Editor’s note: This entry is part of an ongoing series of personal essays by the author on love and life. You can read here parts 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5.

‘Rizz,’ a shortened, mutated spelling of the word charisma, has been selected as the Oxford word of 2023, meaning it will be formally included in all future editions of the Oxford English Dictionary, with the definition “style, charm or attractiveness or the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner.” Rizz can be used both as a noun, as in “he got so much rizz with the girls“, or as a verb, as in the expression “rizz up“, when a person attracts, seduce or chats another up.

Rizz, as well as many other terms from our era, is stemming from a common phenomenon that all young (and also not-so-young) people have experienced in the last decade or so, which is hookup culture, and which, as all phenomena and processes in history, is not an isolated thing, but the result of long changes and developments, which form a sort of genealogy of ideas and institutions (in the Nietszchean sense) that includes May 68, the Sexual Revolution, both World Wars, the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Middle Ages, courtly love, chivalry, and ultimately, Christianity, although each in different degrees of importance.

Rizz, unlike other new additions to the English vocabulary (and by extension, universal vocabulary, through its still global lingua franca status), has achieved mainstream recognition for its relatively non-threatening meaning, which in a world completely shaped by the causes and consequences of the now imperant hookup culture, just adds up a little more understanding to a game everyone plays, willingly or not.

Unlike other newspeak developments also coming from or adapted to a courtship (or its failure) context, such as ‘sigma,’ ‘red pill,’ or ‘ick,’ rizz is not limited to a male or female use, its extension can go all over the age range, and its understanding, while focused on the act of attraction, can go from the most innocent attempt at getting to know a stranger and getting their contact info (number, social media handle, username) to actually seducing a person for sexual purposes.

In contrast, from the aforementioned short list of words, sigma usually means a loner and unstable but highly attractive man, based on the movie portrayals of such characters with dubious morality by actors Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale or Jake Gyllenhaal, whereas red pill tends to represent a whole culture, male-centered, including fringe communities such as pick-up artists, incels and MGTOWs, with the nominal red pill being the acceptance of some basic difference between men and women and how that shapes their social interactions. The term comes from the 1999 movie, The Matrix, and aside from this meaning, it also has a political one, which also goes against the idea of equality, a cornerstone belief in the NRx (neo-reactionary) canon set up by Curtis Yarvin (then Mencius Moldbug) and Nick Land.

At last, ick just means a behavior or trait that people, mostly girls, find unattractive in others, mostly guys. It could very well be that ick is the opposite of rizz and thus forms a binary set of terms with contrasting meanings, such as light and dark, day and night, and good and evil. Even in our postmodern society, our binary nature tends to show up even in the most inconsequential forms, such as in the development of new words adjusted to our current contexts and cultural circumstances.

But back to ‘rizz’, what does it even mean to ‘have it’? It is not merely style, charm attractiveness, or the ability to attract a partner, but rather a complete, integral skill set that just makes some people more successful at working their way up in social relations, mostly with the opposite sex, and thus building up whatever social prestige that success may provide.

Rizz, in my humble opinion, is nothing but the watered-down rediscovery of the ages-old idea of seduction as it appeared in the classics of Western literature and philosophy, such as with the works of Tirso de Molina, Molière, Mozart, and Lord Byron (all of whom refer to the archetypical character of Don Juan, based on the historical John of Austria, son of Emperor-King Charles V), and the accounts of Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, the titular Casanova most seducers get their nickname from.

To connect rizz with the lives, fictional or otherwise, of men of, once again, dubious morality would be somewhat forced on my part since it could create a false expectation, or a misunderstanding in the reader, of assigning rizz only to those libertines who disregard social norms for the sake of their own pleasure.

Au contraire, it is my objective, and duty of sorts, to define this skill as something that thrives best in moderation, according to a code found both in the medieval tradition of chivalry and in the most pious examples of Christian Romanticism, so it does not corrupt itself in the vices and excesses of social and moral anarchy, well known back in the day and well exemplified in the disbalances present in current hookup culture.

