Seduction as Offense vs. Resistance as Defense

In many ways, seduction is analogous to warfare. Yet men’s seduction – offense here – need not be ‘hostile’ towards women’s defensive ‘resistance’!

I’ve dived back into reading On War, Carl von Clausewitz’s masterful treatise on military action. I’d taken a break to read some fiction (such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s peak masculinity adventure stories) and a few other non-fiction books on various subjects, but now, like a band of pillagers that struck off temporarily to replenish its supplies before returning to the siege, I’ve wandered back.

Clausewitz speaks often about friction, his term for difficulties doing just about anything in war – a force that bogs down what should be simple maneuvers and plays spoiler to otherwise sound strategies. I’d like to write about how this relates to seduction too… but for today the topic is something else.

Because as Clausewitz talks about offense and defense, I see many parallels there to our topic of discussion here. In many ways, within a romance, the ‘offense’ is the efforts to seduce – while the ‘defense’ is the efforts to resist that seduction.

What I’d like to do is highlight some takeaways from Clausewitz that apply every bit to the romantic battlefield as they do the martial one.

After all, as they say, all’s fair in love and war, and the two fields have their similarities.