Book Review – No Two Alike

March 30, 2006February 10, 2010 Chris Wilson2 Comments

I finished Judith Rich Harris’ latest book, No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality, about a week ago, but it’s taken all this time to come to grips with how I feel about it. That’s a good thing. It means the book has had a significant impact on how I view human nature. But it’s also a bad thing because I’m still toiling with what to do about it. First a little background.

It has been taken for granted pretty much forever that human personality is shaped primarily by the home environment – specifically by the actions or inactions of parents with regard to raising their children. Judith Rich Harris launched an all-out attack on that idea several years ago with her book, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. In it, she argues quite convincingly that the research simply does not lead to the generally accepted conclusion. But, despite the subtitle of the book, she left it at that; she didn’t offer a substitute theory. She has now remedied that problem, which is extremely impressive given her lack of formal credentials.

Judith Rich Harris is not a PhD psychologist. Prior to The Nurture Assumption, she was a psychology textbook writer. Over the years of assimilating all of the research on human personality, she began to suspect that the accepted wisdom in the psych community with respect to what shapes personality was wrong. Home bound due to chronic illness, she began the tedious process of researching and putting together what would become The Nurture Assumption. Along the way, she got friendly with Steven Pinker, which helped quite a bit, and she got crossways with a pile of other academics who had an interest in discrediting her, which probably helped even more. So, to say she’s an outsider is an understatement. To those who dislike her, she’s a hack wanna-be. To me, she’s a hero. The details of her out-thinking the ivory tower thinkers is nothing short of delicious. Now to her latest offering.

No Two Alike is written as a mystery. It starts by laying out the details of the case, by asking a big question. How can identical twins reared in the same home turn out with completely different personalities? They have the same genes, and they grow up in the same environment. Same nature, same nurture, but still they’re different. What could explain this? She picks up where she left off in The Nurture Assumption – it can’t be the home environment, so what is it?

Her next task is to eliminate what she calls the red herrings in the case – the explanations that many believe are correct but aren’t. I won’t go into all of them because, frankly, I had to work to get through them. It’s not that they weren’t interesting; it’s just that I was dying to get to her theory. Had I written the book, I would have started with that. But I understand why she did what she did.

Writing books that get read by academics is tough. You’re dealing with a skeptical lot, to say the least. That means you have to preemptively, if possible, eliminate all of their objections before you can make any headway. Otherwise, they’ll abandon you right away. They’ll say, “Oh, this philistine has missed the papers by such and such and the findings of so and so. She’s clearly a hack.” Like I said, I understand why she organized the content as she did – like it or not. She left her critics with no choice but to at least consider her thesis, which is as follows.

Evolutionary psychology tells us that the mind is made up of modules that were designed by natural selection to enable humans to survive in their ancestral environment – you know, in caves and such. (Check out Steven Pinker’s, How The Mind Works, for a good foundation in this line of thinking.) Far from a blank slate, the mind begins life with a set of genetically determined programs (or modules) that interact with the external environment to form what eventually becomes the mature human mind. This mind will have full use of the senses – for interpreting and negotiating the physical world. It will have language skills for communicating with other humans. Harris contends that we also have three modules, in particular, that shape our personalities – the relationship system, the socialization system, and the status system, as she calls them. The last, the status system, according to Harris, is the culprit in her mystery. I’ll get to that in time. I should first outline the three systems a bit.

The relationship system was natural selection’s way of making ours into a social species, which is widely believed to be the predominant reason why Homo sapiens survived while all other hominids became extinct. Its goal, to use the term loosely, is to establish and maintain favorable relationships. It works by providing us with the tools and motivation to acquire knowledge about other people and to share that knowledge with others. In terms of tools, we have something akin to a mental Rolodex, where we store everything we know about everyone we either know or know of. We also have face-recognition module, a mind-reading mechanism (for inferring what others are thinking), and a relationship sociometer (for determining if we’re getting along well or not). In terms of motivation, we have our old friends, our emotions – particularly, love, hatred, dependency, trust, aggressiveness, lust, and jealousy. The manifestations of this system are infant attachment behaviors, making friends, dominance contests, courtship, trading favors, and gossiping. The relationship system is online from minute one of our lives, and it stays online till we die or go nuts. Also, its actions are largely available to our consciousness (that is, we know that we’re gathering and communicating information about people).

