver.

There are, of course, genuine burns. A person may knowingly simulate romantic interest to obtain money, professional access, housing, gifts, status, sex, attention, or another benefit. She may promise exclusivity she has no intention of keeping; he may do precisely the same. Deception is not abolished merely because entitlement exists elsewhere. But the evidence must show the manufactured expectation and the intended gain. The amount spent by the disappointed person cannot supply those missing facts. A large private investment is proof of a large private investment.

The invisible contract is thus signed by one party and breached by two imaginations. The pursuer imagines that increasing contribution should increase the chance of return. The target imagines that because no bargain was spoken, no bargain is being inferred. The later argument is not only over affection. It is over whether there ever was an agreement.

That dispute is why receipts settle so little. They can establish what was paid, arranged, or sacrificed; they cannot establish the meaning both people assigned to it. A ledger is excellent evidence of expenditure and poor evidence of mutual intent. The missing document is not another receipt but a shared understanding.

V · Losing Before Witnesses

Burning is more than hurting because it has spectators. The rejected man does not merely fail to acquire a relationship; under the old pursuit script, he can appear to have failed at the masculine work of acquiring one. The audience may consist of friends who watched him boast, colleagues who saw the flirtation, an app whose interface keeps score, or an imagined jury no less severe for being invisible.

The psychologists Joseph Vandello, Jennifer Bosson, Dov Cohen, Rochelle Burnaford, and Jonathan Weaver called the relevant idea precarious manhood. Across five American studies published in 2008, participants treated manhood, more than womanhood, as a status requiring social proof and vulnerable to loss. In later experiments, men given gender-atypical feedback showed heightened threat, and physically aggressive thoughts became more accessible. The studies were largely conducted with undergraduates, and the threat was to gender identity, not romantic appeal. They do not show that a rejected man will become aggressive. They show how an audience can convert an event into a status test.

That conversion has several exits. A man can grieve privately. He can reinterpret the match as wrong for both parties. He can make himself the butt of the story, using humor to retain authorship. Or he can restore rank by lowering hers: she is shallow, calculating, unstable, a tease. “I got burned” can be the opening sentence of honest self-accounting, but it can also be a face-saving passive in which his misjudgment becomes her act.

A separate study helps prevent the last possibility from becoming a stereotype about men. In 2015, the psychologists Ashleigh Kelly, Shelli Dubbs, and Fiona Barlow studied heterosexual men's reactions to rejection. In samples of a hundred and fifty-eight and three hundred and ninety-eight, men higher in social-dominance orientation were more likely to blame women and to report persistence, manipulation, aggression, or threats after rejection. Hostile sexism and a belief that “insubordinate” women should be disciplined helped explain the association. The result is correlational and self-reported. Its significance lies in concentration: adverse response clustered with particular beliefs about hierarchy; it was not presented as the natural male sequel to a no.

This distinction is morally and sociologically important. A rejection may threaten a status script that men disproportionately inherit. What happens next still depends on the man, his beliefs, his audience, and the norms that audience rewards. Friends who describe ordinary refusal as emasculation increase the status cost. Friends who treat clear interest as the only dignified basis for pursuit reduce it. Culture supplies the tinder; it does not light every person.

Humiliation also requires precision. There is a difference between being rejected in public and being rejected for the public. A woman who says no at a party has not necessarily staged his defeat; she may simply have been asked there. A woman who circulates private messages for ridicule, or invites an advance in order to expose it, has added an audience as an instrument. In the first case, witnesses happen to exist. In the second, witnesses are part of the act. “Burned” is most literally apt in the second, because the loss of face was not merely foreseeable but produced.

The passive phrase protects the speaker from having to say which injury he means. Was he sad, deceived, or made ridiculous? Each is real when it occurs, but they imply different conduct by the other person. Masculine honor prefers a single dramatic answer. Adult description is less efficient.

It is also less contagious. A story of mismatch invites consolation; a story of treachery recruits a side. The choice of noun can enlarge the audience long after the original audience has gone home.

