Authors: Betsy Prioleau
When self-improvement stops, love stops.
—R
OBERT
S
OLOMON
,
About Love
The love match seems inconceivable: an attractive, ambitious blonde in her twenties and a jobless man fifteen years her senior. But as author Christiane Bird recounts it, he was unspeakably magnetic. The first night she met him at a writers’ conference, she followed him through the snow to an empty brownstone he was house-sitting, and lived with him on and off for three years.
The question she asks herself is why. Besides her rescue complex, the fun, and good sex, she boils it down to the man. He was the forever-interesting type—complicated, insightful, entertaining, curious, and knowledgeable about “everything.” In comparison, other men seemed cardboard cutouts. This is what women want, Bird decides. “Someone who will enlarge our world, expand life’s possibilities, and make us more than the sum of our parts.” “Sometimes,” she concludes, “Mr. Wrong is Mr. Right.”
For lasting passion, an inexhaustible, expansive identity is the penultimate spell. Desire is a glutton and craves everything—continual enrichment, complexity, and enlargement. “There is no end,” declares historian Roberto Unger, “to what people want of another.” Men who eternally enthrall are manifold.They’re “like a mine,” wrote Christopher Isherwood. “You go deeper and deeper. There are passages, caves, whole strata.”
Contrary to Darwinist dogma, women aren’t content with mere material assets; they seek inner assets—men who are multifaceted, convoluted, and on the stretch. Experts suggest several reasons. First, a growth-fueled, polysided mate prevents consumer boredom, providing constant mental stimulation. Second, he’s less likely to thwart female development. Given women’s systematic stunting throughout culture, this is a strong lure. No wonder women in surveys consistently voice a desire for partners committed to change and mutual growth, and speak of leaving stick-in-the-muds who stifle them. Complained one adulterous wife, “I mean my husband isn’t running around worried about my growth as a human being, so I am.”
Love at its best, say students of romantic psychology, is a drive for psychic health. Eros, the life force, pushes us to outdo ourselves—to expand, individuate, and transcend limits. Humanist psychiatrist Abraham Maslow distinguished this positive “B love” from the “D” variety, which is mired in neurotic stasis and need. Women are increasingly disinclined to settle for “D”s. As Erica Jong writes, a positive, dynamic relationship is “always in a state of metamorphosis”; “the perfect man transforms the perfect woman.”
The sex gods were works in progress—proliferous, complex, and many in one. The multi-aspected Shiva was in a permanent state of transformation, dancing the endless Dance of Life, and Dionysus grew into one of the most contradictory and abundant deities in the pantheon. The phallic Hermes, meanwhile, expanded over the centuries to become a master of every trade: thief, orator, seducer, litterateur, accountant, inventor, and guide through the underworld. In their worship of these gods, women expanded as well, casting off patriarchal fetters and ascending to the ranks of the divine.
Jan Kjærstad’s postmodern
Seducer
reconfigures Don Juan along these old mythic lines. Rather than a misogynistic rake, Jonas Wergeland is a futuristic love god who has “everything” and treasures women, boosting each of his lovers to the top of their professions. As all twenty-three women bloom under his influence, he evolves from geologist, musician, architect, adventurer, athlete, and intellectual, to “television’s greatest talent” and host of “Thinking Big.” His inspiration is reciprocal; women’s passion for him, especially his wife’s, make him “unbeatable”
Ladies’ men of Wergeland’s caliber aren’t usual literary fare. “No simple Lothario,” Thomas Chippering of Tim O’Brien’s
Tomcat in Love
, is “complicated.” He’s a linguistic scholar, a decorated soldier, and polymath who is on a personal-growth crusade. Women find him “attractive beyond words,” thrill over his plural charms, and drag him to bed. But it’s a tale told by an idiot. Chippering, the narrator, is delusional—a sexoholic and predator—who spirals into madness and reduces his wife to a psychiatric nurse.
