Decoding Love Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - The Dating Mind

  Chapter 2 - The Dating Animal

  2 ½ - The Dating Animal, Part II

  Chapter 3 - The Dating Culture

  3 ½ - The Dating Culture, Part II

  Chapter 4 - The Dating Game

  Chapter 5 - The Dating Dance

  Chapter 6 - The End of Dating

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliographical Essay

  Index

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  Copyright © 2009 by Andrew Trees

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Trees, Andrew, date. Decoding love : why it takes twelve frogs to find a prince and other revelations from the science of attraction / Andrew Trees. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-68590-3

  1. Sexual attraction. 2. Dating (Social customs). I. Title.

  HQ23.T

  306.73—dc22

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To Heesun,

  for saving me from having to go on any more first dates

  Introduction

  Romance and Its Discontents

  RELATIONSHIPS SHOULD BE SO SIMPLE. YOU MEET SOMEONE. You fall in love. If all goes well, that person falls in love with you. And as the fairy tale says, you both live happily ever after. But the reality is rarely so simple. My goal is to explore why that is the case by taking a rational approach to that most irrational of pursuits, the search for love. Imagine Jane Austen’s romances rewritten by people like Charles Darwin and Adam Smith, and you will have some idea of what sort of book this is. The simple premise behind Decoding Love is that despite our ingrained prejudice, our current model of finding love is deeply flawed, and science can actually provide a great deal of insight into our quest for romance. It will take something we think we know well—how to find love—and reveal that many of our assumptions are wrong.

  There are any number of shocking discoveries that researchers have uncovered in recent years. For instance, did you know that women generally make the first move in a bar? That men find women who are ovulating more attractive? That human testicle size is an indication of how promiscuous women are? That what you can put into words about why you like someone often isn’t an accurate reflection of why you really like that person? That scaring someone can spark as much attraction as seducing him or her? That the number of frogs you must kiss before finding your prince or princess is a dozen? That women who wear a spicy floral fragrance are judged to be twelve pounds lighter than they actually are? That some men have a gene that makes them more promiscuous? That a woman’s orgasms have little to do with love and everything to do with a strange body measurement known as symmetricality? Until I started my research, I certainly had no idea.

  I realize that the scientific approach is not one that comes naturally to people interested in falling in love, but I believe that is because we are the victims of hundreds of years of stories and novels and plays and poems and movies and television shows about a certain version of love. These stories have hammered into us a collective wisdom about what it means to be in love and how to go about finding that love—or what I call the romantic story line. As soon as you look for it, you realize that it’s everywhere. George Orwell’s worst nightmare of mind control never achieved anything like the stranglehold that the romantic story line has over all of us. It wouldn’t matter so much—we all carry around many mistaken beliefs about life—except that it has become a source of misery to many single people and quite a few couples as well. With a divorce rate hovering near 50 percent, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that something has gone seriously awry.

  If using science to find love seems crazy, though, imagine how insane our current system would look to an anthropologist from Mars. Our Martian—let’s call him Zog—would soon learn that finding a romantic partner is just about the most important thing most of us do. We lavish vast amounts of time and effort and money on the search. But, despite our best efforts, almost half of us will end up divorcing that same person we worked so hard to find. And then we will begin the search all over again. What else could Zog say, except that we are mad for love?

  If the extraterrestrial perspective is too far out, let’s make a quick comparison between our model of romantic choice and arranged marriages, an approach that runs counter to every aspect of the romantic story line. The divorce rate in this country is close to half, while the divorce rate for arranged marriages is almost zero. Talk about a stark contrast. In our culture, by the time we are teenagers we don’t even let our parents choose our clothes, let alone our partners. And we devote huge amounts of energy to the search for love. What is our reward for all of our efforts? Seemingly nothing but heartache, frustration, and failed marriages.

