NPR reporter David Kestenbaum tells host Ira Glass about the time, when he was doing graduate work in physics, he and his other single friends decided to figure out the mathematical probability that they’d find girlfriends. They wanted to know what the chances were that there was more than one person in the world for them.

They used a modified version of what’s called the Drake equation, a way of very roughly estimating the number of planets out there which support a civilization with which we might someday communicate. This can be adapted to estimate the probability of making any kind of connection with a shifting population.

I’ve mentioned the Drake in conjunction with dating before, but a friend’s journal on OkCupid brought it to mind again recently when he posted his own tongue-in-cheek equation:

N = P x L x S x B x E x T x H

where:

N = the number of women who I would be interested in dating locally;

and

P = average number women born per year locally

L = total number of years in the age range i’m considering

S = fraction of the above who are unmarried(available) or stuck in unhappy relationships

B = fraction of the above who have similar life goals as i do

E = fraction of the above who have similar codes of behaviour, ethics, interests, etc as i do

T = fraction of the above who i am physically attracted to

H = fraction of the above i have sexual chemistry with

And it reminded me that those of us in open relationships are looking for partners (if we’re looking for partners) in an entirely different population. The S term above is inapplicable, and has to change to something like “fraction of the above who are interested in the kind of relationship I’m interested in”, which I think is likely a much smaller fraction. Of course, unless we’re looking for multiple life partners, term B can be dropped entirely. Perhaps it would need to be replaced with something like “fraction of the above who are not yet seeing all of the people they can or care to”.

In other words, we’re working with a much smaller group, but much more of that group is ultimately available.

Which is probably why it always seems like everyone in Boston is seeing each other, to at most one or two degrees of removal.

In the experiments weve done weve shown that if you can date three people, and they all promise they can stay viable and you can keep on dating them, you very quickly pick one and just stay with that person. But if you date three people and two of them threaten you that unless you go on and continue dating them or they will go away and find somebody else, you keep on revisiting those options. We have a very hard time closing doors.

via The Stupid Things You Do When Dating and How to Fix Them.

So, being in open relationships is preventing us from making stupid choices about which partner we pick for the long term. Highfive!

This whole article is rather interesting. In particular, Dan Ariely’s video commentary is, as always, well work watching.

But that’s hard, especially when you’re first learning how to meet and attract new people.  There’s a great deal of vulnerability to admitting attraction.  (For young straight men, in fact, it’s often the only time that they actually experience vulnerability toward young women, which creates some astoundingly skewed ideas of what actual power differentials exist)  You have to learn to do this thing despite reactions ranging from mere embarrassment to gut-wrenching terror, depending on levels of social comfort and specific hangups.

The usual way that the gurus out there teach you to do this is by tearing down your prospective partner in your head.  If you don’t respect someone as anything other than an object of lust, or a potential paycheck, or whatever it is that you’ve been taught to make the only goal that matters to you, then it’s easy to feel nothing if they don’t care for your approach.  Because fuck them, what do they know, they’re just a {person of a sex to which I’m attracted}, and everyone knows what they’re really like.

There’s another path to this zen of approach, though–empathy. It requires going far enough the other direction that you’re able to just accept and respect that someone else might not be interested.  I know that I am fairly particular, and not likely to be interested in anything with most of the people who might approach me, and I’m sure that’s true for a lot of folks on the receiving end of something I initiate.  Sometimes I’m not interested because I don’t have time, or the other party has some dealbreaker that they couldn’t have been aware of ahead of time, e.g., they look like my mother, or Ayn Rand.  And sometimes I’m just not interested, which isn’t necessarily anything wrong on their end.

I think that’s harder, and it takes longer, though.  If you think Xes ain’t shit but hoes and tricks, then it’s easy not to care what Xes think. If, instead, you respect the opinions of any given X that you might meet, it’s difficult not to take rejection as some sort of negative judgment.  But it’s not necessarily that, and if it is that’s not necessarily something to worry about.  You’re not going to be everyone’s cup of tea.  In fact, you’re probably not going to be many people’s, if you’re reading this; we’re all a rarefied taste.  That’s fine.

The trick is to be able to approach someone with the knowledge that, whatever their answer, you’ll be able to go on about your day.  You’re in no worse position than you were before.  They’re allowed to be disinterested, and you don’t even need to know why.

