Duty, love, and attitude

[Crazy Eddie]

The show What Not To Wear has a very misleading name.

The whole point is learning what to wear. If all you know is that you shouldn't wear certain things, how does that help you get dressed or buy clothes? Take the "what not to wear" mentality too far and you might end up running around naked!

OK, maybe not, but you see what I'm getting at here. The subjects get their horrible clothes tossed out, of course (not that I don't absolutely love some of the outfits that get tossed, but that's another story), but then Stacey & Clinton show them what they should be looking for in clothes (especially clothes that someone else pays for...the new stuff they get ain't cheap!) And instead of obsessing that "this makes me look fat" or "that just doesn't work with me", the subjects find out that things they never even tried on before makes them look completely different and makes them look and feel good. It doesn't "stop them from feeling fat/ugly/etc", it makes them feel good/pretty/etc. Big difference. Without that aspect of it, the subject will just get new horrible clothes whose only virtue is that they look different from the first set of horrible clothes. And sometimes they won't even have that going for them.

And in your relationships, the same thing applies. If you're mainly thinking about "what not to say", you'll end up with a lot of awkward silences. If you gain an understanding of what to say and how to say it, with enough practice you'll have people eating out of your hand. And you don't even need all that much practice... at least not any more than a person of average intelligence gets just by growing up.

I think the answer to my question yesterday 'are normal people born knowing all this social stuff?' is "Yes, to some degree, and I am too". Y'all really liked some of the things I came up with to say to my wife, I liked them too, and so did she. The weird thing is that I didn't really have to think about them. I knew how to do it all along, but I was letting fear distract me. Fear of offending her or boring her tells you what not to say... only a positive desire to amuse her, connect with her, and trigger her attraction led me to apply knowledge and instincts I already had to come up with good things to say. I already knew how to do it... I just had to let go of the fear that was keeping me out of the proper mindset I needed to do it well.

So while I may be weird, I'm not lacking any abilities or instincts that normal people have... I just spent most of my life too anxious and nervous to use them properly.