Welcome Michael!
First, get your law degree if you haven't already. Unless you are a dentist, which is also OK. You'll need to buy an extremely expensive hand made guitar with a gorgeous finish. A Gibson Reissue is good, or a PRS "Artist" series is also acceptable. You can always tell how good a guitar sounds by how much it cost and how pretty the "flame" is. Once you get better, you can transition from "flame" to "quilt". Also, the more inlay there is on the fretboard, the more "sustain" you'll think you hear.
However, if you're not very flashy, you might consider buying a very old Strat that has been abused by a succession of drug addled cover band shredders for the last 40 years. The more beat up the better, because it will look like you don't care about anything except "tone". Besides, this impresses chicks because it implies that maybe you caused all that wear as a touring backup guitarist for ZZ Top on the Deguello tour, something you won't confirm or deny. If you go this route, make sure you take up smoking as Strats have a great spot up on the headstock under the low E string to hold cigarettes. BTW, I find that Maui Jim's are the best sunglasses to wear at night.
An amp is also very important. You'll need to stay away from any of the typical name brands and get a hugely expensive amp made in tiny quantities by people no one's heard of. For the love of God, make sure it's a "tube" amp, because it's physically impossible to impress anyone with a "solid state" amp, which is no where near expensive enough. Anything under $3K is for posers. Two Rock is a good brand here as is Cornford. If the beat-up Strat story in the previous paragraph worked on the chicks, at this point start calling them "valves" instead of "tubes". This is guaranteed to remove panties, especially if you can fake a slightly British accent. Aussie is also acceptable if she's drunk enough.
Finally, you'll need a huge number of pedals and stomp boxes. Again, it's important to stay away from Boss or Roland and only buy boutique pedals with hand painted cases and silly names like Pigtronix or Boiling Point or Way Huge.
At this point, playing will be a pesky detail you'll need to deal with. I suggest learning a "bar chord" which is used to demonstrate "sustain" and for blues you'll also need to bend a string, which is used to demonstrate "tone". Anything beyond that is a plus.
You might hear some crazy talk about how you should buy a basic rig, learn to play by playing along with your favorite music and how tone and all that stuff is in your fingers and not your gear, but obviously those people aren't real bloos lawyers. They are wasting time actually playing music instead of wisely skipping that time consuming step and going directly to the point of the entire thing, which is chicks.
