Relationships 101 - Part 2 - Bridging the Gap

This is a series about relationships - why we need them, how we get them, and how we keep them. There will be several parts. This is the second - it focuses on the changes you have to make. Additional parts will (or already do) include:

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

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.



With a basic heirarchy of love-producing relationships established, it's time to figure out how to get what we want. A river-crossing metaphor seems appropriate. We stand on one side looking across at the promised land, the place where our lives will be centered most around gratifying and enjoyable relationships, where the measure of our contentment is the additive effect of the love we give and the love we receive.

For some, the river is shallow, calm, and narrow enough for easy crossing. All it takes is the will to take the first step. For others, the river is quite wide, and it is perilously swift and deep. For those folks, will is not enough. Their crossings will require planning and the development of specific skills. It will take time, but they have the resources they need to make it happen. And if the promised land is not motivation enough, then I don't know what is. Perhaps a meth buzz. But then...

moving on,

For a difficult river crossing, one has to be able to assess the situation - identify a safe route, identify the best mode of crossing (rope, boat, etc.), and identify the obstacles. Things are much the same when it comes to getting from where we are today to where we want to be relationship-wise; we just have different things to assess. Fortunately, we really only need to worry about three things - looks, personality, and courage.

It is tempting to say that any one of the three can be enough to do the trick. But this really isn't true. You can probably get by on just a really good personality, but that's probably the only one. If looks are your strong suit, you'll have it easy when it comes to "opening" new people (Opening is a term used to refer to beginning an interaction with someone), thus eliminating the need for courage, but a lasting love-producing relationship will require some personality. Similarly, if you're infinitely courageous but you have no looks or personality, you're doomed. The point is that you have to figure out your assets. You have to determine what you've got and what you need to bridge the gap, and you have to be unflinchingly honest.

Though this can be unbelievably scary, it's part of the deal. Sorry. This kind of self-analysis is crucial to becoming the kind of people who attain and maintain healthy love relationships over long periods of time. And if you're like most folks - you either tend to inflate or deflate your assessments of yourself - a good neutral party is always a good idea. Find someone who seems to live on the other side of the river, if you know what I mean. Most nice folks will help you out. Hell, I'll help you out. Send your story to enlightenedcaveman at gmail dot com along with a picture, and I'll do my best to point you in the right direction. (This shit is useless if we don't put it to work, right?)

So you assess your situation. Once you do, you know what you need to work on. For that, let's turn to a recently published, and kick-ass, book called, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, by Neil Strauss. It's about this not-so-suave-with-the-ladies author and music critic who decided to immerse himself in an online community of pickup artists to try to solve his romance problems. Through the course of the book, he transforms his looks and his personality entirely. He goes from being a dork to being a master pickup artist, able to bed everything from Playboy bunnies to actresses at will. Of course, since he's a smart guy, he eventually realizes that his exploits are empty and unfulfilling, so he puts his new looks and personality to work to find real love. To my knowledge, he's still with the girl he ended up with in the book. In fact, here's a picture of the two of them.







Now, I am not advocating this sex-oriented/conquest sort of lifestyle, per se. But the concept is legit - the concept of transforming your looks and personality to get the kinds of relationships you want. And lest I offend our female readers - all of this applies more or less to women - they just need a little less in the courage department. The unpleasant truth is that the skills employed by a pickup artist are largely the skills required to get in the relationship game, especially if your river is wide and treacherous. (In Part 4, I'll address the difference between obtaining a good relationship and keeping it.) Now, I haven't mentioned courage yet, but it's implicit in the transformation process, at least for the fellas.

Most of the guys who are drawn to the pickup society are guys who have experienced so much rejection from ladies that they are gun-shy and totally uncomfortable around them. It is the transformation in looks and personality (which includes the routines they learn to get conversations started and keep them going) that provides the confidence to gather the courage to open attractive women. The simple fact is that guys who have the right combination of looks, personality, and courage do better with women than guys who don't. And, as I've said before, the good news is that the resources are there to make the necessary changes.

