Elaborate Defensive Array (EDA)
February 8, 2009
The Elaborate Defensive Array (EDA):
- Avoid eye contact with people you find attractive, until you are introduced.
- A subsidiary rule: don’t look around for people who might be attractive, lest you make eye contact with them.
- When introduced to someone you find attractive, make strong eye contact, alongside a firm handshake to subtly indicate that you are a serious person to be taken seriously, and quite possibly have no genitals at all.
- When in public and alone, adopt an expression somewhere on the continuum between “businesslike and preoccupied” and “slightly pissed off.”
- When in public with friends, focus attention so completely on those friends as to suggest a complete lack of interest in any other human beings.
- When in groups which include attractive strangers or acquaintances, ignore these individuals entirely (noncommittal smiles are acceptable) unless they either address you directly, or say something intellectually provocative so that you may attack them; see 9 and 10 below.
- Never tell someone that you are interested in them.
- Actively work to mask the appearance of your interest when its object is present.
- Make all outward indications of your interest so overdetermined, such open signifiers, that your actual intentions are impossible to pinpoint, thus making all choices and risks the responsibility of the other party.
- Intellectually challenge people you find attractive in order to: (a) create a plausible reason for your intense gazing (b) experience some semblance of emotional intensity with that person that can be immediately explained away as purely intellectual (c) further confuse the outward indications of your interest in that person (d) further confuse, for yourself, the nature of that person’s possible interest in you.
- As in 10d above, assume and operate as if the interest expressed in you by individuals to whom you are attracted is purely intellectual, or is otherwise an emotional resonance that does not extend to genitals.
- Microanalyze all interactions with persons to whom you are attracted, to determine (a) how successfully you have camouflaged your interest, and (b) possible indications of their interest in you, and its nature, so that camouflaging practices can be minutely recalibrated.
