Reddit reviews How Real Is Real?

Now required reading but any or all of these will make your journey through like a bit less confusing:

• How Real is Real
  
• How To Fail Most Successfully
  
• The Pursuit of Unhappiness

edit:

see also this article

http://www.eioba.com/a70149/how_men_select_women

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From Wikipedia

>During World War II, anthropologist Margaret Mead was working in Britain for the British Ministry of Information and later for the U.S. Office of War Information,[2][3] delivering speeches and writing articles to help the American soldiers better understand the British civilians,[4] and vice versa.[5] She observed in the flirtations between the American soldiers and British women a pattern of misunderstandings regarding who is supposed to take which initiative. She wrote of the Americans, "The boy learns to make advances and rely upon the girl to repulse them whenever they are inappropriate to the state of feeling between the pair," as contrasted to the British, where "the girl is reared to depend upon a slight barrier of chilliness... which the boys learn to respect, and for the rest to rely upon the men to approach or advance, as warranted by the situation." This resulted, for example, in British women interpreting an American soldier's gregariousness as something more intimate or serious than he had intended.[2]

> Communications theorist Paul Watzlawick used this situation, where "both American soldiers and British girls accused one another of being sexually brash", as an example of differences in "punctuation" in interpersonal communications. He wrote that courtship in both cultures used approximately 30 steps from "first eye contact to the ultimate consummation", but that the sequence of the steps was different. For example, kissing might be an early step in the American pattern but a relatively intimate act in the English pattern.[6]

digging up this original research would probably be worthwhile.

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Paul Watzlawick makes these further points

• Human communication involves both digital and analog modalities: Communication does not involve the merely spoken words (digital communication), but non-verbal and analog-verbal communication as well.
  
  
• Every communication has a content and relationship aspect such that the latter classifies the former and is therefore a metacommunication:
  
  This means that all communication includes, apart from the plain meaning of words, more information - information on how the talker wants to be understood and how he himself sees his relation to the receiver of information.
  
  you might want to check out his text
  
  http://www.amazon.com/How-Real-Paul-Watzlawick/dp/0394722566
  
  also Margarete Meade at Google Books
  
  http://tinyurl.com/ldtk48 (goto page 149)
  
  screen shot of the appropriate section
  
  http://i34.tinypic.com/rhpvfa.jpg
  
  ---
  
  This next item is one of those things that can be taken both as comedy and seriously at the same time. (side note: I have seen some people freak out when you analyze in detail the implicit rules of human interaction, such as flirting)
  
  I have noted that in you can use old style asynchronous modem dialup protocols as a model of human communication, in that in life you have handshaking, acknowledgments, error correction, buffer overflows etc.
  
  You also have to learn to recognize what the appropriate non verbal communication signals are, and what are appropriate acknowledgments.
  
  Acknowledgments are very important in human communication, and they have to be appropriate and delivered along the appropriate channel.
  
  An acknowledgment is merely a signal of some sort that communicates that what received as data was in fact received and understood. It has to be appropriate, and should not cause buffer overflows in it's own right. Acknowledgment can range from a lifted eyebrow or nod of the head, to a raucous shout of enthusiasm or of denial. Basic rules of manners, such as please and thank you, etc provide the basics for this, but there is a lot more to it.
  
  Also note that a symptom of buffer overflow is confusion. You can imagine many types of data buffers, including nonverbal buffers.
  
  Another angle is to have an appropriate behavior model for the other person, which will help in making communication choices.
  
  There are plenty of you tube videos that can help you build a model involving flirting. Note that many behaviors are not entirely conscious when it comes to human male/female interaction.
  
  The primary tips are not to act interesting, but to act interested in the other person. And a light touch (not heavy handed) along with an air of some (but not arrogant) confidence is generally more successful.