B007Q6XJAO EBOK (18 page)

His first mistress, Sabina Spielrein, had been diagnosed as a hysteric and sloughed off on Jung as an incurable case. Through a revolutionary regimen, he released her buried repressions and in the process discovered their “deep spiritual affinity.” Their affair lasted two years, and contrary to modern taboos against analyst-analysand liaisons, she recovered fully and became a noted psychiatrist. Later in Zurich, he attracted a seraglio of society women—known as the “Jungfrauen.” They packed his lectures and scheduled sessions with him in their homes, which often included sex.

In 1910 another patient, Toni Wolff, crossed his threshold, and the thirty-five-year-old Jung was struck again; here was his complementary cerebral half. “What would you expect from me?” he shrugged. “The anima bit me in the forehead and would not let go.” The ménage à trois lasted forty years. He brought her home to live with Emma and their five children, and spent part of his day and some nights with Toni, part with his wife, and the rest with women famished for comprehension and contact. None seems to have been injured by these unorthodox unions.

Despite Jung’s interest in self-completion through sexual love, however, he resisted unalloyed two-in-oneship. Emotional interdependence, he thought, was death to identity and romance. The libido, he said, was “like the two poles of a battery”—a continual oscillation of opposites. A complicated man, he encouraged confidences with his warmth and openness, yet he habitually retreated into long, ruminative silences. Jung wrote that the “story of [his] life” was that of his “inner experience.” But it was also a story of seduction on a grand scale via a sophisticated aphrodisiac—concentrated intimacy, cut with differentiation, and the dream, however briefly, of one flesh/one spirit.

The word
intimacy
makes many men head for the hills. It has become a pop sanctity and couples’ therapy billy club. It evokes the rap of the relationship police at the door, a strip search of the soul, and life without parole in a hot box of overshared emotions. As a result, nervous seduction coaches caution men to maintain “good mental armor,” to “back off and go bland” for success with women. But real success—gaining a woman’s entire, lifelong passion—requires engagement, perceiving her unspoken self, inviting alignment, and mixing it up with a vital flux of selfhood and symbiosis.

Even the best-cast psychological “throws,” however, can miss the mark. A man can charge in, applaud a woman until he’s blue in the face, and offer an astral union of souls. But it won’t work without words—the right ones. If he can’t talk, if he bores or runs a line of BS, he’ll never lasso the lady, regardless of sensual or cerebral charms. Conversation is the slipknot in seduction, the first move to master—and the most neglected—for landing and locking in love.

CHAPTER 5

Locking in Love

–

Conversation

Love consists almost always in conversation.

—H
ONORÉ DE
B
ALZAC
,
The Physiology of Marriage

“B
elieve me,” one of New York’s top hostesses tells me, “every woman I know would kill for this man. Talk to him, you’ll see.” When I first meet George Reese at her home for a pre-dinner drink, I emphatically
don’t
see. He looks like a Southern sheriff in a Sunday suit: a thick-set build, bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows, and a suggestion of a jowl above his Windsor collar.

Then we sit down in the den, and he shoots me a larky, high-beam look: “Love your barbed-wire bracelet,” he says in a basso Georgia drawl. “I’m safe, right? Now tell me, how did you wind up in New York?” As I ramble on, he
uh-huhs
and chuckles along. “But you!” I catch myself, “I hear you’re pretty popular with the women in town.”

“Suzanne [our contact] is a peach and all that,” he answers, sipping his Manhattan. “But I’d give myself a seventy on a scale of a hundred.” “Well,” he finally admits, “I
have
always enjoyed the ladies. Back in Shiloh High when I ran for president, I had a female support group—they called ’em ‘Reese’s Pieces.’ ”

“Why the appeal?” I ask. He pauses and says, “Let’s see: I suppose in my case it’s conversation. I mean, I wasn’t a football type the girls chased after. But talking was always easy. And I do think it’s an advantage with women.” He angles forward and splays his hand for emphasis. “Still, it’s got to be spontaneous. I have a lot of interests, and I try to figure out what a gal wants to talk about. And a little drama, too, goes a long way, don’t you think?”

At dinner, he’s not the headliner I expected. Only after the soup course does he emerge from a genomics debate with his female dinner partner, a blonde surgeon, and address the table. He mentions weddings, and stories start to ricochet: the nude groom in a top hat, a ring bearer who swallowed the ring, the poodle “bridesmaid,” and the accident in the aisle.

Reese’s contribution isn’t remarkable. He tells about the time he waltzed with a gay usher at his son’s high-society wedding. But he “throws the gift,” as they say down South. Reese sets the big-tent scene with wry details, mimics the in-laws’ whispered invectives, and builds up to the moment when the priest cut in and escorted him off the floor. The women at the table are riveted. The surgeon beside him slips him her card, and he leaves with a just-divorced Swedish journalist.

