Good seduction?

I was talking a friend recently who was having a little bit of relationship trouble, specifically a little bit of a lack of reciprocation in interest with a new paramour. My friend is (for various reasons) the type to value being straightforward and direct about things -- the type to bemoan the gamesmanship of modern love, e.g. waiting to respond to someone, not appearing too interested, etc. "Don't wait to text back" are the sorts of platitudes you sometimes see in sappy and misguided social media posts, as if it is so brave and honorable to text someone back right away rather than trying to doing them the favor of making them desire you more than they thought they could ever desire another human being.

This has been a topic that my post-graduating-from-therapy-self has been thinking about for a little bit now -- what role does seduction or other types of potentially "good" manipulation have in healthy relationships? Because my first thought when my friend was telling me this story was maybe my friend needed to read the Art of Seduction, or Dangerous Liaisons, or get any sort of game for the sake of the paramour and for the good of the relationship. Because seducing and game aren't necessary always insidious. I've said it before, and even after dropping most manipulation from my emotional daily vocabulary I still believe it -- everyone wants to be seduced.

I asked me friend, "what is it you like about your paramour"? The answer: mystery, and the charming way the paramour goes about doing things in which everything feels like a pleasant surprise. It's the little things, so little that my friend was almost reluctant to tell me because it seemed silly. Things like giving up your reserved parking spot and parking on the street for the other person, working some connections to get into a hip new place, taking care of everything -- planning, paying, and otherwise trying to anticipate and then meeting another person's needs and wants. In the "old days" they called this "wooing", but they could have called it seduction because what it is at its heart is trying to induce feelings of love, affection, or desire in another person. It's manipulation, but it's not "bad" manipulation, and by that I mean it's not at all unwanted (in a consensual romantic relationship, stalking is another story).

I'm not saying to lie or pretend to be someone other than who you are not to get someone to fall in love with a fantasy. But there is nothing deceptive about (to go back to the earlier example) waiting a reasonable amount of time to text someone back in order to heighten the recipient's anticipation and pleasure when they finally do hear back from you. There is nothing deceptive about encouraging mystery and a sense of discovery between each other rather than dumping all of your personal information and baggage on during the first few dates. It's not whether people deserve or don't deserve honesty, it's that people don't really want honesty in that form in this arena. Maybe that's controversial to say, and certainly there would be plenty of people who probably truly do (anti-seducers, for one). But most just say they want the honesty. What they end up choosing is to be swept off their feet by someone who keeps them guessing, by someone who mixes a bittersweet and puzzlingly compelling blend of frustration and satisfaction in their interactions. Romantic love feels better when it's a bit of a challenge and involves a healthy amount of guesswork and angst. I don't know if it's absolutely necessary to use actual seductive skills to achieve this result, but it's certainly one of the most reliable and effective ways. It takes quite a bit of effort to seduce, and at least some skill. Consequently, there seems to be much more demand than supply for seduction. The fact that everyone wants to be seduced but there is such little actual seduction happening suggests that seducing someone, particularly seducing well, is one of the nicest things you could ever do for another person. Don't you think?

Almost sociopath (part 1)

From a female reader wondering where she falls on the sociopath spectrum:

I've been reading your blog from your first post on since I found it at the beginning of this week (still reading, expecting your book by end of week).  It's...fascinating.  But, more than that, it often times rings shockingly true.  I've spent years studying sociopaths, but given much out there was negative I'd frequently told myself "well I don't kill/rape/assault" and thus couldn't possibly be one.