Thus, the starting points could very well be Medieval courtly love, on one side, and Casanova’s autobiography, Histoire de ma vie (Story of my Life), and contrasting them with our postmodern conception of rizz, rediscovering its virtue in a practice moderated by common sense and long term thinking, and the common good.

Let’s begin with courtly love, shall we? As a literary conception grown from the nobiliary context in the European Middle Ages, courtly love is inevitably tied to the idea of chivalry, and as part of the fictional, and sometimes not-so-fictional, accounts of it, knights would go on adventures and perform deeds and services for their ladies simply because of love.

In the literary fiction of chivalric romances, this game of sorts would soon become highly ritualized, with different stages setting up the phases in which love would develop, such as the initial attraction through glances, followed by far worship of the lady by the knight, a first declaration of passionate devotion, virtuously rejected but insistingly renewed with oaths of virtue and eternal fealty which sets the knight on a purifying, deathwish path to cure his lovesickness and unsatisfied desire, ultimately concluding in a heroic act earning him the ladies hear and allowing them to consummate their secret love, before setting again in other endless adventures and subterfuges just to avoid detection.

While courtly love was mostly a literary genre exploited by troubadours and poets such as Dante, in practice, it may have been very well been an actual phenomenon, or at least a cultural aspect strong enough to survive in chivalric traditions still extant to our days, most particularly in England, where the Order of the Garter remains the seniormost order of chivalry (its origin being a loose garter worn by some mistress of a King falling down in public, and the King defending her honor by proclaiming ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense,’ ‘Shame on he who thinks wrong of it,’ becoming the Order’s motto), or where the mere dignity of becoming a Knight Bachelor carries a certain meaning with the word ‘Bachelor’ attached to it, notwithstanding the fact the person knighted might already be married or not.

Courtly love and the idea of loving nobly was the standard for most of the late Middle Ages and early Modernity, as proved by the Don Juan archetype in many works from the time and even later, and more than collapsing, it slowly faded away, becoming replaced by other literary forms of expressing one’s infatuation, such as the ones embraced by dissolute figures of the Enlightenment and later by the overall Romantic movement,

Casanova’s account of his life, in that aspect, proves a paramount example of how social mores in Europe had changed to the point where even if the forms of old nobility remained, the essence of their existences, and most importantly, of how love shaped them, had become something else, less bound by ritual and more guided by hedonistic pleasure.

A Venetian gentleman by birth and a wandering scoundrel by trade, Casanova’s life was everything but boring. Expelled from seminary, military dropout, freelance copywriter, indebted gambler, mediocre violinist, wannabe alchemist and ultimately, full-time libertine, Casanova lived among nobles and princes, seducing his way into each city he found himself in, from Rome to Constantinople, Paris, Warsaw, and London, before dying weak, sick in Bohemia, having met Mozart and contributed to his opera Don Giovanni, ending his days under the protection of Graf von Waldstein and the account of his life reviewed and secured by the Prince of Ligne, which managed to get it published through his connections at the Royal Saxon Court in Dresden.

His ‘romantic’ exploits, to call them somehow, are indeed well documented in his autobiography, and through his hundred of short liaisons left a highly described image of his seduction methods, as well as his own thoughts about the overall attitudes of his age in regards to love and sex.

Could we say Casanova had rizz? Most certainly we could, and most importantly, we should, since his own work leaves some valuable lessons in what rizz is all about, including his own ritualized form of seduction, not so different to the one of courtly love, where he repeats a pattern of discovering an attractive woman in trouble he would proceed to help to gain her gratitude before seducing her, beginning a short liaison that would soon end with him revealing being unworthy of her love and leaving so she could get paired with a better match.

