That phrase is easily modified to take on a darker tone: "find a person, learn about each other's personal lives, gradually escalate to sleeping with them" makes me cautious. The very notion that it's possible for one person to engineer closeness has echoes within the pickup artist community, so it's worth unpacking the differences.
If one person has zero interest in the other person past as a means to a very specific end (sex), and is wholly untruthful about that, then it veers away from scientific study of friendship and closeness.
Taking it a step further: "find a person, learn about their personal life, exploit their weaknesses, escalate to sleeping with them" is definitely red-pill territory, and while it might be unfair to judge the original phrase after being modified, the only difference is the knowledge and intentions of one party within an unchanged process.
"Learning about each other's personal lives" has a strong assumption that the stories themselves are truthful and without pretense past a socially-acceptable normal level as human beings.
Is that surprising? Effective pickup is rooted in psychology.
Sales, romantic attraction, and friendship-building ultimately use the same skill set. Humans don't change huge amounts in different contexts, and the best tactics are often cross-applicable.
Well, going to a place where you feel you'll find like-minded folks is a totally different scenario than going to a bar with a script. At my coworking space we're next door to a total sales guy that asks, seemingly earnestly, the same damned questions about whomever's life on the other end on every call. I literally cannot believe he actually cares that much though he really puts on a show.
I tend to actually care about other people and to be genuinely interested. That doesn't mean that all chatty extraverts are like that, but someone being different from you is not proof they are just faking it either.
Though for me personally that does create questions of how to balance the fact that I genuinely care with things like time limits and the fact that other people typically care about my welfare vastly less than I care about theirs. The fact that I tend to genuinely care about other people has gotten me taken advantage of at times. I am more careful these days about trying to vet people and make sure they aren't all "Yay! Freebies! This dumb bitch is just giving it away and I am going to take all I can, as long as I can, then disappear if she expects something in return."
People who are already socially confident don't think about these processes because they just happen naturally for them. You meet someone, chat with them, and then sometimes you become friends. So when someone comes along and outlines the process, it seems clinical and detached, and thus kinda creepy.
Certainly it was my reaction when I first started seeing things like this. "If you're thinking about it, you don't really care about the people. Real relationships just happen naturally!"
But of course, for some people they don't just happen, and these kinds of outlines can be very helpful.
Actually, I think and read about these processes a lot. I have taken intro to psychology, social psychology and a class on negotiation and conflict management. I find social stuff fascinating and I love to study it.
But it takes 15 to 20 hours a week to establish and maintain a genuinely close relationship. Forty five minutes is barely a down payment on that.
I have known "players" and how they operate. They are good at creating an illusion of closeness, often based on outright lies. Their goal is sex, and her welfare be damned.
Forty five minutes is also not enough time to verify if what they are telling you is something genuine. It can take weeks to learn that what he shared day one to make you feel all squishy is all made up BS.
So 45 minutes may be enough to create certain feelings, but if you think that is genuinely a close friend that you can trust, you have a lot to learn about how relationships work.
I think I misunderstood your comment. I read "talking for 45mins isn't a big deal" to mean it's not that hard so people should just do it rather than planning it, but it sounds like you meant it doesn't mean much in terms of friendship. (And based on other replies to you, it seems like a lot of people made a similar mistake.)
I don't disagree with that, and I do agree that some people seem way too interested in getting to sex rather than actually forming friendships. But my point is that some people really do struggle with the social interaction involved in forming relationships (even platonic) and we shouldn't write off articles like this as inherently about manipulation. (Especially since there are plenty of articles that are overtly about that.)
How do you propose starting a 20 hour a week relationship. Currently my interactions outside the family are limited to online or 5-10 minutes face to face. 45 minutes seems like a good first meeting to me - do you just jump in and spend a long weekend with someone you've never met ... can you see that might not work for everyone?
I didn't presume anything. Someone made a comment about me full of basically ugly assumption. I rebutted it with actual facts about me. Now I have down votes and a pile of ugly criticisms for correcting misinformation about me that should never have been put out there to begin with.
I think all of that is uncalled for, overly personal and essentially an ad hominem.
It takes more than a one time 45 minute conversation to create and maintain a close relationship. There is lots of research about that.