48 Laws of Power

Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power is the book every bloke reads at 24 and tries on a girl at 25.

It came out in 1998. Rappers love it. 50 Cent liked it enough to write a sequel with him. And a lot of men I know treat it as a dating manual, which it was never meant to be.

It’s a book about courtiers. Men whose job was to survive a king. The people in it are masters, rivals, enemies and marks.

Your girlfriend isn’t a mark. Your best mate isn’t a rival.

So I went through all 48 with a pen and sorted them for the only two games most of us actually play: dating, and keeping friends.

Three piles.

• Keep. It works, and you’d be glad if she did it to you.

• Poison. It works, and it will cost you the relationship.

• Depends. A true thing with a bad reason bolted on.

Fourteen I’d keep. Twenty-three are poison. Eleven depend on who you’re using them on and why.

That’s nearly half the book that will cost you a girlfriend or a mate if you take it seriously.

I’m not pretending it’s science. It’s one man’s count and you’d move a few. I doubt you’d move twenty.

Law 4. Always say less than necessary. The more you talk, the more likely you’ll say something stupid. Nobody ever lost a girl by listening.

Law 5. Guard your reputation with your life. Your reputation is your power. In a town, a friend group or a dating app, it’s the only thing that arrives before you do.

Law 9. Win through actions, never through argument. Words are cheap. Tell her you’ve changed and she’ll shrug. Change and she’ll notice.

Law 16. Use absence to increase respect. Don’t be too available. People value what’s scarce. I learnt that one the expensive way and wrote it up in Neediness.

Law 18. Don’t build fortresses. Stay connected. Isolation weakens you. The bloke who drops his mates for a girl has nobody to ring when she leaves.

Law 28. Enter action with boldness. Hesitation is a killer. Move boldly, or don’t move at all. Ask her out or don’t. The six weeks of “haha maybe” in between is where the friendzone lives.

Law 36. Disdain things you cannot have. Indifference kills. The ex who won’t reply doesn’t need a fourth message. If you can’t manage indifference, Limerence explains why.

Law 46. Never appear too perfect. Flaws make you relatable. Perfection breeds envy and hate. A man with no flaws is a man who’s hiding them.

Law 47. In victory, learn when to stop. Know when to quit. You’ve won the argument. Stop talking. The bit after the win is where you lose the evening.

Notice what they have in common. Every one of them is about you. Your mouth, your name, your diary, your nerve. None of them needs her to be anything but a person.

Law 3. Conceal your intentions. Don’t let people figure you out. In a boardroom, fine. With a woman you like it’s called ambiguity, and it does more damage than a straight no.

Law 6. Court attention at all costs. If they’re not noticing you, you don’t exist. That’s the needy lad at the party. Loud by ten, alone by midnight.

Law 11. Keep people dependent on you. Make yourself indispensable. Power comes from being needed. Do that to a partner and you’ve built a cage, not a relationship. There’s a word for it: possessiveness.

Law 12. Use selective honesty to disarm your victim. Read that word again. Victim. If you’ve got a victim, you haven’t got a girlfriend.

Law 14. Pose as a friend, work as a spy. Gather intel while acting friendly. That’s going through her phone with a smile on. I covered where it ends up in Privacy Problem.

Law 15. Crush your enemy totally. Leave no room for retaliation. Nobody who’s had a messy breakup needs telling how this one goes. You don’t crush an ex. You stop talking to her.

Law 17. Keep others in suspended terror. Keep them guessing. Keep a partner guessing for long enough and you’ll have her. Anxious, checking her phone, wondering what she did. That isn’t attraction. It’s a nervous system under attack.

Law 20. Do not commit to anyone. Commitment limits your options. It does. That’s the point of it.

Law 33. Discover each man’s thumbscrew. Find the weakness and use it. In friendship that’s the thing a mate told you at 3am, brought out in an argument six months later. You get to do that once.

Law 38. Think as you like, but behave like others. Blend in. Spend a decade blending in and see who turns up to your wedding. I’d rather be disliked for who I am.

Twenty-three of these. Every one needs the other person to be a mark, a rival or a victim. Run them on a girlfriend and they work, for a while. Then they work on you.

Law 10. Avoid the unhappy and unlucky. Negativity is contagious. True. But a mate going through a divorce is not a mate who’s been miserable since 2015 and is working on you. One you stick with. The other you quietly see less of.

Law 8. Make others come to you. Don’t chase. Right, and chasing is the whole of Neediness. But the second half of the law is use bait if necessary. Bait is a lie you tell to make somebody move. Keep the first half.

Law 22. The surrender tactic. Choose your battles. Every man ten years into a marriage will tell you that’s the whole secret. Greene says do it to get the upper hand. Do it for the upper hand and she’ll know, and you’ve lost the battle you thought you’d dodged.

Law 25. Recreate yourself. Reinvent to stay relevant. After a breakup, yes. Every six months to keep a crowd interested, no. The second one isn’t reinvention. It’s not having a self.

Law 40. Despise the free lunch. Nothing is truly free. Mostly true. But a mate buying you a pint isn’t a handout with strings on it, and the man who can’t accept one is exhausting.

Law 48. Assume formlessness. Rigidity breaks; flexibility endures. Adapt your plans, your tone, how you argue. Don’t adapt your values. A man with no form is a man nobody can rely on.

Eleven of these. Each one a true thing with a bad reason bolted on. Keep the true thing. Bin the reason.

Greene wasn’t wrong. He was writing about power and he was honest about it, which is more than most self-help manages.

The problem is the question the book never asks. What do you want the power for?

At work, to get on. Fine. In a relationship, power is the consolation prize. If you’ve got the upper hand with your missus, you’ve got a woman who’s lost, and you’re the one sleeping next to her.

A friendship with a winner in it isn’t a friendship.

So read it. Keep the fourteen. Learn to spot the twenty-three, because somebody will be running them on you.

And if you catch yourself about to try one on her, notice what you’re calling her in your head. If the word is mark, put the book down.