Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [68]
LET ME HEAR YOUR BODY TALK
With that said, let’s return to the crowded room and look at what happens on some enchanted evening. The first important point to realize is that only a small part of what you are communicating at any moment is coming from the actual words you are saying. There are three ways that we are constantly sending out messages to those around us: body language, tone of voice, and actual words. Of course, if you are explaining a dense mathematical problem, the vast bulk of your communication will be carried by your words, but most of our communication is not like that, especially when it comes to dating. In most casual conversations, what we say is the least important of the three aspects of communication. I have read varying estimates, but roughly speaking, the vast majority of our communication comes from body language and tone, while less than 10 percent of our communication is the words we speak. So, what you say is far less important than how you say it. In one study, college students were hooked up to a portable tape machine that recorded random samples of their conversations throughout the day. When the researchers analyzed the data, they found that even those small snippets were “saturated with unintentional messages.” We may not realize it, but in virtually all of our encounters, a vast sea of unspoken messages are passing back and forth, usually below our conscious notice.
All of this is doubly true for the world of dating where almost everything is done through oblique signals, rather than direct conversation. If you don’t believe me, let’s imagine a few scenarios. What would happen if a guy went up to a woman and told her that he found her incredibly attractive and wanted to sleep with her? If he was Brad Pitt, that might work. For most of us, though, that sort of direct approach would be a disaster. Or think how men would respond to a woman whose first question was how much money they made? Part of the reason for this is that these approaches don’t pay the necessary lip service to the romantic story line, which drills into us the idea that there should be some deep, innate attraction that can’t be explained by superficial external factors like a salary. This controlling myth is why dating is all about sending and receiving indirect verbal and nonverbal messages. For example, if you are a man and want to show off your financial success, don’t brag about the size of your bank account. Show it off through your mastery of the wine list or some other realm that more subtly advertises your success. Indirect signaling is so important that the single easiest way to improve your romantic life is to become better at reading the signals that other people are sending out and better at controlling your own signals. This chapter will, I hope, help you figure out how to do that.
If you don’t believe me, you simply need to look at a recent study of lap dancers by evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller and his assistant to see how our actions are drenched with messages of which we are completely unaware. It is safe to assume that a lap dancer is always going to try to appear as sexy and attractive as possible because doing so has a major effect on the tips she will receive. What Miller’s study found was that the amount of tips women received varied widely. And the variation wasn’t random. It was tied directly to the fertility cycle of the women. A menstruating lap dancer made on average thirty-five dollars an hour, and a woman who was neither ovulating nor menstruating averaged fifty dollars. During their fertile periods, though, lap dancers were like Bathsheba on ecstasy, averaging