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When he campaigned for the princesse de Broglie, he focused on her hands. He kissed them as they drove around in her Hispano Suiza, and followed up with a poem: “Two lily hands are all my desire / They hold my hope, my pleasure / My despair.” She relieved his despair, providing a love nest for them in London and taking him on holiday flings to her villa on the French Riviera.

Cooper’s most notorious affair, though, was with France’s “empress of seduction,” Louise de Vilmorin, a poet, novelist, and siren who had discarded three husbands and just returned to Paris. At first glance, she saw little of interest in the new English ambassador. However, after a night of his expert blandishments at dinner, she followed him to the door and “returned [his] kisses.”

“You are a treasure,” he wrote the next day. “I want to be the miser.” She complied, and moved to the embassy, where she lived with the Coopers for three years in a scandalous ménage à trois. He idolatrized her: he admired her poems, bravoed her guitar recitals, and translated her famous novella,
Madame de
.

Then, nearly sixty, he seduced the twenty-nine-year-old Susan Mary Patten, a diplomat’s wife who later married journalist and John F. Kennedy’s friend, Joseph Alsop. With his usual panache, Cooper deluged her with droll, hyperbolic fan mail until she confessed that she loved him so much it made her “ill.”

Author Evelyn Waugh called Duff “Cad” Cooper. But women—even his indulgent wife—never thought him a cad. He ministered too expertly to the feminine (and universal) longing for applause, distinction, and an enlarged, glorified self-image.

In a climate of romantic skepticism, pragmatic pair-bonds, and transient love, the art of praise has petered out. Hip dating instructors promote anti-flattery, “negs” that cut women down to size with zingers like “Your ex-boyfriend must have really hated that about you,” or “Is that your real hair?” And the greeting-card industry has devolved into generic schmaltz or sarcastic digs.

All of which leaves the game and the girls to ladies’ men. One I talked to recently—an MIT business school student—credits his romantic popularity to targeted praise: “Flattery will get you everywhere,” he remarked, “but it has to be smart and selective.” And sincere: a secure woman always knows the difference. As philosopher William Gass concludes, ultimately “love is a form of flattery.”

Soul Meld/Intimacy

They other self, / thy wish exactly to thy heart’s desire.

—J
OHN
M
ILTON
,
Paradise Lost

The lady is a lost cause. Addicted to laudanum, prone to hysteria, panic attacks, claustrophobia, and fainting fits, Mrs. Carleton of Gilded Age New York has been written off as hopeless by ten doctors. That is until Dr. Victor Seth, a charismatic neurologist, takes over. As soon as Lucy Carleton encounters his penetrating gaze in Megan Chance’s novel
An Inconvenient Wife
, the “cure” begins. Dr. Seth has a unique talent—the seducer’s almost clairvoyant gift of intimacy. (He also has a way with a newfangled vibrating wand, but that’s another story.) When Lucy arrives for her first appointment, he sits beside her as if they “were lovers embarking on an intimate conversation,” and hypnotizes her in order to sound her depths.

Over the course of her treatment, he discovers the “wellspring of [her] inner life,” prompting her to strike off her genteel shackles, defy her despotic husband, and fall hopelessly in love with Seth. “I understand you, Lucy,” he says during the ensuing affair. “Look at me. You know it’s true. I know what you want.” Which triggers the novel’s violent dénouement. Desperate to be with the man who understood her “as no one had,” she shoots and kills her husband, escapes punishment, and runs off to Europe with “Victor the magician.”

There’s no end to what a woman will do for male intimacy. As shopworn a canard as it is, women do want men who plumb their innermost selves and connect with them emotionally. They plead for more closeness with partners: openness, empathy, soul-to-soul rapport, and the promise of deep togetherness. Practical seducers answer their prayers.

Love is constructed to make us yearn for this. We seek, say erotic philosophers, “total union with a loved one,” psychic transparency, and the loss of “I” into a transcendent “We.” Plato provided the master myth of the idea in
The Symposium
. In his fable, a race of double-sexed creatures once inhabited the earth and grew so powerful that Zeus divided them, dooming mankind to an eternal quest for wholeness and his other half.

