The Seductive Value Of Emotional Range

little 15
why does she have to defend
her feelings inside
why pretend
she’s not had a life
a life of near misses
now all that she wants
is three little wishes
she wants to see with your eyes
she wants to smile with your smile
she wants a nice surprise
every once in a while

Women have slicker emotional fluidity than men, but their highs aren’t as high nor their lows as low as the passions that men are capable of feeling. Few women will ever feel with the same intensity the exhilarating rush of power that a man feels when he is victorious in struggle. Few women will experience the lustful, insistent, romantic yearning that surges outward from every corpuscle of a young man’s being when the merest flicker of a pretty girl grazes his retina.

To rectify this sin-inducing passion deficit, the devil gave women, as substitution for intensity of emotion, frequency of emotion. Whereas a man can easily make it through a day without needing his emotional state roused to action, women slowly rot from the inside if their inner emotional joyride rusts unused for too long. Women are not built for stoicism; an imposed stoicism drives them mad, a self-imposed stoicism madder still.

When a woman isn’t receiving her recommended gaily allowance of emotional stimulation, she will try to “fill the tank” by seeking out a man who can make her feel alive or, if no man like that is available, by manufacturing drama in the hopes of dragging others across the event horizon into into her black hole of anxiety.

This sex differential in emotional consonance has a major implication for the sexual market. Women, in general the more passive sex, will be more attracted to men who are skilled at frothing a woman’s broad (but shallow) well of emotions and, from that foundation, creating an emotional connection. As the “receiving” sex, women will naturally gravitate to men who best represent the prerogative of the “injecting” sex. (Fainting dames are welcome to describe men as the “infusing sex”.)

Like all things romance, there are inherent and unresolvable contradictions in the system which a wise player abides. Yes, women are drawn to “the oak”, the man who can keep his cool when her’s is heating up, who lets her frolic under his protective branches. But all stoicism all the time makes Jack a dull boy. Women also want to feel what a man feels, because women know, instinctively, that men boil with an active volcano of white hot passion women can only dream of feeling for themselves. So women, as the sex with the greater need for constant emotional stimulation, will work hard to coax that passion out of men, and when it comes to soak it up like the rays of the sun.

Unfortunately, this is the subroutine of courtship which fails too many men. I’ve seen it happen to older men and to socially maladjusted nerds, the two largest groups with a propensity to stifle their expressiveness, or an incapacity to summon it in the proper dosage. The older Lothario, through a combination of his own negligence and a fatefully slow passion contraction, will lean on manly stoicism less as a seduction tactic than as a necessity to compensate for gimped emotional range.

The spergy nerd has a different problem. His emotional range is bifurcated. Most of the time he’s a monotonic drone, but sufficiently pressured by social contingencies will explode in a cluster bomb of random emotional shrapnel, thereby codifying the social ostracism that always stalks him.

Older men and nerds aren’t the only kinds of men with a constricted emotional range. For example, men suffering from PTSD can lose the ability to feel emotion, or to signal emotion to others. To a normal woman, a man incapable of the occasional burst of passionate feeling must seem an alien to her female mind. Intriguing to her for a while, yes, but absent some human dimension her intrigue will soon enough wither to revulsion.

A lack of emotional range is a serious handicap in the mating trenches for men who don’t have palpable or tacitly acknowledged social power to leverage in exchange for pussy. If this describes you, it’s time to learn how to express yourself. But not haphazardly. There’s still a stern science to this sloppy art.

Here are a few pointers for improving your emotional range:

– Learn to be more facially expressive. Raised eyebrows, comically widened or narrowed eyes, winks, hyperbolic brow furrows, etc. You don’t have to be Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura, but you do want to be more than a blank sheet of flesh with eating and breathing inputs.

– Use your full body. Accentuate your words with hand gestures. Backturn when she misbehaves. Become skilled in the art of slithering close to a woman. Play the “stop repeating me game”, except wordlessly, with your body mimicking hers. It goes without saying that you don’t want to be a spaz. Control of your body mechanics to whatever purpose you put your physicality is key. Be bodily loose, but also be capable of shutting it down at a moment’s reflection. Girls like to know a man is both excitable and self-calming.

– Use a fuller vocal range. Vocal variability is attractive to women.

– Try to “shock” a woman into attraction by polarizing her. There will be more on this in a future post. (Yes, it is possible to trigger attraction in a disinterested female stranger with nothing more than your body language and your words. This is one of the great advantages of being a man.)

– If you have the time and inclination, take an acting or improv class.

– Get well-acquainted with the classic game concepts of push-pull, hot-cold-hot-cold. Bring her up, bring her down, Take her high, take her low. Tell her a happy story about cute puppies, then tell her a sad story about dead cats. Be sexual with her, then be cold. Appease her, then befuddle her. Emotional range doesn’t mean going to one extreme and staying there; it means exploiting the whole spectrum of emotions.

– Storytelling succeeds in the details. Your stories don’t need a plot or a point if they are told with loving details that light up her imagination. In practice, this means more references to the senses: textures, colors, aromas, etc.

– Sing. In the middle of a pickup, I might just sing aloud a thought or two, Is it ridiculous? Yes. Does it entrance women? Yes.

– If you feel happy, or sad, or angered during the time you’re talking with a girl, express those emotions a degree more fiercely than you would in an office setting.

– To nerds: Your best option for self-improvement will be observing men who are good at emotional expression in the field. You have an elevated power of observation, so put it to use. There will be fits and starts, but after a few flame-outs with women you’ll get the hang of it.

– To weary, cynical men: Biomechanical feedback loops are a real thing. Time and/or experience may have robbed you of your expressiveness, but you can, to borrow a nerd expression, reinstall the OS by forcing a reboot. Making pointed efforts to expand your emotional range and expressiveness will invigorate any natural and instinctive habits of the emotional centers of your mind which have atrophied over time. “Fake it till you intake it” works.

– Finally, a cheap and easy method to project emotional range is sarcasm. Sarcastic remarks tend to recruit facial and bodily cooperation for some reason. Just don’t overdo it. Too much sarcasm will incriminate you as the kind of soul-seared man with massive ego-protecting shields. A girl has to feel like she’s cracking through your shell to the “real you”, and sarcasm works against that progression.