Knowing the signs

One of the things that stands in the way of dating success is not knowing the signs.

No doubt there are whole books devoted to this. But the important thing is to start to become aware of the signs that a woman is attracted to you (or not). If you don’t spot them then you may try too hard with women who aren’t interested and miss opportunities with women who are.

The first error that many of us men fall into is to start looking for signs when we are already attracted to a woman. The problem with this is that we are prone to see what we wish to see rather than what is really there. This is very well illustrated in Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night,’ when Malvolio is led to believe that Olivia is in love with him. He interprets everything she says and every glance as confirming what he wishes to believe, leading him in the end to a most unpleasant rude awakening. Try not to be in imagination.

Practice understanding signs when nothing much hangs on it.

I have to admit that I became much better at understanding signs after I was happily married, when the use of knowing the signs is to be able tactfully to deflect unwanted attentions!

Eye contact is very powerful. If a woman holds your gaze then be careful not to hold hers unless you want her to think you’re attracted to her. Be careful, because holding someone’s gaze can also be perceived as a threat. Try to tune into what is actually happening. This cannot be taught by formula.

Smiling can be deceiving. A woman might smile at you because she’s attracted to you. Equally she might smile just to be friendly, or even out of nervousness. Smiles can be used for attraction or defence. Again, observation from a neutral place rather than one of desire is useful training. Try to watch the interactions of others and see where they go wrong and what they get right.

Touching: if a woman while talking to you touches your arm, this is far less ambiguous – it probably means she’s attracted to you. If this happens and you are attracted to the woman you are doing well. But you can still easily mess up at this stage. Play it cool. If you’re interested, continue the conversation and maybe arrange a date – but don’t be too eager.

In general, watch body language as if you were a scientist. Any tips you get from books, don’t take as absolute – watch and learn.

This is the very definition and beauty of true art

This is the very definition and beauty of true art. (Re-blogged from One Thousand Single Days.)

These people had a real connection. This is what you are looking for when you are searching for a soulmate. Forever, or for a moment.

 

Chance and Venus help the daring

Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish. – Ovid, Ars Amatoria III:ix

Chance and Venus help the daring. – Ovid, Ars Amatoria I:xv

So, two points here from our Ancient Roman dating guru.

First of all keep up your attraction skills wherever you happen to be. Be pleasant to everyone, not just to beautiful women, because it’s pleasant, because you need to keep practicing light-hearted chat, and because women can smell a false-hearted creep a mile away.

Practicing light-hearted chat with everyone, not just beautiful women, enables you to practice your skills in situations in which your fear of failure is not evoked. You will begin to experience success and get smiles. Those skills are transferable, so that next time you really do want to start a conversation with a woman you fancy, you’ll be able to do it without becoming tongue-tied.

Which brings us to the second point Ovid is making – chance and Venus help the daring. There are few things so attractive for a woman in a man as confidence. Not brashness but quiet confidence. And one way to develop this is to keep practicing light and pleasant repartee with everyone you meet!

Is it me that I don’t get dates?

First of all, be quite sure that there isn’t a woman who cannot be won, and make up your mind that you will win her.

Thus says Ovid, our Ancient Roman dating guru.

Sooner would the birds cease their song in the springtime, or the grasshopper be silent in the summer, or the hare turn and give chase to a hound of Maenalus, than a woman resist the wooing of a youthful lover.

Maybe so, although it is my experience that if you master the secrets of attraction you don’t need to be youthful either.

Once upon a time I was love-lorn and kept falling in love without the slightest idea of how to attract and keep a woman. I would meet beautiful women or see them at a distance and have no clue how to approach them. I believed from a very young age that I was not attractive to women – and that turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Then, through advice from friends and reading all kinds of hints, tips and strategies and actually trying them out, I began to have success, leading in the end to finding and keeping the love of my life. I started this blog and wrote Dating – the missing manual because I see too many of my male friends fail in this area – men who have good qualities any sensible woman would admire. I now know what these men are doing wrong and how they could fix it.

Think it’s because you’re too old? Wrong. Because you’re not handsome? Wrong. Because you’re not rich? Wrong again. The young, rich and handsome can and do get these things wrong. Behaviour is key. Be yourself and at the same time learn to be confident in who you are. Then learn the arts of attraction.

Ovid says:

Perhaps you think she doesn’t want to yield. You’re wrong.

Well, there will be quite a number who aren’t interested for perfectly good reasons. But if so, move on – it’s nothing to do with you and there is no shortage of attractive women out there.

