I RECENTLY lunched with, among other people, a woman who was a big fan of The Rules. This book became a bestseller in the 1990's by promising to help women catch husbands. The basic premise was that you were supposed to be a) easy to be with and b) hard to get. From the cursory flip-through I once gave a friend's copy, this involved ripping out any vestiges of personality you might possess, the better to make yourself amenable to any available man; and then, when said man asked you out, act as if you couldn't care less whether he dropped off the face of the earth.

It is hard to defend a manual on how to catch the perfect husband written by a woman who has recently gone through an embarassingly public divorce, but this woman tried. It is the men you don't particularly care for, she pointed out, that are the most attentive and persistent.

Possibly true. But it occurred to me long after this desultory conversation that the authors (and a large number of women who have attempted to follow their creed), might have the causation backwards.

Assume there are better and worse catches in the dating market. Part of the dating process, a rather big part, involves determining whether you are, or are not, too good for the other person. So the people who pursue you the most persistently may be the people who are not as good catches as you are; hence your relative lack of interest. Conversely, the people you want most are the ones who are probably better catches than you are, and therefore you are probably more likely to do the pursuing.

I don't rule out the evolutionary possibility that men simply prefer to do the pursuing, however. What do our readers think?