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At first, a romantic putsch often proceeds without words. This was Jackson Pollock’s preferred mode. The abstract painter fastened on Ruth Kligman, his last mistress, at the Cedar Bar and stared at her with “such intensity” and “such hunger” that she felt impaled. At her apartment afterward, she remembered, he cinched the deal by sobbing, “I want you,” “I need you,” “I’ve been looking for someone [like you] my entire life.”

Seduction prophets like Mystery and his henchmen would jeer at Pollock. To nail “targets,” real men feign “lack of interest,” and let women chase
them
. A woman “will do almost anything for your approval,” promise pickup gurus, if you’re “cool” and keep her guessing. According to
Maxim
magazine, the “three treacherous syllables” are “I love you.” Only clueless losers race up to prospects and bare their souls.

If so, some losers are getting lucky; hell-bent, do-or-die lovers still captivate many women, both in reality and fantasy. Warren Beatty put his cards on the table from the start with Annette Bening, revealing his interest at the upshot and telling her later after a wrap party that he wanted her to have his child and marry him. She conceived that night.

In the 2010 movie
How Do You Know
, George wrests the heroine, Lisa, away from her baseball pitcher beau with a no-holds-barred courtship. He gate-crashes a party for Lisa at the pitcher’s penthouse, pours his heart out, and tells her he’ll wait for her at the bus stop for as long as it takes. Journalist Tom Terell read a stack of romance novels for a
Salon
story and decided men needed a course correction. To enamor women they must “move in without invitation,” and “express the depth of [their] passion” “right out of the chute.”

Women, declares Stanford University anthropologist Carl Bergstrom, “
do
appreciate men who court energetically.” Charleen, a character in the documentary film
Sherman’s March
, tries to clue in her friend, Ross McElwee, on how to get women: “I don’t care, Ross!” she tells him. “Passion is the only thing that matters! You must say to her, ‘You are the only woman to me. I live for you. I breathe for you, I would die for you. Please for God’s sake be with me!’ ”

The Wine of Praise

O flatter me, for love delights in praises.

—W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE
,
Two Gentlemen of Verona

When his wife, Lisa, dies in the film
The Other Man
, Peter (Liam Neeson) discovers a dark secret: she had a lover for years. He then embarks on an obsessive pursuit of the mysterious Rolf. What Peter finds, though, isn’t what he expected. Rolf, played by a winsome Antonio Banderas, is a mere janitor who pretends to be a polo-playing aristocrat. During a series of chess games between the two, in which Rolf takes Peter’s “queen,” the truth unfolds. Lisa knew Rolf’s scam from the start, supported him, and loved him anyway. Her reason? Rolf possesses a unique talent: he “makes women pretty . . . prettier than they would be otherwise.” “I was made for the ladies,” Rolf tells the bewildered Peter, “and the ladies for me.”

Women are fools for flattery. As clichéd and passé as it seems, praise is a royal road to the female libido. In love we all seek an inflated image of ourselves, a perfected Me. The man who makes a woman feel like that ideal, photoshopped self can write his ticket. Yet flattery is a complex art that demands subtlety, imagination, discrimination, wit, and infrared vision into a woman’s personality.

According to erotic theorists, ego enhancement is inherent in romance; with loved ones we seek priority and a grander identity. Love, by definition, writes philosopher Robert Solomon, “maximizes self-esteem.” Some extremists, like psychiatrist Theodor Reik, believe that the central drive of passion is vanity, the “dream of a nobler self.” Sex may be the first violins of amour, but the ego is the concert master. Love means knowing you’re somebody special.

For women this lure carries particular weight. They accord higher importance to romantic compliments than men do and are more erotically stoked by ego boosts. Female sexuality, say current researchers, may be flattery-operated. A woman’s seat of desire, asserts Professor Meana, is narcissistic rather than relational; she wishes to be “the object of erotic admiration.” Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir made the same point in “The Narcissist” and expanded it, arguing that women seek self-exaltation in love due to impoverished personhood.

