All the women I number-closed within 5-10 minutes of meeting them never flaked on me whereas the women I gamed for a good 30-45 minutes were much more inconsistent. I reread the DiCarlo Declassified Manual when I came across this nugget from Vin: 'The number one cause of flaking is a lack of intrigue.' Could it be I have a habit of sharing too much with a women, leaving little mystery to pique their curiosity?
Why Familiarity Really Does Breed Contempt
People's intuition is that learning more about a new acquaintance will lead to greater liking. In fact, on average, we like other people less the more we know about them.
Given how irritating other people sometimes are, it's surprising how many of us are eternal optimists about forming new relationships. Indeed people seem primed to like others: the 'mere exposure effect' is a robust social psychological finding demonstrating that just being exposed to someone causes us to like them more.
If the 'mere exposure' effect holds for developing social relationships then, as we come to know more about others, we should come to like them more.A good example of the 'mere exposure' effect is a study by Moreland and Beach (1992) who introduced four fake students to a large college course. Each of the fake students - chosen to be of similar appearance - attended the course to varying degrees, some going to many classes, others to few; but none interacted with the other students.
At the end of the course the one student most people preferred, despite never having talked to her, was the one who had attended the most classes.
If the mere exposure effect holds for developing social relationships then, as we come to know more about others, we should come to like them more. It seems familiarity should breed liking. A recent study by Michael I. Norton from the Harvard Business School and colleagues certainly suggests that this is most people's intuitive understanding (Norton, Frost & Ariely, 2007).
Norton and colleagues first surveyed members of an online dating site, asking them whether they generally preferred someone they knew little about, or who they knew more about. 81% said they would prefer the person they knew more about. In a second survey of undergraduate students fully 88% said they would prefer someone they knew more about.
So much for people's expectations, let's see how they really behave.
Familiarity breeds contempt
In the next part of the study by Norton and colleagues participants were given a list of traits about another person and asked how much they would like that person. In fact the traits were generated to be broadly representative and people were shown either 4, 6, 8 or 10 of these traits at random. The results showed that, contrary to their expectations, the more information people had about others the less they liked them.
The more information people had about others the less they liked them.Norton and colleagues hypothesised that the reason for this finding was that the more people find out about others, the more likely it is a trait will be uncovered to which they take a dislike. The researchers tested this with participants from the online dating site. This time, though, instead of using a pre-generated list of traits, each participant was asked to create a list of traits that described themselves - these were then pooled. Predictably most people chose relatively positive traits.
These traits were then mixed up and randomly allocated in varying numbers and varying orders to participants as though they described a real person. Effectively, then, people were looking at a random list of relatively positive traits that the group itself had generated. Again, even with a list of mostly positive traits, people tended to like the 'person' described by the shorter lists of traits, further supporting the idea that we like people more who we know less about.
Once we perceive a dissimilarity, it's all downhill from there. Even traits we might have liked, or been neutral about before, now get the thumbs down.But what the researchers were interested in this time was the effect of similarity on whether we like others. This is because much previous research has shown that we tend to like other people who are similar to ourselves. The results showed that what was driving the connection between knowledge and dislike was a lack of similarity. Effectively the more traits participants knew about another 'person', the more likely they were to find dissimilarities with themselves, and so the more likely they were to dislike them.
It gets worse. In a fourth study using a similar approach to those above the researchers found that our dislike for others cascades. This means that if we see a dissimilar (and therefore unlikeable) trait early on in our relationship with another, this tends to negatively affect the way we perceive the rest of their traits. So, once we perceive a dissimilarity, it's all downhill from there. Even traits we might have liked, or been neutral about before, now get the thumbs down.
Real-world test
Finally, in a fifth study researchers decided to test the evidence from their controlled studies in the real world. This time members of a dating site were asked either about a potential partner they had met online or someone they were about to meet.
After getting participants to complete a survey they found that, as expected, people knew more about their dates after having met them than before. For the vast majority of people, though, liking for their dates decreased substantially after they had met them. On average, knowledge of their date increased from 5 out of 10 pre-date to 6 out of 10 post-date, while liking dropped from 7/10 to 5/10 and perceived similarity dropped from 6/10 to 5/10.
Of course this wasn't true for everyone - some met other people who they liked more afterwards - but for the majority more knowledge led to apparent dissimilarity which led to less liking.
Hope springs eternal
Considering the results of this study it's a wonder we bother trying to make friends after the first few disappointments. The fact that we do is probably a result of an unrealistic level of optimism about how much we will expect to like others. This is confirmed by the study's finding that the vast majority of people expect that more knowledge about others will lead to liking.