Not so in women’s popular fantasies. As romance critics point out, the new hero is a multidimensional “Omega Man” who “grow[s] with the heroine” and reveals ever-“new aspects of himself.” In Laura Kinsale’s
Flowers from the Storm
, Christian, the Duke of Jervaulx, is inner plentitude personified: an aesthete, athlete, lover, and brilliant mathematician. When he’s shot in a duel and loses his power of speech, he marries a prim Quaker, Maddy Timms, and together they embark on parallel psychological journeys. As Christian learns to speak, solve more difficult equations, and access his softer side, Maddy integrates her repressed sensuality and matures into a cultivated, open-minded adult. “You make me better,” they tell each other at the denouement as they recommit to their joint development.
In reality, ladies’ men—however actualized and growth-directed—don’t always confer personality upgrades on women. Yet some do. The multi-gifted duc de Richelieu nourished Émilie du Châtelet’s intellectual genius; Denis Diderot inspired Madeleine de Puisieux’s six books; and Franz Liszt, despite his defections, rescued Countess Marie d’Agoult from the sterile life of society hostess and turned her into an esteemed author, “Daniel Stern.” Mamah Cheney, who lived with Frank Lloyd Wright during his most prolific phase, broke the “Angel of the House” mold, taught languages at Leipzig University, and translated the work of feminist Ellen Key.
Casanova, a man of parts, became a priest, lawyer, scientist, violinist, novelist, businessman, and memoirist. In the process, he helped promote many lovers; he redeemed a “ruined” countess with social and financial support; launched Angiola Calori’s career as an opera singer; and encouraged Henriette’s learning and her defiance of eighteenth-century gender constraints.
The American Victorian writer Harold Frederic epitomized the German concept of
Bildung
—the constant unfolding of one’s potential. A ceaseless evolver, he was a colossal personality who “took women by storm.” Author of ten novels and two volumes of nonfiction, he wrote one of the finest studies of seduction in literature,
The Damnation of Theron Ware
, starring a vanguard “Venus.” He appreciated women, aided the growth of his loved ones, and knew how to fascinate them.
For a ladies’ man he was a huge and unhandsome specimen. “Big-bellied” with thick lips and a walrus mustache, he looked like a giant “cucumber” in his signature long green overcoat. He grew up in Utica, New York, but worked in London as the British correspondent for the
New York Times
from age twenty-eight until he died. Although he told highly colored tales about his background—desperate poverty and such intellectual neglect that he learned to read from soap boxes—his past was more prosaic. He came from a middle-class home with a devoted mother, received a regular education, married a conventional hometown girl, and rose to be editor of the
Albany Evening Standard
at twenty-six. But there was nothing prosaic about the man. Frederic was a presence: baroque, myriad-minded, and larger than life.
From the moment he arrived in London, talented women converged. While drifting apart from his wife, who retreated to the suburbs with their five children, he cultivated accomplished ladies in town, including three “attractive young” poets. One rhapsodized, Frederic is “a man of power,” a “barbaric king well worth the taming.” He was not, however, the tamable kind; he flew under the radar, living covert lives at men’s clubs, on backstreet labyrinths, and in the arms of a second “wife,” Kate Lyon.
Lyon, an American expat who wore a pince-nez and oozed “sex at every pore,” shared a secret household with him for eight years and had three of his children. Her passion for him never flagged. A one-man continuing education program, Frederic studied rare plants, book-binding, philately, photography, politics, music theory, haute cuisine, and theology. His complexity deepened. Contradictory and mercurial, he wore bohemian Chinese shirts but belonged to the anti-bohemian movement, and was both vain and insecure, snobbish and democratic. In contrast to Frederic’s estranged, reclusive wife, Lyon flourished, becoming a gifted intellectual hostess and short-story writer.
Frederic’s early death at forty-two was just as mysterious and complicated as the man himself. There were so many conflicting accounts—death-bed resurrections with trips to bars and hovering faith healers—that Kate Lyon was tried and acquitted for manslaughter. Afterward, she remained single, but thrived (ghostwriting for Stephen Crane at one point) and retired on her royalty checks to Chicago, where she died at eighty. The British thought Harold Frederic “the frankest man in two hemispheres,” but the women drawn into his penumbra knew better. He was as complex, as multifarious as they get, not to mention captivating.
