dating

I receive many press releases per week, and most of them hold zero interest for me. Weird new porn movies. Shitty new vibrators. Swanky events I can’t go to because they’re in New York or Los Angeles.

But recently I got a press release that did pique my interest. It was about a new book that had just been released, The Offline Dating Method: How to Attract a Great Guy in the Real World, by dating coach Camille Virginia.

The concept caught my eye because the realm of “offline dating” advice is usually presided over by male pickup artists. They call it different things – “day game,” “night game,” and so on – but it’s essentially the same idea, just twisted into a different form. PUAs are misogynist manipulators, but this female writer, I gathered, was not advocating the shitty kind of manipulation – maybe just the kind that can get you a date with someone who finds you attractive but who you otherwise never would’ve talked to.

Indeed, while Neil Strauss’s books are guides for men on picking women up, Camille Virginia’s book is a guide for women on getting picked up by men. (Yes, it is painfully heteronormative, so I’m sorry for any accordingly heteronormative statements that follow. Virginia does acknowledge in her introduction that a lot of the tips she offers will work on a broad range of people, not just straight men – and she’s right – but the book is written explicitly through the lens of “You are a woman and you want men to ask you out.”)

Virginia’s central thesis is that meeting potential romantic partners in “the real world” is superior to online dating, for a plethora of reasons: you can make better connections more quickly, and you’ll know much sooner whether you’re actually attracted to and compatible with the person you’re flirting with. In three meaty chapters full of headings and subheadings, she explains how to seem magnetic and approachable, how to start and sustain a conversation with a man you don’t know, and how to transition that conversation into getting asked on a date.

At first, the most striking thing to me about this book was how anathema it seemed to how people my age actually seem to date, and to want to date. I’d recently read an Atlantic article about the so-called “sex recession.” The millennial interviewees spoke about meeting “offline” as an impossibility, an archaic relic, in the wake of Tinder and its cohorts. Take, for example, this sentence where the author, Kate Julian, is chatting with a young female source about Sex and the City: “’Miranda meets Steve at a bar,’ she said, in a tone suggesting that the scenario might as well be out of a Jane Austen novel, for all the relevance it had to her life.” But for all their romanticization of meeting a partner in a bar or a bookstore, these millennials also acknowledge that this type of meet-cute wouldn’t really be welcome in their lives. Julian, who met her husband in an elevator in 2001, writes, “I was fascinated by the extent to which this prompted other women to sigh and say that they’d just love to meet someone that way. And yet quite a few of them suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out. ‘Creeper! Get away from me,’ one woman imagined thinking.”

This is in line with my own experience of dating in a world filled with smartphones and social anxiety. Once, during an extended dry spell in which it felt like I’d never have sex with someone who desired me ever again, I was approached by a random flirty man at a food court while I was reading. After a tense conversation in which I basically politely told him to leave me the hell alone, I tweeted, “Dear men who try to pick me up in food courts: can u not? I’m just tryna eat my General Tao chicken & read my book, bro.” A male friend replied, “Complains about lack of male attention by night, complains about male attention by day” – which enraged me at the time (and still to this day, honestly – hi, Brent), because it implies that all romantic/sexual attention is the same and should be received with the same warmth, whether it’s wanted or not, and that if I ever push back against negative attention, I don’t deserve the positive attention I want.

But as misguided as that feedback was, it also, in some ways, captured the same millennial dating contradiction Julian’s interviewees talked about in her article: we romanticize offline “meet-cutes,” but, at the same time, we find them scary, annoying, or just plain weird.

This is the somewhat hostile context in which Virginia’s writing her book on how to get picked up in public. There’s very little acknowledgment in the book that people might think you’re odd or creepy for trying to talk to them on the subway or at the grocery store – she just says that women are rarely perceived as creepy, and that if someone gives you a weird look for talking to them, they’re not a good match for you anyway and you should just shrug it off and move onto the next person. She does acknowledge that there are certain places and cultures where it might actually be unsafe for a woman to initiate a conversation in public with a man she doesn’t know, but for most women, she seems to think it’s a perfectly normal and acceptable thing to do. I had to suspend my disbelief a little to accept this premise that underlies her entire book, but I’m a socially anxious introvert, so of course I did.

