Dating Tips for Men

Dating Tips for Men: Framing

Framing is a fascinating concept in what you might call social relations, or social psychology. It’s really much more than ‘dating tips’, and for a man to have a lot of success with dating it is required knowledge.

A social frame is basically a social situation where roles are assigned to people. Most of the time, people observe these frames and act out the roles, totally subconsciously.

The power of a frame is revealed when one considers that identical actions in one frame, will be interpreted and responded to very differently in another. Perhaps the most straightforward of this is the example of a blink versus a wink. Blinks and winks are socially very different things. How do we know when someone is blinking, and how do we know when they are winking, when they look physically identical? How do we know how to respond? The answer is that we get cues from the  dominant social frame.

An example of a dominant social frame is this: a woman gets examined by a gynecologist. This frame, which we could call ‘doctor/patient’, says that while the doctor is able to touch the woman in a very delicate area, in a way that in another context would constitute sexual activity, this will be allowed by the woman and not interpreted as sexual. Both parties act congruently with this frame. For example, a sexual comment by the doctor would be grossly inconsistent with the frame.

Possibly this is why dogs, the mentally unbalanced, and drunk people are so unnerving to have to deal with. They all exist outside the norms and expectations of human behaviour. They don’t respect and act in accordance with the dominant frame, and this makes their actions very hard to predict.

So far we have taken a brief look at the psychology of frames. But we said at the beginning of the article that this relates intimately to dating, and so far we haven’t really seen that. So why all this talk of framing in an article about dating tips? Here’s the explanation. One of the things that a so-called ‘bad boy’ does, as we all know, is to ‘not play by the rules’. Women find this irresistible. So here’s the rub: not playing by the rules means acting outside of the dominant frame. When we say ‘he doesn’t play by the rules’, we are saying ‘he doesn’t act consistently with the dominant frame’. Essentially, these people just do what they want, not what they are being told to do. What this enables them to do is to re-frame situations to create a frame that is consistent with seduction.