The year of Harold Frederic’s death coincided with the ascent of another leviathan on the British literary horizon—H. G. Wells. In 1898, the thirty-two-year-old Wells had just published three scientific romances, among them
The War of the Worlds
, and was on the brink of writing over a hundred books of fiction and nonfiction on an encyclopedic range of topics. He was also on the brink of a career as a “great amorist.” Although he coyly denied it in his autobiography, he was a heavyweight ladies’ man, loved forever by a fleet of superior women.
To see him on old BBC tapes is not to believe it. Wells was short and tubby, with a center-parted slick-down, and a high, squeaky voice. Sensitive to his physical deficiencies, he compensated with a cerebral “sexual system” of his own. Dynamic and lively, he had an omni-curious mind and could talk to women about everything.
For a man of his rational bent (a zoologist by training and logician by temperament), he was surprisingly romantic about women. He sought “lover-shadows,” twin personae, who were intelligent, free-souled pioneers. After a first, ill-suited marriage to his cousin, Wells accrued an honor roll of women. A partial exception was his second wife, “Jane,” his former biology student and mother of his two sons, who wrote minor short stories, kept house, and looked askance at his affairs.
In each case, Wells claimed, women seduced him—achievers like writer-journalist Dorothy Richardson; scholar Amber Reeves, who had his daughter; and Elizabeth von Arnim, a best-selling author. All went on to further accomplishments and held him dear. Richardson wrote at least sixteen books; Reeves, three novels; and von Armin, twenty, including
The Enchanted April
, adapted five times on stage and screen.
As Wells grew in prominence and intellectual breadth, gifted women gave him no rest. His most famous liaison with writer Rebecca West lasted ten years, during which she gave birth to their son and wrote acclaimed pieces for
The New Yorker
. Despite West’s cavils about Wells’s destructive effect on her work, she published two novels under his aegis, and admitted that being with him was like “seeing Nureyev dance or hearing Tito Gobbi sing.”
With age, Wells gravitated to global politics and lobbied for world peace, predicting atomic warfare. He took up religion, world history, art and design, cinema, racial inequality, and eugenics. Beside him was always a retinue of brilliant women: birth-control activist Margaret Sanger, war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and his “chief mistress,” Moura Budberg, linguist and Russian secret agent. Wells thought that if any man had had his amorous opportunities, he would have acted accordingly. But he wasn’t just any man; he was a boundless, multiple personality who drew exceptional women and drove them to excel with him. As Margaret Sanger—still excited by him years later—said, “To be equal to his company, you must pull yourself up [and] keep alive every second.”
All told, personhood is the fizz in the love philter. A vacuous Mr. Big can assemble the ingredients and follow the steps for eternal passion—from conversation and festivity to a difficulty-delight master mix—but it will go down like Nyquil. The ladies’ man himself—his inner wealth of fascinations—is the big magic, and so potent he doesn’t need everything. He can add and subtract charms, forget seasonings, and brew to suit his strengths. He can be a temperamental chef—capricious and combustible.
But he has the formula few possess—the sorcerer’s secret to the female heart. Great seducers grasp what women desire at the quick of their beings. They ennui-proof their identities, and practice a love artistry that’s time-tested and time-resistant and customized for each woman. They’re continual romancers who keep romance crackling. As the dreamboat tells the heroine in the movie
The Wedding Date
: It’s just “about giving you what you need.” “Holy crap!” she says. “You’re worth every penny.”
–
I say to you, make yourself a lady’s man as much as you can.
—W
ILLIAM
M
AKEPEACE
T
HACKERAY
,
Sketches and Travels
If men knew all that women think, they would be twenty times more audacious.
—A
LPHONSE
K
ARR
,
Les Guêpes
I
’m in my living room with five “hot choosers”—two married, two divorced, and one single—who love men and have always had their pick. They’re here to discuss the great seducer. “Don Juan! Casanova!” exclaims Anne, a psychoanalyst in her forties with a blonde chignon and chunky silver rings. “None of those labels work. Can’t we just talk about the men who besot us?”