Some bits of Casanova’s “wisdom” include proclaiming that “there is no honest woman with an uncorrupted heart whom a man is not sure of conquering by dint of gratitude. It is one of the surest and shortest means” but insisting that “a man who makes known his love by words is a fool,” even if “without speech, the pleasure of love is diminished by at least two-thirds“, for “words of love must be implied, not boldly proclaimed,” as well as saying that “after all, a beautiful woman without a mind of her own leaves her lover with no resource after he had physically enjoyed her charms.”

A later follower of this lifestyle would be Lord Byron, whose life would also include adventures and scandals similar to the ones of Casanova and other seductors in history, and if his poetry (including his satirical epic on Don Juan) teaches us something, is that their rizz was not only based on whatever physical attractiveness they might have, or their belonging to a social group that provided them with the resources to engage in such a lifestyle, but rather, that their own life experience was a great source of material from which they could seduce others, not only for romantic purposes but also for political ones, such as in Byron’s case, fighting for Greek independence against the Ottoman Empire.

In all of this, aside from the obvious similarities and common points between courtly love and the archetypical Casanova/Don Juan seductive rizz later taken by the Romantics, I think the most important element found in both is the adventurous spirit that drives the attraction and commands the interest of the respective beloved.

For most men, this should be obvious: you are not going to attract anyone if you are not interesting enough actually to attract someone. This goes beyond physical attraction, given that beauty, while objective, is also varied, and different combinations of traits create innumerable types of attraction that can be ignored or pursued depending on how well they match with one’s given preferences.

If we get to consider these two examples of historically relevant manifestations of rizz, we can clearly see that what makes seduction possible is the drive to adventure the seductor manifests in their life or in their story. Both the ideal chivalric knight and the Don Juan/Casanova archetype display knowledge and experience beyond the immediate experience of the ones they wish to seduce. These adventures can have happened before they set up on their Romantic path, so they have a wide array of topics to engage in discussion, so to impress their beloved, or it can happen during their heart-conquering quest, as they struggle both emotionally and in reality to impress the subject of their affections, proving their worth through their successful completion of the challenge set forth for them.

Considering this, it was not uncommon in the past for many, mostly wealthy but not necessarily, young men coming of age in the West to engage in a months-long Grand Tour of Europe in which they would not only visit the most important cities of the Old World but learn the arts of good taste and good manners, such as dancing and fencing, as well as languages, etiquette and other soft skills required in business and diplomacy that would be of good use at their return and the start of their productive lives.

That Grand Tour would also give them the life experience and the knowledge of the world to make them interesting conversationalists and attractive hosts in their future endeavors trying to find a woman to marry and build their families with.

We could mention many examples of gentlemen that got not only their rizz but also the principles they later defended and promoted in their lives and struggles from their respective Grand Tours, but to stick to a certain pattern, it would be better just to name a few of them, such as Simon Bolivar and Gabriel García Moreno, from Latin America, or Lord Byron and Mark Twain, from the Anglosphere. The former two went on to become great political leaders in their countries and their region overall, while the latter two are some of the best writers in the English-speaking world.

This reference, however, is nothing but trivia fact in general culture and history and by no means should be taken as a compelling call for expensive trips so that men get more rizz in their lives and become more interesting towards whoever they intend to seduce. But the fact remains that they need, at least, to try to build up as many life experiences so they are actually educated in the social arts and rituals to both have meaningful lives and trades and not run out of interesting topics to speak about in their social circles, independently of whether their ultimate objective is to seduce someone or not.

Now, on a related but separate note, I was recently having dinner with a friend of mine as she was visiting my city for a grad school class we were taking together, and as usual, we were talking about life and love, with me telling her all my recent experiences and (mis-) adventures, some of which are already accounted for in previous entries in this series.

As we laughed over the ridiculousness of some of my situations, I ended up asking her about why things get to be so difficult for guys when it comes to dating, and she, as the slightly older, more stable (and wiser, by default) friend she is, explained to me that, from her perspective, girls are fed so many ideals about love that do not quite align to the actual reality that when whatever they are looking for, or expecting, comes close to it, they rebuff it for it would mean commitment, and most of them are not ready to handle it outside of their fantasies.

