Hi. This is a throwaway because my life is crazy now and I don't want reddit at large to know from my other accounts. Warning: I am an oldster. Please don't judge.

This is a cool topic and I want to share.

Putting the last thing first, NLP is awesome. (Thanks for mentioning it!) I studied it a lot in the late 70s. It is a transferable knowledge set; it will work in different contexts and many different situations. It's particularly cool because it is an awesome skill being a subset of communication skills in general, and communication is hugely important in friendship but also in romance and relationships (which SO don't get off the ground at all, get messy, or crash and burn because of lousy communication). I even used NLP skills on the job. You can get social tricks from Dale Carnegie, sure, but a little bit of NLP helps you to "speak the same language" as the person you're with. They open up more, and faster, as a result.

Now to the whole emotional intelligence thing. When that book came out, I though it was a load of crap. I didn't discover how wrong I was, and how very important emotional intelligence is, until only recently. It can become absolutely crucial if even ONE person in a relationship has No EI. I know because around the same time I figured out that my girlfriend has zero EI (one of the many reasons I need to leave her), I discovered that I actually do have a fair amount of EI. It's sort of the ability to recognize emotions in others, and also in yourself, and to be able to gauge the strength and importance of an emotion. Like if you tell someone "this is not working, you are treating me like crap, I am so unhappy with you," and you're sobbing, and the other person doesn't get it at all, then they probably don't have much EI.

I've decided it's important, and that if I'm going to be with someone ever again, they have to have emotional intelligence.

Thanks for listening.