oneitis

The suffix is medical, and was chosen to be. By the time Neil Strauss (opens in a new window) set the word down in 2005, the pickup community already used it for a disease of beginners: a man fixes on one woman who is neither dating him nor sleeping with him, grows nervous and needy around her, and drives her away. The observation underneath is ordinary and mostly correct. A person who has staked everything on one outcome behaves badly in its presence.

A diagnosis with a cure is a product. The cure given in the same passage (opens in a new window) was volume: other women, in quantity, after which the first would look less singular. The seminars and books that followed sold the treatment as a mindset of plenty and a schedule of several. They sold the symptom as a warning, because a man has to fear the condition before he pays for the course.

Under load, the word can’t tell obsession from commitment. Any attention paid to one person beyond the point of a guaranteed return reads as a symptom, so a man who knows the word diagnoses himself at exactly the moment he begins to care. Its cure is the condition the word calls health. It is the one term in this file that describes the sunk cost fallacy accurately, and it was coined to sell a way out of caring about anyone in particular.

By the definition in circulation, this file is a case history. Of its 19 forms, 16 are filed on one person. Across 120 days she issued 12 disclaimers, I acted on 0 of them, and I ended each of the 3 silences longer than a day. The 3 forms since are filed on 3 different people inside 6 days, which is the cure as prescribed. It has cost $428.33 and 375 minutes so far, and the literature does not say what a full course runs.