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Did you know?

That if you tell me the different types of girls/guys you like and I go out there and bring one of them for you, chances are you would look at the one I brought and decide that you don't like them? You would see that truly they have the things you said you wanted in a man/woman but you just don't know why you don't like them.

Now, say you liked this one I brought, if I go out and bring another that fits your description you might reject him/her, but if you don't reject them one certain thing is that there's no way I'll bring 100 people who fit your description that you wouldn't find at least 10 or thereabouts that you don't like. You will see that they fit your description but you'll just wonder why you don't feel that likeness/attraction.

That's just life. Being a person who observes, does a lot of thinking and is enthusiastic about psychology I take a lot of experiences to note. One day I realized that there are certain features I tell people I want in a girl but that there are so many girls who have those features that I'm not attracted to; and there are so many other girls I'm attracted to who don't have those features.

It turns out we can't really tell what we like, we only have an idea and half the story, was don't have the full story.

I was going to do this write-up by saying what I've said so far and try to explain with examples I think people can relate with but along the line, I recalled that I've read about an experiment on this before. It was done by two professors from Columbia University, Sheena Iyengar and Raymond Fisman, and I had read about it in Malcolm Gladwell's book called Blink. These professors bring couples together for short dates, called speed-dating. Here's an excerpt:

Their participants don’t just date and then check the yes or no box. On four occasions — before the speed-dating starts, after the evening ends, a month later, and then six months after the speed-dating evening — they have to fill out a short questionnaire that asks them to rate what they are looking for in a potential partner on a scale of 1 to 10. The categories are attractiveness, shared interests, funny/ sense of humor,
sincerity, intelligence, and ambition. In addition, at the end of every “date,” they rate the person they’ve just met, based on the same categories. By the end of one of their evenings, then, Fisman and Iyengar have an incredibly detailed picture of exactly what everyone says they were feeling during the dating process. And it’s when you look at that picture that the strangeness starts.

For example, at the Columbia session, I paid particular attention to a young woman with pale skin and blond, curly hair and a tall, energetic man with green eyes and long brown hair. I don’t know their names, but let’s call them Mary and John. I watched them for the duration of their date, and it was immediately clear that Mary really liked John and John really liked Mary. John sat down at Mary’s table. Their eyes locked. She looked d own shyly. She seemed a little nervous. She leaned forward in her chair. It seemed, from the outside, like a perfectly straightforward case of instant attraction. But let’s dig below the surface and ask a few simple questions. First of all, did Mary’s assessment of John’s personality match the personality that she said she wanted in a man before the evening started? In other words, how good is Mary at predicting what she likes in a man? Fisman and Iyengar can answer that question really easily, and what they find when they compare what speed-daters say they want with what they are actually attracted to in the moment is that those two things don’t match. For example, if Mary said at the start of the evening that she wanted someone intelligent and sincere, that in no way means she’ll be attracted only to intelligent and sincere men. It’s just as likely that John, whom she likes more than anyone else, could turn out to be attractive and funny but not particularly sincere or smart at all. Second, if all the men Mary ends up liking during the speed-dating are more attractive and funny than they are smart and sincere, on the next day, when she’s asked to describe her perfect man, Mary will say that she likes attractive and funny men. But that’s just the next day. If you ask her again a month later, she’ll be back to saying that she wants intelligent and sincere.

You can be forgiven if you found the previous paragraph confusing. It is confusing: Mary says that she wants a certain kind of person. But then she is given a roomful of choices and she meets someone whom she really likes, and in that instant she completely changes her mind about what kind of person she wants. But then a month passes, and she goes back to what she originally said she wanted. So what does Mary really want in a man? “I don’t know,” Iyengar said when I asked her that question. “Is the real me the one that I described beforehand?” She paused, and Fisman spoke up: “No, the real me is the me revealed by my actions. That’s what an economist would say.” Iyengar looked puzzled. “I don’t know that’s what a psychologist would say.”

They couldn’t agree. But then, that’s because there isn’t a right answer. Mary has an idea about what she wants in a man, and that idea isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete. The description that she starts with is her conscious ideal: what she believes she wants when she sits down and thinks about it. But what she cannot be as certain about are the criteria she uses to form her preferences in that first instant of meeting someone face-toface...

Really interesting isn't it!!!

Conclusion

You have to be more chilled/humble/open-minded when you're talking about what you like because you're not as good at saying what you like as much as you think. Note that experience is usually the best revealer, give some things a try and always be ready to admit what your experiences reveal rather than fighting the real you.

The End

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