Underneath all the bombast and saber rattling that plays out whenever President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin meet up, there’s always an undertone that sounds more like a plot line from a high school film comedy.

You know the script: Mean-spirited cheerleader dumps her boring-but-dependable boyfriend in the hope of snaring the dreamy quarterback and being elected Prom King and Queen. The dreamy quarterback has a pathological fear of commitment, though, and gives her the runaround until she ends up being jilted on Prom Night. This painful experience gives an early glimpse of how lonely the world can be when you treat relationships as power transactions.

That’s a pretty good analogy for the state of play in the multi-billion dollar geopolitical wrangling over Russia’s gas exports. Two years ago, Moscow was so confident of the world’s hunger for its methane that it dumped its largest customer, the European Union, to pursue its invasion of Ukraine. Putin felt he could afford to be so reckless because a new buyer was waiting in the wings: China.

Xi, however, appears to have other ideas. Every time the two leaders have met since then, feverish reports out of Moscow have promised an imminent deal on a proposed Russian-Chinese gas pipeline, dubbed Power of Siberia 2. Every time, Putin has gone home with nothing.

That shouldn’t really be surprising. China’s demand for gas is still growing, but it’s already signed contracts for more than enough supplies to serve its needs well into the next decade — at which point batteries and green hydrogen may prove more compelling options. Beijing is naturally wary of the sort of energy blackmail Putin demonstrated in attempting to use the Nord Stream pipe to pressure Europe over Ukraine. The Chinese government is also under fire from Washington for its close ties with Moscow, while Putin appears to be offering ever-more-desperate concessions to get an agreement signed. The benefits to Xi of playing hard to get are obvious.

Putin’s two-day visit to Beijing last week was a case in point. In advance of the trip, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak was pushing the usual hype. Heading back Saturday with no sign of a deal in hand, Putin’s own assessment was more sobering.

“This is always a complicated process,” he said in a briefing with Russian media. After four years of design and survey work by Gazprom PJSC, the original plan — a gas-only pipeline through Siberia and Mongolia — appears to be off the table. The two options Putin laid out are quite different: one following the same route but with a separate oil pipe laid alongside it, or alternatively an LNG shipping lane through the Arctic Ocean. This latter would be “almost the same as the pipeline,” he added.

Brave words can’t hide the sound of a dictator’s heart breaking. Neither option would be anything like the deal that Putin hoped to sign.

The new oil line wouldn’t be supplying additional demand — Chinese consumption is barely growing now, according to state-owned China National Petroleum Corp., as electric vehicles eat into gasoline and diesel’s market share. Instead, Russia would be laying hundreds of thousands of tons of steel pipe to give Beijing optionality — an alternative source of crude to protect against the risk that, in a major conflict, the US could obstruct China’s energy supplies by blockading the Straits of Malacca and Singapore.

That’s also the lesson of the second option for an LNG shipping route. Contrary to Putin’s assertion, this would be nothing like a pipeline. First there are the costs of liquefying and re-gasifying. Then there are logistical challenges, at a time when sanctions prevent Moscow from using much of the US and European knowhow that underpins the LNG industry. That will make it far more difficult and expensive than the original idea. It would also, surely, be far smaller: Power of Siberia 2 had been designed to carry 50 billion cubic meters of gas a year, more than Russia’s total LNG exports.

It would, on the other hand, provide China with more of that precious optionality — especially in the event that worsening ties with the US cut off that source of LNG, too. Optionality also explains the 300 billion yuan ($41.5 billion) China is investing in green hydrogen, a clean fuel that aims to be cost-competitive with exported gas, and the active construction work under way to build a Power of Siberia 2-sized pipeline to Turkmenistan, a nation more easily pushed around than Russia.

The global energy market, like the high school dating market, can be a brutally unsentimental place. It’s one, too, where the mean girls and boys perpetually underestimate the value of establishing and maintaining stable relationships, and find themselves rejected and isolated as a result.

“Nothing is more reliable,” Putin said this weekend, “than supplies from Russia.” In a world rapidly turning its back on fossil fuels, reliability is increasingly the only thing Moscow has to offer. Putin’s behavior in recent years has squandered even that advantage.