VI · Burn, Bruise, or Bad Map

The hardest romantic injury is often not a clean no but a changing signal. In two experiments published in 2004, the psychologists Katherine Buckley, Rachel Winkel, and Mark Leary found that rejection produced more anger, sadness, hurt, and inclination toward aggression than acceptance. Yet extreme rejection was generally not more painful than mild rejection. What mattered was sequence: feedback that became more rejecting produced worse reactions than feedback that remained steadily rejecting. The temperature drop carries information. It forces the recipient to explain not only loss but change.

This helps explain why people reach for the language of being led on. Yesterday's warmth is treated as a promise against which today's distance must be reconciled. Sometimes this inference is correct. Often it is simply the mind demanding that variable human feeling behave like a signed term sheet.

A popular explanation goes further and calls the chase intermittent reinforcement: irregular rewards supposedly condition the pursuer as a slot machine conditions the gambler. The metaphor is irresistible, the direct human courtship evidence less so. The best-known uncertainty experiment, by the psychologists Erin Whitchurch, Timothy Wilson, and Daniel Gilbert in 2011, assigned forty-seven female undergraduates to believe that men liked them a lot, an average amount, or an uncertain amount. The uncertain group reported more attraction. A 2013 conceptual replication in a doctoral dissertation by the psychologist Bryan Richards successfully increased wondering but found no overall attraction advantage for uncertainty; only within the uncertain condition did wondering predict later attraction. No direct study of a variable-ratio reinforcement schedule causing persistent human romantic pursuit was located for this essay. Ambiguity occupies attention. Calling that addiction adds mechanism the evidence has not earned.

What, then, has happened when a man says he got burned? The evidence above supports a four-part editorial taxonomy. It is a tool for description, not a psychological scale.

The first case is refusal. He hoped; she did not reciprocate; she communicated the answer without making a false promise. Relational devaluation can make this intensely painful. Nothing in the intensity converts nonreciprocity into wrongdoing. This is a bruise to hope, not proof of a burn inflicted by another.

The second is miscoordination. Both contributed warmth, ambiguity, or changing interest; neither necessarily understood the other's threshold for commitment. He projected his desire; she postponed clarity, perhaps from ambivalence, politeness, conflict avoidance, or safety. The encounter can be costly, and either person can behave carelessly, without a plan to exploit. “He got burned” may describe his felt outcome. “She burned him” outruns the known facts.

The third is deception or exploitation. One person knowingly manufactures romantic expectation in order to obtain a benefit. The benefit need not be money; it may be status, access, housing, sex, labor, gifts, or the regulation of loneliness. Here the language of being burned can carry a justified allegation, provided the allegation rests on evidence of intention and use, not merely on expense and disappointment.

The fourth is humiliation. The rejection is deliberately staged, shared, or sharpened for an audience. The wrong lies not in declining affection but in using another person's vulnerability as social material. Again, mere visibility is insufficient. Public humiliation requires more than witnesses; it requires conduct aimed at degradation.

These cases overlap in life. A deception may end in humiliation; miscoordination can contain moments of selfishness; a clear refusal can follow an earlier promise sincerely made. The taxonomy does not settle facts from a phrase. It asks the phrase to surrender them. What was said? What was promised? What benefit was obtained? When did the signals change? Was the audience accidental or recruited? The passive “got burned” is psychologically eloquent precisely where it is evidentially incomplete.

VII · New York’s Audiences

New York makes exit imaginable. The Census Bureau estimated more than eight million residents in 2024, a scale that offers the consoling thought that every failed encounter can be replaced: another borough, another app, another social set. The phrase “he got burned” fits that brisk accounting. It summarizes a bad position and clears the books. But population is context, not a count of romantic alternatives available to any one person.

The city’s anonymity is routinely overstated. People meet inside industries, neighborhoods, schools, friendship networks, and scenes. A person may be anonymous on the subway and thoroughly known among the people whose opinion matters most to them. Reinvention is possible because there are adjacent worlds; humiliation is possible because a chosen world may be dense enough to watch. A screenshot can travel farther than the relationship that produced it.

The same rejection can therefore have two audiences in New York: strangers who will never hear of it, and a small circle that may. Which audience a person imagines changes the story they tell about the loss. This is an editorial argument about social setting, not a measured local rate of deception or injury. The evidence earlier in the essay distinguishes pain from blame; the city supplies no warrant for collapsing them.

