Lena Potapova is a musician, singer and writer from Moscow who lives in New York City.  She is the operator of Thankyouforyoursex.com, and writes this sex column.

Laborious seduction has never been my cup of tea. May be, if I weren’t so lazy to give it a fair try it would have been great – but I could never bring any manipulative romantic campaign to its logical completion.

Never. I simply didn’t have the patience.  Somewhere in the middle of the road I would get mad.

Any time a man of my choosing wouldn’t jump into my arms on his free will, I would feel vulnerable and insulted. I would then squeeze my hot-tempered personality into a tight sugary smile, and in two days I’d be so pissed off that I’d pick up the phone, yell at the dude and be done with the whole thing. Oh. Yeah.

Coy smiles and all that business are one thing. Pulling somebody by the dick is a different story, but it all depends on how hard you have to pull.

Every time I look back and try to reprimand myself for acting childish and being overdramatic, I can’t help but to admit that none of my little explosive protests were entirely unjustified. My sensors were not off. People are like animals, they feel a lot of things. And why should I jump on one foot around the hypothetical Christmas tree in order to be loved? And what is calculated seduction anyway?

Oh, tricks. You figure what the other person needs, you bend yourself into an ‘S’ shape, you give him the perfect combo of soul candy and personal space, and then you keep at it until he swallows the bait deep. You become what he wants to possess. You please him, you excite him, you train him. You don’t contradict him unless he secretly wants it. Eventually you become so cool in his eyes that his brain releases Pavlovian drool at the first sound of your name as if it were a picture of the that ‘S’.

That’s too much work. End of story. Not good, not bad, just too much work.

Technically, it is possible to do many things. The main questions for me have always been “How bad do I really want it and am I prepared to sacrifice my identity for it, even temporarily?” And the answers have typically been “Eh” and “No”. Even if I do, even if I really, really want the man, I want him to want me, too.

But I dig seduction. I dig the real seduction, beautiful, powerful, gift-giving. I keep looking for balance – a place where I will attract the right people and be loved for what I am. A couple of times in my life I have seen true seduction. It comes from great power and great love, beyond words. Nothing like mechanical manipulation PUA style. Manipulation has its place and it certainly works. It can be a fun little sport if your heart is not vested. But I can not toy with people’s sincerity; it just doesn’t feel right. And when they try to toy with mine, they play with fire.

When I was nineteen, I fell in love with a tall blue-eyed surgeon. I knew nothing about seduction, but I loved him. I invited him over for a cup of tea and said: “Listen, I love you. Do what you want with it”. He did exactly that. He vanished for six months. All that time I suffered before I finally gave up on him. I remember the evening. I wrote a very sad song and made the decision to stop thinking about him. The next day I ran into him at a party. For whatever reason he suddenly was enthralled with me. We spent the entire night making out on the couch against the body of a strange girl pretending to be asleep, and in another couple of months we were living together. How it all happened, I don’t know. I didn’t do anything.

I don’t know how it works. Perhaps a combination of luck and serenity. I know that I am bored with long-term romantic manipulation. It’s too labor intensive and I don’t like to bend my soul.

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