Jean-Paul Sartre was right - on average - other people really are hell. And occasionally we do actually meet people who turn out to be similar to us, who end up as our close friends or even partners. It's these relationship hits that we tend to remember when meeting someone new rather than all the times we were disappointed.
As this study shows, on the vast majority of occasions the less we know about someone the more we are inclined to like them. It's like the fake student in Moreland and Beach's study, ambiguity allows us to imagine that other people share our world-view, our personality traits or our sense of humour. Unfortunately as soon as we start to find out more about them, we're likely to find out how different they are to ourselves and, as a result, to dislike them.
Jean-Paul Sartre was right, on average: other people really are hell. That is, most other people are hell. There are, of course, a few people we each hold dear, people who do not begin to smell after three days; but these people are the glorious exceptions, so hold on to them tight.
Hey! How are things going with you these days? I hope all is well.
I'm known among ALL of my friends for being there for anyone at anytime - no question, and never saying, "No." Always, being available. But, even though I like to - I've read that it's a defense mechanism and selfish. I'd still like to be reliable to my friends and everyone else as long as they genuinely need the help and it's something that only I can do. So, how do I come to the point where I can not feel guilty about it?
I ask this because I know that it kills me with the chicks. I'm always giving them compliance and for nothing. I just think it's nice to do things for people. But I know while initially it's probably cool to do, women will come to expect it. As well, they might resent it later and think I'm too soft. And overcompensating. Also, it puts me in the dreaded "friend zone." Hence, why I mentioned before that I've had so many female friends.
I want to get to this point from your, "Tear That Pussy Up!" post :
"Nowadays, I no longer hide my niceness, my power, or my sexual desire. Rather than be the doormat I once was, I now hold open doors for women and whisper romantic nothings into their ears - AND still get laid. I command respect. I make women blush by the things I say...and turned on. I am an unstoppable, fucking machine!
If you were to tell me three years ago that I'd reach this point, I would've thought you were crazy. I used to think women had a secret desire to be beaten, used, and abused. Now that I'm much older, more mature, and more experienced, I know the real reason women love bad boys. It's the real reason so many women get involved with abusive men and even marry them later on. Low self-esteem? Lack of good men left? Financially trapped in the relationship? Oppression of the patriarchy? Nah. The sex with bad boys and jerks is off the hook!"
Got any ideas?
It’s a Complicated Subject
Just before Valentine’s Day this year, Sunday Styles did something very unromantic: we asked college students nationwide to tell the plain truth about what love is like for them. We weren’t sure what to expect, but we thought we wouldn’t receive many essays about red roses and white tablecloths.
When the contest deadline passed seven weeks later, more than 1,200 essays had arrived, from 365 schools in 46 states and Puerto Rico. In perhaps typical collegiate fashion, nearly 700 poured in on the last day, 400 over the final hour. We counted only three red roses among them, and one was bestowed in a laundry room.
As for the more complicated stuff, and the uniquely 21st century struggles — those we got by the hundreds, covering everything from how students view communications technology (as a lifeline, a crutch or a scourge) to their ambivalence about the no-strings-attached sexual opportunism of the hookup culture.
Five of these essays will appear as the Modern Love column, starting today with Marguerite Fields’s winning entry, “Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define,” an eloquent, clear-eyed account of her generation’s often noncommittal dating scene. On the Sundays between Mother’s Day (May 11) and Father’s Day (June 15), we will publish the four runner-up essays.
Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define
By MARGUERITE FIELDS
RECENTLY my mother asked me to clarify what I meant when I said I was dating someone, versus when I was hooking up with someone, versus when I was seeing someone. And I had trouble answering her because the many options overlap and blur in my mind. But at one point, four years ago, I had a boyfriend. And I know he was my boyfriend because he said, “I want you to be my girlfriend,” and I said, “O.K.”
He and I dated for over a year, and when we broke up I thought my angsty heart was going to spit itself right up out of my sore throat. Afterward, I moved out of my mother’s house in Brooklyn and into an apartment in the East Village, and from there it becomes confusing.
So, a few days after the chat with my mom, when I found myself downtown drinking tea with my friend Steven, I asked him what he thought about dating. He has a long-term girlfriend, and I was curious how he viewed their relationship.
“The main thing,” he said, “is I don’t mind if she sleeps with other people. I mean, she’s not my property, right? I’m just glad I get to hang out with her. Spend time with her. Because that’s all we really have, you know? I don’t want her to be mine, and I don’t want to be anybody’s.”
