Emotions

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed the fundamentals of certainty – The Triumvirate of Certainty.

The Triumvirate goes like this:

• Certainty of Knowledge

• Certainty of Desire

• Certainty of Morality

If any of these pillars are missing from your mind, your certainty will be imperfect. You will be uncertain. This article is dedicated to managing these uncertainties.

Let’s get to it.

If you get your hackles up, or start to feel defensive, it’s easy to turn adversarial on dates and in conversations. Yet do this, and you will quick run into walls with women...

Here’s an insidious problem it’s easy to overlook.

Sometimes if you hit the bars, or the street, or a party, and your first few approaches don’t go well, and you pick up a couple rejections, you can start to sour on the whole ‘chat up new girls’ thing.

Or sometimes if you have a history of rejection... or you’ve been reading too much anger-inducing content on the Internet... or you’ve just had a terrible day in general... this can happen.

Basically: you start to expect the worst, and either bristle for it, go in adversarially, or both.

And when a woman talks to you, she can feel it: you’re defensive, guarding against rudeness, insult, or dismissal. And/or you’re aggressive, treating her like an opponent whose defenses and objections you must ‘beat’, instead of as a friend you’d like to help lead around those objections (and into bed).

Yet the more adversarial you let your approach become, the worse it will usually do.

You need to not do this to make things work better with girls.

What women say they want and what they actually choose often doesn’t line up. Why is so much of what women really want unconscious?

One of the most challenging aspects of psychological science is how often people say they want one thing, only to choose something else.

I saw this routinely back in my tire salesman days. A customer would come in and say he wanted the cheapest set of tires we had. I’d ask him about what he wanted his driving experience to be like; I’d discover he wanted great road traction and a comfortable ride; and he’d proceed to purchase a premium set of tires with excellent traction and ride comfort instead.

This “what you say you want vs. what you actually want” issue manifests in all sorts of ways in psychological science, too. Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel’s 2008 speed dating study “Do people know what they initially desire in a romantic partner?” found no matter how strong someone insisted a preference was (e.g., “I will only date a girl if she is beautiful” “I won’t date a guy unless he makes a lot of money”), that person was no more likely to pick someone who matched the preference in a live event than average.

In his chapter in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, on how women evaluate mate prospects, Bruce J. Ellis unfurls a host of items on how women select their mates. One of the most important things Ellis talks about, though, is some of the paradoxes in mate selection. For instance, much research finds women are drawn to men who are socially dominant: men who dominate their social environments. These men tend to be cooler, more aloof, and more detached. Yet a lot of other research finds women are drawn to men who are warm, personal, and caring. How do those two connect?

We’ll talk about Ellis’s solutions to the warmth-dominance paradox below. But first we need to pose a question: do people actually know what they want?

Jealousy is a green-eyed monster. But to overcome it, you must adjust both your focus, and steer your partner’s worst behavior.

Sometimes you’ve got a girlfriend who’s a bit of a flirt and keeps guys around her on a hook. Sometimes you’ve got a girlfriend who’s a little oblivious (or at least, presents herself that way)... and keeps men around whose intentions with her are more than platonic, yet she acts like she doesn’t see it. Sometimes she doesn’t do any of that, but you’re nervous anyway. Maybe a girl’s burned you in the past, or you’re just a little short on trust in general. Regardless the reason, you know jealousy’s an issue for you... and it’s time to rein it in a bit.

This article is not about how to prevent cheating. If you need that, read my article on it: “How to Prevent Cheating by Your Girlfriend.” Nor is this article about how to screen for girls less likely to cause problems or cheat; for that, check out the list of resources in this article: “Her Raw Material or Your Relationship Skills: Which Matters More?”

Instead, this article is a reframe of normal male jealousy. For this article, we’ll assume you’re in a fairly healthy, fairly safe relationship where cheating is not that big of a real issue. If infidelity is a big issue, of course, you shouldn’t read an article on how to get rid of jealousy. You should, rather, probably read about how to get rid of a troublesome partner and replace her with someone less heartache-inducing.

