Dating books - help or hindrance?

"Women have more guile than men," begins The Technique of the Love Affair by an anonymous ‘Gentlewoman', "but men have the advantage of being more necessary to us than we are to them." I don't know if that was true back in 1928 when The Technique was published, or if it's true now. Either way, people just don't write dating books like that any more.

The Gentlewoman was Doris Langley Moore, a costume historian and Byron scholar, married but only 23 at the time of authorship. (Reviewing it in the New Yorker, Dorothy Parker commented that if she'd only read it years ago, she might have been "successful instead of just successive".)

After the Great War, women significantly outnumbered men and the mores of the prior generation were being shucked off, but The Technique is in no mood to celebrate newfound emancipation: "It is useless to tell men we are independent, and then beg them to come and dance with us. It is fatuous to proclaim that we don't care whether we marry or not, and then fall into the arms of the first man who asks us, as countless women do - else why so many divorces? We are not managing the thing skillfully."

In our own era - the Great Noughties Man Drought - when tumbleweeds blow through bars and clubs, lips grow parched and cracked from a paucity of kisses, and unused women are tossed onto a mountainous bonfire around which other women sit, singing mournful songs of dates gone by, it is more important than ever that we manage the thing skillfully.

My mother always said to wear red and stand by the punchbowl, but coquetry has probably advanced. I read a tall pile of dating advice books to find out. For the most part, they made my mother look like a genius.

 

All dating advice books fall into one of three categories. First, there are seduction handbooks - highly technical manuals which assume that you've landed a date and need to know how to get some. Their suggestions are pretty ridiculous.

The Complete Idiot's Guide To The Art of Seduction, for example, advises you to imagine yourself entering a room to the sensuous beat of a Latin band, about to perform a tango. It also suggests giving your clothes an exploratory fondle: "ask yourself what the material is saying".

Next are books, popular even as late as the 90s, designed specifically to help you extract a marriage proposal. Now there seems to be a whole new genre of books emerging that recommends you dump whoever it is that has made you feel so disheartened that you have picked up a dating advice book.

These new books argue that it's much better to hold out for real love, even if that means staying single, than to settle for anything less. Have we learnt nothing from Fleetwood Mac? Stevie Nicks sang it; you better believe it: Players only love you when they're playing. As long as men hope to sleep with you, they have a reason to pretend to care about you more than they do. Helping women avoid being played like a piano is what these books are all about.

How things have changed. Ten years ago a lot of books assumed that an engagement ring was something to be chased down with the panting seriousness of those faceless, black-robed cavalry in the Lord of the Rings movies. The most famous of these is 1995's The Rules and the 1997 sequel, The Rules II.

"When you're with a man you like, be quiet and mysterious, act ladylike, cross your legs and smile. Don't talk so much. Wear black sheer pantyhose and hike up your skirt to entice the opposite sex!"

Although it pains me to admit it, one rule made sense: don't hang around your mother or anyone who badly wants to see you married off before going on a date, as you might then "reek of desperation". In general, though, there's something clumsily dogmatic about these books, which tell women never to accept a Saturday night date invitation after Wednesday and never to initiate sex, even after you're married, "even if you want it badly".

Still, an excess of dogmatism is preferable to an excess of pragmatism. In the book The Program: How to Find a Husband After 30, Rachel Greenwald uses what she learned in Harvard Business School to formulate a 15-step Action Plan. This didn't horrify me at first. Rather, the horror grew on me, creepingly, like an Edgar Allen Poe story.

Taking the tone that you're single only because you haven't managed to get yourself organised into a relationship, Greenwald creates a "proven, proactive, assertive program" that uses "powerful marketing tactics" to "get you" a "lifelong partner".