I have been meditating a lot on that, especially as I continue with a social practice I’ve recently taken a liking in, which is talking to strangers in my trips on the tram. It may seem silly, but in societies that are becoming more and more isolated as a result of hyper-individualism and atomization, to try to engage in conversation with an unknown person in an unusual third place (that is, neither home nor the workplace), outside of the internet can be quite scary.

Not for me though, and I enjoy doing it for the sake of it, added to the fact that it helps me put my rizz into practice and to improve it with each new person I meet on each trip. It may also be that I found it quite unique as a way to make ourselves known, although the source of my inspiration to do so may be way less fascinating than any story I could make up for it: I took it from the opening scene of the pilot of a short-lived TV series titled Forever, where the protagonist talks to a beautiful stranger on the NY subway to the best results, at least momentarily.

Of course, there are a couple of girls I’ve met this way, and while I do not try to imitate (nor I wish to, given my own moral discipline) neither the courtly love technique nor the Don Juan/Casanova seduction method, I cannot help but unwillingly fall into both, even while trying to moderate myself according to higher ethical principles before I either hit a wall of discovering the disappointing fact these girls have boyfriends of their own (lucky guys, I guess) or that the girls themselves become either too shy or simply stop showing interest altogether.

You might think I might be doing something wrong, but considering my last experiences merely meeting people, I think there might be a little too much of that ancient rizz going through me that does not quite match with the current needs in the dating market. After all, courtly love tends to be quite intense, and the Romantic seduction of the Grand Tour gentlemen might be too adventurous for an age that has become increasingly and boringly mundane.

Nonetheless, I do enjoy the fact that the last two girls I’ve met on the tram have been quite interesting themselves and have been not only open to the experience of meeting a stranger in such unexpected circumstances, but all in all, it might be that I am not only a stranger, but an interesting one.

Like many others before me, I did have my Grand Tour in my younger years, a high school trip with my classmates that began in Switzerland went around Austria, Italy, and France before finishing in Spain, and while it was not the same kind of experience as the one my fellows back in the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries had, it was certainly a start of sorts, especially as I am now engaged in a more ‘classic’ version of it, education and cultural visits included, notwithstanding the fact that I am also working for my sustenance during its indeterminate duration.

My case, in particular, could be very well titled ‘Five Degrees of Plot Twist’, since every fact I share from myself or my life in the back-and-forth conversations I have with these unknown girls on the tram ties up by an equally unexpected follow-up that just increases their fascination (and their interest), and perhaps intimidates them given that it is not only unusual to meet people in such circumstances, but it is highly improbable to meet a polyglot expat, with cultural (and legal) ties to several countries, and with a career spawning so many different areas such as law, writing, book publishing, politics, among others, not to mention some of my family’s apocryphal stories about our ancestry.

A suggestion one of these girls jokingly gave me was to edit those iceberg-tier memes to include my most unbelievable facts in each level, so they don’t get lost as they get to know me. It may be that, or keeping up with the joke, it could also be that it works just like Shrek said about onions: in layers.

That does not mean assured success with every person we meet, and I, for one, know that meeting people is a harder process than it seems and what I can show. Rizz can only get you so far as you have something to build that rizz from. To become attractive, if so, requires at least a certain amount of years well lived and of personal experiences to share with others.

Building a life is quite different from just living, and both are not the same as making an adventure of it. The hero’s journey, in essence, is an adventure, and to answer that call, we need both instinct and intelligence. Rizz, rightly understood, is just that, combined with the experience of an interesting life and the courage to live it and share it.

In an age where both courtly love and the Casanova archetype seem to be dying, if not outright dead, I still believe some girls deserve their fifteen minutes of a fairy tale, even if inconsequential. After all, we never know who we might end up meeting on the tram.