This being said it seems highly possible I am.  I have done "bad" things - taken what wasn't mine, gone places I shouldn't have, destroyed psyches and lives - with nary a care in the world.  ...In fact even the "I don't assault" statement isn't entirely true given I'd been in a few fights; but they were non-chargeable incidents, disbelieved by others (no one believes the adorably pint-sized blue-eyed, blond, girl is capable of violence, especially when she targets bigger kids and boys), when I was young and they were often provoked or a playfulness that went awry...I thought I was playing, the other person found me to be physically bullying.  What I've always found most troubling - still do find most troubling - was how not troubled I was/am.  When my friends wept at movies I laughed, when they seemed horrified by the latest terrorist threat I shrugged, and when they grew cross at something in the news I simply did not see why they were making the fuss (after all, it did not personally affect them, did it?).  ...I used to torment my best friend thinking it was playful/it didn't bother her and hadn't a clue what I'd done was considered wrong/cruel until junior high when she wrote an explicit poem on how it made her feel...and then directly told me that the poem was about our interactions.

I slip in and out of interests and infatuations with both things and people without a second look back.  When asked what I love I simply gauge the people I'm with and go with the most satisfactory-to-them answer - with nerdy friends I like Lord of the Rings, with jock friends I like weight-lifting and kick-boxing, and on and on it goes.  This holds true for people as well...while I've had a small handful (3-5) of friends for years, since childhood, it seems due to not being able to keep any others.  I make friends fast, easily, but rarely keep them - they all just seem to slip away on me.  Of course I confess others have run off do to some game I played with/on them that they were not overly fond of.  Whatever the reason though I find I don't mind too much provided I didn't lose them to someone else - this holds overly true in the romance department; people don't leave me, I leave them, and I'll reconnect with exes just to ensure, in the end, I left them.

I cannot, for the life of me, say with any certainty what/who I, myself, love.  I have interests, yes, and can hold them for years upon years, at times almost obsessively I've been told, but loves?  ...I don't know...

After knowing me for a while some people have mentioned my...personality.  High school friends called me the Devil's puppy and said I was like the manipulative Katherine from Cruel Intentions (the modernized Dangerous Liaisons with Sarah Michelle Gellar).  Another friend noted that I was "the one that gets people to do things and then hides in the bushes, laughing, while the cops arrest them" (she was unaware at the time that I'd, in fact, done something just like that in my earlier youth...my then friend got kicked out of that store as a result, it was hilarious to me).  Even my grandmother declared "that's you!" as I read off some sociopathic traits I'd learned of.  My eyes have been mentioned once or twice, but only in positives (in that they were attractive) except from enemies who've noted I "stare right through" people...of course I don't know if they mean through like into the "soul" of or through like the other person wasn't there.

In argument for not having sociopathy: I am female (thus making it statistically less likely, so the research says).  I do understand sarcasm - which you mentioned would be hard for sociopaths - but there's a caveat on this one: I understand it in my family and close relations who use it with great frequency, I understand the kind I grew up on.  If I'm with someone new - a new friend, a new mate - I'm slower to pick it up...especially if written out without a winky/smiley emoticon or some other signifier that states the person is joking.  I also can at least speculate why another might cry should there be a stimulus for it around - she's crying because someone in the movie is dying - and have cried once or twice at movies myself (the greatest emotion attached to my crying though is frustration, even in a movie situation where I'm often finding something keenly unfair in the narrative towards a character I identify with in some way, but still I cry at a situation I know, logically, to be completely falsified...something I hate, the sense I'm being manipulated into a feeling, which is probably why I'll never watch a movie that's made me cry again).  ...Of course these might be due to years of experience and/or my exceptions, not my rules, in personality.  Not sure.

Sociopaths in literature: Dangerous Liaisons

I shall have this woman; I shall carry her away from the husband who profanes her; I shall even dare to ravish her from the God she adores. What a delicious pleasure to be alternately the cause and the conqueror of her remorse! Far be it from me to wish to destroy the prejudices which torture her! They will add to my happiness and my fame. Let her believe in virture, but let her sacrifice it to me; let her slips terrify her without restraining her; let her be agitated by a thousand terrors and not be able to forget and to crush them save in my arms. Then I agree, she may say “I adore you,” and she alone among all women will be worthy to say so. I shall indeed be the God she has preferred.

-- Valmont, Dangerous Liaisons