How to Read a Person in the First Ten Minutes

I ruin thrillers. I name the traitor before the second act, every single time, and my son has stopped watching films with me because of it. That part is almost charming. The rest of it is not. I do the same thing to people, before they have said a word worth hearing. Within four or five minutes of meeting you, before you have offered anything you would think of as revealing, I have already gathered most of what I am going to learn about you this evening, and almost none of it came out of your mouth. This sounds like a boast. It is closer to an affliction. And the thought that keeps me awake on the bad nights is whether a woman who reads a room this fast has ever once been surprised by love, or only ever been confirmed in advance.

So let me get the ugly word out of the way. “Manipulation”. That is where we file this skill now, somewhere between cold reading and the man who has watched nine minutes of a video about power poses and now believes your folded arms mean you are concealing something, rather than that the restaurant is cold. The whole subject has gone to seed. It smells of poker tells and sales seminars, of airport paperbacks with a lone human eye on the cover, and the man at the party who has just discovered the phrase “micro-expression” and cannot stop saying it. I understand the instinct to back away.

Seeing another person accurately has come to feel like something you do against them, as though attention were a form of theft.

I want to defend the opposite view though. Reading people is not a weapon unless you were already the sort of person out looking for one. Beneath the grifters and the seminar men there is an older practice, far closer to attention than to strategy, patient where they are predatory, and it belongs to anyone willing to look at what is actually in front of them instead of what they were promised would be there. My mother, quite unsentimental, calls it simply paying attention. She thinks inattention sits closer to sin than most of what the priest frets about on a Sunday.

The person who taught me the grammar of this was a Canadian sociologist named Erving Goffman, who watched human beings like patient people watch birds, without needing them to be nobler than they are. In a book from 1959 with the deceptively dull title “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”, he drew a line I have never managed to unsee.

There is the expression a person gives. And there is the expression a person gives off.

The first is the performance. The words, the anecdote worn smooth by forty retellings, the modest little shrug rehearsed at some mirror and long since automatic, the job title slid into the talk at the precise moment it will do the most work. All of it managed. Most of it sincere. None of it accidental.

The second channel is everything leaking out around the edges while the performer is busy performing. The pace of a breath. Where the eyes travel when the room laughs. What the hands do under the table. The half-beat of hesitation before an answer that should have been easy. This second channel runs mostly unmanaged, for a reason almost insulting in its simplicity: nobody has enough attention to work both at once, and the performance eats the attention first. So the leak is where the person actually is. Not the whole of them, obviously. The part that is not, at that moment, for sale.

And here is what should make you sit up because it is the hinge the rest of this swings on. You are leaking too. Right now. The channel you cannot fully govern is broadcasting whether you like it or not, which is either the most frightening sentence in this essay or the most freeing, depending entirely on how much of your one life you have spent guarding the wrong one.

So, where to look, if not at the words?

Begin at the edges of the encounter, the arriving and the leaving, because the middle of any meeting is rehearsed ground and people carry a script for the middle. What nobody has a script for is the three or four seconds after they believe the scene has ended.

Goffman called the managed zone the front region and the unguarded one the back, and the curtain between them is badly hung, swinging open constantly. Watch a face in the instant just after its own laughter. There is a small settling, a return, and the expression it returns to, before the next social demand recruits it again, is the resting weather of that person, the climate they live inside when nobody is buying anything from them.

Some faces settle back into amusement, as though delight were the factory setting and the world keeps interrupting. Some settle into a low watchfulness you would never have caught while they were charming you. One woman I met at a book launch near the Panthéon settled, every single time the laughter died, into a rapid sweep of the exits, and I understood something about her months before she told me why.

That one trick, the face after the laugh, will change how you sit at every table for the rest of your life. I mean that as a warning fully as much as a gift.

I could stop here and you would already walk into your next dinner more awake than you were this morning. But the face is the amateur move, the thing anyone picks up in an afternoon. What I actually want to give you lives lower down, in the body that cannot lie for long, in the grammar people reach for when they narrate their disasters, and in a handful of small tests you can run on anyone across a table without them once suspecting they sat an exam. Those are not secret. They are the sort of knowledge that ought to cost you something, even a little, so that you end up using it with the care it turns out to demand.