I sucked my teeth and looked over at the next table, where two men sat opposite each other. One looked over his shoulder and gave me a closed-mouth grin.
Steven explained that it’s not a question of faithfulness but of expectation. He can’t be expected not to want to sleep with other people, so he can’t expect her to think differently. They are both young and living in New York, and as everyone in New York knows, there’s the possibility of meeting anyone, everywhere, all the time.
For the sake of brevity and clarity, I’ll say I’ve dated a lot of guys. It’s not that I’ve gone out anywhere with a lot of these guys, or been physical with most of them, or even seen them more than once. But there have been many, many encounters.
I’ve met guys in the park, at the deli, at galleries, at parties and on the Internet. The Internet idea came from thinking that if I could sift through people’s profiles, like applications, I could eliminate the obvious lunatics.
And that didn’t work out very well. One leaned across the table an hour into dinner and screamed: “You love me! I know you do!” Another stood outside my apartment with one finger on the buzzer and another covering the peephole, occasionally banging his fist, until he finally exhausted himself and left.
As for the guys I first met in person, there was the construction worker I ran into on the train twice before saying anything, kissed the third time, kissed the fourth time, got stood up by the fifth time and never saw again. Then there was the guy with tattooed knuckles, the young Republican, the Irishman on vacation and the guy who stole $300 from me to buy drugs. There was the activist, the actor, the librarian, the waiter and the bond trader.
So when my friends and I started having a conversation about the nature of monogamy, I thought I knew something about monogamy. Because, despite the fleeting nature of most of my encounters, and despite my own role in their short duration, I think what I have been seeking in some form from all of these men is permanence.
Sometimes I don’t like them, or am scared of them, and a lot of times I’m just bored by them. But my fear or dislike or boredom never seems to diminish my underlying desire for a guy to stay, or at least to say he is going to stay, for a very long time.
And even when I don’t want him to stay — even when he and I find each other as strangers and remain strangers until we stop doing whatever it is we are doing — I still want to believe that two people can meet and like each other well enough to stay together exclusively, without the introduction of some 1960s rhetoric about free love or other noncommittal slogans.
But noncommittal is what we’re all about.
There was the guy with red hair and big steaklike hands that walked with me arm in arm through Washington Square Park, kissed me on the stoop of my mother’s brownstone and said he wanted to be my boyfriend. Until our next walk, when he kept his hands to himself and said he meant boyfriend “in the theoretical sense of the word.”
Then there was the installer of soy insulation who cooked soggy pasta and made me watch football and whimpered and kicked in his sleep. In the spring there was the guy 12 years older than me who shared an apartment overlooking Tompkins Square Park with an antediluvian man who walked around in graying long underwear.
There was the guy who wore more makeup than I did, and the one who waxed his eyebrows clean off his face. And the one who slept with a guy when he was drunk, then with another when he was sober. (But he insisted he wasn’t gay, just curious, and since when was I so uptight anyway?)
Over the summer there was the Jesuit taking a break from the seminary who stopped calling after I said I wouldn’t sleep with him on our third date. In the fall, back at school, there was the banjo player from the woods of New England who took me home to meet his family, then moved away and told me to wait for him. And I did, for months, until he called to say he was falling in love with me, and oh, man, I had to come see him right away (“Buy your ticket tonight!”), before he called again to say it was moving too fast and he wasn’t ready.
And on, and on, and on.
Then this winter I met a guy while waiting to have my computer fixed. He had big blue eyes and a wide red mouth and delicate hands and greasy brown hair. He sat down and asked what I was reading and did I have a boyfriend because he was asking me out. He smelled like incense and clean linen, and I was overwhelmingly and instantaneously smitten. Among other things, I liked his indifference, confidence and knowledge of foreign film directors.
On our first date he explained his theory of exclusive relationships, which was that they shouldn’t exist. We talked about our (and all of our friends’) divorced parents, about how marriage was nothing but a pragmatic financial venture, and about the last time we cheated on someone. He said that his disregard for monogamy wasn’t a chauvinistic throwback, but quite the opposite: the ultimate nod to feminism.
On our second date we watched coverage of the Iowa caucus, and later, after listening to jazz at his apartment, he crawled onto his bed, leaned against the headboard and said he didn’t burn artificial light after dark. I sighed and edged into bed next to him.
During the night he kicked and snored, grabbing greedily at me with his well-moisturized hands like a child snatching at free candy.
We overslept. In the morning I watched him dress frantically, the way a drifter would (gray pants and shirt tucked in and tie and vest and brown wingtip shoes and gray sweater and red scarf and jacket: it was lovely). He looked up occasionally from his scrambling to give a big toothy smile. I made the bed and drank the orange juice he bought for me the night before. We left his apartment and tried to find a cab.