Anyway, “learn to accept folks’ reasons they don’t want you” isn’t very helpful, but I do have some specific advice here for anyone who’s looking to deal with fear of rejection.  These will all pertain to online dating; may be useful elsewhere, but I can’t make any promises:

• Contact lots of people.  Aim to send a lot of messages that you put a little effort into, rather than a small number of messages that you pour your heart and soul into.  You’re just dashing off an introduction, and you don’t need to sweat it too hard.  Saying something is more important than what, specifically, you say.
• Don’t over-invest.  If you read someone’s awesome profile (or look over some gorgeous pictures), it’s easy to feel like you’ve already made a connection.  To some extent, you have already had half a conversation with them.  The problem being that they don’t know you from a hole in the ground.  They’re not your soulmate, and they don’t owe you anything.  They’re just some interesting and attractive stranger.
• Start by contacting people with whom the stakes are low. Don’t go after friends or friends-of-friends, and don’t contact super-local people who you’re likely to run into.  That can come later, but it’s easier to get over the first several tries while you’re just getting your feet wet if someone’s rejection has no real effect on you, and you’re not going to meet them at a party.
• After you send your message, stop thinking about it. This is a tough trick, but if you just shoot it out there and move on with your life you’ll be better off.  If you get no response, you’re exactly where you were before, and if they get back to you that’s great.  Start thinking of responses as a bonus, and not as the expected result of sending just the right message.

None of this addresses whom to approach, or what to say, because that’s just not nearly as important as developing a thick skin with regard to rejection.  How people respond to you is only partially under your control; what you’re looking to do is give more people a chance to respond.

I don’t mean to set myself up as a dating swami.  I do all right, but I have a lot left to learn about this stuff.  For example, how to approach people in person, or for that matter how to respond like a human being when someone approaches me as opposed to locking up and acting as if I don’t notice.  However, as I learn how to manage this particular sort of interaction, I’m going to continue posting what I’ve learned, to chronicle both the learned info and the learning process.

If you have any other tips along these lines, please mention them in the comments, and maybe I’ll follow up with another post.

So, this strange sensation, I ultimately realized, was the absence of the need to attract anyone.  I’m not sure that, since discovering that I “liked girls” (and later that I “liked boys”), I have ever lacked that need.  Even in monogamous relationships, I was occasionally looking for that validation of someone furtively glancing at me from across the room, or of having to (getting to) turn someone down because I was unavailable–that sense that someone new was into me.

For at least that night, I didn’t really even want that, and it was freeing.  I didn’t need to focus on how I was standing, or what I was doing with myself, or how visible I was; there’s a long list of things that I have been paying some amount of attention to for about eighteen years, and that I suddenly didn’t have to do.  I didn’t even realize that I was doing this until the pressure was lifted.

I don’t know if this is everyone’s (or even anyone else’s) experience of attraction.  I think on some level I assumed that everyone had this barely-conscious buzzing in their metaphorical ears about whether they were looking and acting their best at all times, but I had also assumed that it would always be there for me.  I didn’t know there was an “enough”.  I’m not sure there would be, except that there are simply practical limits  on how many people can have claims on my time, and unless I want to completely close myself off to anyone I’m not yet “seeing”, I’ve reached that point for now.

Each of these new maybe-something interactions is, perhaps ironically, just about me and the person across from me.  It’s not just in spite of but because of the fact that I’m not coming into it lonely and weary, due to the lovers and others that are already out there.  I’m not looking for anything in particular, except what the party of the other part inspires desire for.  People don’t have to fit some slot in my head before I can want them.

I know some of my readers haven’t been in serial-monogamy headspace for a long time, so these things aren’t revelations.  Some probably never have been.  But this sort of meta-analysis–”can I see this person for years without getting bored? can I commit to not looking for anyone else while I’m doing so?”–is a huge drag on the ability just to enjoy someone.

So, at 28, I was single for the first time in my adult life, living on my own, and had never asked anyone out.  And didn’t for some time thereafter; I just continued on that path, spending time with the people who approached me.

Erika was 19. Far too young for my 28 years, obviously.  I found her on OkCupid. Gorgeous, of course, which caught my eye, but also fascinating. We had all the cliches in common: musical taste, sense of humor, movies, being the only two interesting people within two hundred miles of each other, etc.  I let it go, though, because she was obviously too young, being nine years younger than me (this will be hilarious to some of the people reading).

For three months, at least.  And then I got in contact with her, and it turned out she’d been trying to work up the nerve to contact me, too. Still, though, it was.. cordial.  On purpose.  I wasn’t hitting on her, I told myself, just getting to know her.  Which I did, and well, for another three months.  She was fantastic, and we clicked hard, and IMed almost every day.  We hadn’t met in person.

