The Experiment

For five years these notes have been about research. This one is about a person.

For some months I have been speaking with a woman whose name I won't use here. I'll call her E. The reasons should eventually be clear. She contacted me after reading something I wrote about provision, and she said, in her first message, that she had tried something I hadn't written about yet.

What she called her experiment

E. described a set of changes she made, alone, to the way she behaved in relationships. She was careful to say alone. She didn't ask anyone to change. She didn't announce anything. She changed the structure of her own behaviour, kept notes, and watched what happened.

She called it her experiment, half as a joke and half not. She ran it, she said, across more than one relationship, over a long period. The notes were detailed. Some of what she showed me read like a lab book. Some of it read like a diary.

I won't describe the changes themselves yet. Partly that is because she asked me not to. Partly it is because I don't yet know which of her claims I can stand behind.

How we started talking

Her first message was short. She said she had read my notes for a year and recognised her own life in most of them, except for one thing. In my notes, the women waited for men to change. She had not waited. She wanted to know whether what she had done instead was something I had seen in the research.

I hadn't. I told her so. She replied with a single line from her notes, and I asked to meet her the next week.

We met four times in the spring, always in public, always for longer than either of us planned. She was precise, funny, and careful about what she would and wouldn't say. She never asked me to make her look good. She asked me to get it right.

Why I took it seriously

People send me theories all the time. Most are opinions dressed up as discoveries. E.'s were different in one way that mattered. She didn't claim to have found a method that works for everyone. She claimed to have found something that worked for her, and she wanted to know why.

And some of what she described lined up uncomfortably well with things I had written about over five years: the attention I described in Attention Is the Technique, the provision I tried to define in The Provider Problem, the link between who carries the household and who is desired, which ran through The Attraction Killer.

It was as if someone had read the research and then lived inside it.

Trying to verify it

I have spent the spring trying to check what I can. Some of it is checkable. Dates, places and the broad shape of her life match what I can confirm independently. Two people who knew her in different periods have spoken to me, and both described changes in her that fit her account, though neither knew the cause.

Some of it is not checkable at all. The men involved are, for obvious reasons, not people I can simply call. And her notes are her notes. I can verify that they exist and that they were written over a long period. I can't verify that they are complete.

Where this stands

I want to be careful. This is the first account of something I am still investigating, and I may be wrong about parts of it. I'll separate what she claimed from what I can confirm as I go.

What I can say now is that E. is real, her notes are real, and the pattern she describes is real in her life. Whether it means what she thinks it means is the question I am working on.

She has agreed to keep talking. I'll write more when I can.