Centuries of culturally imposed inferiority have contributed to the female yen for praise. Although women are no longer the “devil’s gateway” or male chattel, the legacy of the “lesser sex” lingers on. Many women can still use a shot of confidence. Fifty-five to eighty percent of women are unhappy with the way they look, and across the board they report low self-esteem. Then, too, notions of masculine superiority continue in Western culture. Women often need a prestige hike just to even the erotic match.

Neurochemistry also factors into the feminine relish for flattery. Women are biologically primed to base self-esteem on intimate relations with others and have a built-in “negativity receptor.” Their mental worry station, the anterior cingulate cortex, is larger and more active than men’s and craves validation. As Chaucer’s Wife of Bath says, “A man can win us best with flattery.”

Kudos does wonders for the brain’s esteem center. In what’s called the “applause response,” we get a reward rush from compliments that simulates a drug high, bathing the brain in amphetamine-like chemicals and heightening our sense of self. We feel exhilarated, “more attractive,” confident, and competent.

The classic love guides counseled men to applaud women. “Flattery works on the mind as the waves on the bank of a river,” wrote Ovid. “Praise her,” right down to her “fingers and toes.” In the medieval
Art of Courtly Love
, adulation of the beloved was canonical. No man could expect a woman to smile on him unless he hymned her to the skies, and with skill. A middle-class lady might be swayed by tributes to her beauty, but a noblewoman required more rarefied homage. Lord Chesterfield in the eighteenth century cast aside all these distinctions; a man should flatter women “as much as possible,” he told his son, “whenever possible in any way possible.”

More recently, amorous thinkers have reassessed and fine-tuned the role of praise in love. Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips speculates that ego inflation may be crucial for passion. “What if our strongest wish” in desire, he asks, “is to be praised?” He’s seconded by many theorists who contend that idealization is indispensable in relationships.

The craft of praise itself has received new scrutiny. Complimenting well, say investigators, is an astute business. A man has to be alert—cultivate creativity, humor, and sincerity; add a dash of bitter to the sweet; and suit the praise to the person. The worst gaffe is half-hearted flattery; one study found that most people, in an “above-average effect,” will believe superlatives about themselves. Fulsome plays best in love.

Fertility gods knew how to pour it on; they enthroned and glorified women. The Indian Shiva, Sumerian Dumuzi, and Egyptian Osiris lauded their queens and placed them on high altars. Dionysus rescued his mother from the bottom of the sea and crowned her (and Ariadne) with immortality. At the rites of these sex deities, women served as high priestesses, avatars of the goddess, with a direct line to the divine.

Seducers of fable and fiction historically buff up women for less honorable ends. Such is female inferiority throughout history that a woman can be a pushover for praise. The arch-flatterer Odysseus deftly exploits the female longing for status under Greek patriarchy. When shipwrecked on the island of Scheria, he endears himself to Princess Nausicaa (and gains an entrée to the court) by “mistaking” her for an exalted being. Rather than the subjugated nonentity she is, Odysseus calls her a goddess who alone has the power to save him: “I marvel at you,” he cries, “pity me.”

The serpent in
Paradise Lost
plies a similar form of ego massage. Again, he goes for the status jugular. The Eve that Milton portrays is a member of the seventeenth-century underclass—“weak,” disenfranchised, and subject to male authority. The wily Satan manipulates her like a cosmetic shill. She will be an “Empress” (as she deserves), and “more than equal” to Adam if she’ll bite the apple.

In Edith Wharton’s socially stratified world of
Summer
, the déclassé heroine is just as easy pickings as Eve. The cosmopolitan architect Lucius Harney visits a rural backwater for the summer, finds a raw, insecure mountain girl, Charity, and courts her with a social promotion. He admires her “difference,” he says, and suggests she’s one of the elect as he leads her off to an abandoned cabin. “He was praising her,” she exults as he kisses her knuckles, “and praising her because she came from the mountain.”

