I Can’t Believe You Didn’t Know It Was A Line!

I Can’t Believe You Didn’t Know It Was A Line!

In the very first episode of “Friends,” Monica falls for a seduction line and doesn’t even realize it until Joey and Ross explain it to her. (Refresh your memory - download it now:

It’s a sad, sad thing that this line continues to work when it's been excruciatingly well documented in movies (the best examples are in Some Like It Hot and Pillow Talk). Monica fell, but you won’t have to, if you follow this blog.

Seduction Con Lines

Luckily for us, even after centuries of guys desperately pooling resources and stealing seduction ideas from books and movies and each other, the lines they come up with are pretty predictable.

Seduction Con Lines will generally fall into three basic, easily recognizable categories, with subcategories as plentiful as the desperation that drives them, along with one scheme that never, ever works on us but that two subgroups of sub-men, with blindingly hilarious stupidity continually believe will work someday. Plus the one seduction con that’s been working pretty effectively since about 1960.

We’ll get to all them.

But as a preview, Monica fell for what has to be called the “Some Like It Hot” seduction – Marilyn Monroe, alone with Tony Curtis on a yacht, is on her guard against being seduced. But Curtis pretends to be – shall we say, “harmless,” moving Marilyn to take on his harmlessness as her personal fix-it project, plying him with champagne and kisses to get him, shall we say, up to speed.

Doris Day falls for the very same seduction con in Pillow Talk, which we’ll get to in some detail and again in Lover Come Back.

Stay with me, and you’ll soon know every seduction technique, plus the effective counter-measures.

The Idea of Him & Safely Married

If you let it, The Idea Of Him can be a dark force that nudges us into relationships that, like the Sally & Joe relationship in When Harry Met Sally, may not be really traumatizingly bad for us, but are serving only as placeholders and that are wasting everyone’s time.

See, Sally thinks she’s in a “Man Who Can’t Commit” relationship – they talk it out, and that’s as far as he can go. But what she was really in was a Man Who Refuses to Settle for a Safe Marriage relationship.

When Joe actually met the girl he wound up marrying, it happened fast; what’s difficult for us as women to wrap our minds around is, this is not an insult to Sally. Sally’s a bit Type-A; she’s wracked with remorse – if she had been lower maintenance, Joe would have married her, blah blah blah. Almost unconsciously, she sees it all as a competition that she lost.

Joe is the hero here. Well, and Sally. But especially Nora Ephron – she’s conceding a fault of smart women, but it’s a concession better to face and move forward – a certain percentage of these Men Who Can’t Commit relationship scenarios are actually Women Who Want To Have Been Right. With strong hints of I Don’t Want To Have To Start Over.

Women do this all the time, and in recent decades women have wasted the universe’s time with piteous appeals that men are soul-less and fickle, and it’s pretty dadgum brave of Nora to admit that sometimes girls are just in a hurry and that the boy was right to sideswipe Safely Married and hold out for Gloriously Married.

Keep following this blog, and we’ll get you Gloriously Married.