A powerful instinct when we meet someone we’re attracted to is to try to please them - and
we can naturally assume that the best way we might do this is to signal just how much
we agree with their views and choices on all matters great and small.
On an early date, when they happen to mention that they love dancing, we will reveal that
of course we love dancing too. Or when they explain how boring they find museums, we will
hide that on a trip to Berlin last year, we spent a whole fascinating day in the galleries
of the Altes Museum.
We may not state direct falsehoods but we stretch and bend the truth to its limits so
as to create an impression of near-total alignment.
Along the way, it rarely occurs to us that they might be performing some of the same
rigmarole for us, that they might also be adjusting their self-presentation in subtle
but powerful ways to fit in with what they take to be our preferences and values. There’s
a tragi-comic aspect to our deepening mutual attraction. Two decent people are trying to
be as nice as they can. No one is setting out to deceive and yet, gradually, a set of
hugely misleading and dangerous ideas about who each person really is, are getting established.
The apparent success of our will-to-please can inspire us to move in together and later
to marry. And then - inevitably - the prolonged, intimate scrutiny that coupledom brings reveals
the scale of our mistaken expectations. In a sequence of disillusioning stages, we are
each saddened, disappointed and shocked to discover who we have ended up with. There
are recriminations, rows and fragile reconciliations until finally one or other of us comes to
the grim, but still surprising conclusion that we were never compatible.
Or we may stick at it with growing misery. We face a life-time of holidays that never
involve the museum visits we crave. We have to resign ourselves to never having had the
kind of sex we want. Or, even more grievously, we eventually embark on a furtive life; we
seek out the moments when they’re away to pursue needs we’ve pretended not to have.
Until one day our double-life is exposed - and we drown in bitterness, fury and sorrow.
Yet the origin of such nightmares is only ever a hugely touching, but painfully flawed
and risky, devotion to being an easy match. We want to be simple; and yet we end up in
a very complicated mess.
A genuinely simpler approach would involve daring to be a bit more complex from the start.
There is no need to be brazen or demanding just as there is no requirement that our date
agree or even stick around beyond dessert (or the main course). Some will run away - and
should. It will save everyone a lot of time.
In order to be honest in seduction, we need a basic sense of acceptability, we must know
that we are not perfect but that we are not for that matter wholly abject or shameful.
Our inner conviction that our oddities are essentially reasonable allows us to present
ourselves to another person without fear or defensiveness.
Our candour then arms us with the right to ask our date to reveal - with similar honesty
- what may be individual and difficult about their own characters. If they insist that
they are really very simple and ‘easy’, we are allowed to be gently but firmly sceptical.
They are a human being, and to be human is to be complicated. It cannot possibly be true
that they exist without significant quirks.
Being straightforward on dates is in the end a mechanism for two people to fast-forward
time - and to spare themselves agony. We should know that a polished surface can’t be a
true picture of who anyone can be. Only once our mutual complexities have been outlined
should we sense that we are safe in the presence of a fellow mature and pleasingly direct individual.
We will have the simpler relationships we desire, when we can dare to share and accommodate
the actual complexities of human nature.