One of the most often repeated mistakes I’ve seen in seduction systems is a requirement that the Seducer should spend a substantive amount of time establishing ‘rapport’ with the Seducee.

The initiative of establishing and building rapport as a tool originated in the fields of Hypnosis and other talking therapies; it then moved through NLP, Sales training and on to seduction techniques (a lot of seduction techniques seem to arrive via NLP and Sales training).

Tracing this idea back only to the start of Neuro-linguistic programming, Richard Bandler and John Grinder (co-founders of NLP) say in their early book ‘Frogs into Princes‘:

If you want to establish rapport, then it would be useful to match the representational system, indicated by the predicates.

Notice that they say IF you want to establish rapport, and not you must establish rapport, or some similar phrasing. This is most likely because people generally do not start therapy without good reason, and so when they do, it is possible that they might have concerns about appearing to be a loser, looking bad or seeming stupid in front of another person, all of which will hinder the therapeutic relationship and inhibit the client from revealing information which the therapist needs in order to help them, and quite possibly even stop the client from becoming open to new ideas.

If this is the case, the client needs to understand that his therapist is trustworthy and capable of understanding and accepting his or her problems. This ability of the therapist and client to trust and communicate openly and honestly about the client’s model of the world is known as ‘Rapport‘.

Many times, we see people claim that being sympathetic and having agreeable interactions is equivalent to being in rapport. But rapport is not the ability to be sympathetic, and it does not necessarily mean being liked by the person that you are communicating with.

In a therapeutic setting, the therapist may spend a few moments establishing rapport and building trust with a very nervous client, all of which will pay dividends later in the therapy. Likewise, second hand car salespeople, timeshare representatives and people employed to sell goods or services in areas that have a tarnished reputation from previous poor salesmanship will try to establish rapport in order to build trust at the start of the new sales relationship, and (hopefully) gain a sale later.

In terms of seduction, if the seducee is very nervous or damaged from a previous relationship, then establishing rapport may well be a useful first step. However, most people are quite confident when approached by a stranger, as in the modern world they will have experienced people asking directions in the street or just random people talking to them in bars or shops etc. Therefore, the majority of the time, establishing rapport is quite unnecessary, because socially and culturally it already exists to some extent.

Thus, building a seduction system around the techniques of establishing rapport only serves to line the pockets of those people teaching this very simple technique, which you should not really need for more than a short while at the start of an interaction with a specific type of person.

Now, you might say “So what if I spend hours building rapport?”, after all it’s not a bad thing and there are no doubt far worse seduction techniques… But, if one spends too much time creating rapport, it tends to lead towards a trance state. And then, unless you are specializing in hypnotic seduction or you’re skilled at manipulating people in trance, this will either end as an abreaction where the seducee becomes uncomfortable because they are having sexual feelings so soon after meeting someone they don’t know very well (assuming that this doesn’t usually happen with them), or else the undirected feelings of closeness and attachment become friendly feelings, rather than sexual interest.

Of course, as the relationship develops, you will find that your partner gradually starts using the same predicates as you, and that they mirror your analogue behaviours etc. all of which are things that you see occurring naturally in girlfriend / boyfriend relationships. Although since (hopefully) you will have established and maintained a sexual relationship by that point, it is highly unlikely that the emotions would convert from sexual love to friendly feelings.

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Posted by Jonathan in Psychology, Sociology