655. The Strategy Of The Self-Arranged Commitment Project

655.   The Strategy Of The Self-Arranged Commitment Project

Sometimes men give me the feedback, that they disagree with my searching strategy as is outlined throughout this blog.    This disagreement is a mixture of lacking comprehension and of the error of considering the instinct induced focus as better than a more rational but eclectic and uncommon approach.  

But my approach and my strategy are not even my invention, very learned people have similar ideas.   I already mentioned Epstein's love project in entries 29 and 385.

Further information can be found on his website in many publications and interviews, some of it about his love project and about arranged marriages:
http://drrobertepstein.com/index.php/media-coverage

This short video gives a good introductory overview:
http://www.sandiego6.com/san-diego-living/this-week/tuesday/Science-of-Love-139242443.html



1.  The self-arranged commitment project.
 
When more than a decade ago I first read about Robert Epstein's love project, I perceived this as a very good representation of my own previously more vague inclinations and wishes.  At that time I had already implicitly developed the paradigm of my own matching strategy, but the awareness for this was still emerging.   I immediately recognized my own inclinations, convictions and attitudes in Epstein's idea and I fully agree with his principles.  

My own strategy for a 'self arranged commitment' differs only in details.        

• A signature under a contract is only of legal significance.   If there is not enough trust between two persons to feel bound by a verbal agreement, then there is no base to attempt a relationship. 
• Paying for counseling is too much of a financial burden.   In the case that not each partner is able to comfortably afford a fair share of this burden, it is not such a good idea to require financial sacrifices, which may jeopardize the project. 
• I consider a very careful choice of the suitable match as even more important than it seemed to Epstein.   He admits to not even have read most of the over 1000 emails he got after the announcement of his project.  Instead he chose for his first attempt a woman, whom he met in an airplane.  

As far as I can make a guess, Epstein developed his love project as a consequence of his psychological research and as a remedy against being misled by his own inclinations.   To me the idea of the self-arranged commitment comes as a most natural expression of my own needs.   It is the result of full awareness of my own inclinations.


2.  The influence of instinctivity.

Unfortunately, Epstein's love project is spontaneously counterintuitive to men, who react strongly to the effects of female bodies upon their instincts.   It needs some intelligence and theory of mind to comprehend its wisdom.

The self-arranged commitment project can be chosen for disparate reasons, which are connected with my recurrent topic, that individual differences in the power of instinctivity have a very strong impact upon personality, attitudes, perception, decisions and behavior.
   
Men with high instinctivity cannot help but experience instinctive reactions when interacting with possible mates.   These reactions blur and distort rational long-term reasoning.   

This works both ways.   Such instincts can cause

• strong physical attraction and fast infatuation.    
• strong frustration, when the expected infatuation is not experienced immediately.   

Both effects impede rational decision and a wise choice of a mate.  


The choice of the self-arranged commitment project is influenced by a man's instinctivity and by the quality of his theory of mind: 

• The stronger a man's instinctivity, the less he is prone to comprehend and accept my strategy of the self-arranged-commitment project.  Only a man with an exceptionally good theory of mind and ability for the long-term anticipation is able to think independently and to act rationally in spite of what his instincts urge him to and in spite of the distortion by infatuation.   
• The less physical infatuation at the beginning of a relationship, the better the chances of rational choices and reasonable behavior and long-term happiness.   Only a man with low instinctivity and high predominance of cognition can meet a possible match without any expectation for strong physical attraction and without immediate infatuation.  Only he has a sufficiently clear mind to consider long-term compatibility and to welcome a self-arranged-commitment project.   

Men's instinctivity causes often an asymmetrical constellation.    While men get immediately infatuated with bodies, women can also get infatuated and blurred in their decision, but in a very different way.   Women can get infatuated with the prospect of and hope for a safe haven, a reliable companion, a trustworthy lifelong partner, a mindmate, in short with the fulfillment of all their cognitive relationship needs.  
The asymmetry dooms the relationship.   When the man's infatuation wears out, he discovers the reality of how much or how little both have in common.   The woman, who enters a relationship for the purpose of getting her non-physical needs met, discovers after a while, that she was infatuated with a delusion, and there was no safe haven, only a man wishing to get access to a female body.   The man gets tired of the woman and the woman gets hurt.  

Starting a relationship as a self-arranged-commitment project is a method to avoid such an asymmetry.   The less a man is infatuated, when he agrees to build a relationship, the better are the woman's chances to be offered realistic prospects and no delusions.   

Therefore a self-arranged commitment project is for me a method to reduce the risk of getting hurt. 


3.  My inclinations towards the self-arranged commitment project.

I have never experienced or expected infatuation, immediate love or love at first sight or anything of this kind at the first encounter with someone, neither online nor previously offline.  It seemed natural to me to let love and attachment grow slowly.   Reciprocally meeting each other's basic criteria was to me always the starting point for the cooperation to create long-term attachment.    

I mistook this for the logical way how things were usually going.   For a long time I had the wrong impression, that most people were more rational and cognitive than they really are.   I thought that passion was an invention of novelists and that those men, who were driven be passion to annoy and to harm women, were only a sick and deranged minority.  

Only when learning about evolutionary biology and when the internet allowed me access to many public personal accounts of the experiences of real people, I understood the sad reality of the huge power of instincts over the majority of men.  It was really disheartening. 

I was not really astonished, that when Epstein created a project of what to me had always been sensible, reasonable and logical, it was perceived as an extraordinary and very novel project and stirred a lot of publicity in the media.      


4.  The scarcity of men inclined towards the self-arranged commitment project.

There is nothing wrong with being a nobody.   There is nothing beneficial in being famous.   Fame is merely the situation of being known by notoriety, admired, despised, envied or hated by lots of haphazard and insignificant persons.  

There is only one disadvantage of being a nobody.   There is no way of getting publicity, when there is a need to find something scare, rare and hidden.

Unfortunately there are very few men sharing Epstein's wisdom.  When I am in contact with men, whom I consider as hopeful candidates for a self-arranged-commitment project, they usually do not understand my intentions.   While hoping for a positive response, I am getting rejected as a consequence of their incomprehension. 
There are certainly a few men out there somewhere, who are innately suitable and motivated for a self-arranged commitment project.  Some may share this inclination, some may have been convinced by Epstein.   

Somewhere out there, there is one who would be as happy to find me as I were happy to find him.   But I just do not succeed to reach him.  
 
Epstein had one big advantage:   As the then publisher of Psychology Today, he had sufficient publicity, when he announced his love project on their homepage.    He got over a 1000 emails as a reaction, many from interested women.  

I am looking for and offering nearly the same as Epstein did.   But I am a nobody, I am unable to get sufficient publicity.  This blog is implicitly an elaborated synopsis of my self-arranged commitment project.   But writing 653 blog entries appearing in google searches in more than two and a half years has not given me even a tiny fraction of the resonance, which Epstein had in a few days. 

Life is not a novel.   If it were, a journalist from a widely read web site would discover this blog and help me to get the publicity needed to enable my mindmate to find me.   Or someone would start a matchmaking site especially for people interested in self-arranged projects of any kind and I could find my mindmate there.