We'll start with looks. This one is easy. One interesting thing about the pickup community is they are not a group of dashing playboys. Sure, there's the occasional GQ guy, but most are ordinary guys making the best with what they've got. Of course, the archetype of physical beauty is fairly well-established. Heterosexual females will almost universally prefer to look at say, Johnnie Depp, than Michael Moore, and males prefer Pammy to Oprah. This is largely genetic, as in, it indicates fitness (Check out my posts on Appearance Deltas and Gimmick Theory.), however, the archetype of beauty is no match for a damned good personality. Personality transcends fitness; it points to status, which is the primary engine of the caveman mind. So, when it comes to looks, you do the basic stuff - you look like you care about your appearance.

For some, that simply means paying a little more attention to personal hygiene and trading that flannel shirt for something a little more in fashion. For others, it implies more drastic measures. The author of The Game, who by the way nicknamed himself, Style, shaved his head, got laser surgery, and had his teeth whitened. He also started working out regularly. Nothing wrong with that. It let people know that he cared about how he looked, which had the effect of lowering the amount of personality he'd need come pickup time. It doesn't matter that he didn't need it. It only matters that he made the effort. As they say, every little bit helps, and this is no exception.

Personality is a little more complicated. At the highest level, it comes down to being trustworthy and interesting, but there are dimensions a-plenty to each of those. Being trustworthy is about being interpersonally reliable. Remember - we're cavemen at heart, which means we're wired to be attracted to reciprocally altruistic relationships. Be truthful, even when it hurts (you, that is), and know when it is acceptable not to be truthful (as in when your cyclops friend asks if he looks funny in his new sunglass). For more on this, click here. Keep your word and repay your debts - both monitary and otherwise. Simple stuff, but essential to having the right kind of personality to succeed.

And be interesting, for god's sake. Have a personality. Getting emotionally connected to someone means finding common ground. Yeah, you can talk about the weather and fluff like that, but you'll never find the kinds of commonalities that glue people together unless you know what makes you tick and you learn to find people who complement those aspects of your personality. (Compliment, not necessarily share.) And to do this, you need a baseline of information not so much about who you are, but about who we all are. (Click here for a crash course.) Once you know what your genes are pushing you to think and do, you can decide what you're really interested in. This is all part of the personality transformation process, and believe me, it's a process.

Your next task is to go out into the world and explore, and to do this, you need people. You need to interact with all sorts of people, and you need to do so openly and courageously. You see, the courage it takes to open a potential new relationship is developed through opening people with whom you have no initial interest in long-term relationships. That is the subject of Part 3 - Fashioning a Friendly Environment.

Relationships 101 - Part 1 - Identifying the Target

What follows is a series about relationships - why we need them, how we get them, and how we keep them. There will be several parts. This is the first - it establishes the target, so to speak. Additional parts will include:

• how we turn our attention inward to become "relationship-friendly;"
• how we take control of our environment to make it friendly to our efforts;
  
• the difference between getting relationships and keeping them;
• real interpersonal feedback - quantitative concurrence;

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.


Part 1 - Identifying the Target
It's all about relationships. If you're not already tuned into this really basic concept, take my word for it. Or you can go to an old folks home and interrogate the inmates. The ones who can remember their names will, in the vast majority, tell you that the best times in their lives were the ones spent with their loved ones. They won't go on about their house or their favorite football team. It'll be love, love, love. Believe me. So, we, being just smart enough to recognize that epiphanies like that, when realized early-on, have a tremendous ripple effect through life, give the idea some thought. And once we do, the pieces fall into place.

It comes down to love - a two-way street of emotional connection and gratification. The desired effect is achieved when there is some balance between love dispensed and love received. The key to that is long-term relationships that are rewarding, dynamic, challenging, and of course, enjoyable. You need all four to get the balance that elicits the full life-enhancing effects of love.