Be ultra-focused, she says. Allocate 10 percent of your income to an account named Partner Search. Nominate someone to be your mentor. Carry out market research by asking friends and acquaintances for feedback on your "packaging", otherwise known as your appearance. (Here, Greenwald - no limpid-eyed dreamer - reveals a snarky side: wear an underwire bra because "after 30 it can't hurt". "Think hard" about your hair, as there are a lot of blondes with "shockingly horrible hair colour" and redheads whose colour is "so phoney-looking". And "never dye your eyebrows the same red as your hair".)

If you think all this methodical self-objectification is horrible, wait until the Advertising chapter, where Greenwald suggests you do a direct mail campaign, sending out reply cards (self-addressed envelopes enclosed) asking your friends to introduce you to eligible candidates.

"___Yes!" says the card. "Please call me. I know someone whom I'd really like you to meet. He is my..." and then there are check boxes next to designations like "Doctor; Dentist; Plumber; Accountant" ranging through "Cousin; Ex-boyfriend; Father; Boss" to the ever-intriguing "Other".

This is all very well, but in New Zealand, you are likely to have already met the ex-boyfriends, dentists, cousins and mysterious Others of your acquaintances. You might even share them. The direct mail campaign won't work. You can't just send away for romance. Your options are more along the lines of lowering your standards, or accepting half-baked relationships with men who just aren't that into you.

 

A major publishing success story with a movie tie-in, He's Just Not That Into You was co-written by Sex and the City writers. All of the chapters are about how if he doesn't call or he's married or he completely goes to ground, then he's just not that into you.

Boy, does that book send out mixed messages. While it reassures you that "You, the superfox reading this book, are worth asking out," it is also confident that whoever the guy is, he's just not that into you. It's not that he's scared to ask you out; "the only thing he's scared of... is how not attracted to you he is."

Suddenly Single, by Julia Hartley Moore, takes a similar tack only, being a New Zealander, Hartley Moore says, he's "really not that fussed one way or the other". Like HJNTIY, Suddenly Single lists and refutes all the excuses that inadequate men commonly make, in order to vanquish these dangerous and destructive myths from the minds of over-generous would-be lovers.

Hartley Moore's New Zealand is a pulsating place of quickie hook-ups at conferences and one desire-fuelled encounter at a gas station: "It was lust at first sight... phone numbers were exchanged before the tanks were full." Yet, on the whole, her book is depressing. Where HJNTIY advocates passivity on the woman's part so she can be sure that he is indeed "into" her, Suddenly Single advises passivity so she can be sure that he's not just into her money. Let him chase, Hartley Moore seems to say, so you'll have time to work out if he's an opportunistic, bounty-hunting mega-spiv.

But over the phone, Hartley Moore insists she's not disillusioned about men. She's frustrated with women. "Look, guys do things their way and women do things a different way, but women blame men all the time. And you can't blame men; you've got to understand them. It's a bit like, if you wanna protect your home from a burglary, talk to a burglar. If you wanna know about fraud, talk to a fraudster. You need to understand the nature of the beast. But we, as women, think we can analyse. Guys'll say something and we'll think, ‘Oh no, he'll mean... ' We'll turn it around to make it suit ourselves, and we're so wrong."

She says the dating scene in New Zealand is thriving. "They're getting dates, girl. You know this man shortage thing? There's really no man shortage. They're getting dates. But it's the kind of dates and what they accept: women will accept being treated like crap, and if a guy can get what he wants from you and do very little else, and if he doesn't really fancy you huge amounts, he'll just do that. Simply because he can. Because you let him." (Hillary Clinton, she says, is a bad role model for women. "She's going to bed with him, she knows how many affairs he's had: what does that teach your daughters?")

It's hard to argue with this better-off-single reasoning, but in a chapter called Loneliness, appended to a re-issue of HJNTIY, the cracks are starting to show. At least now, the book insists, "No one is making you feel like you aren't enough. No situation is making you feel unlovable... There is just you. There is just you and your standards... " Sounds dreamy! Everyone loves to kiss and cuddle their standards when it's cold at night.