  Of course, this comparison is not apples to apples or even apples to oranges (more apples to mangoes, really). There are obviously a host of factors that can influence divorce rates, and Americans have a more tolerant view of divorce than many other countries. But this also tells us something revealing about our romance with romance. The ready acceptance of divorce is itself a sign of how deeply embedded the romantic story line is in our culture, because it depends on one of the deep-seated myths of romantic love, the idea of “the one.” When our marriages fall short of the idealized visions many of us have, we often see it as a sign that we have made a mistake, and our current partner is not really “the one.” The only cure? Divorce and a renewed search for love. Guided by the enormous expectations of the roma
ntic story line, we dive into relationship after relationship only to have almost all of them end in disappointment. And when they do, we rarely question our approach. We simply start a new search for love.

  The good news is that the problem is largely not our fault (at least not personally); instead, our difficulties arise from the romantic story line itself, which has become enshrined as virtually the only arbiter of any relationship. It wasn’t always this way. A group of researchers compared different surveys from more than half a century to see how Americans’ relationship priorities have changed. As recently as 1939, Americans placed love far lower on the list. For men, it was only fourth, and for women it was fifth (No. 1 for men back then was a dependable character, while women rated emotional maturity as the most important trait—apparently, they’re still waiting on that one). But love has been rising steadily ever since, hitting No. 1 for women in 1977 and No. 1 for men in 1984, where it has remained ever since. During this same time, the divorce rate has gained just as steadily. I don’t want to claim any simple causality, but it is telling that as love has grown in importance, it has become harder and harder to find and hold on to.

  The time has come for us to throw the romantic story line overboard and fix a cold, clinical eye on love and its attendant complexities—less romance and more science. While we have continued to struggle along without making any discernible progress in our love lives, science has made significant advances. For example, various methods can now predict with more than 90 percent accuracy whether or not a couple will divorce. In other words, hard as this is to believe, when you are sitting at a candlelit dinner and looking into the eyes of the man or woman you think is Mr. or Ms. Right, you are less likely to make the correct decision about marrying that person than someone in a white lab coat using nothing more than a videotape of the encounter or a multiple-choice test.

  Decoding Love is my attempt to regain a place at the table for science. We tend to treat finding love as we do making sausage—we don’t want to look too closely at what goes into it. Well, this book is going to look closely, and it is not always a pretty story. In fact, some of the insights into relationships are distinctly upsetting, particularly if you cling to lily-white ideas about human nature. But my mission is not to tell us flattering truths about ourselves. It is to try to show us as accurately as possible who we are and why we do the things we do.

  There is one enormous hurdle, though, which you must get past if you are going to be open to the information in Decoding Love—you must be willing to set aside your own common-sense assumptions and consider with an open mind the research that I am going to present. I know how difficult this is. When I first read much of the material for this book, my own reaction was skeptical, and my wife serves as a continuing reminder of the difficulty of discarding our romantic prejudices. Whenever I came across an interesting study, I would share it with her. She then considered it against her own experience and decided whether she agreed with it or not. If the study failed to align with her experiences, so much the worse for the study. There are various evolutionary reasons for this, but suffice it to say that we are all deeply resistant to impersonal information, especially when it clashes with our own experiences. And it will clash! All of the research in here focuses on the average person’s response. Part of what makes us fascinating is that as individuals we all differ from the average in lots of idiosyncratic ways. So, all of this will not apply to all readers, but some of it will apply to each reader.

  In the interest of truthful advertising, I should let everyone know that Decoding Love has no magic bullet for finding love. I wish it did. If only it were as easy as telling you to put down this book, trundle yourself off to the supermarket, and wait for a mysterious stranger in aisle five looking for lentils. I can promise that the foundation of the book will be based on the latest scholarly advances in a number of different fields to try to understand something at once utterly familiar and deeply mysterious, the relationship between a man and a woman. You may find it hard to believe that some of the things I discuss have been studied—I found it hard to believe myself at times—but rest assured that I am not simply making things up. This is more important than you might think. It turns out that even many relationship “experts” have been winging it much of the time.

  In fact, if I am really going to follow the truth in advertising approach, I should tell you that this book is not intended primarily as an advice book. Don’t worry. It contains advice along the way. But the deeper interest for me—and I hope for you—is to understand the elusive elements involved when one person is attracted to another and to use that as a window into that which makes us most human. In the end, I hope that this book will provide insight not just into your love life but into your life.

