Alain de Botton on Seduction

In the season of romance, as we head out on dates across the city, we should bear in in mind that seduction is never easy when it's a case of seducing someone one actually likes. It is one of the ironies of love that it seems easiest to confidently seduce those we are least attracted to, desire eliciting a crippling sense of inferiority compared with the perfection we have located in the beloved.

 

Out of this perceived inferiority, there often emerges the need to lie or be absurly reserved: to take on a personality that is not directly our own, a seducing self that can locate and respond to the demands of the superior being we're having dinner with. Does love condemn us not to be ourselves? Perhaps not for ever, but at least initially, for it leads us to ask What would appeal to her? rather than What appeals to me?

 

Silence and clumsiness can sometimes be forgiven as rather pitiful proof of desire. It being easy enough to seduce someone towards whom one feels indifferent, the clumsiest seducers could generously be deemed the most genuine. Not to find the right words may ironically be proof that the right words are meant. When in the Liaisons Dangereuses, the Marquise de Merteuil writes to the Vicomte de Valmont, she faults him on the fact that his love letters are too perfect, too logical to be the words of a true lover, whose thoughts will be disjointed and for whom the fine phrase will always elude. Language trips up on love, desire lacks articulacy (but how willingly most of us would swapped our tongue-tiedness for the Vicomte's vocabulary).

 

Seduction is a form of acting, but just as an actor needs to have a concept of the audience's expectations, so too the seducer must have an idea of what the beloved will want to hear - so that if there is a conclusive argument against lying in order to be loved, it is that the actor can have no idea of what his or her audience will actually be touched by. Most of the time, we charm people for reasons we don't entirely understand and cannot fully control. There's no better reason to try to be that most tricky of things on our dates: ourselves.

 

For more on Seduction come to The School of Life's Sunday Sermon this weekend, where the preacher is none other than Sam Roddick, founder of erotic emporium Coco de Mer.

 

Or sign up to The School of Life's Love course.

Comments

[Carol Omer]

I MUST get glasses! I thought that said "The Art of Reduction"...

"Yes!" I replied to my error..."When we are trying to woo and win..the Art of Reduction is the rudder that drives the love boat."

Reducing our flaws, eliminating our wind-levels, shrinking our bad habits, reducing our flawed past...

The Art of Reduction has orchestrated the awechestra of romance through the passages of time....only to find the love boat is ship wrecked once the Reduction returns to normal sighs...I mean size....

Give me the Art of Seduction over Reduction anyday!

.....or night.......

Carol