Eros, like the Greek mythological figure, pertains to the unconscious act of “falling in love,” which, like physically falling itself, is involuntary, perhaps unexpected, illogical, and certainly impassioning.
Cupid, piercing you with his arrows, is the Roman name for Eros.
Love’s first phase, sexual attraction, has “wounding” as a theme, a risk. To be “smitten” with somebody has the same root as in ancient texts meaning to “strike” or “smite” another.
Desire is woundedness, or the intense risk of it should it in its fickle ways be lost.
“What are the sources of poetry? Love and death and the paradox of love and death. All poetry from the beginning is about Eros and Thanatos. Those are the only subjects. And how Eros and Thanatos interweave.”
- Erica Jong
Thanatos goes further than a wound since it is the god of death, the deity to which the poor girl, Psyche, was to marry. By happenstance, Eros stumbled and ended up pricking himself with his own arrow of love. Then, fell in love with Psyche and marries her.
In fact, at any step of courtship, there is the very real risk of death - the death of the potential relationship itself.
At every turn, every move, words said not to the liking of the Other, a scent, an appearance not in their preferences, and there may be the instant death of desire on their part.
If further into courtship and intimacy, then the death of the friendship which has just started, or the death of the commitment, exclusive connection, or even marriage that has been going on for years.
This is the nature of human (or any) courtship: less to find the needle in the haystack that is your “soulmate” and more to efficiently weed out those who are not right for you through the frequent and likely failure of a phase or step of courtship.
Then the only one left standing is closest to your “soulmate.”
Romantic Dynamics™ helps you do this on both counts - efficiency and recognition of what will not work for you in love, while also making you an “avatar” to aim for with instant recognition of one’s “soulmate potential” for you.
Knowing courtship by steps and phases gives men and women the power of both the promise of love and the avoidance of death for as long as possible.
As actor Cory Stoll says in the character of Ernest Hemingway in Woody Allen’s film, Midnight in Paris:
I believe that love that is true and real creates a respite from death. All cowardice comes from not loving, or not loving well, which is the same thing. And when the man who is brave and true looks death squarely in the face like some rhino hunters I know, or Belmonte, who's truly brave. It is because they love with sufficient passion to push death out of their minds, until the return that it does to all men. And then you must make really good love again. Think about it.
Whatever cultural or religious background you come from, the story of human courtship is told in a three-act play.
Can you fail at love? Most certainly.
In fact, you ought to hope that you “fail” quickly with those incompatible with you. But you can avoid the darkness of rejection by simply not going too far into a relationship without evidence that it makes sense - evidence provided by Romantic Dynamics™.
If you want to avoid the death of a relationship that you have put far too much into without evidence that things will work, we will help you with that too. Avoid dying and declining relationships because you don’t go far too far into them in the first place when they are ill-advised.
Together Sexual Attraction, Emotional Attraction, and Intellectual Attraction ensure the success of your Romantic Dynamics.
Act I: Sexual Attraction: Assessing the other’s ability and interest in you as a lover via sexually communicating between the masculinity or femininity of their Reptilian Brain.
Act II: Emotional Attraction: Developing a friendship via emotionally communicating to their Mammalian Brain.
Act III: Intellectual Attraction: Forming a partnership via intellectually communicating to their Higher Brain and its sense of rights, agreements, creativity, discipline, and maturity.
Every great love story follows these same three phases. So does every great story.
Think of the romantic comedies you love. Can you track their progression through these phases?
If you can’t yet, you’ll certainly be able to do so by the time you finish this book.
Your Story Leads You to Meet the Right Person at the Right Time
All human beings have an “animal instinct” in their reptilian brains.
You must appeal to this instinct to attract another person's desires, and this must happen in the first seconds to hours of meeting that person.
First impressions, and compelling attention, are hugely important with regard to this animal instinct.
If you don’t appeal to a mate in this way immediately, you likely never will. This is because a man and woman will find a wonderful story together in a true, lifelong romance, but this story has to start somewhere.
We have to get someone else to be willing to “open the book” in the first place, so to speak. Attention and timing are everything in this regard. We “get noticed.” We say, “I saw her, and I did...” or “When I saw him for the first time, I did...”
This is Sexual Attraction. It compels a physical response to the Other.
From there, we don’t buy into stories that don’t open us up emotionally either. Myths are stories that speak to all people by touching the heart and wrapping us in the drama.
Of all the thousands of modern stories we discover in novels, films, and by word of mouth, a handful speaks to our individual hearts as no others do. They “tug at the heartstrings” and cause us to quickly have what you have heard to be called “emotional investment.”
Our stories of romance must speak to our hearts in this way, uniquely and privately. The story of you with the Other compels you to silently say to yourself, “This feels right; this feels special.”
This is Emotional Attraction. It compels an emotional response to the Other.
A good story has timing, and regardless of whether you fit the “laundry list” of traits a particular mate wants, your romance will fizzle if your timing is off.
Have you ever seen a romantic comedy with no attraction between the two lead characters?
If you were to watch them form a friendship or even dive into a marriage commitment with absolutely no sexual chemistry, you wouldn’t buy it. But the story also needs to build on itself.
Act I (desire) leads to Act II (friendship), which leads to Act III (partnership/commitment) or something about the story feeling clumsy or wrong, losing its power or “losing you,” and the spell is broken. The courtship falters, and you walk away from the story.
You walk out of the theatre or close the book, so to speak.
The same is true in real life.
The sexual chemistry called “attraction” in a man’s reptilian brain must be stimulated first before anything deeper happens between you.
