And what have you done with your day? Got to be honest, that previous post took a good chunk of the day to prepare. I won’t bother to run down the “workflow,” but it was significant. One of those moments where you make the effort in the interests polishing something such that it will continue to be a solid piece, though the short term pay-off is marginal at best. Made the sacrifice for quality. Mann’s work deserves it. The labour only really pays off if you click on the images, particularly if you have a big display.

New Piece

I’m partway through a new piece on honesty applied in romance. Interesting subject. I hacked on it on my iPhone from the Edgemont Village Starbucks. I’d like to finish it tonight actually but I’m already yawning my ass off.⁽¹⁾ As some readers may know, I’ve wrestled with the presentation of the material relating to psychology and behaviour in romance. This is because on one hand, just objectively,⁽²⁾ it’s an incredibly rich and fascinating part of life and when you recognize patterns you understand that Mother Nature’s rules are at work. Behaviour in romance is the clearest example of the fact that we are not even close to rational creatures. The problem with writing this stuff is associations. I really do not want to be associated with any kind of flaky dating tips thing. That’s not how I would care to see this content realized. It cheapens what to me is legitimate study into a part of life that causes more joy and pain and has been the inspiration and motive force behind creative endeavours of all kinds.

Powerful stuff. Now obviously, you would assume that once patterns emerge, loose ends begin to tie themselves, and some general directions suggest themselves to you, that this info could easily be bumped to the next logical phase: packaged advice. And you may further assume that this content could be of practical value to folks in need of advice. Not that I would take it there, but that assumption would be both right and wrong. Because it depends on how you measure value. The material is valuable in that it’s the unfolding of some of Nature’s guarded secrets. But value can only exist if someone were to actually place value on the information, meaning they’d be prepared to offer up consideration in return for it. Which interestingly enough, they don’t. They don’t find value in it. In fact you can’t even give away the content for free: I have found that people actively resist, if not outrightly reject, the material. And this, I believe is once again part of Nature’s plan: she doesn’t really want us to understand and thus misuse this stuff. So she wires us in such a way that what works for the opposite sex would feel absolutely perfectly backwards and just plain wrong to us. And so we automatically shut down suggestions to that which feels just plain wrong and against our internal beliefs. Pretty clever. Like I say, it’s a fascinating field.

So I’ve been considering ways to somehow segregate those subjects from the other random stuff I write about, like shuffling it off to another domain. But one-seventh is my home, this material is something I’m very interested in and so, I think I’ll leave it here, and just be judicious with how I talk about it.