Next we have the socialization system. This system is designed to get us to become members of one or many groups. In terms of tools, this system works with a categorization module, which helps us sort people into categories based upon whatever attributes we discover using our relationship system. Basketball players versus football players, for example. Then we have a calculator of central tendencies. This tool allows us to define our categories with what we can think of as stereotypes. Basketball players are tall, for example. Lastly, we have a social-acceptance sociometer, which is helps us to know if we’re fitting in or not. In terms of emotions, we have hostility toward groups of which we are not a part, group pride or patriotism, and unhappiness at being rejected. This system manifests itself in our tendencies to adopt the behaviors, language, accent, dress, and attitudes of our group mates, and in our tendencies to defend our group(s). The socialization system comes online around age three, and it has done most of its work by the end of adolescence (although it stays with us to some degree probably forever). Interestingly, this system operates largely below the level of consciousness, which means that we really aren’t aware of the influence that our interactions with and within groups have on our minds.

The last system, the big kahuna, is the status system. This system is all about our being better than our rivals. For tools, it also uses the mind reading mechanism that is used by the relationship system, but it also draws on an eye-gaze detector (to determine who is getting the most attention) and a sociometer that gives detailed, multi-dimensional information about status. For motivation, this system gives us emotions such as ambition, envy, triumph, and conceit, as well as embarrassment, anger, or unhappiness at losing status. We see the status system in action in our tendencies to match or measure ourselves against our peers, to compete in contests we might win, and to avoid contests we might lose. According to Harris, this system is evident in three-year-olds, but other components of it develop slowly. Changes in strategy, says she, are common during adolescence and are still possible in adulthood. And though the eye-gaze system operates below the radar, the rest of the status system is pretty much available to our conscious minds.

So there you have it, the three systems. Now before anyone concludes that I am expert at distilling hundreds of pages of material into three paragraphs, I should admit that I pulled all of this from a table Harris graciously provided toward the end of the book. That said, this information alone was worth the price of admission. I have long discussed the artifacts of the caveman mind, so it was a joy to have them placed into a more useful context. But the point of the book is to say that the status system is responsible, more than anything else, for why two people who have the same genes and grow up in the same environment end up with completely different personalities. It takes a while to unpack that thesis, so I’ll only hit the high points. Read the book for the gory details.

It begins with such a thing as developmental noise. This refers to the little changes that happen as the fertilized egg develops into a full human being. Though two may have the same DNA, there are still little differences in how that DNA expresses itself in each individual. That’s why parents and friends can almost always tell identical twins apart – and not just by sight. Harris’ argument is that those little differences cause people to treat each individual a little differently. Maybe not so much in the home, but definitely out in the world, where the socialization and status systems are on overdrive.

The key to all this is the notion that natural selection would not have bothered to build these complex systems for mediating our thoughts and actions in the home. The home of our parents is not where we’ll form our mature bonds of friendship and love (the kind that leads to offspring), unless we’re weird. That’s where Harris is coming from in The Nurture Assumption. Our home life while we’re growing up is simply a stepping stone to the real world where humans do what matters evolutionarily speaking. So the modules that form our personalities do their thing away from home, when we’re with our peers. That’s where it gets dicey.

You see, the socialization system drives us to be like the other members of whatever group we’re in or want to be in. The status system does the reverse – it drives us to set ourselves apart. The systems are essentially competing. Now take hypothetical identical twins Jimmy and Johnny. They’re already alike, which means fitting in is less an issue than standing out, so they end up adopting different strategies in their social environment. Maybe little Jimmy comes off to kids in the playgroup as the rowdy, outgoing one. So Johnny’s status system tells him to do something different. He becomes the quiet, shy one. Voila, over the years, you have two completely different personalities. Mystery solved. (I can oversimplify anything.)

But as I said, I am still toiling with what to make of all this. I have no issues whatsoever with any of the aforementioned information. It all makes very good sense to me, and like a good scholar, Harris backs it up with footnotes aplenty. However, I think information for information’s sake is a waste. I want to be able to put it to good use, and, in this case, as a parent, I have a vested interest in doing so.

