The Middle-Aged Genius’s Guide to Almost Everything 1 – Picking A Partner
February 1, 2018
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is your main tip on picking a partner with all of your experience?
Rick Rosner: First of all, become your best sustainable self. The better you are then the better selection for you; the more people you will attract. You will have more people that you will like to choose from, probably.
I know people who have become famous and attracted better people when they became famous than before they were famous. Though not everyone or very few people can become famous, there is always the risk that you will attract a bunch of shallow a-holes while becoming famous.
While not everyone can be more famous, they can get a better haircut, dress more appropriately, gain better manners, at least simulate kindness and consideration, the more areas you hit in terms of optimizing your appearance and behavior then the greater your likelihood of attracting somebody better.
What you are doing has to be sustainable, anything that you can only do for a short amount of time and then you have reverted back to your slovenly horrible self is not going to be helpful in the long-run.
Unless, your horrible slovenly self is the most charming horrible slovenly self like Dudley Moore in the first Arthur movie, which is a 40-year reference. He is the most charming alcoholic. He is really cute when he is shitfaced, but most people aren’t.
Optimize yourself in a sustainable and reasonable way. Then, thing two, scrutinize yourself and see where you fit in on the ladder of estimated attractiveness to potential mates. Then thing 3 is to make your expectations reasonable.
That does not mean eliminate anybody you might like from consideration and only go for horrible people because your chances might be greater because it is not as simple as that. For one, horrible people can be just as hard to attract as not as horrible people.
What we’re talking about here in adjusting your expectations and that includes the John Nash Beautiful Mind strategy, which finds the people within your sphere of contact who are most in demand and eliminate them from consideration.
Because since they are in such high demand, you are less likely to be able to attract them, so you’re wasting more effort. Unless, your value as an attractor is so high that you can stand out among all of the other people who are vying for all of these attractive partners.
You can use the John Nash strategy of trying to attract the best of the people who are not getting a lot of business. But the caveat to that, which I just stated, somebody’s attractiveness isn’t always, or pleasantness and ease of being with aren’t always, inversely proportional to their overall attractiveness.
In a really simple model, somebody who is less attractive in some of the major ways in which we gauge attractiveness, which can include physical appearance, can make up for a lack of physical attractiveness by being nicer.
It is the old, “she has a nice personality,” thing. But she can be not pretty on the outside and also not pretty on the inside; we can stop there and come back to this.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
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Rick Rosner 