So this is what we're after - relationships that have these qualities. Fortunately, we can break things down into nice simple terms. There's a heirarchy, as I see it, which provides a basis for subsequent communication on the topic. It is as follows:

1. Parent/child relationships. They necessarily embody all of the aforementioned characteristics (if done even half-right).

2. Sibling relationships. These are deep and wide if all four characteristics are present. Often they're not enjoyable or rewarding, so the siblings share very little of the kind of love we're talking about. Yes, they love one another, but they don't share love with one another; the connection is there, but it is rarely used.

3. Committed pair-bond relationships. Marriage, partnership, civil union, whatever you want to call it. It's the duration and the "stuck with each other" factor that creates the dynamic and challenging aspects. Like I said, you need all four. It doesn't matter how people come by their commitments to one another; it only matters that the commitments are known (even if only among both parties) and that there are understood harmful consequences associated with breaching them.

4. Extended familial relationships. Aunts, cousins, etc. These adhere to the same rules as sibling relationships - they just yield a little less of the good stuff.

5. Exclusive (or semi-exclusive) trusted friend relationships. These may be acquired through extended shared experiences or by way of a vouch. They may be Platonic or romantic (as in the case of a relationship headed toward the committed pair-bond category.) The exclusivity is the notion that each person knows that they are the other person's best friend. Corny as it sounds, this is where the Best Friends Forever (BFF) thing comes in. I have to stop. This is cracking me up.

[Close laptop]

[1 Minute Later]

And, as serendipity would have it, Pammy is on Leno in a skimpy Santa Suit. I'm saved.

Now (with a completely straight face), the BFF thing hits the key aspects of a productive relationship (in the ideal love balance sense) because there is much satisfaction to be derived from the feeling of exclusivity with other human beings. It is but a perk in the committed pair-bond relationship, but it's the heart of the BFF. This kind of relationship is dynamic because anything over a long period of time with humans is bound to change, and it is challenging because all parties will work to keep it going. Gay or not, it's a lot better than being alone.

6. Non-exclusive trusted friend relationships. Like the BFF relationship - this can be Platonic or romantic. Even though all parties can walk away (either figuratively or literally), there are usually commonalities that keep things together - could be a shared interest, or a shared existence (as in people who work together). And even though there's no exclusivity, these relationships can be quite deep and gratifying, such as in the case of soldiers who serve in war together.

Beyond those six main types of relationships, you're not likely to be dealing in much love, or at least not healthy love. You may loooove Tom Cruise, but two-way emotional connections do not transpire when the parties in question don't know each other. At least not yet. It's the fucking Innernet, man, so who knows. Regardless, and this requires a delicate touch, the more you think a relationship like that is love, the longer your life sucks.

Now to the matter at hand. We get to decide - because we're free and we know that life doesn't happen to us; we happen to it - which of these types of relationships we want to pursue. We can do so through long deliberation or simply by trial and error, which at least has the benefit of getting results. But no matter how we approach it, the fact is that finding worthwhile relationships is different for everyone, but the strategy is basically the same. First the difference.

It's a real good idea to figure out where you stand on this curve. If you're the gregarious type and are never at a loss for people to hang out with, you have it easy. If you're the shy type, you don't. On another level, even if you're gregarious in "friend" environments, you may be the shy type in potential pair-bonding situations. In that case, you have it easy for some relationships and tough for others. The point is that it is incumbent upon all of us to know this aspect of ourselves. This is because there's a cure for whatever ails you. More on that in a moment.

In terms of strategy, it's also a good idea to start at the bottom of the list and work your way up. Hopefully, it is perfectly obvious that it makes sense to try to extract love from non-exclusive friend relationships before you tackle committed pair-bonds. So how do you do this? The simple answer is to be a good friend and be interesting. That means you're honest and trustworthy...and fun. Some people find this stuff, the simple stuff, very challenging, and they want for love as a result. But fear not. As I said, there's a cure.

Alas, my time is up. Sorry for the cliffhanger but compromises have been made. It's this or nothing.