The Magic of Mystery
Guys. How’d you like to meet any woman you fancy? Even in a bar crowded with competition? Not only meet, but get her phone number?
Yeah, right. Not in dating-brutal T.O., you say. And not for you, Mr. Joe Average.
You’re lucky to even get a smile returned, let alone a phone number.
But look at that guy over there. Short, fat, balding, big nose — yet he seems to be a babe magnet.
Is he a millionaire? A film or TV star? Maybe a famous author? Does he have a wing woman? (A hired woman who makes the approach to women for the man.)
Maybe he does have a charismatic personality. But it’s also possible he’s a student of The Mystery Method…, the infamous system of attracting and meeting women that’s become a legend in the world of PUAs (pickup artists).
It’s an intensive and unusual seminar course taught in workshops in Canada and the U.S. by an early-30s Toronto man who calls himself Mystery (real name Erik Von Markovik) and an approach that has turned him into an unlikely international celebrity.
Now living in Las Vegas, Mystery is a tall, colourful character who wears flamboyant clothes and always paints his nails black — both an important aspect of his “method” that he calls “peacocking,” which makes sure a man “stands out” rather than “blends in.”
He developed the basis of his Method during his experiences as a close-up magician working in Canada and the U.S. stating that his interaction with people helped him learn the complexities of human behaviour.
During this time he connected with the Internet seduction community, a loose-knit online community of men aiming to improve their success with women…
It’s a community that attracted wide media attention when The Game by Neil Strauss was published and the seduction manual reached the New York Times bestseller list. A movie is now in the works.
Mystery quickly became known as one of the best “seduction gurus” and was the first to take students out in the field to clubs and bars to show them not only how to approach women but what they were doing wrong.
“The mistake most men make,” he says, in a phone interview from Cornwall, England, where he’s visiting friends, “is that they try to seduce a woman right away. They have to realize that for women it’s all about feeling comfortable with a man first and not feeling he’s pursuing her for sex.”
He says beautiful women (HBs — hot babes) have, after all, heard every line a thousand times before so men have to try something completely different. (The men are AFCs — Average Frustrated Chumps.)
For instance, Mystery teaches men about “negging,” a term he invented. It means making a negative remark or ignoring a woman (“the target”) so it disqualifies him as a potential suitor yet provokes the woman’s interest. She then has to position herself as a conquest rather than just ignore the pickup lines.
He also points out that most women today go out in groups so he offers the tip that in order to meet the woman he wants, he should always put a smile on his face and introduce himself to the entire group. Better still, he adds, is to introduce himself and his group of friends to the group.
“It’s essential,” he says, “that he doesn’t indicate he’s after one particular woman, even if he is. That way she feels comfortable with him.”
Von Markovik says his Method teaches nine phases that lead — in only seven hours, he insists (the hours can be spread over any period of time) — to the culmination of the liaison, although he says the method takes three-and-a-half years to really perfect.
There’s three states of attraction; three of comfort building and three of seduction.
“Every love story that has ever existed has been through these phases,” he says, explaining that his methods are based on sound principles of psychology and social dynamics.
“As women’s emotional circuits are all the same and are triggered by the same responses, I help men find those triggers of connection.”
Mystery’s seminars have been so successful he now has a coterie of trained seduction gurus to teach his seminars for him but he still conducts many himself.
With his courses now costing up to $2,500 (although the Learning Annex held a four-hour session recently in Toronto for only $109), he has long ago put away his magician’s cloak.
Now he prefers to perform the magic of getting sure-fire dates with hot women for the average Joe.
Magic indeed.
Excerpted from The Toronto Sun.
