Intro: Getting Blown

These tips are fatal because they were picked up, in part, from French writer Jean Baudrillard’s book Fatal Strategies. Fatal strategies are what you use when normal strategies no longer work.

It may feel a bit wrong to combine ‘fatal’ with ‘dating’. To be clear: nothing here is violent or deadly, though via these tips you will slay. This is a straight-up practical manual for better relationships—plus a bit of other stuff—that you don’t need to have read or even heard of Baudrillard to enjoy. 

And if you don’t normally read philosophy, and worry this might be dull or complicated or useless or old-fashioned, relax. Let me be the one to pop your theory cherry, I know how to give you a good time. And I’ll be gentle, I swear.

Also: this isn’t a joke. ‘Fatal’ here doesn’t mean ‘bound to end in failure’, this isn’t one of those guides that proposes wrong things for laughs. My wisdom is hard-won and I am dead serious. For me, ‘fatal’ means what it means for Baudrillard, who can stretch words slightly from what we’re used to. For Baudrillard, ‘fatal’ means… well, let’s say it means unusual techniques: ways to be that may seem flippant, wrong or dodgy. 

But when what’s supposed to be right can feel like a let-down, perhaps it’s time to give something else a whirl.

Nice to whirl while the world burns, you may feel. All right for some. A lot seems fatal these days. Having love problems? I feel bad for you hun. 

But the mess and confusion of our closest relationships mirrors other confusions, Baudrillard has shown me. The personal is the political and vice versa. As above, so below, etc. Maybe unpicking mess in the apparently silly, superficial and indulgent private realm can help out elsewhere also.

Fingers crossed.

I didn’t mean to find Baudrillard. I was loitering in the self-help sections of bookshops looking for magic answers to very basic questions about women and men. This was back in the early ‘00s, just before smartphones took over, just after The Matrix came out, which is probably why Baudrillard popped into mind. He’s supposed to be that movie’s inspiration, according to its PR, especially his book Simulacra and Simulation, which Neo has a hollowed-out copy of in the film. While I might like to think that student skim-reads put Baudrillard on my radar, I’m sure it was Matrix publicity that one day lured me from Relationships to the Philosophy aisle.

In those days, after a break-up, what I wanted, and what kind warm self-help books weren’t giving, and what I thought Baudrillard might offer instead––given my Matrix-based knowledge of his theories––was a long hard look at, for want of a better word, fakeness. Sure, there’s always been fakes. But it felt to me that there were now more, helped out by tech. And there seemed less shame about being one.

Any break-up can feel like the exposure of falseness, even if there isn’t a third person involved. Did you forget about me, Mr Duplicity?, we ask departing lovers when old vows ring hollow and shared worlds for two that were supposed to hold steadfast forever upskirt their sell-by date.

But maybe it’s more honest not to be one consistent thing, to evolve, to have many faces. Nothing holds together in the end, science tells us, down to the quantum level. Who believes in grand narratives and overarching solutions any more? We’ve seen too many of those crumble. We’re all muddling through as best we can finding our own truths: it’s people who pretend, in the face of all evidence, that there are constants, who are being dishonest, and deserve to be chucked or called out. 

Maybe. 

But my dark fear—which I couldn’t yet spell out, which Baudrillard would spell out for me in the years that followed—was: in which case, what does that mean for relationships? If masks are normalised and we can’t believe in anything, can we even believe in love—or what we’ve called love? We used to worry that our lovers were being unfaithful. Now we may worry if they—and us—can feel love at all. 

Is it curtains for ‘the old old dance’?

Of course, whatever I was worried about then is much worse now we’re so wedded to our phones. Amazing devices and their fascinating content can matter more than anything, including sex. These days, even a pure soul like me happily crafts social media that may or may not reflect who I really am and what I’m up to. And if I have problems, I don’t mooch round bookstores for answers. I skim top-line search results, perhaps finding similarly-informed communities to natter with along the way. 

I don’t know that I’d have found Baudrillard were I questing now, and I’m not sure I’d have the patience to start reading him, given what’s happened to my attention span, and how dense and difficult his texts can be, especially at first. 

Which would have been a pity. Because that day, when Simulacra and Simulation wasn’t in stock and my eye was caught by the redness and unusual square shape of The Perfect Crime, 1996 Verso edition––superficials make all the difference: when it comes to the shimmer of false surfaces I’m as much a sucker as anyone––I went home, started reading, and had the rare experience of getting my mind blown, of receiving so much more than expected, once I’d stumbled through the epic first chapters and got into the big secrets B. reveals about what we’re doing to ourselves and each other in what he calls this light, psychedelic giddiness of multiple or successive connections and disconnections where we chug out our days.

Luckily, I was less fugged then. What I found in The Perfect Crime, and later in other Baudrillard texts, were the sweet nothings of the world’s best mansplain, a lifeboat from heartbreak and confusion to a practical understanding that’s helped ever since. Yes, I found love—kind of—with a French philosopher. So here are some fatal tips for everyone, from Baudrillard and others, on how to find and keep true love in an age of fakes.