Fitting Room 101

While working in the retail industry, I have come to believe that the fitting room is a wonderful place to conduct research. Not on which way is the proper way to fold men's shirts (which is a science I have still to master) but on a number of the social and cultural tendencies that we all seem to possess. You learn a lot about the constructs of body image, the spending habits of urbanites, and even which age groups lean towards which colar combinations. But by far, the most intriguing part of human psycholgy that can be witnessed and disected in the fitting room are male/female relationships. I have tested my hypothesis on more than one occasion (as is always done in highly scientific experiements) and have come to the following conclusion: The length of a couple's relationship is directly connected to the way in which the male in said relationship remarks about the clothing the female is trying on. To further my case, take the following two examples as evidence:

1) When a woman asks her male companion the following question, "What do you think of this top?" and his answer is either one of the following:
a) "I think it looks amazing!"
b) "well, you know, you look good in anything"
c) "whatever you think"
then the relationship is relatively new and still in the stage where the male expects that it is probably a trick question and will do just about anything to please her. He feels safer posing yet another question to her to see if he can understand what she wants him to say because he is not yet comfortable sharing his truthful opinion about a topic rooted in pure vanity.

If, on the other hand, the same question is posed and the male responds with one of the following:
a) "I think you need a different size"
b) "Don't you have one like that already"
c) "Hey, it looks nice"
then the relationship has probably already passed the "please me" phase and moved into a relationship that it truly comfortable. The male realizes that he can be honest and the female accepts his honesty as a showing of real love. If you are questioning the fact that 1a and 2c look strangely alike, then let me explain the drastic difference. The male in relationship two realizes that the female does not have to look "amazing" in everything, he feels no need to use such an exagerrated adjective to describe a simple whit t-shirt because he knows, as does his female friend, that sometimes you just need to look "nice" and that is okay too.

So there it is, my experiement in the psycholgy of relationships as witnessed from my little perch atop the fitting room door. I will continue conducting research from within and report back with any new discoveries.