Nick Savoy remembers well the day his girlfriend, Arrin, dyed her hair blond. The 23-year-old actress knew her boyfriend had "always liked blondes," so, Mr. Savoy says, she "went to the trouble of getting herself a beautiful hair job."
"You can bet that every day for the next few weeks I commented on how beautiful she was and how amazing she looked," he said.
As far as her one-year-long relationship was concerned, the dye job was a good move for Arrin. Ten years her senior, Mr. Savoy liked it, and rewarded her with attention: "There's a lot of value that can be accomplished by rewarding the behaviour that you like."
Born in St. John's as Nick Benedict, Mr. Savoy is a professional pickup artist who runs Love Systems, a Los Angeles-based date coaching company that uses "social psychology" to help men bed women, regardless of a man's looks or financial status. But now, Mr. Savoy and many in the burgeoning industry of pickup artists who helped spawn a generation of Frank T.J. Mackeys - Tom Cruise's slimy seduction coach in the film Magnolia - are grooming those players to become boyfriends.
In the past, the pickup industry has produced $3,000 "boot camps," a slew of bestselling manuals and a reality-television show.
Now, rewarding girlfriends for good behaviour and sleuthing out whether they cheat are among the tips Mr. Savoy offers up in his new three-DVD set on "relationship management," due out next week.
"There's absolutely a shift among our customer base from a couple of years ago. The ones that are coming back to us for the most part aren't saying, 'All right, I'm getting one threesome a month and I'd really like to up that to once a week.' What I am seeing among a lot of our alumni is, 'All right, how do I make the relationship angle work?' " says Mr. Savoy, who once appeared on a Dr. Phil episode called "Women Beware!"
Since the late 1990s, the seduction community operated mostly as a male subculture, but was spotlit in 2005 with the publication of The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. Under the tutelage of several "seduction gurus," journalist Neil Strauss morphed from a "dateless nerd" into "Style," a pre-eminent pick.
In 2007, the reality series The Pickup Artist gave the world "Mystery," whose real name is Erik von Markovik. In his trademark black eyeliner and nail polish, the Toronto native popularized "negging:" using condescending remarks to tease women away from the bar and into bed.
Today, Mr. Savoy's Love Systems counts more than 10,000 clients, many of whom read his pickup reference manual, Magic Bullets, and then went to boot camp. Some watched their "instructors" - many of them former students - demonstrate their techniques on women at bars and restaurants.
"We personalize it for you. We model the behaviours that you're supposed to have," says Mr. Savoy, who also runs fashion consultations.
After approximately a year of this type of conditioning, Mr. Savoy says, his clients get "amazingly good" at seducing women. But after two years, many of them are done: "I got what I'm going to get out of this. Now I'm looking to see what's next," is how he summarizes it.
Cyrus, an Arlington, Va.-based computer specialist has read "many books," watched "lots of videos" and took part in a Rapid Intimacy Social Education boot camp this year. He sees the seduction community as an important resource for men.
"I was kind of a late bloomer. I didn't really start dating until my mid-20s. When everybody was learning all these skills in middle school and high school, I was the nerdy kid playing with my Texas Instruments computer."
