The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [68]
So step nearer. Don’t invade the other’s comfort zone: The gentlest touch is effective. In a test, waitresses who grazed a customer’s arm or shoulder when leaving the bill received 25 percent higher tips, yet customers were unaware of having been touched, let alone extra generous.
And verbalize the positive. Linguists term some impassioned talkers “high-involvement speakers.” They favor:
Direct, strong language, full of positives and intensifiers (“must” not “could”)
Few weedy diminutives (no “slightly,” “possibly,” “might have been”)
Personal and relational pronouns (“I,” “me,” “we,” “ours”)
Just the word “we” can be enough to create a feedback effect.
Such is the power of social influence that high-involvers inspire hesitant speakers to talk more passionately, which may explain why opposites attract. By contrast, the gappiest conversation occurs when low-involvers meet. Instead of joking, expanding on themes, or offering fresh material, their comments peg limply off the surface text of what others say—unwilling to raise new topics, scared to pass comment—sapping vital forward momentum; a drag for everyone.
Trepidatious conversationalists with distancing verbal ticks are as difficult to converse with as pompous boors who cling to “I” instead of venture “you”; both make feeble talk-makers, entrenching their isolation by not building topical, or by extension emotional, connections. The diabolical cost of ingrown communication habits, in the worst cases, such as the angry young Internet addicts of South Korea, is that they incarcerate people within ingrown personalities. But for anyone, desire increases the social risks necessary to transmute an encounter into a relationship that might satisfy it. (Did your knees not knock in the vicinity of your first crush?)
So minimize the risk, look after what musicians call their “embouchure,” and keep your spirits up with friendly chirps at people behind counters, on phone lines. Equally, if a shy mouse catches your eye, you can—must!—coax it out of the hole.
Wage war on shyness.
RAISING THE GAME
To ascend to romance proper requires that elusive devil, emotion, which scientists find consolidates and activates memory (as author Siri Hustvedt observes, “What we don’t feel, we forget”). It makes sense to communicate memorably, stoking those stomach-plummeting sensations that ruthless salesmen exploit: doubt, fear of loss.
➺ Rule eight: Imagination feeds romance feeds attraction feeds love
There’s nothing like uncertainty to make you think, giving romance its tragicomic tinge, as is most perfectly realized in the novels of Jane Austen. She knew whereof she wrote: Her own, ultimately unfulfilled, tendresse with Irishman Tom Lefroy had been nourished by ambiguity
in a series of meetings, some of them accidental and some contrived, at which feelings were only partially revealed, desires only half expressed.
Be unpredictable, deploy silence; add layers of mystery, walk away. And don’t look too eager. Regency strumpet Harriette Wilson inflated her market value with spirited perversity. Her memoir records first meeting the Duke of Wellington (it was she whom he told, upon threat of blackmail, to “Publish and be damned!”). Having paid a procuress 100 guineas for his introduction, the old war-horse took Harriette’s hand. At once she withdrew it.
“Really,” said the modest maiden, “for such a renowned hero you have very little to say for yourself.”
ON AND ON AND SO ON?
The language of love changes as relationships shift from lust to attraction to attachment. These are specialized activities: different hormones, different behaviors, even different parts of the brain light up with each phase. What we want of a mate—kindness, warmth, openness—doesn’t entirely square with the aggravating erotic incertitude of infatuation. Yet most of us yearn for one person who can press all three buttons, and don’t expect love to leave lust behind.
Some doomy scientists argue that sexual destiny is inscribed before birth, with men likelier to be gadabout short-term maters the more testosterone