My mother would get upset with me for divulging everything I know about how to connect with the right people, “There are no short cuts in life,” she’d say. “Only shit cuts!”
She’s been saying that for years, and I still haven’t figured out what it means. But I’m not concerned. She calls the Internet “Stacey Jane” and she refuses to drive on freeways because she doesn’t like that the cars mostly drive in a straight lines. “It’s so unnatural,” she says.
So without my mother’s blessing, here’s the deal: Currently, there are four ways to potentially increase our odds at connecting with people:
1. Use social networks
2. Use Internet search sites
3. Use compatibility matching sites
4. Use real world resources and intuition
All of these solutions significantly enhance our odds of making meaningful connections… at least when we compare those odds against, say, trying to find hot dates in an underwater zoo.
1. Social Networking Sites (e.g. MySpace or LinkedIn) do a wonderful job enabling people to stay in touch with their already established networks (e.g. friends, business associates, favorite bands, etc.).
But they don’t do a good job facilitating new “meaningful” connections. Personal pages can only capture a small amount of (oftentimes misleading) information about us. Thus, unless we’ve already met someone in the real world, it can be very difficult to glean whether or not there’s a potential connection.
2. Internet Search Sites (e.g. Google or Ask) contain a great deal of potentially relevant information about people. But while we have control over what appears in our social network pages, we have no control over what’s aggregated and made available by Internet search sites.
Not having control over how we’re found, or what about us is found, hinders “meaningful” connections. Internet search sites provide whatever (if any) information is available – even if it’s old, irrelevant, or misleading.
3. Compatibility Matching Sites (e.g. eHarmony or Match.com) almost always focus on a small niche – such as dating or job search – and ask users to fill out a profile consisting of attributes that they believe are relevant in that niche. We fill out these attributes, and can then search for (or be matched with) others whose results are “compatible” with ours.
But each of us is unique, and we each have unique requirements for the people we want to meet. Because the attributes in compatibility profiles are one-size-fits all, they can’t really reflect what’s truly “individual” about you and me.
4. Real world resources and intuition (e.g. going to a speed dating session for dates, tapping your college’s alumni network for jobs) are currently — statistically – our best option for making meaningful people connections. Even today, we are most successful finding the “right” people when using old fashioned methods than when using available technologies.
Current technologies can’t pick up the nuances needed to decipher “meaning” in relationships nearly as effectively as people can do in a face-to-face meeting. This is because in real world interactions, human brains can recognize subtle and unique patterns that can influence “meaning” in relationships. Current technologies cannot yet store or recognize these subtleties, and thus fail at portraying a “whole person”.
Sometimes, during her endless chatter, my mother drops pearls of wisdom. But like a Google search, I find myself sifting through mountains of “noise” and irrelevant information to get to those pearls.
Yesterday, my mother asked my timid girlfriend, “What winks and fucks like a tiger?” Before having a chance to answer, my mother winked at her. “That’s noise,” I thought. “There are no pearls of wisdom in that outburst.”
But now, upon reflection, I realize that I was wrong… there was wisdom in my mother’s outburst. But it wasn’t present in her words.
Rather, it was in the way she smiled at my timid girlfriend after winking… in the way she gave her enough time to “get” the joke… in the way she managed to make her feel a little more comfortable in an otherwise stressful situation.
Most of the stuff my mother says is absurd. And if you aren’t around her, if you don’t see what she does with her words, you’ll likely think she belongs in, well, a koo-koo home. But when her words are given context — when people see what she does with her words — she is often perceived as a genius.
She recently separated from my stepfather after eighteen years of marriage. She asked me yesterday what I thought about online dating. I asked if she was serious… and she showed me the translucent white dress she recently bought.
So I told her the truth. “There isn’t a dating service out there that will let you show off the things that are most beautiful about you,” I said.
She smiled. “I’m not surprised,” she said. “It’s like I always told you… there are no short cuts in life, only shit cuts!”