A seductive conversationalist does more than verbally connect; he conjures enchantment—of a prepotent kind. A man of winged words and colloquial gifts, no matter how ill-favored, can gobsmack a woman. “Give me ten minutes,” bragged Voltaire, “to talk away my ugly face and I will bed the Queen of France.” And keep her bedded, if he wishes. Conversation is a long-acting charm that fires and feeds female desire and potentiates with time. “Women,” wrote Victorian novelist Wilkie Collins, “can resist a man’s love, a man’s fame, a man’s personal appearance, and a man’s money, but they cannot resist a man’s tongue, when he knows how to talk to them.”

Perhaps for good reason. Not only is a woman more verbal and communicative than a man, but she’s also erotically “lit” by conversation. The XX-chromosome brain is built to savor speech. Women have a larger communication center than men, possess faster verbal circuits, and process language more emotionally. The emotional-linguistic parts of their brain are extensively meshed and hypersensitive to social nuances. When women connect via talk, explains Louann Brizendine, they get a huge dopamine and oxytocin rush, the biggest neurological reward outside of an orgasm or a heroin hit.

All too often, male conversation isn’t providing these rushes. In poll after poll, women complain about men’s inability to give good dialogue—to listen, engage, and interest them. Silence is the number-one gripe. Studies suggest that the fallout may be serious, accounting for a high percentage of fights, divorces, and women’s affairs. Sociolinguists attribute the problem to an innate gender gap in speech styles, and say “cross-cultural communication” can’t be helped. But that’s cold comfort to many women who yearn, as
New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd writes, “to be in a relationship with a guy they can seriously talk to.”

The female fantasy world is full of such men. In Madame D’Aulnoy’s seventeenth-century fairy tale “The Blue Bird,” the King Prince transforms himself into a blue bird who visits his truelove’s prison cell each night for seven years and talks to her for hours. In more contemporary tales, heroines leave perfectly good lovers the moment they encounter talented talkers. Irina McGovern of Lionel Shriver’s
Post-Birthday World
discards her loyal partner of nine years for conversational sorcerer, snooker star Ramsey Acton. In and out of bed, he bespells her with his “soft, thick” down-market accent, his intuitive ear, funny stories, and off-color gabfests where he extemporizes with her until dawn, gesticulating with his fine, thin fingers. In Elin Hilderbrand’s
Summer Affair
, a Nantucket artist and mother two-times her “nothing-to say” cute husband with an overweight, balding retiree who’ll discuss “her work,” culture, and “important ideas” with her.

Mass-market romance heroes answer women’s wildest dreams: they’re talkative girlfriends embodied in 210 pounds of Mr. America muscle mass. Lisa Kleypas’s four Travis brothers in her Texas trilogy are ripped hunks, but they talk up a storm—about dreams, ambitions, psychic wounds, love, and the heroine’s endless attractions. The chiseled six-foot-six Mat Jorick of Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s
First Lady
is a conversationalist from female heaven. Smart, empathic, and gregarious, he love-swoons a hitchhiker (a president’s widow in disguise) on a trek in his RV through his sparkling, in-touch dialogue.

Mythic love gods, predictably, possessed the celestial gift of gab. The Irish Ogma was “honey-tongued,” and Hermes, “the god of eloquence,” wore a gold chain dangling from his lips and deciphered the hidden meanings in language. Dionysus not only founded dramatic dialogue in comedy and tragedy, he drew the wrath of King Pentheus with his “clever speech” and “slippery words.” And Paris seduced Helen of Troy by such “sweet and persuasive” speech that it affected her like “witchcraft” or the “the power of drugs.”

Gifted conversationalists may also have been the erotic kingpins of evolutionary history. According to many theorists (Darwin included), men who were good talking partners had the romantic edge over the grunters and club-wielders and monopolized the prime women. “Verbal courtship,” states Geoffrey Miller, “is the heart of human sexual selection.” Language itself is “made out of love” since speech may have evolved as a mating call or from the shamans’ spell-magic at fertility rites. Conversational fluency in general is a mark of “mating intelligence” and a male plumage display. Great communicators fantail empathy, humor, brains, psychological health, and social aptitude, and suborn women away from the mute studs.

For centuries amorists have implored men to get their colloquial skills up to speed. “Women are conquered by eloquent words,” proclaimed Ovid in ancient Rome. The European, Arabic, and Indian love literature was equally emphatic: a man must be “good at the art of conversation” and render a woman “rampant” with honeyed rhetoric. He is “no man,” said Shakespeare, “if with his tongue he cannot win women.” From Balzac to the present, the advice has persisted. “Speech is the true realm of eroticism,” writes Professor Shoshana Felman. “To seduce is to produce language that enjoys,” that “takes pleasure.”

