Conversation as Synecdoche of the Self
Teaching students is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle where the finished result is going to be a Monet’s Saint Georges Majeur au Crepuscule. Love Systems gives our instructors the chance to meet thrilling characters and to try to teach those guys the ability to present their best selves to women. Because our students are generally of such a high caliber, this usually means granting them permission to be themselves, albeit perhaps a bolder and more sexually confident form of themselves than they have previously been able to summon in the presence of women who might otherwise intimidate them.
When a person meets another person, there are a series of minute judgments that happen at both the conscious and the unconscious level. All these judgments transpire in the space of a nanosecond and amount to what Love Systems instructors have taken to calling a person’s “thinslice”, a reference to Malcolm Gladwell’s terrific book, Blink. When a man is poorly dressed and surrounded with other poorly dressed men, and they all sit with slumped shoulders and persistent frowns, that men and his companions create a thinslice that in many social situations would be deemed unfriendly at best or loser-like at worst. When a beautiful woman sits around with her arms crossed and a scowl on her face, her thinslice is that she’s mean or unapproachable. Those guys could be the most successful, interesting men in the room, and the girl could be a gentle flower or deeply insecure girl, but all anyone has to go on at first is the impression another person gives off, and it’s off this impression, this thinslice, that we base a nearly infinite number of our day-to-day decisions: do I feel well? Does my car need a tune-up? Is my boss angry? Is it going to rain? Is this painting a real or a fake? It is off of this that we establish the belief structures that give rise to the frames that we carry with us into every interaction with the world around us.
One of the jobs of Love Systems instructors is to take our expertise and whatever thinslice we pick up from a student and reconfigure his presentation of himself such that his thinslice is more immediately attractive to women. We also equip our students with tools to recover from unfavorable thinslices, true, but everyone can agree they’d prefer to make a strong first impression and follow through on that than fight an uphill battle from the start of a conversation.
Moving forward from either a positive or negative thinslice begs the question: what do I talk about after that? The obvious answer is anything that displays high value. We’ve published the LSRMv1 and LSRMv2 for a novella’s worth of material. You have those links, and you found this blog. If you’re running out of stuff to say, you’re not trying hard enough.
But that’s not really the issue, is it? Mystery used to proudly exclaim that he had “something like 300 pieces of material which [he could] throw in for anything that could pop up in a set. Something for every contingency.” While that might sound great if you’re scared of your own shadow and terrified of talking to the girls after whom you lust, hollowness is the inevitable consequence of using routines as the backbone of your attempts at seduction. Please don’t miss the forest for the trees and mistake me for here maligning routines. I use routines now, and when I first started learning I was a routine junkie, and it got me laid. Anyone who says you can’t get sex with routines doesn’t know how to deliver routines. But used properly, they are just backstops, nuts and bolts to hold down the girders of the interaction, and those girders are two humans finding a connection amidst innumerable possibilities for that connection to be stifled, scuttled, or denied.
Thus the real question of what to talk about is more complicated and more interesting. What truths matter so much that to hide them is to deny someone else a chance to know the real you? What sentences must be said if the chemistry that forms between two people is to have real meaning? Obviously there is no answer to this, but we ask it every time we interact with someone else, be they a boss, a parent, or a stranger we want to turn into a lover.
A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole (as hand for sailor), the whole for a part (as the law forpolice officer), the specific for the general (as cutthroat for assassin), the general for the specific (as thief forpickpocket), or the material for the thing made from it (as steel for sword).
[Middle English synodoches, from Medieval Latin synodoche, alteration of Latin synecdoch
, from Greeksunekdokh
All art is synecdoche. Great art is the kind of synecdoche that pierces the heart or mind and sings to you in that certain voice beneath hearing, “Yes, that’s exactly what that’s like,” its ability to show, as David Foster Wallace said of fiction, “what it’s like to be a fucking human being.” The genius of Degas, Monet, Manet, Renoir, and Cassat was their refusal to abide by the tropes of the time typified by Bouguereau, Cot, and Gerome and instead render the world through their own peculiar lens, a vantage more experimental but also perhaps more honest than the idealizations of an Ingres or Delacroix. Expressionism took this to yet another level, when Munch and Van Gogh did not stop at trying to represent what they saw on a 2D canvas but to infuse that canvas with their emotional states.