I can accept that I play less of a role than I might like in shaping my son’s personality. (I should note that Harris never makes the statement that parents don’t matter, though her critics will undoubtedly say she does.) Furthermore, I can accept that what happens in peer-to-peer social situations is very powerful in establishing the various hues of long-term temperament and confidence. But where do I leave off, and where do the outside-the-home social influences pick up? To me, that is the question.

Harris explains that children learn their initial strategies for dealing with people at home, but they either keep them or abandon them based upon how well they work outside the home. If the parents are immigrants, the children will quickly learn that fitting in entails learning to speak like American kids, and not like their parents. Similarly, if kids are the stand-outs in their homes because they sing best, they may abandon singing all together when they find that their “talent” gets them nothing in terms of status within their peer groups. Fair enough.

From that, one could conclude that the parents do play a very important role, which is understanding (and, to some extent, controlling) the outside-the-home social environment of their children. This is perhaps an aspect of the situation that is particularly unappealing to immigrants who desperately want their children to maintain the culture of the home land. If they insist on having Sanjay wear a turban to school, they should expect that his personality may be negatively impacted (that is, he’ll be less happy) by how much he’ll stand out in the group. He won’t fit in, and isn’t likely that his headgear will earn him any status in the vicious contest for playground superiority. So he may end up feeling inferior or feeling left out, which may persist into an introverted and not-so-confident personality. But then again…

How much should we cater to the goals of our ancient genes? Have I not said forever that many of our genetic drives do more harm than good? Maybe the desperate need to fit in is one of those. It certainly accounts for all manner of foolishness among young people in this country – pop music, mainstream fashion, and the interminably irritating use of the word ‘like’ come to mind right away. And status? Well, we all know what a bitch that one is. It drives people to value the shallowest of activities and accomplishments and to unnecessarily beat the crap out of themselves when they don’t measure up. So should we forget all about Harris’ interesting theory and go about our business as usual?

No, that won’t do either. In the end, I think it comes down to happiness. Fitting in makes us happy. Being acknowledged as having high status makes us happy. So, as is the case in so much of this enlightening the caveman endeavor, the key, I think, is to co-opt the ancient design for a modern aim. Yes, I think parents should come to grips with how their actions toward their children will prepare them to interact with their childhood playmates. That doesn’t mean they teach them to be lemmings, but it does mean that they carefully evaluate who their kids spend time with, paying special attention to their values and dispositions. (Maybe this makes a case for private schools.)

On the flipside, in terms of status, I think it still makes sense to teach children to try to outpace their peers. Competition and accountability do wonders for our species. But, again, the parent’s role is to help guide the child’s choices in what he or she attempts to excel at. The kids can (and should) pursue status, which brings happiness, but in endeavors that will serve them as adults. Striving to be the kid who can shotgun the most beers before class is not one of those endeavors, though it somehow worked for me. Aaanyway, there’s a lot to chew on here.

As you can see, I have only a vague feel for how Harris’ book should be applied to life as a parent today. I’m sure as time goes on that my sense of it all will crystallize. I’ll keep you posted. For now, let’s just say that things aren’t as we always thought they were, and we should be thankful that a non-academic had the courage and wherewithal to bring it to our attention. That’s a good start.

Keep Your Eyes On Your Big Screen

March 16, 2006February 10, 2010 Chris WilsonLeave a comment

I’ve talked before about my theory of consciousness. The essence of it is that we have this big screen in our minds that is occupied by the aspects of our mental proceedings that are winning the moment-by-moment competitions that are going on continuously below the surface. What we experience (sight, sound, etc.) on the big screen is what we are conscious of. It’s all about attention.

What are we paying attention to? The answer drives such a monumental part of our experience, yet few of us routinely ask ourselves what is on our big screens. That’s probably because no one else has posited the big screen metaphor – at least I’ve never come across it. Nevertheless, visual metaphors can be extremely useful, and this one is at the high end of the utility scale. Perhaps an everyday example.

