The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [63]
Is that such a bad thing? Across the world and time, people have lured lovers in a glance, à la Romeo and Juliet, in throbbing night-clubs, or like traditional Apache teenagers, whose courtship may entail sitting together for up to an hour in silence.
“It’s better,” said one seventeen-year-old. “You don’t know how to talk yet.”
Many techno-literati favor indirect approaches, like dater Andrew MacGowan:
I knew what I wanted and the internet cut out the middleman. You can meet people in bars and clubs, but then the first element is attraction. I wanted to use a medium where you talked to someone on the phone before meeting and saw whether you formed a bond.
Yes. Then again, you lose the precious early bonding moments and the memories that form close up, as well as risk inspiring fantasies that bring needless disappointment when you meet. And can you know what you want before seeing it? Sex rewards serendipity.
Communication doesn’t just create or conserve relationships; it is their essence, and face-to-face matters since so much lies beyond speech. I could tell I liked someone by the butterflies that jived in my belly when we met, and the daydreams after—second-guessing the meaning of a hesitation, a lowered voice, the shade of a smile; promises that neither email nor telephone deliver.
In eighteenth-century Madrid under the Inquisition, prohibition heightened desire and eloquence at expressing it:
On their walks, in the churches, at the theatre, [ladies] speak with their eyes to whomever they wish, and have a perfect command of this seductive language.
But the most spellbinding gaze speaks louder with words. Pick-up lines abound, and some work; however, subtler methods exist to ramp up tension, signal bad intentions, and ensure your pillow talk doesn’t send lovers to sleep—not even in a relationship’s mellow autumn.
SWEET TALK, HARD SELL: THE RISING PRICE OF NEGOTIATING FOR LOVE
Romance makes chess of the most humdrum conversation because in love and lust, all are strategists. We can’t help it; millions of years’ evolution and millennia of cultural change have conditioned us to massage our words to attract value-added partners. But recent decades have shaken up the curriculum of our sentimental educations, and romantic values have metastasized, with the length and style of courtship as unpredictable as ladies’ hemlines. Conversation—seeing others’ point of view, speaking to their desires—has never been as necessary.
For centuries men traded women in deals weighed by dowries, like so many gold balls and chains, and for all the mist swaddling romance, the marketplace persists and is increasingly volatile. In 1993 economists Theodore Bergstrom and Mark Bagnoli dubbed courtship the “waiting game” because in traditional societies, the richer the groom, the older he tended to be, and the younger his pretty bride. They predicted that as female autonomy grew, women would marry later, to men closer in age. Almost right; however, divorce and singledom are soaring.
They had overlooked the strains of negotiating for love in a free-market sexual economy. In The Challenge of Affluence Avner Offer demonstrated that as wealth rises, marital satisfaction falls. Why? Just as money doesn’t end problems but precipitates new ones, so it is with choices. (Call it the quantity theory of insecurity.) Desires alter when we needn’t wed to be kept, fed, or watered.
Ask model-actress-poet Jerry Hall, who in 1985, still embroiled with Mick Jagger, memorably drawled:
My mother said it was simple to keep a man, you must be a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom. I said I’d hire the other two and take care of the bedroom bit.
By 2007, the focus was less on what she could provide than get:
You know the kind of guy I’m looking for? A guy on my own wavelength. A guy I can have a conversation with. I’ve tried toyboys, I’ve done lots of sexy guys, and some have been very smart and nice, but you can’t talk to them about anything. Maybe I’m not going to enough cocktail parties.
Hall could always