Chapter 17 Key Takeaways: Verbal Communication in Courtship
Core Findings
1. Function words matter more than content words for rapport. Linguistic Style Matching (LSM) measures synchrony in function word use — pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, negations, and quantifiers. High LSM predicts mutual liking and relationship longevity better than any content-level measure. The key insight: LSM cannot be faked through deliberate mimicry. It is a symptom of genuine engagement, not a deployable technique.
2. Self-disclosure generates intimacy through reciprocity, not revelation. What Aron's 36 questions study shows is that progressive, mutual disclosure is intimacy-generating — not any specific content. The reciprocity norm means that disclosure invites equivalent disclosure. The mechanism is symmetry and genuine presence, not the particular questions asked.
3. What the "36 questions" research doesn't show is as important as what it does. The study measured self-reported closeness in a single laboratory session with consenting participants. It did not demonstrate that the questions cause love, are effective outside a context of mutual consent, or produce effects that persist long-term. Popular framing has substantially overstated the finding.
4. Strategic ambiguity is the structural feature that makes verbal flirtation possible. Flirtatious verbal communication maintains plausible deniability: signals of interest are constructed so they can always be interpreted as friendly warmth if not received. This face-protection mechanism serves both parties but distributes interpretive labor unequally — the receiver must decode ambiguous signals without being able to ask for clarification without risking their own face.
5. Compliments are more complex than they appear. Compliments simultaneously evaluate, signal attention, and create obligations. The gender patterning of compliment content — appearance-focused compliments disproportionately directed at women — reflects broader objectification dynamics rather than neutral social pleasantry.
6. Interruption is not inherently a dominance behavior. The distinction between intrusive interruptions (which silence and redirect) and cooperative overlaps (which signal enthusiasm and build on what's being said) is essential. Early courtship conversation often features cooperative overlap — two people too engaged to wait for their turn — which reads as positive engagement, not dominance.
7. Verbal courtship norms are culturally specific and intersectionally variable. High-context and low-context cultural frameworks produce very different expectations for directness in verbal courtship. The norms identified in most communication research are primarily Western, heterosexual, and middle-class. The verbal styles evaluated as "charming" and "appropriate" in courtship research encode specific cultural assumptions about who gets to desire and how desire should be expressed.
Methodological Note
Most verbal communication research uses laboratory analogs — confederates, transcribed conversations, hypothetical scenarios — or digital traces like dating app messages. Ecologically valid naturalistic conversation data is rare and methodologically demanding to collect. This means many findings carry the caveat that laboratory behavior may not perfectly reflect how people actually communicate in the emotionally charged, high-stakes contexts of real courtship.
Connections to Running Themes
- Consent and Agency: Strategic ambiguity complicates explicit consent-seeking; understanding this is important for thinking about how verbal cultures can accommodate more direct communication
- Commodification: The pickup line economy, the 36 questions card sets, and algorithmic opening-line suggestions all represent intimacy being packaged as a product
- Intersectionality: Whose verbal styles count as sophisticated versus abrasive, articulate versus aggressive, in courtship contexts is not neutral; racialized, gendered, and class-based perception norms shape how verbal behavior is received