Finally, finally, after three months of this, and of conversation edging toward steamy, or going from talking about the sorts of things that we like to her sending me pictures of alterna-porn models, I took the hint and “asked her out”.  We worked out times and dates and such, like you do, and were set to get together in a week or so.

That Thursday, a couple of days later, we were chatting online in the middle of the night, as was our wont, and the conversation just sort of drifted off, as it does.  She said something, and I responded, and then she didn’t respond, and I didn’t think anything of it.  I went to sleep.

She wasn’t online on Friday.

On Saturday, I was contacted by a friend, because I was visible on her MySpace page as someone who’d commented on a couple of things.  He was tracking down her friends, because her parents had called him, as he was a number they’d found in her cell phone.

She’d hurt her back, which I knew about, and she’d gotten something to deal with the pain, which I also knew about.  Morphine, which I could have guessed.  See, she was an ex-junkie.  Or maybe ex-ish.

Anyway, the pain was too much, but she was no good as keeping to dosages, either.  That Thursday while we were chatting, she’d drifted off as I thought, and then she died in her sleep.

Worst place to meet a gal’s parents is her funeral.

That said, the wake was fantastic.  One of the best nights of my life.  An evening sitting around with people that it turned out I liked a great deal, listening to them swap stories about someone they’d known much longer, being just welcomed for the small connection I could make to someone we all wished was there.

This was a traumatic and important event in a lot of ways.  The most relevant to this blog being that it made “asking people out” a very difficult thing for a long time.  Just developing a crush on someone would send me into a panic.  Sending the “hey let’s meet up” message felt like dying; I couldn’t approach someone in person.  I still haven’t, actually, come to think, but I’ve recently become able to make an approach online with what I assume is no more than standard anxiety, which feels like a superpower to me.  I mean, it’s been more than four years, so I think it’s time that I get past this particular hangup, or at least stop blaming it on this incident.

Obviously, of course, other people were much more traumatized by this than I, and I wouldn’t suggest otherwise.  Not least, her poor cat, which was locked in with her for a whole day.

It’s made me realize that I’ll probably have to be “out” as nonmonogamous at some point, even in the workplace.  It’s a small city, and I run into clients and coworkers all the time.  The latter aren’t really a problen; there’s one guy who will make stupid jokes if he finds out I’m seeing other people, but everyone else is fine.  I’m already out to at least one person there.

Clients are more complicated.  I’m a consultant, so my “office” is just a central base I spend small amounts of time at. The vast majority of my week is spent at various other offices around southern New England, which have a wide range of cultures and attitudes.  The place with the gal who saw me with my “girlfriend or wife” is someplace that it would probably be fine.  Other places might go so far as to ask me not to come back, I think.  Most are in the middle, where it would be uncomfortable knowledge but probably wouldn’t seriously impact my client relationships.

It won’t serve not to explain, though, I’d imagine.  Otherwise, I will just get pegged as a cheater rather than someone who openly sees other people.  I’ve mostly avoided casual discussions of my love life, but people make small talk, and it at least comes up that I’m living with a significant other.

None of this is a huge problem.  I’m an upper-middle-class white fellow, and I tick off basically every category of privilege out there, so people might look askance but I wouldn’t expect serious consequences.  It’s an angle I hadn’t considered, though; given that I’m not going to, say, hide away the non-Carrie folks that I’m seeing, I’m probably going to have to explain myself.

Also, I may have to tell my doctor, because I’m pretty sure he thinks I’m cheating, too.

me, “Haha, rejoinder. I am a big fan of aspect. Can you tell me more about your favorite band or dish?”

her, “Oh, I LOVE band or dish. Are you a fan? I didn’t know anyone else had ever eaten/listened to it/them. So, invitation to imply what your salary is?”

me, “Well, implication that I work in a lucrative field. Brief discussion of band or dish. Offhand mention of a girlfriend who is clearly mentioned and linked to in my profile.”

Fin. Exeunt omnes.

In any event, Carrie has a handful of these in her arsenal, the most powerful that I’ve experienced being her cheese biscuits, although I’m going to nominate her “leathery tofu” as another candidate, and I think that her seasoned soya nuggets should also get at least an honorable mention.  My go-to for some time has been cheese-stuffed poblano peppers, but that only works for a certain time of year.  I think that I’m going to add, for summer rotation, my new watermelon-and-edamame salad.

What kinds of foods do you make for a would-be paramour? Or, conversely, what sorts of things would impress you if a date laid them on the table? (pun unintended but noted as I was writing it)

It is possible that I have ulterior motives here.