After reading Amboabe's 'McCain' post, it got me to thinking about politics, specifically those of an inter-personal nature. I believe Steve Miller referred to it in his colossal song ‘The Joker’ as ‘the pompetus of love’. Funnily enough, as a child, I always thought he was singing, ‘the POLITICS of love’, which actually makes more sense when you think about it.
In my experience, women generally are attracted to two major things in a partner; physical beauty and/or power.
I’d venture to say this is not an original thought, in fact it’s more about an innate biological imperative than anything else. Starting back in caveman times, the guy with the bigger club nailed the hottest babe to produce the hardiest progeny. Nowadays, not much has really changed. As a man, if you’re not lucky enough to be born looking like Brad Pitt, you’d better have something going on in the ‘power’ department, or else you’re gonna have a tough row to hoe.
Now, the question is, what constitutes ‘power’?
Does it mean great wealth, an impressive job, high social status or a fancy car? In some cases yes, but most of the time it’s an illusion. Most of the time, all you need to do is trick your prospective partner into thinking that YOU hold all the cards. Now, as Amboabe touched on, pretending to be disinterested in someone many times has the opposite effect. However, I’d go one step further. In my personal experience what really works, is to be TRULY disinterested. You need to actually condition yourself not to care. Is she wanting you, are you wanting her? These thoughts need to be eradicated from your brain. Now you may ask, ‘what the hell is the point of that, if you’re truly disinterested in the person, then why waste your time at all, it makes no sense!?’ The simple reason why?
Sex.
Every day in the trenches, men and women are battling with each other in order to get what they need from each other. For women, it might be a stable relationship, for a man it’s probably to get laid. Unfortunately, we’re usually at odds with each other on an emotional level, so we set traps.
Women have their own tricks up their sleeves, don’t fool yourselves, they play on insecurities, use guilt, and sometimes come up with some wildly irrational act out of nowhere just to ‘get your attention’.
‘*sniff* I only slept with your boss to get you to NOTICE ME!!!’
When you think about all the things we do to one another, sometimes a life of monasticism seems as refreshing as a nice cold seven-up.
It’s all just the ‘pompetus of love’.
Unfortunately there's one major drawback to all this game playing and machination - it never works out in the end. If you go on long enough not caring, you may get a lot of sex, but you’ll wind up a bitter hollow shell and if you sleep with the boss of your boyfriend, chances are you’re going to get dumped. The thing is, everyone out there is searching for something that doesn't exist, it's just this bill of goods that's been force-fed to us from childhood about what constitutes the 'ideal' when it comes to sex and love. Movie bullshit, tv commercials, sitcoms where the fat guy that works in some dead blue collar job is married to some improbably hot wife, poetry, love songs, fairytales…
Fairy tales all.
It’s funny, as the truth in things rarely disappoints. In fact it’s far more surprising and empowering than any cliché you can hang your hat on. Politics in any form are just plain unrewarding.