Pre-Valentine's Day blues?

The vagaries of our minds when it comes to everything from predicting how something will make us feel in the future to remembering how something made us feel in the past should generate a certain amount of skepticism for one of the central claims of the romantic storyline—that finding Mr. or Mrs. Right will solve all of our problems and make us happy.

If you don’t believe me, then you need to consider what I like to call the parable of the lottery winner and paraplegic, which reveals that no single thing affects our happiness as much as we think it will. There are numerous studies confirming this ranging from college students predicting how they would feel if their football team lost to professors predicting how unhappy they would be if they failed to get tenure. But let’s go right to the starkest evidence imaginable. I’m going to ask you a simple question: would it bring you more happiness to win the lottery or to become a paraplegic? No doubt, this is an astoundingly easy choice. Equally astounding, though, is how little the difference is between these choices when you measure people’s long-term happiness.

At the moment people first learn their fates, of course, the contrast could not be greater. Lottery winners are ecstatic and often think that all of their problems have been solved, while paraplegics face a level of despair that is difficult for most of us to imagine. But over time even the best and the worst of events get woven into the fabric of our daily lives. According to more than one study, lottery winners are no happier than people in general. One study compared people who had won anywhere from $50,000 to $1 million in a state lottery with a group of non-winners. Not only were the winners no happier than the non-winners, researchers found that many everyday activities, such as watching television or talking with a friend, were no longer as enjoyable for the winners as they were for the non-winners. What about the paraplegics? Surely, they were significantly unhappier than the average person. But another study revealed that their level of happiness was only slightly lower than it had been before their loss.

No matter how important something is at the moment, we always tend to overestimate how long it will stay with us. Psychologists call this the “durability bias.” This holds true even for our relationships. A recent study has shown that people were less upset by breakups than they had predicted they would be. The reason for this is that most of us fail to factor in the positive experiences we will continue to have in the future, regardless of the breakup. Studies have also found that people recover even from bereavement fairly quickly, especially if they can find meaning in the loss. Researchers have discovered that people have a certain set point for happiness, a level that they may stray from briefly when a major event occurs, such as winning the lottery or getting married, but that they generally return to and remain at for most of their lives. Just how quickly do we return to our set points? Usually less than three months.

In other words, finding “the one” simply isn’t as important as the romantic storyline tells us it is. So, if you do find yourself alone as Valentine's Day approaches, you should take comfort from the fact that there is much more to being happy than finding Mr. or Mrs. Right.

The dangers of self-pleasure... and framing

Framing a relationship in a certain context can have a powerful influence on how you feel about the relationship. In fact, you can insidiously undermine a relationship just by planting certain ideas about what is normal.

That’s exactly what Norbert Schwartz did in a study of male college students. Schwartz selected students who were already in a relationship with a steady partner, and he asked them a number of questions about their sex lives. One of the questions was how often the men masturbated, but Schwartz added a sly wrinkle. He used two different scales when he asked the question. One group was given a scale that ranged from more than once a day to less than once a week (the high frequency scale). The other group was given a scale ranging from more than once a week to never (the low frequency group, or in Seinfeldian terms, the masters of their domain). Needless to say, the rigged scales influenced the amount of masturbation the men reported—those on the high frequency scale reported slightly more than nine episodes a month, while those in the low frequency group reported slightly more than seven episodes a month—but even with that shift, both groups still fell within the typical range, according to numerous studies of sexual behavior.

The really interesting aspect of the study was how it influenced the men’s perception of their relationship. Depending on the scale used, the answers appeared at very different points in the spectrum, even though the actual amount of masturbation was similar. For the high frequency scale, once or twice a week put them in the middle, which made their answers seem entirely normal and unexceptionable. For the low frequency scale, though, once or twice a week put them at the high end of the scale, which fostered the impression that they were engaging in an excessive amount of self-flagellation. Planting that one small seed of worry—framing the question so that the students thought that they were masturbating too much—didn’t just affect the students’ opinions of their sex lives. It affected their entire relationship. In follow-up questionnaires, Schwartz found that these students were plagued with doubts and expressed more dissatisfaction with their relationships. He got a similar result when he manipulated the scales for a question on the frequency of sex between the men and their partners.

Even when it comes to something like personal attraction, we are far more malleable and open to influence than we think. As numerous studies have found, we tend to make better judgments about our relationships when we trust our intuition, while thinking too much tends to screw us up. Something to keep in mind as Valentine's Day approaches.