Why Internet dating may be bad for your dating...

Don't get me wrong. I know lots of people who have found love on the Internet, but I have also come across enough disaster stories to feel that a word or two of caution are in order. Let me offer three reasons why anyone should be a little leery of dating web sites.

1. Deception is rampant. Now, I should also say that deception is fairly prevalent in dating as a whole, so this is not just an Internet problem. But the ease with which people can lie on the Internet makes this a much bigger problem for dating web sites.

2. Too much choice is not always a good thing. Research shows that when people are faced with too much choice, a variety of things start to happen. First, it becomes much more difficult to make any choice. Second, the criteria you use to make a choice become increasingly arbitrary. Third, you end up more dissatisfied with whatever choice you do eventually make. I talked to several Internet daters who experienced various levels of this, and some of them swore off Internet dating because of it.

3. The personality matching systems touted by the sites have not been shown to have any validity. That doesn't mean you won't like the people you meet, but it does mean that you will be subject to the same vagaries of chance you find in regular life. In fact, simply telling two people that they are similar (regardless of whether or not that is actually true) automatically increases the chance that they will be attracted to one another.

So, caveat emptor! There is nothing wrong with Internet dating as long as you realize that it does not offer any magical solution.

That fickle female!

Some readers probably read the fascinating article about female desire in last Sunday's New York Times. The main point was that female sexual desire remains a far more elusive subject than male sexual desire. While doing my own reading for Decoding Love, I came across numerous studies that illustrated this point. I think it is worth making one additional point: female desire as it pertains to selecting a mate is also extremely malleable.

Let me give just a few examples. One study has found that women prefer a different sort of man depending on her ovulation cycle. During peak fertility, women prefer more masculine men, but they choose more feminine men the rest of the time. Another study found that during peak fertility, women preferred poor but creative men to rich ones for a short-term liaison. One study even revealed that marriage itself can change the type of man a woman prefers.

Why all this variability? I believe that it points to how intimately our sexuality has been shaped by evolution--in this case, the dual necessity for women of trying to secure not just the best genes but also a man who will support the family. The two don't always go together, and depending on context, a woman's sexual preferences will shift to secure whichever is more important at the moment. So, far from being a problem, female fickleness may represent a sophisticated response to the challenges of dating and mating.

Less sex, better dating?

Stop having sex! Okay, maybe that's a little extreme. Let me be more specific: if you are a woman who wants a long-term relationship, the single most important piece of advice I have for you is to extend the period of courtship. However long you normally wait before having sex with a man for the first time, you should undoubtedly wait a little longer. There are numerous studies to back this up.

A recent English study found that, by waiting longer, women could weed out the bad partners because those men were unwilling to wait around for, er, consummation. And there's another study that proves what researchers have taken to calling an "affective shift." What they found was that men and women react very differently after having sex for the first time. For women, feelings of attachment grow. For men, though, sleeping with a woman decreases how attractive he finds the woman and how attached he is to her.

All of this makes perfect sense if we step back in time and look at our relationships through the prism of evolution. Many evolutionary psychologists believe that our tendency to couple off grew out of a trade off--men agreed to provide food and other resources in exchange for a greater security that his children were indeed his own. A woman who sleeps with a man too quickly sends out a damning message--she is not enough of a catch to secure a long-term mate, so she is willing to settle for whatever short-term action she can get.

I realize that all of this flies in the face of sexual liberation and feminism, and it would be nice to believe that we could pursue sexual pleasure without any downsides. But part of what I try to argue in Decoding Love is that we can't simply ignore unpleasant facts just because they go against our current cultural beliefs. The truth is, scientists have devised any number of ingenious experiments that give as a detailed knowledge of human attraction and how it works. It may be more pleasant to ignore that science and do whatever we want, but it will also mean that you will be less effective at determining your romantic fate. Although I would never want to reduce love to science, I do think science can help you find love.

Vocabulary and attraction

Single men, take note! It may be time to start casually dropping big words into flirtatious conversations. Tongue twisters like triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13) or sesquipedalian (characterized by long words!). Researchers have long known that intelligence is one of the qualities that women look for in partner (and they care even more about for short-term hookups than they do for long-term partnerships). Well, it appears that vocabulary can be added to the list of proxies that women use to judge intelligence. In a recent British study, students were asked to imagine a romantic encounter with someone or to imagine a conversation with an older person. Then the students were asked to write an essay on an unrelated topic. The result? Male students who had been primed with thoughts of romance used more unusual words in their essays. This should give hope to any of us geeks and nerds who fear we might never find someone and hide our insecurity behind daunting vocabulary words.