While both sexes crave ego fusion in love, women seem to covet it more. In surveys they chronically complain of inadequate intimacy with men, and say a frequent motive for sex is the hope of an “emotional connection.” Researcher Lisa Diamond believes the drive to bond is one of the four cues of female desire, and so forceful a woman will reroute her affections. Women are setups for intimacy. Even in the womb, their brains are hard-wired for emotional contact, and in adolescence, an estrogen surge promotes a powerful impulse to empathize and affiliate. A man who acknowledges that need, who engages and has the “gift of intimacy,” wrote a 1901
Cosmopolitan
columnist, can secure women with “links of steel.”

Storytellers have long chronicled the erotic pull of intimacy. In the ancient Egyptian myth, Isis is as attached to Osiris as a “brother,” and when he’s torn to shreds by his enemy, she mends him and draws “his essence into her body.” Kali, the Hindu energy of the universe, likewise, enters Shiva’s inner being and “melts into his heart.” Becoming “one” with his female votaries was the goal of Dionysus’s mystic rites.

Perhaps uncoincidentally, women of fairy tales and myth mix the philters which bind lovers into a “complete and united” whole. Iseult’s mother blends the potion her daughter accidentally consumes with Tristan (instead of her intended, King Mark), thus igniting their fatal romantic union. In a twelfth-century Italian legend, three good witches of Benevento create an intimacy brew. They concoct a liqueur of seventy herbs (bottled and sold today as “Strega”), which they give to Princess Bianca Lancia, who promptly soul-bonds with the “red, bald, and short-sighted” Frederick II, and lives with him until she dies.

The German author Goethe thought science was behind this urge to merge. Eduard of his 1809 novel,
Elective Affinities
, invites his wife’s niece for a visit to his castle, and chemistry seizes control. Impelled by the same force that draws physical particles together, the young Ottilie develops a spiritual affinity for Eduard that soon subsumes them both. Ottilie’s thoughts and handwriting match his; her headaches on the left side mirror his on the right; and their improvised musical concerts echo the harmony of the spheres: “They were one person, one in unreflecting perfect well-being.” Drunk on a more gothically inspired potion, Cathy Linton of Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
tells the narrator, “Nelly, I am Heathcliffe!” He is “my own being.”

Modern heartthrobs of fiction are well versed in this drug. Ludovic Seeley, the foxy charmer of Claire Messud’s
Emperor’s Children
, has an infallible maneuver with women—intimacy, “or the impression of it.” He leans in, speaks in a confiding whisper, regards each with an unbroken gaze, and causes erotic mayhem. Another seducer, Jonathan Speedwell, in James Collins’s
Beginners’ Greek
, makes out like a bandit in love because he gets “into the heads of women.” “The human heart, baby!” he tells a married beauty before bedding her on the country club lawn. “That’s what I’m all about.”

Romance heroes take women further into the primordial, mythic domain of erotic twinship and oceanic oneness. These dream men insist on shared selfhood and have telepathic insight into the heroine’s psyche. Juliet of Christie Ridgway’s
Unravel Me
marvels: her lover “can read her mind!” Critic Amber Botts argues that he
is
her; the romantic male lead is actually a projection of the heroine’s shadow self, her disguised double.

“You’re not really a bloke are you?” Libby asks her boyfriend in Jane Green’s
Mr. Maybe
. “You’re a girl.” Nick is intimacy personified, a mind-melder who breaks barriers, exchanges confidences, shares secret wishes, and makes her feel so comfortable that she joins him in the tub the first night. He’s a broke, disheveled writer-wannabee, but Libby jilts her wealthy fiancé for Nick. Nothing matters, she says, until “you’ve got your other half.”

The leading men of daytime television (and its successor, chick flicks) are fanatical bonders as well. They interlock with heroines, intuit emotions like psi (parapsychological) detectives, and murmur, “I would do anything to spare you heartache.” “The desire for intimacy,” writes Professor Martha Nochimson, “propels the storyline of soap operas.”