You’ve just come from the grocery store. You walk in the door to your home and find that your wallet or purse is not with you. It’s no shocker what’s on your big screen for the foreseeable future until you recover what you’re missing. You’re completely absorbed, which is to say that your big screen is occupied by one thing almost entirely. Yes, the big screen in our heads, unlike the one at your average movie theater, has split-viewing capability. In fact, it more resembles those walls you’ve seen that are made up of dozens of TVs – they can each play individually, or they can work together to produce several multi-TV experiences, or even a giant, cohesive experience. So, in that context, losing your wallet is an absorbing conscious experience, but most things are not.

In this multi-tasking world with so many have-to-dos right next to so many want-to-dos, it’s obvious that our big screens are in multi-image mode most of the time. We’re thinking about the people in our lives, our jobs, our problems, our hopes, and whatever happens to be going on from second to second. The big screen is a melange of ever-changing images and sounds. Most of life is a fragmented conscious experience. I have found that simply being aware of this concept has profound effects on how I can modulate my conscious experiences, and thus influence my levels of contentment and awareness. (Sounds all zen and meditative, huh? Not really.)

We all have things that pop up on our big screens that we’d rather not think about, and we all have our ways of ushering those experiences off the screen. It is my sincere opinion that most people are really good at getting rid of things that they should keep, while they have almost no ability to get rid of things that have no place on our big screens. This, I believe, is mostly a function of our caveman heritage. For example, most people simply have not learned that status in a modern, largely anonymous world is irrelevant. Dave Ramsey, the radio consumer advocate, is fond of saying that people are all the time spending money they don’t have to buy things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like. That about nails it – we’re doing what we’re programmed to do – we don’t know any different. And what about the things we should keep on our big screens?

Though some folks may disagree with me, I would argue that at least 80% of the population is absolutely unwilling to accept truths about themselves, even the ones they know, but try to deny. My most recent boss was an absolutely abysmal manager, and he had indications almost weekly that confirmed it. Nevertheless, were he asked, he would undoubtedly proclaim his skill at governing and guiding the actions of other people. We’re talking about a massive blind-spot. How does something like this emerge, you ask? By kicking the truth off your big screen when you don’t like how it makes you feel.

The hallmark of human maturity is self-awareness, and it only comes by letting the rough stuff have its 15 minutes on our big screens. I’m not about to say that I’m the most mature guy in town – I do stupid shit on a regular basis – but I will say that I have a good handle on where I’m strong and where I’m weak. In other words, I would argue that I don’t have any blind-spots, at least no big ones. I may overestimate or underestimate some aspect of my personality, but I know who I am, and one thing I know is that, though I may resist, I always eventually manage to accept the truth when it reveals itself to me. This is because of how I control my big screen.

Occasionally, things absorb my screen that I’d rather not experience. Instead of invoking a default program to wipe away the unpleasant and replace it with the pleasant, I split the screen. Next to the negative experience, I add a vignette about why this experience is so unpleasant to me. Nine times out of ten, it’s because the answer is some truth about myself that I’d rather not accept. (A disclaimer – this is personal best practices stuff, which means I try to always do this. Sometimes I succeed; sometimes I fail and have to try again later. Such is life.) Maybe I’m being selfish in a way that is unacceptable. Maybe I’m being vain – as in when I lost my tooth recently. Whatever. The point is that the mind always knows when we’re going astray. It’s up to us to listen when it throws our foibles up on the big screen. If we don’t, we’re just asking for pain later.

The bottom line, folks, is that truth will get you in the end. It always does. You may live in a fantasy land, and it may hold up pretty well, but one day, truth will burst your bubble. And when it does, the agony will far exceed what you’d have experienced if you’d just have watched your big screen a little longer when it wasn’t feeding you candy.

So the next time you’re absorbed in something, think about your big screen (which will, incidentally, immediately split the screen). If what you’re absorbed in – say, a rock concert – is worthwhile, then you can take pleasure in knowing that your mind is tuned into something positive that is giving you pleasure. (There’s nothing like good art to reboot a fragmented big screen.) Conversely, if you’re obsessed with envy at your supposed best-friend’s good fortune, your newly split big screen will also let you know that you’re being a shallow douchebag. That, too, is something positive, so pay attention.

