Decoding Love: Why It Takes Twelve Frogs to Find a Prince, and Other Revelations from the Science of Attraction

268 Pages·2009·0.92 MB·English

by  Andrew Trees

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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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

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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 romantic 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.