Amorous guides throughout recorded time have put intimacy at the top of a man’s skillset. The
K
ā
ma S
ū
tra
schooled students in how to interpret female feelings, and regarded transcendent unity as the aim of love; couples’ lives should be joined “like two wheels of a chariot.” Ovid was an ardent advocate of up-close seduction. Get intimate fast, he told suitors, gauge and mirror her moods, endear yourself as a friend, and shower her with “attentive devotion.” Stendhal adjured men, in a chapter on “Concerning Intimacy” in
Love
, to cultivate naturalness and transparency for erotic accord.

More, however, may be necessary. Recent critiques of intimacy caution that a total soul graft may not be ideal. The concept of spiritual union is extremely seductive, promising an end to existential loneliness and the fulfillment of infantile fantasies of fusion. But unrelieved togetherness can also depress sexual desire and breed demons: codependency, suffocation, and boredom. Francesca and Paolo’s punishment in Dante’s hell is to be permanently soldered together and condemned to circumnavigate the same claustrophobic round for eternity.

Vibrant, sexy intimacy, instead, maintains the tension between attachment and separation, togetherness and privacy, and preserves self-differentiation. This is a nuanced operation, not designed for erotic triflers. It calls for resolve, tact, and sensitive emotional antennae.

Casanova, long vilified as an emotionally avoidant rake, was one of the subtlest and most masterful engineers of intimacy. He strove to fathom women’s psyches and sought “the kiss that unites two souls in bed.” With the castrato Bellino, he alone pierced “his” facade, revealed the true Teresa beneath, and launched an ecstatic affair with his “double.” Yet Casanova always sustained a here-there interplay in his intimacies. He liked games of disguise with Teresa, faked then confessed his true wealth, and advanced and retreated from the altar.

The Reverend C. L. Franklin isn’t a household name in the annals of seduction. But he was an Afro-Baptist sensation in the 1950s, a preacher and woman slayer whose specialty was empathic, heartfelt connection. A gospel pioneer with his sung sermons (he’s the father of Aretha Franklin), and a civil rights leader, he was also a consummate ladies’ man. As Mary Wilson, an original member of the Supremes, said, women “absolutely loved him” and dozens cycled through his life, including two wives and R & B celebrity Ruth Brown. Asked why, the answer was always “his uncanny ability to address the deepest recesses of another’s soul”—while retaining an “inner wall of privacy.”

In the beginning, Monica Lewinsky was underwhelmed by President Bill Clinton; he was an “old guy” with a “big red nose.” That was before the 1995 rope-line incident when he lasered her with his “look,” and she fell like a shot bird. For all his squalid delinquencies and sexcapades, Clinton is beloved by women—insanely so. As Gail Sheehy observes, he knows how to make them “purr.” His secret: heat-seeking intimacy. Says an old girlfriend, “he makes you feel like you were the only one on this earth.” He dollies in and seems to “crawl into your soul.” Many inamoratas have stayed close to Clinton, and his wife, say intimates, remains “besotted” with him. At the same time, he has a cagey, inaccessible side that only ramps the I-we dynamic.

Psychiatrist Carl Jung was an intimacy virtuoso of a different caliber. He, too, had a fix on women’s interior life and a genius for connection. But he made the exploration of “inner space” the focal point of his career, becoming a founding father of analytical psychology. A lifelong student of romantic love, Jung resurrected Plato’s trope of the search for a twin soul and gave it a depth-psychology spin. Each of us, he theorized, possessed an image of our other self in the unconscious—an anima for men and an animus for women—which explained why certain people entrance us.

Jung, “a great lover” by his own admission, was often entranced. Although he attracted his share of women in his youth, he encountered his first anima at twenty-one: a fifteen-year-old girl in braids whom he saw on a staircase and married six years later. He and Emma Rauschenbach had five children, but as his psychiatric practice grew, so did his female admirers and extramarital interests. It was, he realized (before the censure of doctor-patient involvement), the nature of the job. In therapy, patients projected onto him aspects of formative figures in their past, a process called “transference” that can create “unreal intimacy” and erotic yearnings. The yearnings must have come easily. Jung’s manner invited intimacy, and he was strikingly handsome—a six-foot-one “bull of a man” with piercing eyes and rugged features.