Mr. Darcy Game

Mr. Darcy is a famous literary character.

He is also a world famous lover.

He doesn’t just get any girl, but he gets the girl he wants. Getting what you want and not just what you can get is fundamental to our philosophy at Charisma Arts, and I’m going to use Mr. Darcy’s dashing example to explain how you can achieve this too.

For about 200 hundred years Darcy’s been making women go weak at the knees, and making all other male attempts at seduction look bad. You may not be into Georgian Romance novels but we can all learn a few tricks to success, and mistakes, from what he did.

He may have screwed up a few times (don’t we all) in his journey to getting the girl of his dreams, but he did it with so much style that he’s been a hero of romance ever since. His unique ‘Darcy’ seduction style even rivals that of our own Wayne Elise…

To save you reading all 400 exciting pages of ‘Pride and Prejudice’, I’m going to have a go at condensing Darcy Theory into a few key principles… and make them relevant to helping you overcome your dating dilemmas.

Darcy’s Mistakes:

How not to introduce yourself to the girl: Even if you’re not a dashing, loaded, member of the landed gentry and likely to make everyone around you feel inadequate, an insult as a way to open a conversation can still go badly wrong. When asked if he would like to dance with his ‘target’ Darcy says ‘she is not handsome enough to tempt me’, just loud enough so that she could hear.

That’s a pretty big insult in the Regency period.

Insulting your target didn’t work 200 hundred years ago for Darcy (all the women in the novel essentially think he’s a jerk after he says that) and often it doesn’t work that brilliantly now either. I once had a guy ask me if I was going to have the mole on my face removed. Was I mystified by his confidence and disarmed of my female sexy powers? Yes. I ran away crying and asked my friend to punch him… I’m sure this wasn’t the desired effect.

So next time how about forget all this value stuff (as Darcy eventually has to) and meet people on a level. Work on your preamble to engage them in conversation, and then start talking about the important stuff: thoughts, feelings and experiences. Not cheesy or insulting one-liners. Even if the latter works short term, the former is a much better way to sustain attraction… and not come across like a total dick.

Instead follow Wayne Elise and learn how to be a Conversation Man.

**Over Investing:**To give Darcy credit he does his best to avoid making all the effort in terms of arranging to meet the girl he likes or even speaking to her at the start of the novel… then at about page 150 he blows it with a surprise marriage proposal that no one was expecting.

Now whilst no one these days is likely to go proposing to a girl that they’ve only met three times, there are plenty of other ways you can over invest in a relationship before the time is right. This doesn’t need to be anything extreme like stalking them on Facebook; you can over invest just in your conversations. By asking lots of questions about a person (and telling them nothing about you), not being comfortable with ‘conversational vacuums’ (silences or natural pauses) and trying too hard to DHV, you may end up with you dominating the whole conversation.  If you don’t give them the opportunity to offer any value by filling a conversational gap, or responding naturally to a statement you make with a personal preference or experience, then you may miss any value they’re trying to offer you.

Another problem with asking too many questions, and not making enough statements, is that any response you get will be less of a genuine response, than if someone had chosen to respond to a statement. You could also end up finding out a lot about their job, their favorite color, why they like this restaurant and absolutely nothing of real value about themselves. Women like to know that you have a reason to like them, other than the obvious. Tell a girl directly why you like her, and don’t do a Darcy and surprise her too much by plunging right in to trying to date her when the only thing you’ve shared is small talk.

What Darcy did right

**Tension:**Darcy and his lady’s route to domestic bliss may not have been all plain sailing but my God that’s better than if it had been boring. There is no great novel in ‘guy meets girl, guy befriends girl’ or even ‘guy meets girl who wants a steady relationship, guy never disagrees with girl, guy and girl have a terrible sex life’ and so on. It is better that your interactions become weird, uncomfortable and awkward rather than boring. Obviously we’d prefer if they were exciting, engaging and stimulating but if you have to pick one or the other avoid boring.

Darcy is well remembered for his brutal honesty, annoyance in small talk, and constant tension in his relationship with his target. He is, if anything, a master of changing the pace of their interaction and escalating. A change is an escalation and an escalation creates tension. Tension creates at least questions within the woman’s mind and often leads to sexual tension.

If she asks you ‘what do you do for a living?’ and you say ‘do you really care?’ she is going to be taken aback, but she will respect you. No one will have interrupted her small talk, and attempts to avoid intimacy, before. Similarly if you’re not sure where the interaction is going, consider having the courage to ask ‘do you find me attractive?’ This may not always be appropriate but not only does it immediately remove you from the dreaded friend-zone, and creates a meteoric rise in tension; it also leads me nicely on to my next point…

**Courage:**Whatever way you slice it ‘I admire and I love you’ takes a lot of balls to come out and say. Now, you may not want to go quite that far, but even asking ‘do you find me attractive’ is pretty nerve-wracking. But you know what, that’s OK. It is okay to fear escalation, and no matter what anyone says, when you put yourself out there it is scary. Mr. Darcy with every self respecting gold-digger in England after him still showed he was nervous. The thing is you are not supposed to conquer fear, but learn to approach it. Because in approaching it you’ve demonstrated not only your vulnerability but also your courage. And courage is sexier than if you’d simply had the confidence to not be afraid at all. To learn more about facing your fear check out our blog on how to be a conversational lion tamer.

**No retraction:**It’s counter intuitive but when his target rejects him for the first time Darcy doesn’t retract his affection, and this is one of his main reasons for success. We’re not talking about being persistent but rather not ending your interaction instantly if you’re initially rejected. If you get knocked back maybe say ‘that’s fine if you don’t want to right now, but I still feel the same’. By not retracting all your affection at lightning speed the girl may have reason to suspect that you like her for something other than instant gratification, whether that is the truth or not. Also by managing the situation in a mature manner she’ll have a chance to admire your good qualities and it will leave a question in her mind whether she was right to reject you in the first place. Also if you remain open then it leaves a much smaller obstruction for her to remove for you to get together. Remember that great relationships often spring out of great timing.

And it worked for Darcy; by page 350 his ‘wishes are unchanged’, (that’s ‘I still want to push you up against the wall and kiss your neck’ in modern English) but his targets have, she now wants to be Mrs. Darcy… although he did have one last ace in his pack to help with this one.

Visualization:

Jane Austen was right when she wrote, ‘A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love’.

Create a powerful visualization of what you will do with a girl on a date, or in the bedroom (if the interaction is at that stage), and it will give her an image to buy into and be tempted by.

In ‘Pride and Prejudice’  Darcy’s girl starts to really desire him when she gets thinking about what life in a stately home set in the Derbyshire moors with pots of money would be like. In fact the moment she starts to love Darcy is when she sees his crib. Yet it isn’t the material goods that really attract Lizzie, but the idea that is created for her of what her life could be like.

You may not have Pemberley Manor as your love nest but you can work this magic on a much smaller scale.

Instead of focusing on the logistics of a date (the when/where) specifically tell your date what you want to do ‘I want to take you out to this little tapas bar I know that has the best red wine, spend the evening telling you my bad jokes, and then hopefully kiss underneath the moonlight’. This not only allows her to have a clear plan for the evening, which should offset the panic that a ‘what you up to next Friday?’ text will cause. It will also create a powerful visualization of the experience she could have with you which can then develop in her mind like a photo. Do this right and she’ll want to pay a visit to the romantic date or sexual scenario you’ve created for her in your mind.

Take it from a girl - this really works.

For a more detailed explanation of everything in this article you can grab a degree in English Literature and start annotating ‘Pride and Prejudice’…