She has our attention. The group leans in around the coffee table: Karen, a racehorsey, retired financier; Zoe, a Eurasian twenty-seven-year-old art dealer; Trina, a petite documentary filmmaker swathed in a paisley shawl; and Roxie, the senior member of the klatch, a journalist in round red glasses and a gray bob.
Karen speaks first. “I can’t talk generally—only about my own experience. It wasn’t money, first off. But it was a high bar. I wouldn’t say Mac was the most attractive man. Except he had this certain presence.”
Trina tosses the end of her shawl over her shoulder and breaks in: “ ‘Star Quality,’ that glow!”
“Exactly,” Karen resumes. “And you know, Mac was just adventurous, unusual, and fun! He’d say, ‘Let’s go down to Aria [a nightclub] and play.’ And he loved to communicate; I really like that in a man. He also made sure I knew he cared; he was totally connected to me. I had a fabulous ten years with him.”
“I had a Pierre once,” says Roxie, swinging her red glasses by the stems. “He was very short, burly, almost gorilla-esque. But he was just
wow
! My mother didn’t care this much for me. That total caring is very sexy. I would go for focus, concentration, and intensity. Ladies’ men, I imagine, have the ability to focus on a woman so that she feels re-defined in a very good way.”
Zoe punches her knee in agreement. “Yes! I knew this guy in a band who reminds me of Russell Brand. You couldn’t trust him to take out the garbage or take a shower every day. But he makes you feel so special—as if you’re the only person in the room he really wants to hear from. He appreciates women.”
Anne adds with an analyst’s nod. “A man who loves women, makes women love
him
. One of the men I dated like that had two sisters and a mother he adored. And those kind of guys love women’s bodies.”
Trina hugs her shawl and lets out a long contralto laugh. “Listen, sex has to be the most important thing. Anything else you can get from a friend. I just followed my clitoris across the world.”
Karen and Roxie both frown. “But you can have sex without falling in love with someone,” protests Karen.
“Right,” chimes in Roxie. “I like conversation, the communication, the contact, the humor.”
“Listen,” Trina cranes forward. “Only we know what went on behind closed doors and can speak about the men who made us feel fabulous. Twelve years ago, I was involved with this man who brought an extraordinary amount of fire. He was one of my ‘fire-signs.’ Every day was an event—book, ideas, and excitement. It was a phenomenal relationship. He gave me such an incredible template. Nobody can rob me of that! And how great I felt about myself and—.”
“They make you feel,” Anne breaks in, “sexually capable of anything. That you’re totally desirable.”
“In truth,” Trina sweeps the circle of women with a charged look, “you’d do anything for a man like that.”
Zoe sinks back on the sofa and sighs, “I’d love to meet these men.”
The Romantic Landscape
“How’s chances?” as the Irving Berlin ballad goes. What sort of erotic climate is Zoe stepping into? At a glance, it doesn’t look like a season for romance; in fact, writes Maryanne Fisher in
Psychology Today
, there
is
none on the dating scene. Gone are the old rituals and rules, and in their place reign confusion, anomie, superficiality, and cynicism. “The love experience,” say trend-trackers like sexual theorist Feona Attwood, has “flattened and fragmented.” Rather than grand amours, we have “cold heat,” desire without passion, and plural, light attachments. Although an advance for sexual liberation, casual coupling, hookups, and turnstile partners have shriveled eros.
A hypersexualized culture hasn’t put us in the mood for love either. An excess of the explicit, show-and-tell nudity, and boudoir graphics has paradoxically neutralized desire. We’re numbed by wall-to-wall cleavages, buns, crotch shots, and coital live feeds. “Sexual boredom,” states Judith Seifer, former president of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists, “is the most pandemic dysfunction in this country.”
The Internet has opened up a pantopia of erotic possibilities, but it has also discouraged romance. We’re more into Facebook than face time with significant others, and can always find a bigger, better deal in cyberspace where endless options beckon. Love is “liquid”; ties are frailer; we can e-snub or press “Delete.” Online porn has also taken some of the bloom off the rose.