Even if you’re not a straight woman trying to get a straight man to ask for your number, there’s still lots of valuable stuff in this book about general social skills. It contains a lot of practical advice about sparking and maintaining conversations, building confidence, and developing a natural curiosity about your fellow (hu)man. When I read some sections aloud to my extremely extroverted partner, they said all the social tips were fairly obvious to them and almost go without saying, but I didn’t feel that way at all – I think a lot of people who are as socially awkward as me, or moreso, would find these tips illuminating. They give you a blueprint for developing your relational skillset and having meaningful (i.e. not small-talk-y) conversations with people you just met.

So, yes, this is a useful dating book. But I actually found it to be a fascinating read on an entirely different level as well, and here’s where this review gets really weird. As this book picks up steam in the middle, it starts to read like – there’s no other way I can say this – conversation fetish porn.

Hear me out. I’d never heard of a conversation fetish before that phrase popped into my head while reading The Offline Dating Method, but I’m sure it exists. My friend Bex often talks about having a “flirting fetish,” being turned on by witty repartée and double entendres – and that’s what I thought of as I read Camille Virginia’s rapturous magnum opus.

I’m not saying that Virginia necessarily has this fetish, but the way she writes about good conversations is genuinely erotic at times. “You’re going to become addicted to how fulfilling it feels to make other people feel good,” she warns in a section about committing “random acts of kindness” as icebreakers in public. She colorfully defines a “meaningful connection” as “a genuine conversation that feels natural, not forced in any way, and gives each person a feeling of deep fulfillment… being completely present in a conversation and co-creating a shared experience.” After an example conversation in which a man tells her that his cufflinks bear his English family’s coat of arms, Virginia writes, “Boom! You just went from the topic of cufflinks to talking about his family’s 300-year-old estate in Cornwall in less than ten seconds” – profound conversations are as compelling and exciting to her as “number closes” and “kiss closes” are for pick-up artists, and she writes about them with the same slick sensuality. “I’ll admit it: I have an addiction to connection,” she says; “I absolutely love it.”

Virginia talks with reverence about hallmarks of human kinship like sustaining eye contact, making relatable jokes, exchanging compliments, and creating intimacy through authenticity. “Conversations will become an experience that are ten times better than any movie, TV show, or book because you’re not just observing; you’re living the story with another human in real time,” she effuses. “This will not only feel incredibly fulfilling for you but everyone you create that connection with, which means people will naturally want more of you and the good feelings they now associate with you.” She could literally be talking about sex or kink here instead of conversation and the sentiment would still feel true. I’ve never seen someone describe the simple act of dialoguing with such carnal enthusiasm.

I’m not at all saying this to shame her, whether or not this is actually a kink for her, or for anyone else. I actually find it fascinating to observe how eroticizing a particular act, and/or fitting it into a kink framework, can help me look at that act with new eyes and feel invigorated to include it in my life more often. It’s like how thinking of comedians as reaction-soliciting tops has helped me enjoy comedy even more. Understanding that conversations unroll with electric and pleasurable interpersonal energy, just like sex or kink, has made me more jazzed than usual to engage people in conversation, even people I don’t know very well or at all. I enjoy the process more now that I’m specifically chasing the fulfilment and connection Virginia writes about so descriptively (and erotically). I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: kink is magic.

There are some problematic things about this book, as you might imagine. Safety concerns aren’t acknowledged enough. Every reader is assumed to be a woman who wants to date men but doesn’t want to be so forward as to initiate a date herself. (“Asking a man out myself has never turned out well for me,” Virginia mentions. “I’ve been told by many men that they prefer to ask the woman out and plan the date.”) Most vexingly – and pretty typically, for the dating self-help genre – the author uses herself and her own stories as examples of how easy it is to meet potential dates IRL, without particularly acknowledging that she’s conventionally attractive, thin, white, able-bodied, and socially capable in ways that many people are not. Advice that amounts to “Be yourself!” rings pretty hollow when your self isn’t as traditionally desirable as the advice-giver’s self. I will say that her conversational suggestions don’t necessarily rely on you being attractive, but their positive reception might.

Overall, though, while I went into The Offline Dating Method expecting a light and frothy dating guide that reads like cobbled-together Cosmo tips, it is actually so much more than that. It’s an ode to the beauty of human connection, and a road map to help you get there. It’s a brave stand in a world that has increasingly digitally anesthetized us to our fellow people. It’s also – most surprisingly of all – some of the most explicit and satisfying erotica available for a subculture I’m not sure even exists: conversation fetishists.

Thanks to Camille Virginia and co. for supplying me with this book to read!