SOMETHING USEFUL IN EVERY ARTICLE
dating advice you can use tonight.
For years I believed a lie about connecting with people: that you click with someone by finding stuff you already have in common.
Same hometown? Okay, we’re off to the races. Same team? Cool, there’s twenty easy minutes right there. And if she somehow loved the same obscure band I did, I’d basically start picking names for the dog we were obviously going to adopt together.
So every date turned into a scavenger hunt. I’d dig around for overlap like Jimothy in a trash can, hoping to find one shiny thing we shared.
Then I’d smack into the wall every guy smacks into...
What do you do when you have nothing in common?
(Quick context if we’ve never met: I’m Race. I’ve spent an embarrassing chunk of my life obsessing over why some people just “click” with anyone, and most of us don’t. This is one of the answers.)
She Loves Shoes. You Own Three Pairs. Now What?
Picture it. She’s telling you about her shoe collection. A genuine, closet-has-its-own-zip-code situation.
You? You own three pairs. Two of them are the same sneakers. The soles are worn so thin you can basically feel the sidewalk say hello.
She’s also into volleyball. You played once on a random guy’s beach trip. (yes you did look like the scene in top gun.. high five)
She went to some school across the country you’ve honestly never heard of.
Old me would’ve panicked and reached for the eject button. Nothing in common... abort... talk about the weather... die alone.
Turns out I was building a bridge to the wrong place.
The Idea That Hit Me on a Train to Brighton Beach
This one clicked for me years ago, back when I lived in New York, careening through the underground on a train down to Brighton Beach with one of our interns.
Quick backstory. We were young, broke, and stupidly ambitious. We lived and worked out of the same space and could somehow run a full day on three hours of sleep. The night before, someone had invited a bunch of Swedish girls to a house party at our place, and there was a real language barrier in the room. The intern had watched me connect with them fast anyway.
So on the train he just asked me straight: how? How do you click with someone that quickly when you can barely trade full sentences?
And somewhere between stops, rattling through the dark with the lights flickering, I heard myself say it out loud for the first time:
We’re all islands of experiences.
Every person walking around has a completely unique pile of experiences. Even identical twins. You will never share the exact same set of experiences with another human, so if that’s the bridge you’re trying to build, it’s a dead end every single time.
But emotions are different. Emotions are the bridge that connects our different experiences.
I taught it to that intern right there in the New York underground, and it rewired how I talk to everybody since. Cashiers, strangers on planes, my dentist (sorry doc, you did not sign up for a philosophy seminar with your hands in my mouth).
The One Question That Builds the Bridge
Back to shoe girl.
She loves buying shoes. So instead of nodding along and quietly dying inside, you ask her the magic question:
“How do they make you feel?”
And she lights up. “They make me feel powerful. Confident. Like I can walk into any room and own it.”
There’s your bridge.
And you’ve felt every one of those. Not from shoes, obviously. But from finally hitting a lift you’d been chasing since March. From a presentation you were dead certain you’d bomb, right up until you didn’t. Powerful, confident, own-the-room... same feeling. You just took a totally different road to get there.
The shoes and the deadlift have nothing to do with each other. Doesn’t matter. That feeling underneath, the walk-in-and-own-it one, you both know it cold. And that’s the only part you actually need.
Same Feeling, Totally Different Story
Here’s a second one. Say you love to travel, and she tells you she’s honestly never really been anywhere.
Most guys bail right here. Dead end, next topic.
But don’t just say “I love traveling.” Tell her why:
“I love waking up with no idea what’s going to happen that day. Eating food I can’t pronounce. Being somewhere totally unfamiliar and just figuring it out as I go.”
Now she can meet you there. Even if her big adventure is working on her art projects in her room.
Her: in her room, music blaring, lost in the creation of her art.
You: backpacking through Southeast Asia, lost, sunburned, grinning like an idiot.
Two totally different lives, one feeling they both recognize. That’s the bridge, and it holds every single time.
The people who click with everyone aren’t luckier than you. They’re not more interesting than you either. They just quit digging for matching trivia and started listening for the feeling underneath.
Your Mission This Week
Next real conversation you have... a date, a friend, the barista, whoever... when they mention something they love, don’t say “oh cool.”
Ask them how it makes them feel.
My go to is, “No way, how cool. What got you into that?”
Then go find that exact same feeling somewhere in your own life and hand it back to them.
No lines, no script, no pretending you care about shoes.
Watch what happens. They’ll walk away swearing the two of you have some kind of unexplainable chemistry.
It isn’t unexplainable. You just built a bridge.
cheers,
R. A. DePriest
P.S. Reply and tell me what happened. Did they light up? Did you find the shared feeling under it? I read every single one.
P.P.S. This emotions-over-experiences move is one slice of something I call “Providing a Space”... the bigger framework for making pretty much anyone feel deeply connected to you. Want me to write that one up next? Say the word.