Pride In Our Prejudice

March 7, 2006February 10, 2010 Chris WilsonLeave a comment

The current furor over the Dubai Ports World deal brings to light an important aspect of our nature as human beings. We’re the purveyors of prejudice, all of us, which is far from the evil thing it is always made out to be. Indeed, it is the utility of our prejudice that tells us that it is indeed legitimate to argue against the close proximity of Arabs (an ethnicity with a clear record of anti-US sentiment and actions) to our ports. Let’s consider the idea from an evolutionary perspective.

The ability to group individual entities into categories was of paramount importance in the early days of our species. For example, suppose your caveman buddy got eaten by a lion. Then, a few weeks later, you’re cruising through the bush and you see a tiger. Now, you’ve never seen one before, so you have no frame of reference for this animal. Or do you? You know what a lion looks like, and this gigantic cat looks a lot like it, just with stripes. Two possibilities – you either generalize (that is, invoke some level of prejudice) that this cat is likely to be dangerous (like the lion is) or you give Tigger a fair shake, assuming that he is probably harmless. Who lives in this scenario? You got it – the prejudiced caveman, the one who successfully generalizes. That’s basically where we are today.

Our minds are equipped to generalize like crazy. It’s an extricable part of the way our minds do business. Of course, as the cheeky old saying goes – all generalizations are bad, including this one. So what are we to make of this? Should we see our tendency to generalize as an anachronistic holdover from our caveman days, an attribute that should be rationally stricken from our mental repertoire? Or should we be happy that we have it? I say the latter.

This does not mean that we should embrace all generalization to the detriment of evaluating individuals objectively. It isn’t an intellectual milestone to suppose that we can both generalize and be objective in evaluating individuals. Prejudice need not dictate actions. I can assume when a kid dressed in a “thug” getup approaches that he’s a complete moron (most are), but I can easily hide that assumption and treat him fairly (while secretly waiting for him to confirm my bias). Is this shady? Is this being duplicitous? Maybe, but everyone does it.

Our experiences shape our prejudices. There’s no way around it. The more enlightened among us manage to set prejudices aside when dealing with unknown individuals, but that doesn’t mean they go away. It just means we don’t act on them. But when the question is about a group, the best tool we have is our ability to generalize. if we do not for fear of misjudging an individual or two, we virtually guarantee that we’ll misjudge the whole situation. In other words, if we worry that the tiger we’ve come across in the bush is the one sweetie of tiger in the area, we’re not likely to live to regret it.

This brings us full circle to the political and national security hubbub over the ports. My take is that it makes exactly zero sense to do the deal. Sun Tzu didn’t say, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” for nothing. Even if every worker for the Dubai Ports World organization is an NSA-approved America-lover, the fact is that those who would do us harm in the name of Allah are nothing if not patient – America-lover today; going to home to Allah and 72 virgins two years from now. So, it’s fair to suggest that giving one of these potential terrorists daily exposure to the affairs at our ports is just about the height of stupidity.

Now, apologists for the deal are saying that the Arabs really pose no threat because they’re only going to be executing stevedore duties. I’ll confess that I don’t know where those duties begin and leave off, but I’ll hazard a guess that they entail being at the ports all day, right next to the customs offices and the security shift-changes, and so on. Therefore, we have people with the one completely common characteristic of every terrorist involved in 9-11 (being Arab) potentially being given access to our ports, with the ability to observe our security measures. Is it me? What kind of boob buys into this?

The irony of the whole situation is that many politicians who have heretofore decried discrimination (the execution of prejudice) when it comes to racial profiling and the like are now vehemently objecting to the ports deal. Whether they are being politically opportunistic, seeing an opportunity to bash Bush, or genuine in their concern over the issue, it doesn’t matter. (We can’t trust them anyway. Remember?) The fact is that the basis for any real objection to the ports deal is founded in prejudiced thinking, and that, friends and neighbors, is a good thing.

Too bad the politically-charged landscape (and often a supremely misguided worldview) prevents those who are against the ports deal from recognizing that what works for ports also works for crime. If three weeks went by and every night on the news, we heard stories about women being raped by a guy in a red sweater, would it be wrong to be on the lookout for men in red sweaters? Of course not. It’d be the only sensible thing to do. Sadly, when it comes to crime, where so many believe the extenuating circumstance (and there always is one) trumps the action, the tendency to discriminate based upon reasonable prejudice is vilified as horrific and unjust. The result is that the guy in the red sweater never worries about getting caught…or even getting a different colored sweater.

