Part 4 in the series on How to be Approachable. Two contestants meet for a blind date in a restaurant. A hunk of a Norwegian man walks in and his date, already seated, is beside herself with excitement. After a few minutes of sexually-charged small talk, the waiter swings by. Ladies first. Approaching someone blind, with little or no background information about them, poses risks. Part of this is due to the potentially explosive mismatching that can can arise.
As such, you can assume that anyone considering approaching you feels more safe or less safe, depending on how much they can can infer about you from afar. Conversations often begin on the back of some casual eavesdropping, as our readers at the NSA can confirm.
Sometimes the eavesdropper has already planned to jump into the conversation and is already following along attentively, lying in wait for the next serviceable on-ramp. Other times, it never occurred to the eavesdropper to approach. No way! One evening, at a small house party, I was ranting about hyper-hypochondria — the insane levels of hypochondria I witnessed on holidays in Thailand last year. Less an eavesdropper, more a peeves dropper.
Eventually Daddy Long-Legs Face interrupts me. After a performance — say a talk or a reading — people gather around the recent star, becoming temporary groupies, at least for a moment. In a room full of foreign faces, the performer is a safe bet. Having already been in the audience, you know what the performer stands for. Indeed you may already feel like friends, as people so often do around writers and actors, even though the conversation has thus far been completely asymmetric.
Many events, corporate or community, start with a circle of introductions. The primary purpose of such ordeals is to induce soul-crushing anxiety. This much is obvious. But if you turn your head to the side and close one eye, you could be induced into viewing these introductions as supplying useful prompts for further conversation. I have a generic face. That got a laugh, and, compared with Michael I sensed that I would prefer the company of this Swiss lady.