  I don’t want to present myself as an infallible expert. My research has only deepened my sense that relationships are far more complex than I thought and that when it comes to understanding love, we all know less than we think we do. I have been struck again and again by a simple thought: we are sophisticated and advanced in so many ways, yet when it comes to love, it often seems as if we haven’t left the sandbox. Decoding Love is my attempt, if not to get us out of that sandbox, then at least to give us a sense of what strange things might be buried within us. After reading it, I hope you will never think about attraction in quite the same way again.

  1

  The Dating Mind

  What I Learned About Dating from Freud—Or at Least from the Subconscious

  “Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.”

  —Bertrand Russell

  LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO A STRANGER I THINK YOU are going to like—yourself. That’s right. I know you’ve been spending a lot of time with this person. Perhaps you’ve even grown tired of him or her, and in the great American tradition you hope to exchange your old, boring self for an entirely new one. Before you do that, though, consider the possibility that you scarcely know who you are.

  I should be a little more precise when I say that you don’t know yourself. I don’t mean that you are somehow unaware of what you like and don’t like. I mean that your conscious mind is far less aware of the reasons you do things than you think it is. As study after study has revealed, our conscious mind is usually playing catch-up with what is actually going on. It is a little like a busybody who shows up at an accident after it has occurred and then runs around trying to explain to everyone what happened. It tries to come up with explanations that make sense. But those explanations are after the fact and often woefully wrong. As you might imagine, this can have a profound influence on your life, especially your love life.

  TOO SEXY FOR MY MIND

  Consider sexual desire, something we have all felt so many times that I’m sure everyone reading this book can confidently state the order in which it occurs. For example, a man sees a woman across the room and finds her attractive. His desire leads to arousal, and he heads across the room to talk to her. There are countless variations of this, but in each one we would predict that desire precedes arousal—and we would be wrong! New evidence reveals that arousal precedes desire, that “desire” is merely the conscious label we put on physical sensations that have already begun to occur. Not persuaded? In one study, sexual images were flashed so briefly that they were not consciously seen, and the body still reacted physically to those images, even though the conscious mind remained unaware of them. Simply put, we are not the “deciders” we think we are.

  Scientists have even figured out how to manipulate our responses through something psychologists call “priming” (think of priming a pump). In layman’s terms, priming is simply using a certain stimulus to influence how people will react. The ability to “prime” individuals has been shown again and again in all sorts of contexts. Do you want to motivate people to compete more when they play an investment game? Leave them alone with a black briefcase. Do you want them to cooperate more
? Put a backpack in the room. Do you want people to clean up more after themselves? Pipe in the smell of cleaning fluid. Unsurprisingly, sexual arousal also works to prime people, and not just in the bedroom. In one study, when men were given bras to handle, they suddenly placed a higher value on immediate payoffs over long-term consequences, whether those payoffs involved sex or money or simply eating candy bars.

  What does all of this have to do with your love life? It turns out that attraction itself is remarkably susceptible to priming. In a recent study, students were handed either a hot or a cold cup of liquid. Any guesses as to how it influenced the students’ perception of the person handing them the coffee? If you guessed that the students judged the person to be cooler or warmer depending on the heat of the beverage, you are beginning to understand the susceptibility of all of us to priming. If you want a real world example, studies also show that putting someone in a nice setting, such as a fancy restaurant, increased how attractive other people found that person.

  I thought this sounded a little crazy until I interviewed one woman who had experienced exactly that sort of priming. She went on a date to a nice restaurant, had a wonderful time, and spent all week looking forward to her next date, which ended up being a bit of a letdown. But she chalked it up to an off night and went out with him again, only to be disappointed a second time. After a few more lackluster dates, she broke it off and didn’t see him again. The funny thing is, she never thought that the restaurant itself might have “primed” her until I started discussing my research with her. As I told her about how the setting in which you place someone can alter how that person is viewed, she suddenly interrupted me to say that she had just realized that her change of heart was not caused by the man but by the restaurants. The first one had been so lovely that it had cast a romantic glow over the entire date, including the man in question. Without that setting, though, her feelings for him proved to be tepid at best. In other words, her inconstancy was due not to the fickle nature of attraction but to the fickle nature of priming.