A man can’t successfully be a romantic friend and partner before he sees himself as a potential lover.
Likewise, a woman can’t instinctually feel right about sex if you have no friendship feelings.
To move beyond sexual attraction, or “lust,” into those higher levels of romance we call friendship and committed partnership, one needs to appeal to the personality, that product of the mammalian and higher brains.
Yes, a woman can cause attraction and desire by appealing only to a man’s reptilian brain (and several men out there would love more women to think this way.)
Yet, if she isn’t already making judgments about his other “two brains,” she may invest months or years of her life only to wake up next to the wrong person far too often.
One can also have friendship and commitment from a person if they connect with the mammalian and higher brains, even if the sexual spark is missing.
They may make a “good enough” marriage - one that makes their mothers or friends happy (but not themselves), a “good enough” or “tolerable” relationship that is cuddly at times, stale at others, but always lacking a full passionate desire.
These days they say women “want it all and can have it all.” Well, this is not true that anyone can “have it all” without learning to connect with all three brains in concert.
This is absolutely necessary to create a durable, rich, exciting relationship that is also a rich story – a three-act play with a beginning, middle and happy ending.
If your relationship reads like a beautiful story, each chapter of which lingers like a satisfying meal, then chances are, you have a lasting, beautiful relationship.
This is Intellectual Attraction. It compels an intellectual alignment, collaboration, and partnering response to the Other.
The Pace and Timing of the Story
The “three brain phases” of courtship are sequential and “compounding”—meaning that they must all be satisfied and amplify each other, but the amount of time each phase lasts varies within a certain range.
Like the acts of a play, they have to come one after the other.
In general, the Attraction Phase, Sexual Attraction, begins even before “hello” and lasts up to one month as an initial process.
The Friendship Phase, Emotional Attraction, tends to begin at or just after the first date and tends to develop completely in three months.
The Commitment Phase, Intellectual Attraction, usually begins in small ways around the first month and can continue for life under the best circumstances.
There’s some room to move here.
You and your potential ideal mate might begin bonding as friends right after you meet and even before your first date, or you may not start bonding until the second date if the attraction is still growing and on the upswing.
This is fine, and great relationships can come from this.
You’ll start getting into trouble, however, if your phases with each other jump around wildly – for example, bonding strongly as friends before there’s even a hint of sexual attraction (although there is the exception that one of the two people did have an instant and massive sexual attraction.)
Another example is going out of order and jumping straight to the intellectual attraction of commitment before bonding as friends. (Someone’s definitely going to be resentful about that).
It’s a scenario more like having a shopping list of traits in a mate which, when you find someone who “looks good on paper,” as if reading their resume, you dive into a relationship only to find that it has “no meat” even if it has spice, and is like an automobile without gas or oil, but looks clean and sleek on the outside.
Likewise, it will be tough to make anything last if the timing of your three phases varies too much from the norm. If you take an entire month to build sexual attraction, you may already be “just friends” emotionally in the other person’s mind.
At this point, you may wonder, “Well, how do ‘meeting,’ versus ‘casual dating,’ versus ‘exclusive dating’ relate to these courtship stages? How does timing work as far as these ‘types of dating’ go?”
“Meeting” is when sexual attraction is likely the only thing going on between you.
When you start emotionally attracting each other in friendship, “casual dating” is likely what you are doing, and “exclusive dating” is when the beginning of a commitment has formed – you’ve passed a milestone in your story, where you have both already proven that you can work well as a team together.
I feel that many women have an intuitive sense of timing in dating—far better than we men do—but some of you may have never actually drawn it out to analyze. Now you can.
If you take a whole month to build attraction, you may already be “just friends” in the other person’s brain.
If you take a month to bond in friendship, you might have simply been an interesting “conquest” he was attempting to arrange a one-night stand with.
As I said, there’s wiggle room here, but you can’t go too far outside the norm, or there is a problem in the flow of the story you are creating together.
Have you ever seen a romantic film with scenes that droned on and on, to the point where you wanted to fall asleep?
What about a romance that had those silly montage clips of the couple going through weeks of romance in two minutes of the film?
You thought it was “contrived,” right? Not believable.
The same is true of your real-life story. Timing is everything in a romance, just as timing is everything in the culinary arts, just as the timing of mechanical parts of an automobile must be in perfect synchrony for it to run smoothly.
Choosing the right person to invest in is crucial to success in your dating and relationships because if you don’t judge well in the first hours of meeting, you could be wasting this most valuable resource of time.
Likewise, the “opportunity cost” of missing the right person walking past you while you are with the wrong person is just as painful. Romance is about being with the right person at the right time. If you’re with the right person at the wrong time or the wrong person at the right time, things won’t work out either.
Understanding your Romantic Dynamics™ in this way will allow you to choose the right person for you, avoid wasting time and emotional energy on a relationship that simply can’t work, and follow an order and pace of dating that helps that potential soul mate grow with you in a story that only the two of you were ever meant to share.
There’s only one ideal mate out there for you and only one story you were meant to share with them.
Why spend even a minute with the wrong person?
Now that you’ve begun understanding how the three brains and Romantic Dynamics™ work, that’s no longer necessary.
If you want to be able to cross-reference everything in the Romantic Dynamics™ system in a highly educational, “wikified” way, go to Romantipedia.com to sign up…
I think so, I am my own test study, with your help I am able to peace/piece “stuff” together. Have a beautiful day Dr. Paul, Geraldine Hughes