As we crossed Hudson Street, we waded through a passing stream of preschool children walking in pairs, holding hands. I watched their teachers — one at the front of the line, one in the middle, one at the back — while he hailed a taxi.
A week passed before I saw him again. I was about to go back to school in Vermont, and he was headed to Jamaica on vacation. When I entered the restaurant, he said: “The nice part about having a shoddy memory is I forget how pretty some people are. You look beautiful.”
As we ate, we theorized about the effects of pornography on romantic relationships. Dinner ended; he had to go pack for his trip. I asked casually when I was going to see him again.
He sighed. “That’s a loaded question.”
I asked what he meant, because I thought the question was fairly straightforward.
Then it came. The story. The long, boring, aggravatingly rehearsed and condescending story. It spewed, overflowed and dripped off our table and onto the floor and underneath the shoes of the other patrons and into the street.
He said he had just gotten out of a long relationship, and now he was single and didn’t really know how this whole dating thing works, but he was seeing a lot of other people, and he liked me; he thought I was special. Cross my heart, he actually called me special.
WHEN he was done, he asked: “That’s what you were talking about, right? Seeing me again and the nature of our relationship? Like, what are we to each other?”
I said I just meant to ask when we were going to see each other again, because I thought that was the polite thing to do after a few dates, and I wondered if he wanted to make time for me to come back to New York to see him. And he said no, that was “too much, too soon,” but if I’m ever in town I should call him. He would love to see me.
We left. It was raining, he hailed a cab for me, and we hugged without looking at each other. I got into the cab and rode away.
And tried to process it. And tried to remind myself that when we first met I thought he was an arrogant, presumptuous little man. I tried to think about my conversation with Steven. I tried to remember that I was actively seeking to practice some Zenlike form of nonattachment. I tried to remember that no one is my property and neither am I theirs, and so I should just enjoy the time we spend together, because in the end it’s our collected experiences that add up to a rich and fulfilling life. I tried to tell myself that I’m young, that this is the time to be casual, careless, lighthearted and fun; don’t ruin it.
Hi Dicknotist!
I've been a regular reader of your blog and I find the way you think really sympathetic. You might have the answers for me, so I'd like to ask you for some advice. I am not the regular AFC, I am living life awesome, I am a head-turner, women are really attracted to me based on my looks even before they get to know me. I always had women in my life, proper girlfriends as well as friends with benefits, and one night stands. I also have quite a few women around as friends, so I am quite familiar and comfortable with girls. I've been a practicer of Dicknotism before I even knew the word existed, I have given orgasms to girls who thought they were physically incapable of cumming, my exes keep in touch with me, tell me that I've been the best in bed, and come back for an occasional joyride. Right now I am in a foreign country on a university scholarship, have a non-exclusive relationship with a girl, who is quite talented in bed. I suppose I shouldn't complain, I am young, intelligent, handsome, outgoing, financially stable, but still feel that I am far from my full potential.
Even though I have a reasonably big social circle, I feel that my confidence and my social skills are far from what my background would make possible. I used to have an anxiety disorder, panic attacks, which caused unusually strong sweating (in a minute I got so soaked that I looked like if I just took a shower) in social situations, like meeting new people, or sometimes even in the weirdest places, like talking to a shop assistant, or even my family members. I had this issue worked out with a psychologist, now I feel relieved, and want to get rid of the rest of my old bad habits. Like I rarely open girls, usually either they open me, or I use a mouthful of social lubricant to loosen up, and I usually go overboard with it. That all equals to not getting the highest quality girls possible. And I don't mean going for the ugly ones, they are usually cute, also craved by others, but not the really hot ones.
The first introduction to the seduction community for me was The Game about a year ago, since then I've been reading books and blogs, also applying some material successfully, but only a few techniques, I am not the typical sarging-addict. The indirect method seems a bit useless for me, my appearance generates attraction, I don't need to sneak in under the radar. But I am not used to doing cold approaches - at least, when not drunk - and I quickly run out of things to say when talking to a stranger, and really hate the 'What do you do?' kind of small talk, and the following awkward silence. And to avoid that, I simply don't open. I somehow lack the confidence to display my personality. I can also be quite self-centered, which really isn't good for getting to know people. My other major problem is the lack of motivation. I want to work these issues out, but I tend to get lazy with it, having an already decent life and getting laid daily really lowers my motivation.
Thank you in advance for your reply, and keep posting, your blog really made a difference for me!
gamut