One thing is for sure, whether you’re talking about domestic crime or national security, no law or policy will ever eliminate the human tendency to evaluate the world in generalized, prejudicial ways. It’s a constraint, as Thomas Sowell would say, and a good one. Best to try to work with it. All other options are futile.

Relationships 101 – Part 3 – Between Getting and Keeping Relationships

March 4, 2006February 10, 2010 Chris WilsonLeave a comment

This is a series about
relationships – why we need them, how we get them, and how we keep
them. There are four parts. This is the third – it focuses on
contextual strategies for making progress on the long-term relationship front. Additional parts include:

identifying the target; (click here)
how we take control of our environment to make it friendly to our efforts; (click here)
the difference between getting relationships and keeping them;(click here)
real interpersonal feedback – quantitative concurrence; (click here)

I’m sure there will be more to this as it evolves, but that’s what you have to look forward to. Off we go.

So let’s suppose you’ve set your sights on the kind of relationship(s) you believe will best serve your quest for long-term happiness. And let’s further suppose that you’ve correctly assessed the market of desirable targets, and that you’ve successfully enhanced your looks and personality such that you now have wide access to the people with whom you hope to become close. You’re there, right? The world is your oyster. Not exactly.

The interesting thing about the quest for ideal relationships is that what you do to get in the door is not the same as what you do to develop and maintain rewarding interpersonal connections. You see, the love game is a bit like a funnel filtering system. You start by making yourself as broadly attractive as possible (to your desired audience, that is) – multitudes of candidates enter the wide top of your funnel. Then, you eliminate candidates that don’t work for you – winnowing them down until just the right one (or ones) come out the narrow bottom of the funnel. Perhaps ironically, the winnowing down part is dramatically different than the attraction part in terms of strategy and tactics.

When you’re attracting, you’re working off a basic understanding of human nature and what gets people interested in other people. So you get the attention of your targets by looking like you have something going for you and that care about how you’re perceived (you’re not obsessed, you’re just aware). Face it – relatively speaking, no one worth a crap is interested in a total slob. On the flip side, no one’s interested in someone so obsessed with how they look that they’ve strayed into the land of the orange tan, way over-sized fake books, and duck-lips look (for women) and the land of the over-built, orange tan, shaved head-to-toe, and perpetually in gym clothes look (for men).

Beyond looks, you emphasize the aspects of your personality that separate you from others – you make sure you’re interesting. Additionally, you demonstrate value, as they say in the pick-up community. You have something to offer. It could be that you’re always a barrel of laughs, or that you’re exciting, or that you’re rich (and therefore able to provide endless luxuries and entertainment possibilities). Whatever. The point is that you have a gimmick (or gimmicks) – broad appeal during the attraction phase, which necessarily, though unfortunately, means that you’re likely to attract people with whom you have little chance of any long-term connection. Here’s where it gets dicey.

I’ve talked to guys who say that they can’t even imagine having more prospects for relationships than they might want. They’re saying, “At this point, I’ll take what I can get.” Aside from being a lame-ass defeatest attitude, this is a recipe for disaster. Self-esteem is on the line here. If you’re a worthwhile human being, then there are literally hundreds of perfect matches for you out there. Nevermind the romantic fantasy of the one, the fact is that the numbers are extremely in your favor. You just have to get your act together to start feeding as many of your targets as possible through your funnel. You have to become attractive and courageous, and anyone can do it. The good news is that, though it may feel contrived at first, the process of enhancing your looks and personality will help you develop the self-esteem that you desperately need if you want to find lasting relationships that are built on mutual respect and admiration (and this is the grail, folks). So let’s say you’re making progress. You’re trying to attract targets en masse into your funnel, and it’s working. Then what?

