Relationship Analysis

During the years I was trying to overcome depression, I was part of a group of guys whose sole objective was to sleep with as many beautiful women as possible. This group is known as pickup artists. One of the guys I met was a coach and he has mentored many people. Despite the fact that he recently got married, he was a perfect example of game-playing love. Oddly enough, the group always referred to what they did as “The Game”. The point was never to stay in a relationship. The point was to see how many “hot” girls a guy could sleep with.

Playing “The Game” was much like playing chess. They learned the ins and outs of human behavior and you manipulate it to the best of your ability to attract the person of the opposite sex. Quite a few guys have made an art form out of this and it has turned into an industry from something that started as a close-knit community. With branches or “lairs” worldwide, lectures and workshops can be found in just about every part of the globe. There are books and CD collections. Members range from the socially awkward to natural Casanovas.

The man in question made it his job to get into relationships and get out of them, as he felt appropriate. A relationship that lasted longer than a month was considered long. Most relationships only lasted a few weeks if that. The purpose was never to stay within the person they ended up sleeping with. If he did, it was an unintended consequence of playing “The Game”.

In this particular way of getting involved in relationships, they use several tools in order to influence a young woman to be with them. Part of this is becoming familiar within a short amount of time. Familiarity increases the chance of liking someone (Taylor, Peplau, & Sears, 2006). They attempt to become a known person by interjecting themselves in the space of the target. They converse with them, introduce themselves, give their name, they may leave for a while to be with their wingman or other friends and they return. By this time, they’re not an unknown person, but a person with a name. They constantly expose themselves to the person and or their social group.

Likewise, in order to build rapport with the person and or group, they focus on being similar. This is accomplished by mimicking. The more a person acts like them, the more they tend to like them. They pick up on visual cues as well as talking points and they expound on those points and lead the conversation in a way that makes them seem just like the intended target. Much like familiarity, similarity leads to liking as well (Taylor, Peplau, & Sears, 2006).

Lastly, due to the outgoing nature of a pickup artist, they come across as competent. People who are socially skilled tend to be an asset. In a word of Twitter and Facebook, talking outside the context of a computer has become a lost art form. Pickup artists tend to be good conversationalist. If they do not have the ‘gift of gab’ they develop it. Any time someone can garner your attention and come across as exciting, they are showing a level of competence and typically people find that as being attractive and makes the person easily likable (Taylor, Peplau, & Sears, 2006).

In the Indian culture, the chance for sleeping around with a bunch of people isn’t part of the cultural norm. Many marriages there are still arranged and the chance to date or choose your mate is almost non-existent (Madathil & Benshoff, 2008). In Western cultures, mates select their mates directly. They do so on a number of different things including how similar they are, do they mesh well, do they know the person, and or how attracted they are to a person. None of these things tend to be factors in Indian marriages. Indian marriages are based on a contract between families and none of the things the come into play in Western relationships are relevant. Romantic love is considered as being impractical and dangerous (Madathil & Benshoff, 2008). Within the context of my example, pickup artists would not be very practical in India. What they are searching for and trying to do would not fit in very well with Indian culture.

References

• Madathil, J., & Benshoff, J. M. (2008, July 1). Importance of Marital Characteristics and Marital Satisfaction: A Comparison of Asian Indians in Arranged Marriages and Americans in Marriages of Choice. The Family Journal, 16(3), 222-230. ↩1 ↩2
• Taylor, S. E., Peplau, L. A., & Sears, D. O. (2006). Social Psychology (12th Edition ed.). Pearson Prentice Hall. ↩1 ↩2 ↩3