The Social Animal Read Online Free PDF Page A

judgments. It turned out to be one of those restaurants with ungraspable salads. Julia, anticipating this, had chosen an appetizer that could be easily forked and a main dish that didn’t require cutlery expertise. But Rob had selected a salad, which sounded good on the menu, composed of splaying green tentacles that could not be shoved into his mouth without brushing salad dressing three inches on either side of his cheeks. In some retro-nostalgia for 1990s tall cuisine, his entrée was a three-story steak, potato, and onion concoction that looked like the Devils Tower from
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
. Getting a biteful was like chipping off a geological stratum from Mount Rushmore.
    But none of it mattered, because Rob and Julia clicked. Over the main course, Julia described her personal history—her upbringing, her collegiate interests in communications, her work as a publicist and its frustrations, and her vision for the PR firm she would someday start, using viral marketing.
    Julia leaned in toward Rob as she explained her mission in life. She took rapid-fire sips of water, chewing incredibly fast, like a chipmunk, so she could keep on talking. Her energy was infectious. “This could be huge!” she enthused. “This could change everything!”
     
    Ninety percent of emotional communication is nonverbal. Gestures are an unconscious language that we use to express not only our feelings but to constitute them. By making a gesture, people help produce an internal state. Rob and Julia licked their lips, leaned forward in their chairs, glanced at each other out of the corners of their eyes, and performed all the other tricks of unconscious choreography that people do while flirting. Unawares, Julia did the head cant women do to signal arousal, a slight tilt of the head that exposed her neck. She’d be appalled if she could see her supposedly tough-as-nails self in the mirror at this moment, because there she was like any Marilyn Monroe wannabe—doing the hair flip, raising her arms to adjust her hair, and heaving her chest up into view.
    Julia hadn’t yet realized how much she enjoyed talking to Rob. But the waitress noticed the feverish warmth on their faces, and was pleased, since men on a first date are the biggest tippers of all. Only days later did the importance of the meal sink in. Decades hence, Julia would remember the smallest detail of this lunch, and not only the fact that her husband-to-be ate all the bread in the breadbasket.
    And through it all the conversation flowed.
    Words are the fuel of courtship. Other species win their mates through a series of escalating dances, but humans use conversation. Geoffrey Miller notes that most adults have a vocabulary of about sixty thousand words. To build that vocabulary, children must learn ten to twenty words a day between the ages of eighteen months and eighteen years. And yet the most frequent one hundred words account for 60 percent of all conversations. The most common four thousand words account for 98 percent of conversations. Why do humans bother knowing those extra fifty-six thousand words?
     
    Miller believes that humans learn the words so they can more effectively impress and sort out potential mates. He calculates that if a couple speaks for two hours a day, and utters on average three words a second, and has sex for three months before conceiving a child (which would have been the norm on the prehistoric savanna), then a couple will have exchanged about a million words before conceiving a child. That’s a lot of words, and plenty of opportunities for people to offend, bore, or annoy each other. It’s ample opportunity to fight, make up, explore, and reform. If a couple is still together after all that chatter, there’s a decent chance they’ll stay together long enough to raise a child.
     
    Harold’s parents were just in the first few thousand words of what, over the course of their lifetimes, would be millions and millions, and things