By conversation these writers didn’t mean solo flights of glittering oratory. Although a command of words, subjects, and narrative drama is part of conversational charm, the rest is interactive, a dialogue that resembles a complex, erotic
pas de deux
. Ladies’ men are master choreographers. They both shine alone and coordinate conversation for two—talk that soothes, amuses, entertains and informs, and poetically enchants. And not all of talk is spoken; much depends on how a man moves, uses his voice, and listens. A great seducer provides verbal and nonverbal eloquence, shows a woman to her best advantage, and creates an improvisational “zone of magic” that’s charged with drama and sexual sorcery.

Unspoken Eloquence:
Gesture, Voice, Listening

There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture.

—W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE
,
A Winter’s Tale

You can miss his SoHo shop if you aren’t looking for the small plaque, “Bryce Green, Couturier,” on a black nondescript door. But you can’t miss his edgy, neo-fifties’ designs in fashion circles, or the man himself. He’s tall, rail thin, with a mane of sandy hair, and on the day of my first visit, he’s dressed in black jeans, a fitted checked shirt, pink socks, and matador shoes. In his world, heterosexuals are rare—rarer still are beloved ladies’ men like Bryce.

“Ladies man!” Bryce protests when we sit down in his studio. “That has a rather negative ring; I prefer a man who loves ladies.” His voice is soft, plumy, and dusted with his native Scottish burr. He cants forward, drapes his long arms over his knees, and says, “I was a late-bloomer—married twice—and now here I am with a string of lady friends. Must be a dearth of decent men,” he laughs.

“There’s more,” I coax.

“Oh, absolutely,” he spreads his arms. “I make a woman feel appreciated. Like most good lovers, I expect?” Then I’m off on Casanova—his gifts, veneration of women, and adventures—while Bryce beams and listens: “Right!” “Right!” “Yes.” “Exactly!” The phone trills, a client is here, and he shows me to the door, with a light hand on my shoulder: “Let’s talk again. Fascinating.” Back on Broome Street, I’m suddenly struck by what Bryce
didn’t
say, the spell of his voice, supple gestures, and avid listening.

Gesture

Conversationally, we speak volumes without words. At least 60 percent of conversation content is “silent.” Women read this nonverbal subtext better than men, and attend closely to men’s paralanguage, especially in romantic exchanges. In a Harvard University study, 87 percent of women versus 42 percent of men correctly interpreted the content of a couple’s conversation when the sound was turned off. A woman is on high alert for unsaid messages—wise to nuances of body movement.

Unlike ordinary men, great lovers are pros at wordless communication. T. C. Boyle depicts an adept in his novel about Alfred Kinsey,
The Inner Circle
. “Sexual Olympian” Corcoran seduces the narrator’s fiancée, Iris, with a polished nonverbal “rush,” sidling over and mimicking her smile for smile, move for move. Most men, say body-language students Barbara and Allan Pease, display few facial expressions (only a third of women’s) in conversation, and use mutual eye contact just 31 percent of the time. But Corcoran gazes fixedly at Iris, his mobile features alight with animation. Before long, she’s packing her bags for a liaison.

Gabriele D’Annunzio was celebrated for his “speechless” eloquence. Although handicapped by a homely face and squat build, he bewitched women with his amorous gestures. In a photograph of him talking to his Russian mistress, he stands tilted toward her, head inclined, arm extended, and one foot pointed forward. As kinesics experts explain, this was a fine-tuned erotic move. An inclined, asymmetric posture communicates immediacy and engagement; a head nod, rapport; a swerved foot, inclusiveness; and an open arm sweep, attraction. Expressive hands—a female favorite—were a D’Annunzian specialty as well. Actress Madame Simone found the poet’s looks repellent, but she conceded that he spellbound her as soon as he spoke, “waving his beautiful white hands in the air.”

It takes an agile romancer, too, to manage personal space successfully. He needs radar for mood and timing and a working knowledge of female “proxemics.” During intimate talks, a woman tends to stand closer and may become more generous with her favors if a man touches her lightly. Conversational doyen Bill Clinton excels in this lexicon. When he speaks to women (and men), he’s “almost carnal,” squeezing their hands and wrapping his arm around their shoulders as he locks eyes with them.

Voice

Along with his way with words, Casanova had another conversational gift that made him irresistible to women: his sonorous voice with its “seductive inflections.” As the
K
ā
ma S
ū
tra
recognized, a woman “can be hypnotized by a man’s voice.” The female weakness for vocal seduction has been featured in folktales since ancient Egypt, where the vulva was called “the ear between the legs.” Women hear better than men and listen with their libidos. Even as babies, girls are better at detecting tones of voice, and they remain good at it, sizing up potential mates by the sound of their speech. Vocally expressive themselves, women favor inflected male voices that are deep, low, and musical, which may be related to the fact that a “sing-songy, lilted voice” correlates with stronger empathic abilities.