Q4ALL: What do you think about people-watching? What have you learned from people-watching? Have you gained any insights from it?

1: What do you think about people-watching?

2: What have you learned from people-watching? Have you gained any insights from it?

I had an interesting exchange here on PPD with /u/Love8Death on this topic.

Note: Below I'll put /u/Love8Death’s comments from our exchange as quotations and mine as plain text.

I wonder how many men unsuccessful with women have spent even 100 hours actively people watching.

That's interesting. Is "active people-watching" useful? What does it entail exactly? How do you go about doing that? And what are the benefits?

Oh fuck yeah it's useful.

I kept hearing women say, they like people watching. At first the term was ridiculous to me. What a waste of fucking time.

Turns out, I'm the idiot.

You pay attention to everything you can. Body language. What type of people behave the way they do, dress the way they do. Women use all of this all the time. Women constantly psychoanalyze and profile people to better figure them out.

What they're wearing for example. How they walk. What they look at. For how long they look at.

I love love love watching couples. Very interesting. You can learn to tell if they're probably a new relationship, a bored one, an exciting one, if they're into each other, how they match up, how they contrast, etc. You can pretty strongly see when the guy is really into the girl, when he kind of is, when he's not at all, when he's just putting up with her, and vice versa. Paying attention to their expressions is a great way to figure out much of body language, micro expressions, knowing what people say without them saying it.

That's interesting.

1: What are the best locations to observe people?

Every where people are. Different settings give you different groups of people to analyze and learn from.

I usually observe people I want to be more like, want to understand better. Usually that's people that are richer than me, are more successful, or more overall developed. But the other side is telling too, like go to a poor shopping mall and you'll see a pretty big difference in behavior compared to a rich one.

2: And you're just analyzing (1) facial expressions and (2) micro-expressions and (3) non-facial body-language?

Plus more. Why are they here? What do they want? What do they expect? If you can hear them certainly helps a lot too.

3: Do you ever see couples in line at the airport or wherever where they're all over each other, very touchy, and their body language relative to each other is intensely sexual? And it (1) makes all the single people in the line feel lonely and (2) makes all the couples in the line feel a bit self-conscious because their relationship clearly doesn't have the same chemistry/intensity/passion?

Can't say I see a lot of PDA. How someone reacts is mostly about if they think the action is sweet and nice to see, versus if they make it about themselves and feel bad.

I'd guess like 80% feel bad. I got made fun of for kissing my SO in public like we're a new couple the other day lol.

4: What do you think about very "possessive" body language where the man is holding the woman in certain ways so as to stake out his possession of her? I'm sure there are many different forms of this. What do you think about this?

Holding the woman? Possession from a man usually has to do with his energy towards her.

Energy is something I pay a lot of attention to. Everything has an energy state based on its attributes, beliefs. All living things too have a readable energy.

5: What do you think about intense PDAs (public displays of affection)? Do you think this is an awesome thing that really signals a good relationship that couples should strive for? Or is it just awkward? What do you think about making out, subtly straddling each other in public in various ways, or just being really touchy?

I enjoy it, at least if it's not ugly people doing PDA. It's a good sign, you don't PDA if your relationship is in the shits. Usually.

But I'm also a bit of an exhibitionist and voyeur so, take my bias into account.

6: To what extent is this cultural, whereby couples from certain countries are way more touchy/sexy/intimate in public with their body language?

Yes it's very cultural. In our culture that is hateful of natural sexual dynamics, it's often looked down on.