How to Make Someone Fall in Love With You in 90 Minutes or Less, Nicholas Boothman (2009)

How to Make Someone Fall in Love With You in 90 Minutes or Less,
Nicholas Boothman, 2009 (Read 2012)

 

Not that there’s anything really wrong with it, but the title is quite a bit misleading – and considering everything I read in The Game, that’s a far more potent book.

This book gave me the concept of the matched opposite; that is, a person who is both your opposite – social where you are introverted, creative, wild, and spontaneous where you are dedicated and routine-driven, etc – but who is also a perfect match for you, with the same values and beliefs, especially in the long term. It’s a good, if imperfectly strict concept. And I don’t recall – and certainly didn’t highlight – any scientific evidence for this. But it seems as valid as extrapolating that there are more-ideal and less-ideal MHC matches with a biological foundation, doesn’t it?

There are some great tips for meeting people – excluding all the digital apps we have these days to help: accepting all invitations for one, for example. Still, the bulk of the book is – admiteddly, as the author begins by saying – about the first hour or so of meeting, which, again, there’s equally good content in The Game.

Several solid pages of highlights, worth reviewing once in a while (although after the other books on relationships).

 

 

My first two highlights:

Falling in love and staying in love are completely separate events.

We don’t fall in love with other people; we fall in love with the feelings we get when we are with them.

 

A few highlights I bolded and then re-highlighted:

From here the shift into commitment with your matched opposite is as natural as self-preservation itself.

 

Loooooove this quote about choosing a partner. Sad that it’s perhaps the most important life decision most of us will ever make — more than our (increasingly temporary) career, where to live, etc. — and yet we provide no training on it to our youth.

Imagine you had to spend the rest of your life in a rowboat. It’s a wide boat, so it takes two at the oars to keep the boat going forward. You and the other rower would need to agree on a direction, row at the same rhythm and speed, and be content to stay on your side of the boat-otherwise you’d go around in circles until you went nuts. Given all this, no doubt you’d be very selective about whom you chose for a partner.

 

…two simple rules for meeting people: Entertain once a week without fail, and accept all invitations.

 

 

three types of starters that either of them could have used to ease quickly and gently into rapport: a statement (“This is such a bright sunny office-I love the morning sun”); a question (“What brings you here so early in the morning?”); or a sincere, pleasant compliment.

 

In the first few moments:

If the other person isn’t willing to put in the effort to match your conversation level, you are not matched. If you can’t find at least three upbeat things in common, it’s selection/ rejection time and you should seriously consider moving along to someone else.