I recently had an insight about how to form good relationships with people. I'm not even sure if this is the place to post this, but I think it applies to pick-up as much as any other aspect of your social life. Also, everyone here really just wants to get laid, right? and forming strong relationships with the opposite sex can also lead to that.

So I'm an introvert. I've had friends and even girlfriends throughout my life, but in spite of that I've always felt less than fulfilled in the social department. I have always socialized without really knowing how or why, and having a personal tendency to overthink things, I have always been very inconsistent with how I acted around people, depending on how I expected them to act towards me.

I do enjoy people though, and in spite of my hangups I've found some lasting friendships in unexpected places. I was recently staying over at a friend's house in another state, someone who I once had a class with back in middle school, and got to know very well and kept in touch with, and I was reflected on how, even aside from my friendship, I was benefiting by having a free place to stay out of town.

It occurred to me that people ultimately form relationships based on the personal gratification they hope for and expect. In other words, whether you're evaluating a potential friend, girlfriend/boyfriend, sexual partner, even striking up a conversation in public, no matter what you think about that person, you're ultimately concerned with what you're going to get out of it.

It is a bit paradoxical then, but the way to get the most out of people is to focus 100% on what you can do for them. I suppose I had always been aware of this on some level but never really realized explicitly. If you look at what you want from people, including sex, and try to earn that thing by offering what you think is proportionately valuable, you will be limiting yourself, and fail much more than you succeed.

The trick is to realize that most everyone operates in this manner to some degree. Furthermore, anyone who you don't actually talk to will evaluate you on appearance alone. This is obviously the case but you have in your head all these personal details about yourself and you usually don't realize how much other people don't know them.

So rather than saying you probably have a lot more to offer than you realize, you probably have a lot more to offer than anyone else realizes. If you want anything from them, unless you have a really attractive appearance, you need to make an effort to communicate this. Also, no matter what you have in terms of looks or status, you can always offer conversation and emotional feedback, and even people who already have everything will still value that.

Once people know that you can do things for them, instead of evaluating you on your perceived value, they will now be trying to prove their own value to you. This will probably include whatever you wanted from them in the first place, but it's important to apply this to everyone and not just people who look attractive, because just like you have a lot more to offer than your immediate appearance dictates, so does everyone else!

So I apologize for the wall of text and run-on sentences. I believe a lot of this has been said before and maybe I'm just putting it all together for myself. But I would love to know if there is other stuff out there in the same vein, or if there's a better place to talk about this. Thanks!