Decoding Love (2 page)
Authors: Andrew Trees
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.
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.
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.
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
L
ET 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.
ET 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.
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.
If you want a startling indication of how easily romantic attraction can be spurred with the right priming, try exposing your date to extreme duress, or a little dating technique I like to call shock therapy for love. You see, we don’t do a very good job of distinguishing between sexual arousal and arousal related to other emotions, such as fear. So one way to prime an individual for romantic attraction is to scare the hell out of him or her. In one study, male students were brought into a room with a large amount of electrical equipment. The male students were told that the study involved the effect of electrical shocks on learning, but the real purpose was to study the effect of fear on arousal. There were two levels of shock, one that was very painful and another that was mild. An attractive woman was also supposedly taking the shock test, although she was actually part of the experiment. The level of the shock was determined by a coin flip. The experimenter then told the student that he needed to get more information about the student’s feelings before administering the shocks, because that could influence the experiment. The male student was sent away to answer a questionnaire, including questions about how much he would like to kiss the woman in the study and how much he would like to ask her out on a date. Being faced with a painful electrical jolt was like Cupid’s arrow. The students who were anticipating the painful shocks were significantly more attracted to the woman and had both a greater desire to kiss her and to ask her on a date. In fact, one can simply pretend to go through a painful experience and still elicit a similar reaction. In another study on attraction, male students pretended that a female interrogator was painfully torturing them by putting acid into their eyes (the interrogator actually used water). The students so thoroughly embraced their roles—they screamed and shook with fear—that they later reported they had experienced real fear. The result? They were far more attracted to the female interrogator than male students who only pretended that they were being interrogated in a mild way—a radical twist on the idea of sexual role playing. Perhaps the CIA can get itself off the hook for its new interrogation methods by claiming that they are really dating techniques.
You don’t have to hook your date up to a car battery just to spur a little romance. All you need is something at least mildly scary. In a famous study, an attractive young woman waited for men to cross the Capilano Canyon Suspension Bridge in Vancouver. The bridge is only a few feet wide, more than four hundred feet long, and is constructed of wood boards and cables that tilt and sway in the wind. And if you fall off the bridge, you face a 230-foot drop into rocks and shallow water—just the kind of thing to get the heart racing. Once a man crossed the bridge, the woman in the study would walk up to him and tell him that she was doing a project on attractive scenery. She would then ask him some questions. At the end, she would write down her name and phone number and invite the man to call her if he wanted to talk more about the study. As a control group, a similar experiment was run at a much safer bridge nearby. Once the men had been primed for arousal by crossing the suspension bridge, how much more likely were they to call the woman? A lot more likely—
eight times
more likely, in fact. Once we are aroused, whether it is from fear or anger or desire, that arousal will change how we look at someone so that a person we might never have noticed becomes someone we feel a strong attraction to.
eight times
more likely, in fact. Once we are aroused, whether it is from fear or anger or desire, that arousal will change how we look at someone so that a person we might never have noticed becomes someone we feel a strong attraction to.
Before you go out and start trying to prime some romantic prospect, though, be forewarned. All of these effects were the product of controlled environments in which the participants had no idea they were being primed. Consciously setting out to manipulate another person is more difficult and comes with a big risk—if the person becomes aware of the manipulation, not only does it fail to work, but it tends to backfire. And you can’t make someone who isn’t attracted to you become attracted just by scaring him or her. Priming will only intensify the feelings that are already present so that if someone finds you unattractive, this type of priming will only make him or her find you even more unattractive.
All of this may seem far-fetched, but my interviews have turned up countless stories about more idiosyncratic flashpoints that have sparked romantic desire. Call them our personal primers. Something as prosaic as gardening will do. One woman traveled from England for a conference and found herself seated next to a man at breakfast. She never said a word to him. She said that she simply hadn’t had her coffee, although he claimed that she seemed to dislike him and scowled at him the entire time. Later, they ended up at a bar with some other people from the conference, where she remained utterly uninterested in his charms—until they started talking about gardening. It was, she said, “as if the lightning bolt struck.” Why gardening? It conjured up some of her favorite memories as a child playing in the garden with her sister. Even though she lived in a different country than the man and left the day after meeting him, the two married ten months later. Others recounted similar experiences involving different priming—drinking bourbon, discovering that the person went to the same high school, even a certain perfume (which the man later realized was the same one that his mother wore, leading to a most uncomfortable Oedipal moment). The likelihood is that we all have these personal trigger points, even though we are usually unaware of them. We are all also primed by the romantic story line itself, which teaches us to expect love to occur in a certain manner, although that manner may be a largely false and misleading construction. For instance, we tend to believe that a couple should immediately fall head over heels in love, even though those people are precisely the ones who tend to end up in divorce court (more on that later, in the chapter on marriage).
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