Scientific American Mind
reports that moderate use can cause “dissatisfaction with a partner’s sexual performance and appearance” and plant doubts about a relationship. The commodity culture has further eroded romantic love. Desire has insidiously migrated to the mall, where it’s been trivialized and merchandized by beauty czars and enmeshed in a “web of consumer spending.”
Meanwhile, desire itself seems to be dwindling. Critic Camille Paglia believes “a sexual malaise [has] sunk over the country.” Nothing is sexy anymore; we’ve sprung an erotic energy leak, with the genders in a state of terminal indifference and apathy. The sixties’ sexual optimism, note cultural commentators, including Maureen Dowd, has curdled into bitterness and disillusion, and ushered in an age of irony and discontent, and lukewarm, melancholy marriages.
Estranged Men
Nobody seems happy with the current lovescape, and rarely have men and women been less happy with each other. Many men aren’t feeling the love right now. In an unprecedented cultural shift, women have undermined male dominance, advancing in business, in education, and in public and private life. Amid this dislocation, many men’s egos and libidos have taken a hit. Feeling increasingly demoralized and emasculated by this change in traditional roles, men report erectile dysfunction at ever earlier ages, often as young as eighteen.
Anger has also crept into men’s relations with women. Unhinged by the loss of historic prerogatives and power and uncertain how to adapt, some men have reverted to chauvinism. “The men of my generation are angry, howling nasty,” inveighs
New York Times
correspondent Charlie LeDuff, and aren’t about to “waste time trying” to “understand women.” In a recent retrosexist outbreak at Yale, men chanted obscenities at freshman women and rated them in an email blast according to the number of beers it would take to have sex with them. Tucker Max’s misogynistic hump-and-dump adventures with “sluts,”
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
, has sold over 1.5 million copies. In TV and movies, notes
New Yorker
writer Anthony Lane, “sexual politics are going backward fast.”
Another contingent of men has retreated from the fray by taking shelter from romantic engagement in man caves with their buddies. Director Judd Apatow has created a popular genre, the “bromance” movie, out of this trend: guys who’ve opted out of the whole love business to bond with each other and horse around with guitars, video games, and easy pieces.
Machismo is making a feeble last stand too, with men anxious to salvage the shreds of masculine identity. Pickup artists feign warrior cojones and roll out paramilitary maneuvers to seize prey in bars for quickie takedowns. Culture-wide, men feel romantically beleaguered, regarding women with a wary, jaundiced eye and clenched fists.
Estranged Women
Women are equally at odds with men. The biggest surprise for researchers in one survey of over two thousand women was the female anger toward men. For every misogynistic Tucker Max, there’s a man-basher, cat-calling “ass-pirate” and sporting T-shirts that read, “Boys are stupid. Throw rocks at them!” Two scholarly books have chronicled a rise in misandry (antipathy to men), and attack jokes fill the Internet: “What is that insensitive bit at the end of the penis called?” “The man.” Or: “What do clitoris, anniversary, and a toilet have in common?” “Men always miss them.”
If men are riled and unnerved by the gender quake, women are bitterly disappointed by it. The sexual and feminist revolutions of a half century ago were supposed to have ushered in a love fest—fem-centric sexuality, parity, and romantic happiness—especially as women rose in the world. When it didn’t work out that way, and the male backlash kicked in, generations of women felt cheated.
Women’s libidos have been just as quashed as men’s by all this. Two-thirds of women opted for anything but sex in a 2010 study, and female sexual dysfunction persists in large numbers. “Women’s sex lives,” says New York University psychology professor Leonore Tiefer, “are often a struggle, a disappointment, an archipelago of regret.”
Nor are relationships paying off as hoped. Since 1972, women have become steadily unhappier according to several 2009 studies, a trend caused in part, claims
Huffington Post
writer Lisa Solod Warren, by men’s failures to pass muster. Spouses and boyfriends aren’t “evil,” per se, she writes, they’re “obtuse” and “clueless,” despite “women’s every effort to wake them up.” Napping on the job has consequences. Women’s infidelity is rising, and the most commonly cited reasons are boredom and neglect. “Women,” said one seasoned cicisbeo (lover of wives), “just want to be loved.”