Now you start screening. It’s a delicate process, but what you’re essentially doing is gingerly revealing what really matters to you in life, while making sure to keep the attraction strong. For example, say you opened a woman at the cleaners with some witty banter about fashion and what-not. She inferred from your looks and demeanor that you’re a confident person, and she inferred from the clothes you were picking up that you are probably somewhat successful. She may have even seen your car (if it’s nice or novel) and inferred the same thing. In any case, you ask for her number and she gives it to you. Then what?

No dates. Read that again. You do not take her on a date. At least not one where you pay, not at first. This is a chump move, and you’re not a chump. You find something that you can both go to or do that is either low cost or no cost. In my single days, I would invent some task that I had to perform and ask girls if they wanted to join me – usually something during the day. For example, say you’re in the market for a new couch. This is perfect. You’re spending time together getting to know one another without any real pressure. There are opportunities aplenty for horseplay and to see how each of you deals with the general public, traffic, and so on. (All this stuff tells you tons about people.) The money grubbers will be disappointed that you’re not showering them with expensive events to impress them, so they’ll wash right out of the program early. That’s the plan.

(Quick sidenote – to avoid ending up in the “friend” category, it’s imperative to make your intentions known up front. I told my a girl once – she is now my wife – that though she had a boyfriend and thought of us as just friends, I had every intention of kissing her one day and taking her away from him. She laughed, and so did I. But she knew I wasn’t kidding, and there kindled the beginnings of real attraction. If a target says he or she only wants to be friends, I think Neil Strauss’ response is great – “I never put that kind of limitation on my relationships.” I love that. It sends the message loud and clear, and, to some extent, just having the confidence to push beyond the “let’s just be friends” category is critical to winning hard targets.)

The idea underlying the slow revelation process is that you don’t want someone who just likes you because of some enhancement that doesn’t really reflect who you are or what really matters to you. I’m assuming that you’re smart enough to know that material success is no foundation upon which to build a relationship. Nevertheless, part of your gimmick during the attraction phase may very well be the appearance of success – clothes, car, home, etc. So you use it to initiate attraction – yes, even the most down-to-earth and high-quality people are attracted to successful people – but you deemphasize it once the attraction is established.

You’re theme is something like, “Yeah, I’m successful, but only so I can have more time to mountain bike or hang with my friends or whatever.” High-quality people will appreciate this. Shallow people will be baffled – to them, material success, particularly the appearance of it, is the end game. Shallow, gold-diggers should never make it through your screening process. If they do, your funnel has a leak near the top.

So you’re making headway with this woman. She has accompanied you on your couch shopping adventure, and you’ve both had a great time. You’ve started talking on the phone regularly. You find yourself thinking about her all the time, and you get the warm fuzzies when you talk. In short, you feel that love is blooming. All is well, right? Maybe, and maybe not.

There are two extremes to address when love begins to bloom. One is the resistance to commitment; the other is the rush to commitment. We’ll start with the latter. There’s a very real risk when you haven’t had many love experiences (especially recently) that your emotions might overwhelm you and render your rational mind nothing more than a hat rack. When those physiological processes start clicking in your brain after being long dormant, it’s a rush. It’s meant to be. Your caveman mind is wired to do whatever it takes to maintain these feelings because they often lead to offspring, which, as we know, is the true aim of our genes. Fortunately, however, we’re tens of thousands of years beyond being totally at the mercy of our genes. We can now deliberately decide which emotions make sense and which ones may not.

Think about the famous words of Percy Sledge in, “When a Man Loves a Woman” – “He’ll turn his back on his best friend if he put her down.” Does this make sense? Not usually, but love has that effect. It turns our thinking minds to mush. The only defense against it is a rational, prepared mind. So, even when love is blooming, we have to be aware that we’re still in the screening process. There’s a lot that goes into a lasting, meaningful relationship, and it takes time to determine if it’s all there. More importantly, it’s critical to maintain the willingness to walk away if things aren’t working – and to advertise that willingness.

Nothing will drive away a potential new love than overt neediness. This demonstrates excessive vulnerability, which is the mother of all turn-offs. Like I said, you have to maintain some of what you did during the attraction phase in order to effectively navigate the screening process. Some would say, “But I don’t want to play games. I just want to be honest about my feelings.” Great, I’m right there with you, but like it or not, this is a game, and losers show their hands too soon. Feel free to spill your heart to your buddies. They’ll admire you for feeling so strongly while sticking to your tactical guns and not turning into a clinger. This is necessary not just to avoid turning your potential new love off, it’s a critical part of rational screening.