Alarm bells – what not to do on a first date

Excellent advice from a female blogger about what not to do on a first date. Men, pay attention. If you do any of these things you may trigger alarm bells in her head.

My comments:

About the bill. I think the point here is that if you invite someone out, you pay. Certainly if you’re already in a relationship it’s reasonable to split the bill. When we were dating, the woman who is now my wife insisted on it. But if it’s a first date, and you’ve invited her, you pay.

Talking about sex on a first date – no (unless this is just a hookup for sex – but then that isn’t a date – it’s just a hookup). Or about your ex? No further comment from me required I think.

Bad table manners? I heard of one man who asked his date if she wanted a particular piece of food then took it off her plate without waiting for the answer. Needless to say that did not go down well.

Talking too much about yourself? You are the international man of mystery. Answer any questions she may ask, but only what she’s asked. Further detail is not required unless she asks for it. Keep turning the conversation back to her, and listen to the answers. She’ll think you’re wonderful if you can do it.

Ovid’s plan of action

“You, who for the first time are taking up arms beneath the standard of Venus, find out, in the first place, the woman you are to love.”

Ovid, in his two-thousand-year-old dating guide ‘The Art of Love,’ lays out his plan  in three stages: (1) find your woman, (2) “bend her to your will,” (3) do what you need to do to make your love endure.

We shall talk about all these stages in due course, but in passing I’d like to say that we often neglect the third. Once you’ve made a conquest, don’t slack off. You need to keep the flame alive. Don’t start being a typical bloke and fart and belch in her company (sorry, but it needed to be said). Don’t neglect oral hygiene if you still want deep kisses and more. Don’t stop the behaviours that she found attractive and exciting in the beginning. Especially when married, tend the fire.

Back to the matter in hand.

Ovid goes on, “Now that you are still fancy-free, now is the time for you to choose a woman and say to her: ‘You are the only woman that I care for.’ She’s not going to be wafted down to you from heaven on the wings of the wind. You must use your own eyes to discover the girl that suits you.”

I definitely don’t agree that you should go up to a woman and straightaway say, ‘You are the only woman that I care for.’ She’ll run a mile unless already desperately in love with you, and that you cannot count on. You have to work on attraction – a process explained in my own book. One important principle of attraction is, let her come to you. Paradoxical. For now let’s just say, never appear desperate. But Ovid is right that your soulmate is not going simply to turn up and ring your doorbell.

Ovid goes on, “The hunter knows where to spread his nets… .” This should be part of your strategy. You need to think about where the woman of your dreams is likely to hang out. If you’re a wild party animal, don’t look for her in the library. And if you hate parties and prefer intelligent conversation, don’t torment yourself by going somewhere where the music is so loud you end up deaf. Your soulmate won’t be there anyway. However you do have to go out looking. And wherever you go, you need to keep practicing the arts of attraction until your babe magnetism is fully charged and under your control.

What makes you think you need to go to Russia?

“You who seek out the object of a lasting love, learn the places which the fair ones most haunt,” writes the poet Ovid in his 2,000-year-old poem, The Art of Love.

I have given a few tips about where to find your soulmate before.

If spam emails are anything to go by, there must be a fair number of men out there who fall for Russian woman who are very romantic and are looking for an honest man in the West for love and marriage. Now there is of course nothing at all wrong with Russian women. But if you can’t attract a woman in your own home town, why do you imagine you’ll have more luck with a woman from hundreds or thousands of miles away?

If the relationship is based on money (which it may be) then is that what you really want? Wouldn’t you rather learn the arts of attraction and find a woman much nearer home and who wants you because of what you really are? (Ok, you really like Russian women. There are probably thousands in London. You still don’t need to find the air fare.)

Ovid says, “You won’t have to put to sea or undertake any distant journeys … Rome alone will give you a choice of such lovely women, and so many of them, that you will be forced to confess that she gathers within her own bosom all the treasures that the world can show. As numerous as the ears of corn on Gargarus, grapes in Methymna, fish in the ocean, birds in the thickets, stars in the heavens, so numerous are the beautiful girls you’ll find in Rome. Venus has made her seat of empire the city of her beloved Aeneas.”

And for the benefit of us in England, note that our own Henry Purcell made a song called ‘Fairest Isle’ from John Dryden’s words, in which the poet explains that Venus has made her dwelling here, too.