Not just loved, but loved extravagantly. Improbably, in the midst of erotic famine and dismay with men, women have never asked so much of romantic partners. Journalist Jillian Straus and others document the sky-high expectations of contemporary women, while romance novels parade battalions of superlative lovers—complete-package Casanovas. The voices of reason advise settling for a Mr. Almost Perfect and simpatico pal, but as Zoe, the art dealer, says, “Why would I settle? I can earn my own money. I’m looking to meet someone who blows my socks off.” Women with options, report researchers, aren’t satisfied with “solid, good, nice men” any longer; they seek passion and excitement, too, in “hedonic” unions with equals.
Imagining a Neo-Ladies’ Man
So what would a “hedonic” man look like if Zoe could locate him in this unpromising scene? Although each woman has her own mate print and preferences, ladies’ men have remained remarkably similar through the ages. A 2012 survey of romantic values concludes that “women’s needs haven’t changed one bit”; what enthralled a queen of ancient Sparta and an eighteenth-century
salonnière
still enthralls the banker, product manager, and college dean today. With a few tweaks; every era favors a signature set of charms.
The twenty-first century, with its tectonic upheavals, is changing—ever so slightly—the face of the ladies’ man. Driven and overtaxed themselves, women will unlikely embrace high-maintenance men like the overwrought, labile Gabriele D’Annunzio and the alcoholic Kingsley Amis. “Too needy” is one of the top-five deal-breakers for women in a new study, and both Karen and Trina of my focus group had discarded lovers when they became clingy or flunked AA.
Money and status, minor lures in any age, are losing further ground with women. Reflecting a common sentiment, none of the “hot choosers” at my gathering cared about either. The brighter the woman, found a University of Michigan study, the less swayed she is by a man’s wallet size, and in a University of Louisville survey, three-fourths of women would choose a teacher with short workdays over a surgeon with eight times his salary.
Some charms, though, will carry more weight with women. One may be looks. As popular romances dramatize, the “female gaze” has been liberated in recent decades. Women notice beautiful men with nice bulges and are less tolerant of Pillsbury Doughboys. A
Psychology Today
feature notes that the more attractive and self-sufficient the woman, the more she values a man’s appearance. As a result, male cosmetic surgery is climbing and men admit, “it’s really to do with women.” Karen, Roxie, Anne, Trina, and Zoe all mentioned “the chemistry of good looks,” but as soon as they spoke about specific lovers, their tune changed; their favorites were consistently unhandsome and “sub-average.” Supporting the homely seducer phenomenon, psychiatrist Michael Pertschuk discovered in a large-scale study that women tend to like a loved one’s appearance, regardless of stated ideals.
Sexual virtuosity will also loom large in the new ladies’ man profile. Stanford professor Shelby Martin, who has studied the “orgasm gap,” believes women lag behind men largely through male ignorance and ineptitude. Another factor is female naiveté, which is changing fast.
Huffington Post
contributor Gail Konop Baker writes that as women’s power in the workplace grows, their “inner vixen is coming out and saying HELLO.” These vixens will demand their due. Mass-market romances, with their man stallions and detailed orgasmic romps, have anticipated this desire for years. No great seducer has ever failed women, but now he must be at concert pitch to keep up with today’s pleasure-claimers. Every guest at my klatch put a premium on sex with a capital
S
.
Women, too, will ask for an extra dose of romantic zeal in a postmodern ladykiller. Despite the privilege of the sexual initiative, “women want men’s urgency.” The great lovers my group discussed were regular Aly Khans, surging in like Roxie’s Pierre. Neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam determined in their 2011 investigation that women long to be vehemently desired and pursued. Journalist Laura Sessions Stepp made the same finding in her sample of young women. Weary of putting the make on men, they yearned for suitors like romance heroes who scoop up heroines and say, “There’s something about you I’m finding impossible to stay away from.” According to sexual psychologist Marta Meana, assertive, fervid male ardor is critical to the female libido. “Strike one” against Ashton Kutcher’s character in the movie
A Lot Like Love
(and what keeps the heroine from committing for seven years) is that he doesn’t “make the first move.”