VIII · What the Ashes Prove

Return to the students with their two stories. In one, the warmth had meant something, the ambiguity had been extended, and the final refusal rewrote the past. In the other, warmth had remained warmth, the signs had never formed a promise, and continued pursuit had made ordinary politeness feel dangerous. The researchers did not possess matched testimony from the same encounters. They could compare the forms of self-explanation, not decide whose memory was true. That limitation is the point with which everyday conversation begins.

To say that a man pursuing a woman “got burned” in an American or New York context means that he experienced the pursuit as a costly injury. The costs may include wounded attachment, lost time or money, embarrassment, self-doubt, or a belief that trust was abused. The phrase works because it is vivid, masculine without being confessional, and conveniently imprecise. It permits a man to report pain without saying “I wanted her more than she wanted me.”

Is the event common in New York? The available research cannot supply a local base rate, partly because “burned” is not a stable event category. Ordinary nonreciprocity is structurally unavoidable wherever people choose among one another; deception, exploitation, and deliberate humiliation are narrower claims and should not borrow its frequency. No evidence reviewed here shows that New Yorkers are usually victims of a scheme. What is culturally familiar is the story: the expression makes the kind of loss intelligible in American English while revealing almost nothing about its cause.

It may also imply that she deceived, exploited, or humiliated him. That implication is not automatically true. If she clearly declined and promised nothing, he was rejected, however badly it hurt. If both allowed ambiguous hope to outlive shared understanding, they were miscoordinated, perhaps carelessly. If she knowingly performed interest to extract a benefit, deception is the relevant fact. If she recruited an audience to degrade him, humiliation is. The same distinctions apply with the sexes reversed, and outside heterosexual courtship; the evidence reviewed here is narrower because the older literature is narrower.

Two sentences should therefore be kept apart. “He feels burned” is testimony about his experience and deserves to be heard as such. “She burned him” is a claim about her behavior and deserves evidence. Sympathy can accompany the first without prematurely granting the second. This is not pedantry imposed on heartbreak. It is the minimum fairness owed to both people when one relationship has produced two moral stories.

The distinction also gives the man back more agency than the injury idiom at first allows. If the episode was a refusal, he need not convert sadness into prosecution in order to preserve dignity. If it was miscoordination, he can revise the map by which attention became promise. If it was deception or humiliation, naming the specific conduct produces a stronger account than the haze of “burned.” Precision does not make the loss smaller. It prevents one loss from becoming every possible wrong.

Such precision is not automatic absolution for the rejector. It is a refusal to let one person's feeling perform all the fact-finding. It leaves room for carelessness, cowardice, and cruelty, while requiring each to be shown in its own name.

The mature account is sometimes unsatisfying: nobody cheated, nobody plotted, nobody won. One person hoped beyond the available agreement; the other understood the arrangement differently; a cultural script encouraged pursuit, softened refusal, and made the ending feel public. The fire was real. The arson was not.

Notes on Sources

Baumeister, R. F., Wotman, S. R., & Stillwell, A. M. (1993). Unrequited love: On heartbreak, anger, guilt, scriptlessness, and humiliation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(3), 377–394. Seventy-one upper-level psychology students supplied 134 stories. The authors explicitly note that the two sets were not paired accounts of the same encounters and that differential selection could not be ruled out.† (Retrospective narratives from a mostly young, middle-class student sample.)

Merriam-Webster, “burn” and “burned,” dictionary and thesaurus entries checked August 31, 2026. Sources for the American slang senses of humiliation and deception. They do not establish a specifically New York usage.

Leary, M. R., Springer, C., Negel, L., Ansell, E., & Evans, K. (1998). The causes, phenomenology, and consequences of hurt feelings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1225–1237. N = 164; source of the relational-devaluation account.

Kross, E., Berman, M. G., Mischel, W., Smith, E. E., & Wager, T. D. (2011). Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108, 6270–6275.† Woo, C.-W., Koban, L., Kross, E., Lindquist, M. A., Banich, M. T., Ruzic, L., Andrews-Hanna, J. R., & Wager, T. D. (2014). Separate neural representations for physical pain and social rejection. Nature Communications, 5:5380. Sixty participants were recruited for the task study; imaging analyses used fifty-nine. Source of the ninety-two and eighty per cent classifier accuracies and the failed cross-classification. (Together these papers support overlap at one level and distinction at another; neither turns distress into evidence of wrongdoing.)

