I was reading an article on psychoanalysis which discussed what love is. In the article, which focused on the Lacanian premise that desire is produced when we try to fill the gap between our conscious selves and idealization of that self, the author made, I think, quite a profound argument: that love, as the ultimate manifestation of desire, is giving something you haven't got to give, to somebody who doesn't want it.

I think this to be intimately tied to the art of seduction. While this forum seems to have come to a consensus oppinion that attraction can be manufactured by a confident, skilled man, I am of the opinion that the reality is quite the opposite: attraction manufactures confidence, not the other way around.

Attraction begins when one gives a thing they haven;'t got to give. This means empathizing with the object of your desire: quite literally feeling what she wants, giving her a thing that fills her emptiness, and therefore giving her a thing that you do not finally possess.

The culmination of this process occurs with the women's resolution that the gift you have to give her is something that she doesn't ultimately want. We see this in various manifestations of "shit tests" and other trepidations about recieveing the gift the man has to give.

Whats the takeaway here? We need to focus less of what a confident man looks like and does, and more on the fatalistic, absurd concept of accepting a desire that manufactures us, that moves through us.

I believe that the mastery of seduction is placing oneself directly within the tension between what she says she wants and what she really desires, and riding this emotion. Empathy, not confidence, is the most important facet of what we do when we seduce.