Saturday, February 20, 2010

Project 365 (51/365): Is Magic A Turn-On?

.:51/365: Is Magic A Turn-On?:.

a
Pimpin’? Really?

We’ve been talking about love and magic for this month for a while already, but we haven’t really tried answering a very uncomfortable question at the root of it all... does being a magician actually help attract potential partners in the first place?

Now, if you’re a girl who’s even remotely cute, the answer is almost unequivocally yes. However, if you’re a guy, then the answer deserves a bit more elaboration than that.

Magic is a double-edged sword. It’s a nice novelty, but it’s still a novelty. It’s something you get to have people talking about, but once the novelty wears out, you have to be able to prove your worth beyond just the novelty. At the same time, this assumes that the people you deal with are not antagonistic of magic in the first place, and this isn’t a rare thing at all. There are a lot of people out there who think magic is “kid’s stuff” and dismiss you as some guy who’s going through his second childhood. No matter how good you are, even if you’re an Erik Mana or even a Derren Brown, haters of magic simply throw your achievements under the bus.

Knowing how to do magic can be one of the easiest icebreakers in the world. Instead of fishing for a good topic to open with, you impress them with a good magic trick, and then you gauge where the conversation could go from there, and how much you’re willing to let on about your involvement in magic. I remember one girl in particular who asked for my number and was genuinely surprised when she found out I do it for a living, and it’s not just a conversation starter. Personally, I’m not too broken up about that, but it opened my eyes to the fact that some people really don’t think that it’s very respectable to do magic for a living.

So in the end, like any other skill, magic does provide you with a good way to attract someone’s attention. There will always be people who dislike magic the way some people won’t like a singer’s song choices or the way a dancer moves, but ultimately, if you’re trying to woo someone, it would always be better to have the option to use or not to use magic than to not have that option available to you at all. Stick to your strengths, and make sure that you have something more to offer as a person once the novelty wears off.

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