Downey, G., & Feldman, S. I. (1996). Implications of rejection sensitivity for intimate relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(6), 1327–1343. Four studies; source of the anxious-expectation, ambiguous-perception, and couple-dissatisfaction findings.

Rose, S., & Frieze, I. H. (1989). Young singles' scripts for a first date. Gender & Society, 3(2), 258–268. Fifty-eight women and thirty-nine men. Rose, S., & Frieze, I. H. (1993). Young singles' contemporary dating scripts. Sex Roles, 28, 499–509. N = 135.† (Old, regional, predominantly white undergraduate samples; cited as evidence of a culturally legible script, not universal contemporary behavior.)

Lee, A. J., Sidari, M. J., Murphy, S. C., Sherlock, J. M., & Zietsch, B. P. (2020). Sex differences in misperceptions of sexual interest can be explained by sociosexual orientation and men projecting their own interest onto women. Psychological Science, 31(2), 184–192. N = 1,226: 586 men and 640 women.

Freedman, G., Hales, A. H., Powell, D. N., Le, B., & Williams, K. D. (2022). The role of gender and safety concerns in romantic rejection decisions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 102, 104368. Registered report with a mostly heterosexual pilot and a bisexual main sample.† (Safety salience made ghosting more appealing; its interaction with target gender was less clear in the main study.)

Rusbult, C. E. (1980). Commitment and satisfaction in romantic associations: A test of the investment model. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 16, 172–186. A role-play experiment and survey of ongoing relationships. Arkes, H. R., & Blumer, C. (1985). The psychology of sunk cost. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 35, 124–140.† (Rusbult studied existing relationships; Arkes and Blumer studied theater subscriptions and general decisions. Their application to pursuit is expressly analogical.)

Vandello, J. A., Bosson, J. K., Cohen, D., Burnaford, R. M., & Weaver, J. R. (2008). Precarious manhood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(6), 1325–1339. Five studies.† (Largely American undergraduate samples and gender-identity threats, not romantic rejections; aggressive cognition is not aggressive conduct.) Kelly, A. J., Dubbs, S. L., & Barlow, F. K. (2015). Social dominance orientation predicts heterosexual men's adverse reactions to romantic rejection. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 44, 903–919. Study 1 N = 158; Study 2 N = 398.† (Correlational, self-reported evidence about individual differences, not a prevalence estimate for men.)

Buckley, K. E., Winkel, R. E., & Leary, M. R. (2004). Reactions to acceptance and rejection: Effects of level and sequence of relational evaluation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40, 14–28. Two experiments; source of the increasing-versus-constant rejection result.

Whitchurch, E. R., Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2011). “He loves me, he loves me not . . .”: uncertainty can increase romantic attraction. Psychological Science, 22, 172–175. N = 47. Richards, B. J. (2013). Target-Uncertainty and Initial Romantic Attraction: For Whom Is the Unknown More Alluring Than the Known? Doctoral dissertation, Ohio University.† (The conceptual replication increased wondering but did not reproduce the overall attraction effect; it is unpublished and not peer-reviewed. Neither study tested intermittent reinforcement.)

U.S. Census Bureau, QuickFacts, New York City, population estimate for July 1, 2024: 8,478,072 residents. This is context for the city’s scale, not dating data.

† marks findings limited by design, sample, replication, publication status, or transfer beyond their tested setting. Figures 1 and 3–5 are qualitative editorial diagrams. Figure 2 schematizes conclusions from named imaging studies; it does not plot neural coordinates. The four-part taxonomy is an editorial synthesis, not a validated scale. Part VII is a qualitative argument about audience and city scale; no New York base rate for the unstable category “getting burned” was located.

Drafted with AI (OpenAI Codex) as a private research synthesis, August 31, 2026; edited, and answered for, by humans. The sources above are real publications, design limits travel with their findings, failed replication is reported, and direct evidence for the most tempting addiction metaphor was not found. Set, with affection and without affiliation, in the manner of a certain Manhattan weekly.New York revision drafted with AI on October 12, 2026; editorial review pending. ◆ ◆ ◆