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- <h2>Seduce someone
- <small>(背单词时发现的)</small>
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- <p>We are never as shy and gauche as we are when attempting to seduce someone we deeply like. The thought of someone
- this perfect coming to take an interest in us seems at once tantalizing and entirely implausible. We develop
- vertigo and, too often, fall. Behind our insecurity lie two conjoined fears: that we are exceptionally awful,
- and that the beloved is exceptionally perfect. Both ideas are hugely destructive - and false.</p>
- <p> However, the road to greater confidence about our own nature is not to start to tell ourselves that we are,
- after all, brilliant. It is to examine more carefully how brilliant any other human being can plausibly be - and
- conclude that we are no more awful than the next soul.</p>
- <p> We are so closely in contact with our own ridiculous sides, we cannot - from within, if we are halfway honest -
- have many illusions about ourselves: every day, we are made aware of our inherent clumsiness, error and
- absurdity. By contrast, we only ever see the carefully constructed facades of everyone else, which is what can
- make them seem - quite unfairly - more impressive than they in fact are.</p>
- <p> We shouldn't try to reassure ourselves of our own dignity - we should grow at peace with the inevitable nature
- of ours, but also everybody else's ridiculousness. We are idiots now, we have been idiots in the past, and we
- will be idiots again in the future - and that is entirely normal. There aren't any other available options for a
- human being.</p>
- <p> Once we learn to see ourselves as already, and by nature, foolish, it really doesn't matter so much if we do one
- more thing that might look quite stupid. The person we try to kiss could indeed think us ridiculous. But if they
- did so, it wouldn't be news to us - they would only be confirming what we had already gracefully accepted in our
- hearts long ago: that we, like them - and every other person on the earth - are something of a nitwit. The risk
- of trying and failing would have its sting substantially removed. The fear of humiliation would no longer stalk
- us in the shadows.</p>
- <p> Furthermore, it is properly unhelpful ever to think of someone we want to seduce as particularly special. It is
- normal, of course, to be momentarily dazzled by beauty or intelligence, but we should quickly recover our poise
- and remember that our beloved is, after all, only human. In other words, that behind the alluring facade, once
- we know them better, they will have a litany of irritating habits, insecurities, obsessions and flaws. To give
- us
- further confidence, if we did kiss and even one day marry this person, we'd almost certainly be quite unhappy a
- lot of the time.</p>
- <p> Our intimidated feelings before a prospective lover stem from a melodramatic sense of how much is at stake. This
- paragon will, with time, prove to be a lot more complicated than they appear and will at points be plain
- heart-wrenchingly maddening. This dark knowledge should relax us as we struggle to cross the room and speak to
- them: we are not, in fact, faced with a divine being balancing our fate entirely in their well-formed hands.
- They are an ordinary creature beset with all the tensions, compromises and blind spots we know from our own
- selves - someone who will, if everything goes really well, in substantial ways eventually ruin our lives. We can
- approach our date with the down-to-earth confidence of one misery-inducing human reaching out to another to
- start a relationship that will, in time, at many points, feel like an enormous mistake. We can import into the
- seduction phase some of the - usefully relaxing - ingratitude that we naturally experience once a relationship
- has started - and use it to get love going. We should, before heading out for the evening, tell oneself that one
- is of course something of a cretin and an imbecile, but then so are they, and everyone else we will meet. One or
- two more acts of folly should, thereafter, not seem like they matter very much at all.</p>
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