Engineeritis sufferers always insist on spouting off about how social scientists don’t produce any predictive results.

Wrong.

By observing these types of interactions, Gottman can predict with up to 94 percent certainty whether couples—straight or gay, rich or poor, childless or not—will be broken up, together and unhappy, or together and happy several years later.

Of course in reality, social scientists have many, many valid findings and produce scads of predictive results. But I just wanted to highlight one in particular since I noticed it.

This contains some extremely broad generalizations, but is mostly true.

“I have to rush,” says the American, “my time is up.” The Spaniard or Arab, scornful of this submissive attitude to schedules, would only use this expression if death were imminent.

When I was working on getting some photos processed very quickly in the Arab world (before digital cameras were a thing) it was nearly impossible, because most people in that culture seemed to believe that, Well, the photo will look the same if it gets processed today or tomorrow, so what does it matter?

And I can understand that, but it’s difficult when you have a deadline in two hours.

In the Arab world, you learn to wait, and to chitchat. There really isn’t any other way.