For our extra post this week, we’re going to start a 2-parter in which we revisit and expand upon some points from the Dope, Attraction, Type, and Shared Reality episodes - including some personal snippets and tips from my failures as we get to that second offering.
Because as usual, a sentence that we breeze through can contain universes. Those universes tend to show up after I’m done recording.
So let’s dive deeper. Gather up some implications. And put them to real life practice.
Now.
This point. Sounds like nothing until you live it a few times.
If we’re similar enough, especially if “familiar,” we’re almost guaranteed to easily flip into attachment. At a certain threshold of similarity, we’re attracted to the same and different aspects of the person
And redundancy in nonverbal attraction modalities means… if we find one sign of desired similarity, it tends to come with more. At which point we feel a “click” as we instantly recognize / romanticize them. We have immedi-love experiences, rather than the slow-build.
Like we learned, we might, at first, notice averaged attractiveness. Especially in some modalities more than others (faces, voices). In these areas we prefer “common features” and those redundant attraction modalities are likely to come as a pack to consume us. If one attraction point is there, the others are likely to be good enough.
But over time, it’s not just about averages; personal experience takes over and affects attraction.
That experience? Men want women who look like mom. Women want men who smell like dad.
A huge oversimplification, but to be reductive that’s what the research said.
Which… I believe, explains a lot about dating app behavior.
Men can match more effectively than women can straight off the app, because they’re primarily pulled in by physical appearance. Then, an average-enough voice helps seal the deal. If a woman doesn’t have a horrific screech or grimace-inducing laugh and looks like their picture in real life? The guy is probably pretty good to go.
Women, on the other hand, speak much more of the “in person ick.” Because more of their attraction points are physical or vibe-related. Smell, for instance, and manner of moving through the world, cannot be contained in a profile. So we often – based on experience and tea spilling – don’t find those important redundant attraction points when we meet after matching.
Women notice traits that don’t translate well via app and also aren’t necessarily redundant. Men have the opposite experience.
Something to think about.
And also… did you think more about this point from the research?
Feldman 2017 proposed a global human attachment system consisting of three overlapping brain networks: reward-motivation system, embodied simulation/empathy network, and mentalizing system.
That means attachment comes from:
We want to feel good,
We have imagined that they make us feel good,
And we think that we know / understand them.
Which spoke to me heavily. As a person with projection problems… I imagine I understand my partners deeply, even when those understandings contradict what they show me. But that’s how I continue to estimate them anyways.
I also historically assumed that people were a lot like me when they were sortof like me. And ignored or justified a lot of bad behavior telling myself they couldn’t have meant it that way.
i.e. those of us who date assholes but insist they’re gentle, well-intended souls underneath. The bad boy who’s good to you. Definite emotional masturbation material.
So. Ability to understand the other person (one thinks), provides a sense of similarity and connectiveness.
And those sweet, sweet, feelings elicited by fantasies of the other party, hit in a vibrant, unignorable way.
Together, creating the story that we’re on the right track with them.
If we self-stimulate (imagine things that also promote our own identity or understanding of self) to create the embodied salience (visceral feelings) and perceived understanding (projections, elaborations, and assumptions) of the other individual, we can create mental, emotional, and chemical green lights where none exist.
Kickstarting what we keep talking about.
The dopefiending. The addiction to this person that can only end poorly, after many weeks, months, or years of deluding oneself.
Similarly, in that Lying Flat episode recently? I said that we can’t really admit dissatisfaction to ourselves if we need to keep marching forwards. And that’s half true.
Because we can be aware, cognitively, that we’re dissatisfied… but hold on to an emotional numbness that prevents the knowledge from really hitting us fully. Keeping the information unintegrated so the marching can continue.
Until it can’t, because feelings always have a way of making themselves known.
And this crosses over with dating in dystopia because… Maybe know you’re not satisfied in life or relationship but similarly, tell yourself you “should be,” which keeps you from feeling what you’re really feeling. This delays the realization of life lived in dedication to this dissatisfying thing being pointless, which delays the breakdown in will. Which delays the breakup in your ship. The integration of the knowledge of your misery, which may have been screaming at you from your bones, all along.
So I just wanted to clarify; we can all be aware AND not aware of how we’re feeling and doing. Conscious and unconscious. Often because we’re living in a much larger illusion and/or aren’t ready to take the steps required by full recognition. The amendments to the problem, once the problem is admitted.
I think many of us have experienced that romantically before.
And wound up in long, eventually dope-deprived, situations where we mourn and resent the loss of the dazzling chemical that got us there in the first place.
At which point, we might not feel motivated to do more than “Lie Flat.” In our relationship world and the rest of it. We might prefer to give up, conserve energy, and wait for the pressure to dissipate.
Until… one of your familiar relationship templates, or a complex combination of them, walks into line of sight.
And that brings us to types. I have a lot to say about types.
First. They’re fascinating (to me) due to the cognitive basis of them.
Essentially ideas and emotions from the past appear to be validated in the present, simply because they already happened before.
A brain event takes place. A thought, an attraction, a happy feeling. Later on, maybe years down the road, it takes place again in somewhat similar circumstances. The mind says “so it must be real, because I have repeat evidence.” Rather than estimating “well it’s the same brain, doing the same thing… which just means that this is real TO THAT BRAIN.”
I saw a band boy, I felt things for him.
Years later I see another, I feel things again.
There must be a significant match here. It feels so real.
And with enough practice, we create heuristics. Shortcuts that protect us from having to think. We see A, we assume it means N.
Obviously, at some level, when I see punk or metal guitarist or drummer, I assume it means _______. Because I’ve thought that before.