.jpg){kind=link}
For the sake of completeness I’ll admit I’m ranting a bit. But only a bit. There is a strange point where artists or creative types use artistic media for experimentation but not necessarily for expression. While I am impressed at Sorabji’s mind, I have yet to find even a fabulously skilled pianist who says that, yes, the Opus Clavicembalisticum is the most moving and powerful piece of music ever written. This is despite the fact the O.C. is commonly regarded as the most technically difficult piece to play on a piano. We need the technicians to explore the boundaries of preconceptions of how we as humans can connect with each other, but if there isn’t an emotional effect, I would submit that art falls short. Feel free to disagree. You and Bertoldt Brecht can high-five each other while I vomit at a performance of the Good Woman of Szechuan. The maddening challenge of any creative endeavor is staring at the infinite collage of colors, words, sounds, and movements and holding them against the even more infinite potentialities of human experience to make an audience member see something the way you do, or to see something the way you want them to see that thing. This doesn’t change just because art belongs to the audience once it leaves the artist’s hands. Art well-rendered might take new meaning for its recipient, but the stuff that withstands the passage of years tends to resonate in the sight of if strictly within the boundaries of its creator’s expectations.
All this happens in the space between when you open your mouth and your vocal cords flex and your diaphragmatic muscles contract and your next words will convey some kind of synecdoche to Her, with every sentence: “This is who I am,” even as you are more than those words or that gesture, vastly more than any sentence or paragraph or biography can ever accurately portray. The paralyzing difficulty of speaking to a woman with an outcome in mind is the burden of the infinite resting on your epiglottis and choking you behind a wall of potential. It makes sense that it can seem like a challenge of monumental proportions to raid one’s psyche for What to Say Next that will make her panties dissolve like dew in the sunlight of your wit and charisma when you approach an potentially romantic interaction with a tepid sense of self.
The irony is that it’s never that complicated. Talk about those things that cause the most extreme emotional vacillation in you. Talk about the things that interest you. Yes, yes, temper your conversation with the attraction switches, but if you are centered in your preferences and unapologetic in the face of adverse reactions, people—men and women—will be won over. This helps you live in the moment anyway. The weak but perfect advice to be yourself applies here. Be yourself. Be somebody. Whether or not you like chocolate or vanilla is not important, but making a choice between chocolate and vanilla is very important.
Dating science, Love Systems, seduction, or crudely, “game”, boils down to confidence, handling logistics, and a willingness to escalate (okay, and maybe a little or a lot of teasing/active disinterest*). Everything else is legerdemain, even if it’s a highly functional waving of hands that will indeed render results. The common theme among our instructors is mostly a reckless willingness to make mistakes and put our own balls on the line. There’s an argument that likes to float around that we are somehow being disingenuous. I think the reason Love Systems instructors get the results they do is the opposite: terrifying honesty. We come from a place of abundance and are thus genuinely non-needy, genuinely certain that our ministrations will yield the intended results. We’re sexually voracious, and we express it with our words, our body language, our eyes, and the tones of our respective voices. Different elements of our personalities manifest in other situations—in instructor calls or during games of Halo 3—but when we address women we desire, we are good at choosing the best synecdoche of self that reflects the truth of our the sexual reality that drew us to the woman in the first place.
By the way, if you’re reading this from your parents’ basement and you just Alt-Tabbed away from World of Warcraft to check out this article, don’t get mad at me because Miss December didn’t suck your dick when you walked up to her wearing your Civil War t-shirt featuring Iron Man and Captain America. All of the above assumes a certain level of hygiene and health, maybe even a job. There is a point where the attraction switches from Magic Bullets are not merely filters for conversation but handy guides for life-improvement. There are certain personality traits and ways to dress and jobs and ways to speak that will get you more beautiful women, but if you adopt too many trappings of someone you are not, you may get laid, but you will find yourself sharing fluids with women whose disappearance from the Earth would mean little to you, and those are not the sort of people you should be spending your most intimate moments with. You are going to die. If you are not living up to one of the attraction switches because of fear, I challenge you to stare unflinchingly into your fear and take the next step toward being your best self. On the other hand, if you read dating advice from someone that seems like it would be grossly out of character for you, err toward being true to you and not trying to emulate someone whose results you envy. You’ll be happier in the long run, a masterpiece of self rendered more accurately by your very imperfections.
*—If you come from a powerful world view and a place of abundance, both of these come naturally for the most part but, yes, tactically, they are wonder workers.