Greetings from cupid…or stupid

By: Anastasia Vaughan

Much like the Rihanna song off of her last album Loud, the songs title lyrics “We All Need Love” stands just as true yesterday as it does today. Finding love can often be a difficult task for many people especially when the one you are trying to fall hopelessly in love with happens to be the person three chairs down at a dinner counter who you have yet to met. Wither your male or your female your back is against the wall as you observer the potential love of your life who appears to be ten seconds and three bite away from walking right out of your life forever. What does your instinct tell you to do? The better question to ask perhaps maybe, what do you say?

According research studies done in the 8o’s Chris Kleinke and colleagues decided to do a case study on a hundred of pick-up lines and their effectiveness. Most pick-up lines fall under one of three categories of gambits. The categories are direct (honest to the point lines), innocuous (hides true intentions by finding things in common), or cute/flippant (humor or corny appeal based lines that get attention). Both men and women in the study each held opinions on which of the three were most effective in their usage, women preferred innocuous lines while men preferred women who took a much more direct approach. Despite many myths on pick-up the standard cute/flippant line was most likely to annoy both genders.

While men did not like the use of innocuous pick up lines because they felt that took to much time to reveal it true intentions women preferred it basically because they thought the approach was less overwhelming than going the direct route and gave them a chance to feel out the man personality. In the end other research studies showed however, that if the person was attractive enough they could still manage to get by using cute/flippant lines because both men and woman admitted they’d be willing to overlook corny lines in order to establish a union of some kind with them. In contrast, for innocuous gambits, the depleted students were less likely to ignore the person and ask the person to leave them alone. In short researchers found the cute/flippant openers did not work well, because individuals were more likely to ask the person using these openers to go away. Opening the doors to a new friendship/relationships should not be very hard, think about the way you would like to be approached and apply this to the person you’d like to approach in a way that seems sensible.