My pattern appears to be an aspect of reality – a joke of the universe - rather than an aspect of my thoughts and doping history and attraction biology. And that explains a lot of people at war with their “type,” doesn’t it?
SO. The helpful question when you’re running into a potential type problem is: What am I assuming just because I experienced it before?
Knowing this: What else have I thought and seen and felt that invalidates that assumption?
And knowing that I have some all-white thoughts about these types, what other evidence do I have that adds some gray to the image?
Use this to help yourself help yourself, when you notice a dopetrap drawing you in.
Do you assume that a particular type of person comes with certain characteristics that are good for you? Are those assumptions based on anything valid? Or are these assumptions based on your own thoughts, which were thought removed from material evidence back then? Focus on that evidence.
And. As we briefly mentioned, remember that the “not your type” type… IS often your type, but with different wrapping.
We might have a mental heuristic that says “well he’s NOT a (guitarist, drummer, banker, doctor, drug addict, deadbeat dad, 40-syo cis-white man… so therefore ____________.)
“They’re NOT a POS!”
….
If they’re NOT immediately “our type,” we might have a thought-shortcut that says “so they’ll be nothing like the assholes that have come before.”
…
The thought we’ve thought a thousand times can draw us towards the same person as always. And then instead draw us towards someone who we estimate to be nothing like them.
Neither of which is helpful.
Both of which are taking the easy, mentally and emotionally lazy, route of jumping the infinite steps of getting to know someone. Which ends up being the much harder route when we get to know them, accidentally, after we’re already attached.
And that’s when we’ll get to find out that they (not our type) probably aren’t so dissimilar from our type, after all.
We were still being pulled in, attracted, to aspects of them that are not good for us, based on experience. But we get so dazzled and taken off-guard by their novel outward appearance that our mind assumes means “they’re not dangerous in the same way” that we miss any warning signs we COULD notice.
We don’t pay attention to the evidence, we pay attention to the more rewarding assumptions and belly flips.
And find out the hard way, when we can’t ignore the smoke and flashing lights anymore, that we made the same mistake again.
Example:
Remember that guy who “wasn’t my type” just a few days ago? Well, we went on another date. And I’ve gathered more evidence that, of course, he’s a lot more “my type” than I said.
He’s not a musician. Not an emo kid. Not a native American. He’s from Mexico and has a quiet, confident, thing to him, and has a different life than the people I’ve dated.
He’s not my type!
And also. That’s not true.
1. I love latino men. My most significant ex was Cuban. But like 3rd generation, so he was as white as the majority of the population. Still… can’t say that I don’t have a taste for Spanish speakers.
2. He’s a Leo. Of course. If you’ve listened to this show closely enough you know. Leos and I love-then-hate each other. It’s my other prevailing pattern besides musicians and sad boys.
And also
3. He has dark, politically incorrect humor. He complains about my poor texting but doesn’t text or offer much via text, himself. He makes big talk about future events that feel too good to be true. It all feels… “known.”
How different is he going to be, really?
And how different am I going to be for HIM, really?
Turns out: not at all. And actually it was another push-pull relationship – just like the one I left behind with my mother - that eventually made itself known pretty quickly. So I called it.
Despite definitely “not” being each other’s types.
Another point to re-mention:
Self-enhancement as a type or type-promoter? Could come down to the reputation of the other, also.
We reevaluate who we are when we enter a new relationship. There are social implications for who we date. Many of us strive for a certain outcome or relational influence on our human clout.
And if the other party has a certain reputation, we might estimate that we will be taken under that umbrella. Our own reputation bumped. Our personhood, seen and approved of after so many years of the opposite.
So beware how you feel about how others seem to feel… about people you think you’re catching feels for. You might be detecting others’ emotions about this human and calling them yours, while also imagining those emotions being applied to you.
I just have to re-mention that after thinking harder about the guy who wrecked me in my 20s. He is known and beloved in the city of Chicago. And I have to admit, I wanted to be a part of that halo effect; that glow.
I think this is especially dangerous, to pull in our latest episode, with social media usage.
We can see the internet clout that a potential partner holds and get drunk on it. Their internet personality and life, being very different from their embodied one, of course. Another way that phones mis-inform and -influence us.
And on that note, let it be stated explicitly….
When you’re getting to know someone, STAY OFF THE PHONE.
Heed my warnings. Or don’t. I don’t care.
But phones are mediums for lies. A heuristic that is actually quite helpful.
You will not get to know someone, for real, through a phone. Because they’re only reporting to you what they believe to be true. And you’re only filling in all the blanks, naturally, constructing elaborate mythologies.
And together, you’re writing novels. Not getting acquainted.
I’m saying, even if they’re not trying to lie. They’re still lying about who they are. And so are you. And so are all of us. Because phones are presentation devices, not observation devices. Everything that takes place through them goes through several layers of filtration in both creation and absorption. Corrupting reality. Making false ones.
So should you get to know someone for a long time before meeting off the apps?
Nope. In my estimates there is no point. You won’t really get to know them until you meet them.
Should you text all day, every day, with new crushes and early dates?
Nah. It’s expanding your ideas of the other person, artificially. Making them seem like a bigger part of your life and someone you know well, when they are not. Making it seem like you have someone and something to lose, when you do not.
Always do whatever you want. But sage advice from someone who used to be a big “let’s talk and make sure we like each other” person… don’t. You won’t know until you spend time with them, for real, anyways. Skip to that part.
There are a lot of reasons for this suggestion.
Only one of which, and a much longer, more central point to the episode being…. The one we’ll get to next time. as we careen through some personal examples and tips.