Daryl Van Horne uses a twentieth-century version of this strategy to seduce the housewives of John Updike’s
Witches of Eastwick
. Amid the domestic gulag of 1950s America, this Satan dangles the apple of distinction to three stifled “witches.” They’re “onto” him but are so starved for professional recognition that they succumb to his puffery. He touts Alexandra’s female figurines as museum-quality art and convinces Jane the cellist of her superior talents. Sukie the town reporter, he harangues, should quit hackwork; she’s an intellectual who can “think” and comprehend his abstruse chemical experiments.

The post-feminist Kate Alexander of Gael Greene’s
Blue Skies, No Candy
lacks all these bygone insecurities; she’s a successful screenwriter, with money, looks, and class, and handpicks devoted lovers who praise her properly. They assure her she’s perfection (plus a “spectacular good fuck”) and she soars. She’s “Remarkable,” she crows, “Wonderful [and] lovable.”

Romance novels probe deeper into fantasy territory. Here women want what psychiatrists claim lies at the core of the unconscious—to be a man’s deity, the only woman in the cosmos. The “good,” authentic heroes in these stories are staggered by the heroine; she is the “most magnificent female” in creation, a goddess who obliterates other women. Rick Chandler of
The Playboy
has done the rounds, but as soon as he views the leading lady, he has a religious conversion: “Rick had been exposed to many females in his lifetime and none had ever shaken him this badly.” He tells her so without cease, itemizing her merits in grandiloquent detail.

The only thing better are two heroes who do this. In
The Sweetest Thing
, an Olympic-medal sailor and NASCAR star vie for the love of the peerless Tara Daniels. To Logan, the race car driver, Tara is his one-and-only and idol, and he won’t leave town until she accepts him. The sailor, meanwhile, is even more full-throated: no other woman has ever attained such heights of female perfection, and he says he’ll be her “sex slave” if she’ll have him.

Real ladies’ men are brilliant praisers who make much of women. Like Casanova, they’re creative and code-read the female heart. As a young apprentice priest, Casanova romanced an advocate’s wife in a public carriage during a trip to Rome. He first said in the presence of her husband that she had destroyed his wish to be a monk, then addressed her alone. Excusing his ardor, he pronounced her an “angel,” the “one Lucrezia” in “all Italy.” In a stroke, he vaulted her from the anonymous property of a dull lawyer to a celestial heroine in a cosmic love drama. By the time the carriage rolled into Rome, she was his mistress.

Certain lovers are prodigies of praise. Sir Walter Raleigh became the “Darling of the English Cleopatra,” Queen Elizabeth, through an ingenious flattery offensive. Instead of the rote compliments of court toadies, he appealed to Elizabeth’s brains and brio. He etched a clever couplet to her with a diamond on the latticed window of the palace, extolled her in witty badinage, and wrote love poems filled with word games and intellectual conceits.

Gabriele D’Annunzio was a flamboyant flatterer. With him, each lover received a new semi-divine identity and name, and an entry into a select society. The lady was “alone of all the world,” the noblest hearted, most radiant of beings. Vouched dance diva Isadora Duncan, “To hear oneself praised with that magic peculiar to D’Annunzio was something like the experience of Eve when she heard the voice of the serpent in Paradise.”

Twentieth-century British statesman Duff Cooper was a testament to the power of praise over every physical and practical consideration. Not only was he plump and saucer-faced with an oversized head; he lacked the evolutionists’ sine qua nons of sex appeal, wealth and rank. Yet as a lowly London civil servant, he achieved the romantic coup of the decade. Lady Diana Manners was the celebrity beauty of her age, an aristocrat of slender means with a taste for “the things money could buy” and a coterie of rich, titled suitors. But she could not withstand Cooper’s worshipful courtship, his barrage of letters that called her the “the brightest color, the sweetest warmth, and the one dazzling light of [his life].”

Their marriage turned out to be more of an “arrangement” than his letters presaged. With Diana’s tacit consent, Duff acquired a stable of mistresses during their thirty-five years together. He never saw an attractive woman he didn’t want to ego-fan into an affair. Actress Catherine Nesbitt, another great beauty, was classic. Cooper dexterously enumerated her best performances, pronounced his passion for her, and begged to kiss her feet, which he had seen nude on the stage. She rolled down her stockings and obliged.