Here are the words:
Fairest isle, all isles excelling,
Seat of pleasure and of love
Venus here will choose her dwelling,
And forsake her Cyprian grove.
Cupid from his fav’rite nation
Care and envy will remove;
Jealousy, that poisons passion,
And despair, that dies for love.

Gentle murmurs, sweet complaining,
Sighs that blow the fire of love
Soft repulses, kind disdaining,
Shall be all the pains you prove.
Ev’ry swain shall pay his duty,
Grateful ev’ry nymph shall prove;
And as these excel in beauty,
Those shall be renown’d for love.

If you want to be loved, be lovable

If you want to be loved, be lovable

– Ovid, Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) II:ii

As I wrote in last week’s post Patience and attraction, “if you become a better, stronger, kinder human being then the right kind of woman will be attracted to you.”

Afterwards I found the quotation at the top of this post in Ovid’s Art of Love.

Ovid was a Roman writer (43BC – 17AD) who was friendly with Horace and may have met Virgil (the Virgil who wrote that extraordinary prediction of the coming of Jesus in Eclogues IV – some may dispute that this refers to Jesus but the coincidence is to be wondered at). Anyway, the poem Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) is Ovid’s guide to dating and sex.

This work got him banished to a cold, wet place by the Black Sea in what is now Constanta in Romania, ostensibly because the Ars Amatoria was far too naughty.

Over the coming weeks I shall be going through Ovid’s poem at a gentle pace, seeing what is still good advice today and what perhaps should be avoided by the wise.

Patience and attraction

When I was a teenager I was rubbish at attracting girls. A wise man told me that I should be patient. When we are older it will all work out.

He didn’t just mean, wait around and it will sort itself out without you having to make any effort. What he meant was, work on becoming a better human being and there will come a time when women will be attracted to you.

The premise here is not that you’ll be wildly successful at brief encounters. The premise is that if you become a better, stronger, kinder human being then the right kind of woman will be attracted to you.

This is true. If you have no substance then the best women will not be interested in you.

Even so, a good man still needs to understand what creates attraction in women. Think of a shop. It might have the most wonderful goods inside. But if there is nothing attractive in the window display, how will anyone ever know? If you don’t know the arts of attraction, how will a woman be attracted enough to you to want to get to know you better?

To find the woman of my dreams I had to learn what attracts and doesn’t attract women.

Luckily, attraction is a skill that can be learned.

Looking at other women (or men)

“He clocks ‘em.”

When we are married or in a serious relationship, how acceptable is it still to admire attractive examples of the opposite sex?

Once a long time ago a newly married young woman complained to me that she was unhappy because when out with her husband he would still look at other women.

Her way of saying this was, ‘He clocks ‘em.’

Now it may be my lack of full fluency in the patois of that particular part of England (South East London, 1990s), but I assumed that just meant that he glanced at them. Of course it could mean more than that. It could mean that he made that kind of eye contact that stimulates reciprocated desire. (The Urban Dictionary first meaning of ‘clock’ currently reads: “1) To regard an act or object.” No suggestion of anything other than just looking.)

Clearly flirting with intent is a mark of unfaithfulness if one is already in a steady relationship. It’s as much to say, ‘I would if I could,’ and will not be acceptable to your partner.

On the other hand, that we are now in a serious relationship doesn’t suddenly switch off our receptivity to sexual signals, still less to the simple appreciation of beauty. So to expect a man or a woman to stop looking at other attractive people is unrealistic.

A middle path needs to be negotiated, in which both the man and the woman feel secure that they’re the one, without either partner having to hide the fact that they find other members of the opposite sex worth looking at. You might want to look at that young woman with the pretty face, excessive eye makeup and very short skirt, but you know if you think about it carefully that you wouldn’t want to spend too long in her company for fear of terminal boredom. Similarly your woman can admire that rugby player’s thighs without having any serious thoughts of abandoning your own more serious charms. (Can you handle that?)

Remarks, however, need to be thought about before being voiced. Openly to admire a woman’s legs might be acceptable, but only if your woman understands that her legs are superior. If it might come across as a possible criticism of her legs, don’t say it.

As long as your partner understands, at a deep level of certainty, that she is the one and only for you, and assuming you also don’t mind her admiring footballers with musculature somewhat superior to your own in very short shorts, then you may openly admire what is there to be admired.

A note of caution – don’t assume that things should be ‘fair.’ You’re the man and it’s your job to be both strong and sensitive.

It’s an area for explicit discussion between couples rather than for making assumptions.