Rules for Love!

Malcolm’s rules for love:

(1) Movement and love go together more easily than stasis and love.
Sex,the proper activity of love, is a movement, not a state, so being in love is a movement. This is why knowing how to dance and being around music is important-also, alcohol, which is like energy in a bottle. Women do not want to sit and talk! If you are sitting for too long, the date is not going well. Keep moving! Also, it will not be impressive that you took her to a museum-any guy can do that. You have to know how to move through the museum in an impressive way.

(2) The static aspects of love should be opaque.
Poetry, which is the food of love, is static in that it is written down, but it compensates for this by being the least clear version of the written word. When sharing thoughts with women, the key is to be unclear in a mysterious poetic manner-hint at hidden depths. Also, go to restaurants where the menu is not easily pronounced. The point is to make food seem more mysterious than it is.

(3) Romance is the act of making the future less clear to women.
Women see more clearly than you what your married life will be like. It hangs over every conversation. Remember: the curtains have already been picked out! You are going to be wrong for them in important ways. Romance is the ability to make that bad picture more hazy in their mind. Not by lying, of course, but by putting a slight twist to everything. They will not believe you if you try to hint that you will stop throwing clothes on the floor or do more dishes. What you need to do is make them feel guilty for wanting you to do such things. Every woman is traditional at heart: there will be some way to turn her to thinking about her inadequacies instead of yours.

(4) Your feelings are more important to you than hers are to her or than yours are to her.
She has been trained from a young age to bridle her feelings for the sake of chastity. You have been taught to act on your feelings: to be a stud. The result is that she does not trust her feelings like you do. That is why it is not important to get her to want to sleep with you. In fact, if she feels those things, she may even begin to resent feeling that way in the morning-even if you didn’t try to sleep with her. So, when dancing, talk. This will add an intellectual tint to her sexual feelings and make her trust them more. Also, do not rely too much on poetry: your words affect you more than they affect her. The main point of the poem is to show that you actually do something sensitive in your off-hours: it means you will be a good dad, but that’s usually all it means to her. Unless she is literary, then it will tie into making the future hazy (rule four): if your poetry is good enough she might begin to entertain the notion that you will be a moderately successful published writer: not much money, but it’s got the mystique!