My anecdotal evidence is that, as you point out, a relationship formed on desperation covered up by acting tends to end the moment the acting dissolves. This implies that sustaining such relationships means acting for the rest of your life, an outcome you probably want to avoid.
Given that your criteria for a "success" are, essentially, "going on dates" and "having sex", I'm not sure whether you're content merely maximizing those two factors or actually care about the resulting relationships being fulfilling, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're actually interested in trying to maximize the latter.
As such, the actual advice I have on this topic is that rather than trying to act away your desperation, it's both more effective and ultimately more rewarding to just "simply" decrease your level of desperation. A discussion of how to accomplish this would be even more out-of-scope, but in my case it essentially amounted to about a year of psychiatric treatment. The benefits of this are not just that it increases your life satisfaction in general (even while single), but also, importantly for this topic, allows you to shift your dating strategy away from "soliciting a large number of short-term dates in rapid-fire manner" and towards "randomly meeting people dynamically in environments sustained over longer periods of time". I think that this is more successful and rewarding strategy in the long-term, and not one that depends on PHTG (nor where it would be beneficial).
In summary: The best way to play hard to get is to just... actually be hard to get, which implies being happy enough with yourself that you don't really need a partner in your life; especially if they're not helping you achieve your real goals. (Besides "having sex", I mean. But then, why not simply pay somebody?)
Do you have any evidence that happy people fall in love slower than happy people. So far I have only noticed a slight inverse relationship where crisis retard my romance response. All attempts to slow the response by having more friends failed (although being happier is nice for other reasons). Past attempts at PHTG have often succeeded.
If you believe that I fall in love faster than other people because I am “desperate” then all my past relationships should have collapsed when I told the person I liked them. This has not occurred. As long as I wait until t... (read more)
Motivation
I have long wondered if I would be more romantically successful if I played hard to get. In a majority of my relationships I pretend to be less interested in my (female) to increase their interest in me. Because I am unusually affectionate, excitable and gregarious, playing hard to get (PHTG) moves me toward the modal behavior.
I recently moved to a coastal US city and experimented with texting strategies on dating apps. I switched to low effort, easy-to-respond-to texts, and greatly increased my dates/week rate. I now go on about two dates a week. I worry that when I meet someone that I really like, I get too excited and signal "desperate" or "low status". So only less exciting women attend the second date. This could extend the girlfriend search and force me to settle for a bad match.
The Intuition
In a date, women have to assess lots of behavioral factors about a partner. Unfortunately, dates do not offer real-time tests of problem-solving, social, physical and mental health skills. You just learn if the person is an interesting talker. So women want to infer about partner's behavioral traits from limited information.
One mechanism that female primates (including human women) have evolved is to prefer men who are high in status. Becoming high status requires those social and mental health attributes that women want, so status is correlated with effectiveness (presumably it also had direct benefits in the evolutionary environment). Women therefore evolved to be more attracted to high status men. My favorite dating blog puts it
But women need honest signals of status (signals which are difficult to fake). A great signal would be how my peers treat me, but this signal is unavailable on a date. Instead women can only judge my status from surface signals and my reactivity.
Reactivity
To avoid reinventing the wheel, I'll quote Grotesman's practical definition here in full.
High-status, unreactive behaviors
Low-status, reactive behaviors
(Hugh Ristik's take, A related video )
Intentionally reducing my reactivity helps me play hard to get.
Reducing interest
Furthermore, expressing too much interest is hard to recover from on a first date. Expressing too little interest is relatively easy to recover from. Waiting to express interest in the partner until you're confident they will reciprocate is a better strategy. Evidence
Setting the prior
Because I am highly reactive and affectionate relative to the average man, I expect I can gain by reducing my reactivity and hiding interest in the first three dates. However, there is also a folk wisdom that "being yourself is always most attractive" or "being authentic is best". I am doubtful but cannot disprove it. Furthermore, I might be too bad an actor to hide my feelings. Both theories imply intentionally reducing reactivity and affection will have negative results. I will test the claim that "intentionally reducing reactivity and affection for the first three dates will increase attraction in partners" (H1)
My prior is 70% that the H1 is true (conditional on null being false).
Experiment design
Fortunately now that I have frequent dates, I can test the theory. For the next ~20 dates I will flip a coin before arriving at the venue. If the coin lands heads, I will intentionally reducing my reactivity and interest signals. If the coin lands tails, I will make no effort in either direction. I talk a lot and loudly. I tell the other person tons about my life. I riff a lot on their statements.
The control
My control behavior is my regular date behavior, but people vary wildly in their courtship behavior so that deserves explanation. I have ADHD, am extroverted and am prone to ranting. I fidget a lot. I make lots of eye contact. When I am interested in a partner, I give a lot of reinforcement. I laugh hard at their jokes. I validate their statements (sometimes even bad ones). I do tease a lot, which is high-status.
It's difficult to compare my behavior with others because I do not date men. From observing other couples I am louder, more talkative and more reactive, but I cannot distinguish first from 30th dates at the table over. These are my best guesses of comparative behavior.
The treatment
In the treatment group I will intentionally reduce the interest signals. In general, I will attempt to observe the dates reactivity and interest and exactly match it. That could include:
Behaviors I will do in both cases
Data
In the treatment category I will continue the altered behavior for three dates. However, I will only gather data from the first two, since I might lose interest after the first date and skew my own data. I'll collect three signals of interest
Analysis plan
I reject the null "that PHTG does not matter". In an academic sense, the null is perfectly possible. In a practical sense, I must choose to PHTG or not. If the null is true the decision does not matter, so getting it wrong has no practical consequences.
I set my prior at .65 that PHTG is more effective. PHTG is more consistent with the presented evidence, but not overwhelmingly so.
After 10 dates in each group, I will do a t-test on both second dates and eye contact to produce a likelihood ratio. I will post that likelihood ratio in the final analysis. Then I just multiply the prior by my LR to find my posterior.
If my posterior belief is between .4 and .6, I will just not PHTG. It's too much of a hassle.
Ethics
All posts about dating get ethical responses because they inevitably violate our vague but intense norms about dating. Ultimately, I must present myself somehow, and I choose the best light possible.
Because this is an AB test, ethical complainants face an additional hurdle. I'm going on these dates anyway, and must apply either the treatment or the control. Therefore, if one wishes to state that the AB test is unethical, one must further assert that either "all treatment" or "all control" or "do not go on dates" would be more ethical (non-consequentialist ethicists please start your own post to debate philosophy).