Love games: Do you need a relationship expert?

I start small, with the book Why Men Want Sex & Women Need Love by Allan and Barbara Pease. The authors have devised a quiz where I can work out my “mating rating.” I miss the top echelons of attractiveness by mere points — harsh but insightful. I lose marks for talking to current love interests about past relationships. I think I’m trying to show how desirable and in demand I am, but, according to the Peases, I’m just telling them that I’m easy. The Peases recommend writing out a list of what you want in a partner — the idea is that you’ll start noticing these traits in the men around you. I dutifully write out my list, but I don’t meet any wealthy, cultured carpenters with a passing resemblance to Gerard Butler, so I call in the big guns.

Relationship expert Lorraine Adams runs a dating agency called Coffee & Company. I turn up at one of her seminars on a grey Saturday afternoon. She’s my kind of crap-cutting lady. (“You do realize that you need a makeover because you look like a boy,” she says to another dating hopeful.) Adams’ idea is that all first dates should consist of just a coffee — a sober setting that allows you to get a sense of each other without the pressure to drag it out. And, unlike the Peases, Adams doesn’t like the idea of lists. Your aim, she says, should be not to meet a certain person but to fall in love.

The next dating coach I meet, Matthew Hussey, talks about developing tactics and strategies and infiltrating groups. He’s that appealing kind of TV handsome, and I sit through his seminar wondering whether I fancy him or hate him. Although some of his advice is obvious (“Don’t dress too provocatively — men will only want to sleep with you” and “Go to a wine bar instead of a pub to target the kind of men you want to meet”), Hussey offers perspectives that I haven’t thought about — and I think about men a lot. He says that women should play “high-value,” not hard-to-get. Hard-to-get confuses men and makes them lose interest, while highvalue simply suggests that any man is lucky to be with you. Hussey says that men want multi-faceted women: a lady for his parents, a laugh for his friends, a liking for the almost illegal in the bedroom. He insists that the best-looking men are the least likely to approach you — not because they’re arrogant but because their egos are so based on their looks that they have too much to lose if they’re rejected.

See if Hussey's 'approach and engage' tactic works on the next page ...
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