Day 18 - More on types, on doing things a lot of times

For the negotiations section!

Maybe the whole book should be advertised and framed as a negotiation book?

I would really like feedback on that aspect of it.

I’m getting close on having all the “content” I want and wanting to organized it.

My last attempt and starting to organize the book - I felt still like I want to keep writing content as it is easier in the every day blog format, when I am doing and thinking about other things.

But I really would start like to organize it.

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So this article is about a specific thing.

Let’s say you are dating someone who is really bisexual. They have had girlfriends and also boyfriends.

You start dating them. You are completely straight. There is an asymmetry of experience.

Or let’s say you are dating somebody who flies for work, and has flown a lot for 10 years for work. That’s an experience that they are used to, that you may not be.

Or somebody goes to sex clubs a lot, or is part of the kink community. That is something they do a lot. You’ve never been to a place like this in your life and neither have any of your friends.

Or you hang out with your exes, and have met their boyfriends and their exes, and do not consider that weird or overwhelming.

You will have actually more knowledge than you know about, and the other person will have theories and guesses and grand arcs. But there are parts about the grand arcs that might not be accurate, but they are speaking confidently about. Or they are accurate and are speaking in such an advanced way, that you do not follow how much they do not know because they actually are right, but from a theoretical analysis and not any experience. Or, because you are a good teacher or a good guide, and they are good at following, they might give the impression that they really know what is going on, but actually they do not.

Stuff you might know about

• things like risks

• things like how the thing fits into the public perception / in conversation with other things

• things like how transitions or logistics for that thing work

If a person has a lot of self-awareness and starts saying things like “I really do not know about X” it is really important to listen to them even though they might seem like they know what they are talking about.

These asymmetries of experiences end up being important. You would explain your perspective, and the other person would explain theirs, but the degree of knowledge from doing something a long time is very very high. The amount of illegibility you should assume is between the two of you, even though you are intimate and are finishing each other’s sentences, should be one or two degrees more illegibility.

In that case, you might find this to be a very strange practice, but practicing “explaining your stuff to complete strangers” actually is helpful to your intimate life.

three classic failure modes

• The experienced partner over-normalizes
  “It’s not a big deal, I’ve done this forever.”
  they skip important context because it feels obvious to them, or skip important emotional touchstones that make it “make sense” if someone has had the emotions, but don’t make sense of they didn’t have the emotions and know how they connect to the actions. In a bad case, the experienced person gets the less experienced person in an overwhelming situation, and then also does not help them process it, because “there is nothing to process.”

• The inexperienced partner mythologizes
  They build big, confident stories out of partial information that has way more to do with their own patterns of mind. If they have only partial information, “how they extrapolate” says more about them and their specific brain shape than about the world. It may or may not match the other person’s reality, and may lead to odd questions or odd assumptions that they then cannot find the source of. In the worst case, it leads to potentially being insulting or getting oneself into strange scenarios.

• The good-student partner over-signals understanding
  They nod along, repeat your language back to you, and seem on board, but they don’t actually catch up.