Set-up Cost: The Bold Girl and the Shy Boy

Have you even seen a bold girl sucking up to a shy boy and wondered why? This can be explained with set-up cost.

It is a common marketing technique for businesses to get people to get hooked in to their products using free samples (beauty creams), cheaper initial costs (low rates for the first three months / zero down payment), attractive freebies (“Free phone upon the signing of contract”), and the lack of hassle (“We’ll tell your old phone company for you.”). What they’re doing is effectively lowering the set-up cost of their potential customers. It might be a sweet deal in the beginning, but they’ll get you later - once you’re nice and settled in.

Now imagine if a not-so-nice-girl is looking for a sucker to mooch off of. She is looking for someone financially successful enough to mooch off, but who lacks the social skills to pursue a girl on his own. In other words, the shy, nerdy, faint-at-the-sight-of-girls type. Now, since he’s shy, all she had to do is to be aggressive and actively pursue him.

Usually, such a guy would have to get over his painful shyness and pluck up the courage to ask a girl out. That is a high set-up cost indeed. But in this case, the not-so-nice-girl is making it easy for him by lowering his set-up cost. The shy guy can not believe his incredible luck. So he enters into the arrangement because it is easy, then stays because he is afraid of incurring new set-up cost in the quest for a genuine girl. Through his lack of experience, he might even think that’s all there is out there.

And here lies the sad double-whammy of being shy: missing out on the nice girls, and attracting the wrong type who wants free dinners.

Assertiveness coaching, anyone?