Bucking the trend for choosing the brave, lonely road on the quest for only the truest of loves, in The Atlantic last month, single mother Lori Gottlieb published a lengthy essay in praise of "settling". Observing that every woman she knows, no matter how successful or secure, "feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried", Gottlieb reasoned that it's better not to hold out for "passion or intense connection", and that anyway, "what makes for a good marriage isn't necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship". "Unless you meet the man of your dreams (who, by the way, doesn't exist precisely because you dreamed him up), there's going to be a downside to getting married," she argues, "but a possibly more profound downside to holding out for someone better."

Gottlieb's point is not just to settle, but to settle good and early - while you're still young and cute, and before the field of candidates narrows. Having turned 40, she realised, "If I don't want to be alone for the rest of my life, I'm at the age where I'll likely need to settle for someone who is settling for me."

Gottlieb passes on a friend's hot dating tip: "Even if he's not the love of your life, make sure he's someone you respect intellectually, makes you laugh, appreciates you... I bet there are plenty of these men in the older, overweight and bald category (which they all eventually become anyway)."

 

There's actually a fourth category of dating advice book - the kind that tell you how to finesse the single life. They don't assume you're single because your mum dresses you funny or because you aren't using the right sort of index cards. They figure you just are single. For now. And you're okay with that. Yet even these books are mostly devoted to how to be sexy and get dates.

Imogen Lloyd Webber, daughter of Andrew Lloyd Webber, has published The Single Girl's Guide, a primer for the urbane, post-Sex and the City woman, interleaved with feeble jokes about how much single ‘girls' love shoes, black cabs and cocaine.

But although it's all terribly modern and tech-savvy, somehow I'm not convinced Lloyd Webber really adds much to our body of knowledge.

For a shrewd amalgam of dating advice, seduction techniques and state-of-the-art man-catching systems, your best bet, even 80 years on, is still The Technique, which is more witty, persuasive, elegantly written and bold.

Like every other dating advice book, The Technique states that the man should be the one doing the chasing. Then, in a chapter subtitled "Certain methods of approach to be used on meeting men who appear worthy of conquest", it tells you how to make him do this. Cultivate poise of manner ("freedom from embarrassed self-consciousness"); light-heartedness ("An air of wistful melancholy may be interesting in men, but it is very rarely interesting to them"); neatness of apparel (although it begs women not to bother spending money on clothes, since "the vast majority of men know nothing more of women's dress than that it is flimsy and expensive, and that the less it resembles their own the more they like it"), and be more flattering in your speech than in your actions. "Say charming things, but restrain your impulses to do them; be prettily grateful for an invitation, but not too eager to accept it; express yourself as glad to see him, but show no great desire for his company in any of your actions."

 

I suspect that plenty of readers don't really expect to overhaul their love lives on the basis of advice from a book. I wonder whether they come to dating advice books more for the camaraderie because, whether they're consolatory or brisk and disdainful, dating advice authors are unfailingly companionable.

Helen Gurley Brown nailed this in her 1962 Sex and the Single Girl, with a blithe, gabby style: "A few weeks later I just happened to be shopping in his store (like Japanese planes just happened to be over Pearl Harbor) and stopped to ask him if he had had lunch... " she writes, and we haw-haw indulgently and think that Helen.

For this reason, books with a bit of pep are always preferable to overly-earnest, overly-schematic ones. Besides, the advice they dish out is generally identical. The idea that men don't care all that much, for instance, is frequently mentioned in dating books. Yet see how it's given a fresh, incisive depiction in Janice Dickinson's Check, Please!, when the former supermodel goes on a date with Roman Polanski.

The celebrated Polish director of such date-movie classics as Rosemary's Baby and Repulsion, said very little, Dickinson complains, other than: "So, are we going to be having sex tonight?"; "Can you act?"; "Shall we have sex this evening?" His quietude bothered Dickinson, who is a big loudmouth.

