59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot (18 page)

A few years ago psychologist Arthur Aron (he of the two bridges) and his colleagues also examined whether it was possible to place people on the fast track to attraction by getting them to chat about certain topics.
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Obviously, the more couples get to know each other, the more likely they are to disclose personal information. Aron and his team wondered whether the reverse was also true—namely, could the act of disclosing personal information to another person make you feel especially close to that person?

The work involved people who didn’t know each other being paired and instructed to chat about increasingly private aspects of their lives. By asking each other a series of preset questions, each couple was given forty-five minutes to play the “sharing game.” The list started with normal conversational openings frequently used at dinner parties (“If you could meet anyone in history, who would it be?”), then quickly moved into “drunk with a close friend” territory (“Do you have a hunch about how, and when, you are going to die?”), before finally getting into “young couple trying to be intimate” land (“When did you last cry in front of someone?”).

Aron knew that chatting about any subject might promote closeness, so he had other pairs of strangers work their way through a control list of small-talk questions (“What are the advantages and disadvantages of artificial Christmas trees?” “Do you prefer digital clocks or the kind with hands?”). At the end of the sessions, each pair was asked to rate how attractive they found each other. Perhaps not surprisingly, the pairs
who had been made to chat about Christmas trees and clocks did not feel that they had developed that all-important sense of chemistry. In contrast, those who had played the sharing game developed the type of intimacy that usually takes months or years to achieve. In fact, the researchers noticed several participants exchanging telephone numbers after the end of the study.

So, when it comes to that all-important first date, go somewhere scary and don’t be afraid of intimate conversation. Common sense says that your date may find you a tad strange. Science suggests that you will be irresistible.

IN 59 SECONDS

Beat Fast, My Still Heart

To help promote the chances of a successful date, choose an activity that is likely to get the heart racing. Avoid slow-moving classical music concerts, countryside walks, and wind chimes. Instead, look toward suspense-filled films, theme parks, and cycle rides. The theory is that your date will attribute a racing heart to you rather than to the activity, and so convince themselves that you have that special something.

The Sharing Game

When it comes to playing the sharing game, it is a case of taking one step at a time. However, providing that each stage seems appropriate, research suggests that disclosing personal information about yourself and encouraging your date to do the same can significantly speed up those all-important feelings of intimacy. Here are ten questions based on items from Aron’s sharing game to help the process:

1. Imagine hosting the perfect dinner party. You can invite anyone who has ever lived. Whom would you ask?

2. When did you last talk to yourself?

3. Name two ways in which you consider yourself lucky.

4. Name something that you have always wanted to do and explain why you haven’t done it yet.

5. Imagine that your house or apartment catches fire. You can save only one object. What would it be?

6. Describe one of the happiest days of your life.

7. Imagine that you are going to become a close friend with your date. What is the most important thing for him or her to know about you?

8. Tell your date two things that you really like about him or her.

9. Describe one of the most embarrassing moments in your life.

10. Describe a personal problem, and ask your date’s advice on how best to handle it.

   
SIX QUICK TIPS FOR DATING

Reflected Glory
. Research shows that women rate a man as more attractive after they’ve seen another woman smiling at him or having a good time in his company.
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So if you want to impress women in a bar or at a party, ask a good female friend to come along and openly laugh at your jokes, then have her quietly slip away. And swear her to secrecy.

Your Eyes Are Bigger Than Your Stomach
. Evolutionary psychologists believe that hungry men should show a preference for bigger women because their size suggests access to food. To test this idea, researchers asked male students entering or leaving a university dining hall to rate the attractiveness of full-length photographs of women of different sizes.
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Hungry students rated the heavier women as more desirable. So if you are female, traditionally built, and interested in a guy, suggest going for that all-important drink before a meal, not after. Or try meeting a couple of hours before eating and then insist he have only a light salad.

