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 The Dating Doctor
The Dating Doctor, Serena Mackesy, brings her hard-won dating wisdom to bear on your problems. You can drop Serena a line about your own dating conundrums and catch up with her words of wisdom here every week. Read her latest advice here.
Lost In Translation
January 16, 2007
AB writes:
Someone gave me a book of body language for Christmas. I've been trying it out, but I can't seem to really get the hang of it. How far can you really rely on set rules when you're trying to interpret what someone else is thinking?
Most body language manuals are absolutely spot-on - up to a point. Of course, the thing with all knowledge is what you do with it. And reading body language, unless you've decades of training behind you, is a bit like trying to read Descartes in the original when you've only got basic French. It can be done, haltingly and with many errors, and you might even get the flavor of what's going on, but you're unlikely to ever really get a deep understanding as a layperson.
The two main problems are this: firstly, before you're going to start interpreting someone's every gesture, you need to have a pretty good idea of how they normally behave. According to the neuro-linguistic programming map of the way your eyes move, for instance, a lot of my responses (looking straight to my right (auditory constructed) and down to my left (internal dialogue)) would suggest that I'm not very honest. Put me in a room with a bunch of fiction writers, though, (and especially if you get us competing, which isn't hard) and you'll find that almost all of us do the same thing. That's because, as writers, we expend an abnormal amount of brain energy on getting our sentences/constructions/anecdotes just right. We also talk a lot of rubbish, of course, but that's another story.
The other thing is that gestures can mean several things. A woman, for instance, is quite likely to be crossing her arms, not because she's feeling defensive, but to enhance her cleavage. Someone who doesn't cross their legs in the same direction as you might well not be doing it because their back hurts. A man who won't meet your eye might well be trying to sneak a look down your top.
In a restaurant the other day, my friend Anne's mum and I were sticky-beaking at a date in progress at another table. They were all over each other. Feeding each other, play-slapping, mouth brushing: the usual. Then suddenly, he sat right back in his chair, which he pushed back from the table, hunched forward and folded his arms across his belly. She looked perplexed, then worried, and stepped up her flirtation: leaned forward, stroked his hand, fed him some creme brulee from her spoon. Was the date going wrong? From her perspective, probably, yes. But what she couldn't see, and we could, was that he'd developed an erection too ebullient to fit beneath the rather low table, and was folding his arms because he was afraid the waiting staff would notice.
Which is what I thought napkins were for, I must say. But, see what I mean?
Read Serena's latest advice here.
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