The moment you let yourself turn to needy mush with a target, your ability to rationally analyze whether the person is right for you in the long term goes haywire. You’re in em>loooove, and everything is wonderful. So what if he’s 40 living at home with his mom and still bouncing checks – he’s a sweet, family-oriented guy. Yeah. Suuuure. So what if she turns into a bitchy princess when she’s had too much to drink – she’s so nice most of the time, and you’ve never dated such a beauty. Uh huh. Whatever you have to tell yourself. No, when you keep your distance during the early days of love’s bloom, you give yourself the absolute best chance of success in the long-term. Guys, go rent, “The Tao of Steve” to see what I mean. Girls, just watch, “Wedding Crashers.” It’s all there.

The bottom line is that when you’re attracting, the air of indifference is essential. Targets need to get the impression that you could take them or leave them. This naturally builds attraction. Once the attraction is established and the relationship is progressing, you slowly replace the indifference with interest, untimately ending in vulnerability. It’s a process that should, in most cases, move fairly slowly. If you think you’re just being honest by jumping to vulnerable right away, you’ll end up in love’s gutter more often than not. The measured indifference maintains the attraction and simultaneously gives you the distance you need to properly execute the screening process to determine if there’s a long-term fit. I’ve dwelled on this a lot because I think most attractive people with relationship problems do this part wrong more than anything else. Now to the never-commit crowd.

There’s a danger to being too good at the attraction phase. This is the problem that plagues celebrities. You have so many options that it’s simply too easy to cut someone loose if things start getting tough. I sat next to a gorgeous young lady on a plane from New York to Atlanta a few months ago. We started chatting, and she eventually confided that, though she dates all these mega-rich guys (with their own private planes and the like), she can never keep them. I explained to her that this only makes sense.

Why would any good-looking playboy want to settle down when he could just find someone new anytime he wanted? (This kind of attitude reflects a gross misunderstanding of how important long-term relationships are to our happiness. Nevertheless, thanks to our genes, it’s pervasive.) She nodded that I was right. She said that she and her girlfriends were always saying that they needed to stop dating those kinds of guys. Alas, they’re addicted to the lifestyle, so it’ll probably never happen. I told her that she should be on the lookout for a good-looking ambitious guy who hasn’t made it yet, but almost certainly will. NYC is full of them. Those are the guys who will appreciate a woman who chose them when they were nothing. And that’s the key – appreciating what you have.

This, I believe, is the epiphany that hit Neil Strauss somewhere along his journey to pick-up artist fame. He was so good at attracting and bedding ladies that he was never actually connecting with any of them. Finally, he realized that what he was doing was shallow and meaningless, so he decided to start screening. When he did, he met the girl that I think he is still with. (See Part 2 in this series.) He recognized that the benefit in terms of long-term happiness that comes with weathering storms with one person is immense, especially when compared with what you get from just hooking up with someone on a short-term basis. It’s all about commitment.

Doing the screening process right is essential because the end game is some sort of commitment. It doesn’t have to be overt or official, although that tends to help when things get tough. You’re just concluding that this is someone you want in your life for a long time, maybe forever. Those who don’t grasp how valuable it is to go through hard times with someone and come out on top will jump ship at the first sign of trouble. How many marriages in Hollywood last longer than even five years? Not many. Those people are so attractive that their funnel is virtually full at all times, so when the choice is to ride out a tough spot with one person or shack up with someone ten years his or her junior, we all know what usually happens. This is a shame. We should never forget the following maxim: it is in our nature to get the most gratification and appreciation from the things we have labored the most for. Relationships are no different, and we can see the results of always going the easy way by noticing how neurotic so many of these celebs are. Most of us should be thankful we don’t have it so good.

In closing this part, let me pose a question. If the end game is commitment, how do you know when to be vulnerable, to be needy, to show your cards, so to speak? How do you know when to commit? There’s no absolute right answer, but I think there’s a way to approach it that has a lot to offer. That’ll be the subject of the next and final part in this series – quantitative concurrence. Until then…