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.

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 battle of the sexes

The science section of The New York Times had an interesting article last Tuesday (Nov. 11) on a new theory about mental disorders. It suggested that there is a struggle between a mother and a father’s genes for control of the brain. If the mother’s side wins too decisively, the brain can end up with schizophrenia or a related mental illness. If the father's side wins too decisively, the child can have autism. Now, there is still a lot of evidence needed to validate this model. But it does fit with a number of other things I have read.

For example, it turns out that the fetus is not some harmless passenger in the mother’s body. In many ways, it is like an internal parasite, and the mother’s body is in a constant struggle to keep the fetus from wreaking havoc with the mother’s health (a lot of pregnancy problems, such as gestational diabetes, stem from this struggle).

What all this suggests is that many things we assume are harmonious are actually better described as a kind of stalemate between fiercely warring factions. And I want to suggest that male-female relationships also fall into this category. Take conception. Researchers have discovered a host of measures that men’s bodies naturally perform to try to ensure that they are the father of a child, while women’s bodies have developed their own counter-measures to try to ensure that they are selecting the fathers. The most wild example of this? Female orgasm, which some scientists have suggested is a “cryptic selection device.”

Of course, this sort of information is no help to people in relationships, so for them, it’s probably better to forget about this post and just think of their couplings as a beautiful expression of what happens when a man and a woman love each other very much…