Some pre-Valentine's Day thoughts

As I sit here a couple of days before Valentine’s Day, I find myself reflecting back on why I wanted to write Decoding Love in the first place. Although I hope, of course, that the book reaches a broad audience, my goal was never to become a love guru. Both my temperament and my research have taught me to be skeptical of gurus. For good or for ill, any final answers about love must come from ourselves.
I also did not set out to write a book of dating advice tips. Don’t get me wrong. I am not trying to disparage the idea of practical dating advice. I think there are some helpful pointers in the book, and I will be thrilled if readers find any of them useful in their quest for love. In fact, some of my favorite parts of the book are in the tips section. Who knew, for example, that a spicy-floral fragrance could make a woman appear twelve pounds lighter? If they could just discover the scent that would make me look like George Clooney or Brad Pitt, I would be a happy man.
But ultimately I was drawn to this subject by something deeper and more fundamental—the sense that our romantic lives could tell us something profound about our humanity.
I know that sounds somewhat grandiose for a book that spends a lot of time discussing dating, so let me try to explain what I mean. In part, my goal stemmed from a basic belief that sexual selection has played perhaps the key role in shaping who we are. In fact, if you really take sexual selection seriously, it is difficult to find any aspect of being human that is not touched by it. For instance, one of the things that distinguishes us is our sense of humor. There is a playfulness about our species that is one of the great joys of life. It turns out, though, that humor is not just there for the giggles. Study after study has shown that it plays a key role in mate selection. Simply put, if you are a humorless oaf, it’s going to be difficult to find anyone who wants to be with you. And you can extend this to all of our other traits as well—our tendency to cooperate or to help people in need. So, part of what I was interested in exploring was how something like attraction could provide a window into something much larger—who we, as human beings, are.
Because I believe attraction does play such a central role in the human drama, I was also able to make the opposite move. In addition to showing how mating shapes who we are, I could range far afield and show how seemingly distant fields offered insight into how attraction works. Although applying fields like consumer psychology to attraction is not at first a self-evident connection, it starts to seem perfectly logical once you have accepted how deeply the need to find a mate has shaped us. And that allowed me to branch out from a narrow conception of my topic to one that could encompass a much broader array of concerns ranging from how the minds works to the hormonal shifts behind female fickleness.
Despite all of those grand ambitions, though, my ultimate goal was fairly simple. I didn’t write Decoding Love thinking that it would provide any easy answers about finding love—far from it, in fact. But I did hope that it would offer a persuasive explanation of who we are and why, when it comes to things like attraction, we act the way we do. In the end, this book was written with the optimistic hope that simply understanding the nature of attraction would help people better withstand the inevitable vicissitudes of romantic life, whether they were looking for love, in love, or losing love.
If it manages to do that, I will be very happy indeed.

Of laughter and marriage

Teasing is good for your relationship! That, at least, is what recent studies suggest. Researchers have discovered that married couples who have a lot of nicknames for one another are happier. In fact, teasing has been shown to help even during fights. This goes against the conventional wisdom of couples therapy, which often insists on discussing things in the most earnest tones imaginable. These findings go to the heart of one of the great paradoxes of relationships. Although they are incredibly important and serious, they do better when we treat them with a certain amount of playfulness. People always talk about working on a relationship, but that is often the wrong approach. When you think it's time to work on the relationship, that probably means it's time to play.

The problem with dating books

I’m embarrassed to say how many dating books I’ve read. But it’s not my fault. I have had many of them foisted on me over the years by my sisters or my female friends. And I had to read a whole slew of them when I was researching my book, Decoding Love. After doing that, I have to come to one simple conclusion, there’s no there there. The vast majority of books are basically a series of anecdotes strung together.

Let’s take a huge hit from a few years ago, He’s Just Not That Into You. As Sex and the City fans know, this book emerged from Miranda’s sudden relationship epiphany that all of male relationship misbehavior can be explained with one simple statement: He’s just not that into you. And the book goes on to illustrate the point in endless ways. It’s the first book I have ever read that you really could judge not just by its cover but by its title alone.

I can see the appeal of the book. It’s funny and entertaining. As relationship advice, though, it is, to say the least, a little thin. If I could pose one simple question, why is he just not that into you? I don’t think that is too much to ask. I’m not looking for heavy number crunching and statistical modeling. But I think it’s not unreasonable to offer something to readers beyond a one-sentence thesis.

And there is a fairly straightforward explanation. Men make sperm, and women make eggs. My previous post explains the significance of this, so I won’t go into the details again. But I do think the reader deserves more than a one-sentence catchphrase when trying to understand something as complicated as relationships.