Social Life

When I was three years old, I reached into a bag of potato chips up on the counter in the apartment my family lived in then and drew one of the chips out. Just then, my father walked into the room and caught me munching. "Who said you could have that chip?" he asked in his booming voice. I stood there stunned, looking at him like a deer in the headlights, a half eaten chip motionless in my frozen hand.

"Mommy," I said in response, eyes wide and voice trembling.

"Really?" my father said, disbelieving. "She said that from the shower?" He was right, my mother wasn't anywhere nearby -- she was in the bathroom getting washed. I could hear her singing from the kitchen. "Let's ask her."

I sat fearfully as my father walked into the bathroom and I heard him ask my mother if she said I could have a potato chip. I couldn't hear her response, but I guessed what it would be. My father walked back into the dining room. "She said she didn't," he said. I just stared at him. "You can't have these without asking first," he said, taking the bag away and putting it out of reach. I'd been caught red-handed (or salty-fingered). Fortunately, I escaped without a spanking, after I pleaded that it was "just one chip."

Ever since then, I've had a lifelong fascination with learning how to spot a liar, and how to not get found out oneself when on occasion pressed into lying. I hate lying, and avoid it whenever and wherever possible -- I wasn't very good at it when young, and came to the conclusion that lies always surface in the end, so it's better to just be honest -- but I'm all for being self-reliant, and very occasionally sometimes you've just got to know how to do it.

So how do you tell someone lying? There are a bunch of ways, and learning as many of them as you can is something that will benefit you enormously in all of your social interactions and relationships and friendships and parternships to come.

I've been putting in 17 hour days, 7 days a week the past 2 weeks for a new business of mine I just launched, and I've been training a lot of new salesman recently for it, and it's forced me to talk on a number of great sales and psychology points. It's been a lot of fun, and I'm even finding myself training my staff with a number of terms from the pick up world that I've developed (if only they knew!). Anyway, now that I've got some breathing room again to get back to things like the blog here, one of the more interesting points I've touched on recently with the staff has been why you should never say no.

My sales guys are a little rough around the edges. One of them used to be a Texas car salesman. One used to sell suits in Wales. Another is a German guy with an unflappable ego who believes he can do anything, but he's never had anything to do with sales before.

Anyway, one of them I listened to while taking him through some drills several times told the mock client he was speaking to "no."

She asked him if he could do something, and he said "no." I corrected him, and he said, "We will not." Argh.

Because, you see, both in sales and in seduction, "no" is a big no-no -- and what I want to talk about with you today is why you should never say no.

I was out last night with a friend at about midnight, and we stopped to ask for directions. I saw a pair of women on a patio as they were leaving a bar, and asked them if they knew where the place we were trying to find was. In the midst of them telling me as I stood there a bit beneath them on the street -- "Go to the cinema, then..." a large, obviously drunken man strode up to the edge of the patio they were standing on, towering over me.

"Oy," he said, and raised his fist in what sort of looked like a greeting.

"Hi," I said, and flashed him a smile. He dropped his fist smack into my forehead, and it connected with a dull thud and a mild sting.

Now, I come from a background of formerly having been a bit of an angry guy, and a bit of a fighter. I used to get in a fair amount of fights, about all kinds of pointless things. Anything that might just be considered disrespect, I used to be ready to go to war over.

These days, I don't make physical confrontation that much a priority for me. I'll use it when absolutely necessary -- I manhandled a guy a few days back who tried pickpocketing me late at night in the rain -- but the risk is often far greater than the reward.

And that's what I want to discuss today -- assessing combat situations well and accurately gauging the risk-reward ratio -- not just for yourself, but for your opponent. Because it's necessary that, as you make your way through the world, you learn when it's worth fighting -- and when it isn't.

Social status: it's more than just something you get or don't get, have or don't have. Lots of people don't see it that way, though; they tend to think of social status as simply a dividing line between the people who are "in" and the people who are "out."

The line, though, is not so clear. And even within the "in" and "out" groups, you can point out distinctions: the guy in the "in" group who's really only in it because he has some connection people need, otherwise they wouldn't include him at all; the girl who's "in" more than her girlfriends, who are kind of just along for the ride with her. The guy who's "out" but still has connections in the "in" group and only seems to be "out" by choice. The girl who's "out" and so far "out" it seems impossible she could be anything else, because that's how she chooses to define herself.

Then there are the people who seem to step around conventional social status entirely; the ones who exude intrinsic status and can flow seamlessly among groups and be included quickly and easily wherever they see fit. These are the people we're talking about when we talk about ultimate social calibration; these are the folks who've stepped off the ladder and come up with a different way for moving socially.

Because as it turns out, there's more than one way you can build and maintain and use social status, and climbing up the social ladder of the closest "scene" is only one of those.

Let's start by talking about what status is good for.

If you're in college, or you ever went to college, you're familiar with a phenomenon that's known widely today as "hook up culture:" the Western tradition of getting together for quick flings and casual intimacy with your friends. The way it's supposed to work is, you go out and get drunk, and you wake up the next day with some girl you're friends with. The two of you smile and laugh about it and then go about your lives as if nothing had happened. Or, perhaps, you hold a late night study session, and then the night goes a little later than either of you expected, and you end up in one another's arms. And then, the next day, maybe it's a little awkward, but again, you smile and laugh about it and shrug it off and it's on to the next one. But there's a problem with this idea of hook up culture, and it's a problem that drives lots of men crazy pulling their hair out and throwing monkey wrenches into their own efforts to bring women into their lives. The problem is, hooking up with friends is that it doesn't quite work as advertised. In fact, more often than not, it doesn't work at all. But why?

My girl was over and we were talking earlier about how difficult a time it is for a woman to find a quality guy she likes a lot. She spooled off a quick list of men she'd been on dates with who hadn't made the cut: there was the older doctor who lied about his age, and the guy she went to the movies with who had touched her arm and creeped her out. But the one who stood out the most to me was the one she described as her "good friend."

This was a guy who took her out to walk on the ice over a lake in town that had frozen over. There, the guy professed to her that he would satisfy all her needs. At the moment when he said that, she briefly asked herself, "Huh. Could I have sex with this guy?" Her answer was no, it'd be weird. He was her friend.

And then she said something that really stood out:

"I like him as a friend. We can talk about anything. I'm like his guy friend. And he's like my girlfriend."

Just made it back to town after three weeks back home. Was great seeing family and friends; got to eat at a lot of good restaurants, hit the desert, and do some snowboarding. Fun trip.

Top priority on returning was seeing my new girl. Wonderful girl, very cute and pretty, dresses very fashionably, very smart, with an insatiable curiosity, educated, good career, very ladylike yet very confident and ambitious. Pretty inexperienced in the way of things; she’d only had one lover before me, and it’d been two years since she’d been with a man at all. She didn’t even like sex, and had some issues with dryness and chafing. I spent the weekend getting her comfortable with intimacy with me, taking her from reserved about it to throwing herself into it over the course of a few days. She spent a great deal of time opening up to me about all sorts of things, and we had a great few days together. At one point she mentioned wanting to give me a child, which is something that, at age 28, I’m becoming more and more interested in pursuing with a really great girl. It was a good weekend.

Yesterday at midday a close friend of mine called to ask if I’d like to grab some lunch with him, and I said sure and that I’d bring my girl along. I’d just helped my pal navigate a bunch of sticky situations with some women in his life, so I knew he was going through a bit of a rough patch, but he’d always been tactful before and I assumed he would be this time as well in front of my girl.