THAT'S MEN: Romantic music is the key to a woman's heart, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN
A COLLEAGUE in the far distant past employed romantic Frank Sinatra LPs as part of his seduction technique. I scoffed, but he was a great believer in the persuasive power of romantic music and he certainly seemed to have above-average success in the bedding department.
Now I see support for his point of view from French researchers who tested out the effects of romantic music on young French women and reported their results in Psychology of Music.
These researchers, who seem to have got themselves one of the world’s more attractive jobs, had previously studied the influence of music on flower-buying. They found that playing romantic music in a florists increases the amount which men spend when buying flowers but leaves females unmoved.
Are females as unromantic as this suggests they are? That's what the researchers then set out to discover. First, they asked women to name the most romantic song they could think of. The winner was Je L'aime à Mourirsung by Francis Cabrel.
They then set up a fake experiment in which 87 young French women were asked to take part in a study on the taste of cookies. Each one sat on her own in a waiting room for three minutes and the Cabrel song or a neutral song was played in the background.
Each was then called in to taste the cookies at the end of which the male who conducted the cookie experiment asked her for her phone number, so he could ring her to go out for a drink.
Take note guys: of the women who listened to the romantic song, half gave the man their phone number. Of those who listened to the neutral song, fewer than one- third gave out their number.
And these are French women. So if it works on them, can you imagine the dizzying heights of success you could achieve with romance-starved Irish women?
Better still, the men had been chosen as “average” by a different group of women who had been shown their photographs – so you don’t even have to look like a handsome French guy in an ad for this to work. Average will do. Average French, admittedly, but still.
It may help to know what line the guy used. It wasn’t, “Do ya want to come out for a pint, like?” but “As you know, my name is Antoine, I think you are very nice and I was wondering if you would like to give me your phone number and we can have a drink somewhere next week.”
It strikes me that in real life the ladies in the waiting room would be listening to their iPods and would thereby avoid all devious influences. So you need a setting, like your living room or your car, in which you can feed romantic music to unsuspecting females.
Bottom line? Ditch the Jedward CD for Francis Cabrel, memorise the Antoine line and see where it gets you. And for heaven’s sake remember it’s Antoine. Not Anto.
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“Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past.” I spotted this quote from comedian Lily Tomlin last week on Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness and Psychotherapy blog.
I like it. It isn’t necessarily the forgiveness part that’s attractive but the “giving up all hope” part. Sometimes I seem to imagine I have a duty to torment myself over not having done, or having done, this or that in the past. But a lot of that nonsense falls away when I just give up on a better past. Self-recriminations become pointless.
The “better past” I could have had might have been yesterday or last year or all my life. On the other hand, probably not. If I hadn’t been doing whatever I’ve been busy doing, would I really have had some wonderful, glittering life instead?
Actually, I reckon I’d have had a life pretty much like the one I had anyway with a few details changed. All the more reason for “giving up all hope for a better past”.
Padraig O'Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Living– is published by Veritas. His monthly mindfulness newsletter is free by e-mail