We’re going to walk a bit of a fine line here. Because the goal is not to totally and completely erase jealousy altogether. Think of jealousy as a warning sign. It’s your canary in the coalmine. If the canary flips out and starts to chirp and squawk every time somebody comes down the mine elevator, it’s obviously not doing its job so well. But you don’t want to completely take the canary out of the mine either; otherwise you’ll receive no warning when the roof is about to collapse.

So, in this article, we will seek to get jealousy focused on only the right signals – and train it to ignore that which is not as much of a threat (or at least, that which is less of a threat).

You might tell yourself “I’ll show her!” when a girl is resistant to or uninterested in you. Is there a better way to respond to a resistant or disinterested woman?

There’s a mentality I see a lot from guys. I’ve been guilty of it too, so I won’t claim innocence.

It goes like this: some girl doesn’t give you what you want, or she puts up walls to you, or does something else you do not like. In defiance, you tell yourself, “I’ll show her!” and you end the courtship. She’ll miss you when you’re gone – but now it’s too late for her; her chance with you is blown.

This mentality does indeed have its uses. We’ll talk about them below.

However, much of the time guys use it, it is just puffery. The girl moves on, doesn’t spend more than a few thoughts on you, and meets someone else. You, meanwhile, get to be alone with all your “I sure showed her!” thoughts.

If you do it, should you never do it? And if you don’t do it, what ought you do instead?

Guys often want a woman who will nurture them. How does a man come to desire this – and is it really the healthiest relationship setup?

There is this dream many men have. In it, a man opens up and tell all his pains, fears, and weaknesses to a woman. In turn, the woman takes it all in, consoles the man, nurtures him, and loves him even more for his sensitivity and innocence.

Often men with this dream try to pull this off with this girl or that. Yet, they are disappointed. The girls they try it with do not respond with the warmth and acceptance they wish for. Instead, the girls they open up to are critical, rather than nurturing. These women often lose respect for them, rather than gain it.

Sometimes this reaction will cause a man to adapt: women are for companionship, homemaking, and sex; they are not for emotional support. Other times, it can cause a man to become bitter: there are no good women out there. No woman will accept me and love me for who I truly am.

Today’s article is about this idea of a nurturing woman you can tell anything you want to to, who will love you regardless how much weakness and vulnerability you share with her, and who will never leave you, no matter what. Are there women out there like this? And is there any role you must play in this – other than to simply offload your emotions to her, and have this girl carry your burdens for you, and bandage your wounds?

Psychopaths have tremendous social acumen, but can be very harmful to those closest to them. Here are the 8 signs your friend is one.

They are everywhere. They work with you. They’re in your social circle. They might even be a family member.

Hell, you may even be one.

Psychopaths are everywhere.

Okay, they’re not everywhere. There’s no way to know for sure, but current estimates are that 1% of the population are psychopaths.

And psychopaths are people, except they lack sympathy. Sympathy, not empathy. That’s the big distinction I think needs clarification. If they lacked empathy, they would have a very hard time fitting in with people and manipulating them, since they’d have no idea how those people felt. In fact, it’s more accurate to say that people on the autism spectrum lack empathy. A common factor in autistic people is they regularly have no clue how others feel in a conversation, and they cannot read the most basic of social cues (which are communicated via facial expressions, body language, voice tonality, etc.).

By lacking sympathy, however, psychopaths lack the ability to actually be concerned about you. They lack the emotional response necessary to think “I feel scared for him if he makes this bad decision, so I’ll save him from it” or “He’ll be hurt if I do this to him, so I won’t do it to him.” To conceptually understand something is not even in the same universe as emotionally understanding something. The latter is infinitely more clear.

They may be able to conceptually understand that you might not like it if they bone your girlfriend, but they won’t feel the potential of regret when they consider the possibility of you finding out and being heartbroken.

You can see how this might be potentially dangerous to date a psychopath or have one as a friend. They do not have Nature’s control mechanism of sympathy that serves to prevent mass tragedies in the human species.

Their only concern is what they can get from you, how much it will cost them, and... that’s it, really.

They aren’t fundamentally evil or malicious, but they do have the capacity to be more cruel and malicious than the average person. Given the right conditions, they will strike without a second thought.

It’s imperative, then, that you learn how to spot a psychopath so you can make more informed decisions on what role you want them to play in your life.