"I do remember wondering, at some point that night, "Is he still thinking about his wife's murder?" she recalls. "Classic mistake: The minute you start giving men credit for being deep, you're entering the realm of the imagination." n

 

The quick-fire Casanova

 

While women examine romantic nuances, men have developed a simple and rapid way of getting sex. Matt Suddain reports on Speed Seduction

 

We are men. You might remember us from such sensual seduction techniques as: hooded gazing, drive-by honking, rooftop shouting, pretending to be gay, pretending to be lost, enquiring if you are lost - on account of how far you are from heaven - shifting to the workout station that directly intersects your eye-line, asking if you have the time, saying "I just love children", saying "that's exactly how I feel about that subject!" We are men, our tricks are lame, but you find that sweet, and what other option is there? We are all you have without resorting to science or each other.

Lately, though, we've made some stunning breakthroughs in the field of seduction and our bravest men are busy testing these innovations in love's glittering night-laboratories. Most of these methods involve taking the standard model for forming a relationship, which, let's face it, takes an ungodly amount of time, and ‘souping' it up. Our goal, briefly, is that the whole process of seduction should occur beyond the speed of awareness. Imagine you're approached by a well-dressed man. Your bartender turns to pull a bottle of grenadine from the shelf, and wheels back to find you both gone, a coaster spins on the ebony top, and the bar's door heaves back with a heavy "schoomph". That fast.

Former comedian Ross Jeffries has created a programme called Speed Seduction. His method borrows techniques from Neuro Linguistic Programming, a field popular with therapists, motivators, and TV mentalists like Derren Brown. The goal of Speed Seduction is to use linguistic patterns to put women in receptive states. A man might say: "Yeah, I was kept up all night by the neighbours below me." Astute readers will note the embedded phrase "up all night"; they might even have started to feel a little ‘sexy', but according to Jeffries, the words "below me" could also be unconsciously interpreted as a command.

Ross's method also requires the user to speak the parts of the sentence he wants the woman to interpret subliminally at a lower register. For example: "I sense there's a special person inside you, trying to get out." The words "inside you" could be interpreted by the unconscious mind as a sexy notion. Especially if you add the mime.

By now, the woman should be in an enhanced state of arousal, completely tuned in to you, and totally oblivious to your many, many defects. Obviously, there are endless subtleties to this method, but essentially what it boils down to is this: we are men, and we are now so lazy and desperate that some of us are literally hypnotising women into bed. We are seeking company by employing the psychological equivalent of Rohypnol. Not that we should feel guilty. Women have kept men under perpetual hypnosis for the entire passage of human history. Also, they've managed to convince us to forgo our primary biological imperative - to have sex with as many women as possible - in favour of their own model: "you will only have sex with me". If a woman's burden is to seek her biological match in a sea of dick-wits (not to mention the occasional uber-dick-wit who sidles up to her at the bar and says, "Not around the eyes, look in the eyes. Drink?"), then a man's burden is maybe to be haunted every five to seven minutes (minimum) by spectres of girls in flimsy summer dresses; or the woman who works Thursdays at the copy store; or etc, etc, etc.

The male ‘seduction community' is now a loosely connected worldwide network whose members hunt in bars (or ‘lairs') and go by names like Style and Mystery and Hypnotica and Steel Balls. You may consider their moves to be borderline abusive but I suspect it's they, the predators, who end up suffering the worst hangovers. That moment when she wakes and looks around, and you can see that who you are and what she's done makes her literally sick - that can't feel good. But what are you going to do? Wake early and start whispering in her ear: "I am wonderful, I am everything you ever wanted in a man, I am a god"? And if you like her, what then? Will you still be whispering as you stand at the altar: "Everything is fine, everything is great, I love steeples, they're so tall and proud"? We are men, we don't think about consequences and we can wash away all moral doubts with jungle analogies. Our only concern is our immediate gratification, even if that gratification leaves us with an overwhelming feeling of emptiness - or even, as we lie awake at night in the massive darkness, a suspicion that we're not exactly men at all. n

 

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