Disagree, Then Agree
. You might think that constant praise and head nodding is the way to a person’s heart. However, research suggests that this may not be true. People tend to be more attracted to those who start off lukewarm and then become more positive toward the end of the date.
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So instead of rushing in at a hundred smiles an hour from the very start of the evening, try playing slightly hard to get for the first hour or so and then turn on the charm later. Also, rather than chatting about things that you both like, talk about things that you both dislike. Describing their work in the snappily titled paper “Interpersonal Chemistry Through Negativity: Bonding by Sharing Negative Attitudes About Others,” Jennifer Bosson and her colleagues at the University of South Florida discovered that people feel closer to each other when they agree about dislikes rather than likes.
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Fake a Genuine Smile
. More than a century ago, scientists discovered that although authentic smiles and fake smiles both involve the sides of the mouth being pulled up, only a genuine smile causes crinkling around the eyes. More recent research has started to explore the subtle science of smiling, including trying to identify the signals that make a smile appear especially flirtatious. Initial work suggests that smiles that take longer to spread over a person’s face (more than half a second) are seen as very attractive, especially when accompanied with a slight head tilt toward a partner.
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Love or Lust
. Gian Gonzaga and his colleagues videotaped couples talking about their first date and then asked them to rate whether the discussion was more associated with love or lust.
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When the couples decided it was about the joys of love, the tape showed they leaned toward each other, nodded, and smiled. But when they thought about lust, they were more likely to stick out their tongues and lick their lips. So if you want to know what your date has on his or her mind, look for these key signals. Whereas nodding and smiling might signal liking and possible love, the occasional licking of the lips suggests that it might be your lucky night.

Previous Partners
. It is always a tricky moment on any date. You are getting on well, and then the issue of previous relationships rears its ugly head. Suddenly a whole series of questions runs through your mind: is it better to pretend to be picky and suggest that you have had only one or two sexual partners? Alternatively, should you appear more experienced and go with a much larger number of lovers? According to work conducted by Doug Kenrick at Arizona State University, it is all a question of balance.
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Kenrick presented college students with profiles of people who had different numbers of partners and had them rate each person’s desirability. The results revealed that for women, increasing a man’s number of previous partners from zero to two made them more desirable, but anything over two was seen as unattractive. In contrast, for men, women became more and more desirable as their number of previous partners increased from zero to four, but anything over that was a turnoff.

relationships

The
perils
of “active listening,”
why Velcro can help couples
stick together
,
words
speak
louder than actions, and
a single
photograph
can make
all the difference

ACCORDING TO SOME EXPERTS
, the bedrock of successful marital relationships involves a form of interaction that has come to be labeled “active listening.” This style of communication involves partners’ paraphrasing each other’s statements of feelings, and then attempting to empathize with each other. Imagine, for example, that during a counseling session, a wife explains that she is furious with her husband because he regularly gets drunk, comes home smelling of alcohol, and sits in front of the television late. According to the tenets of active listening, the husband would put his wife’s concerns into his own words and then try his very best to understand why she feels so angry with him. This intuitively pleasing technique is very popular and has given rise to the phrase “I hear what you are saying. …” But is active listening really essential to successful relationships, or is this yet another mind myth?

In the 1990s psychologist and world-renowned expert on marital stability John Gottman and his colleagues at the University of Washington were eager to find out, so they conducted a lengthy and elaborate study.
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They recruited more than a hundred newlywed couples, invited them to the lab, and asked them to sit in front of a camera and chat for fifteen minutes about a topic of ongoing disagreement. The research team then examined every second of the footage, analyzing each comment. Over the next six years, the experimenters
periodically contacted the couples to find out if they were still together and, if so, how happy they were in their relationship.

To test the effectiveness of active listening, they looked at every instance when one person on the film expressed any negative emotion or comment, such as “I am unhappy with your behavior” or “I can’t stand the way you talk to my parents.” The team recorded how the partner responded, looking for the types of comments associated with active listening, such as paraphrases indicating understanding or empathy. By comparing the frequency of such comments from the conversations of couples who had stayed together with those who had divorced and those who were in happy and unhappy relationships, the team could scientifically evaluate the power of active listening.

Gottman and his team were surprised and shocked by their own findings. Instances of active listening were few and far between, and they didn’t predict whether a couple would be successful and happy. According to the results of the study, active listening was unrelated to marital bliss.

Amazed by this outcome, the team turned to another set of videotapes for a second opinion. In a previous study they had followed a group of couples for thirteen years, and now they set about doing the same kind of analysis on those tapes. They found a similar pattern in the data, which suggested that even the most successful, long-term, and happy couples rarely engaged in anything that resembled active listening.

According to Gottman, trying to paraphrase and empathize with your partner when he or she is being critical is a bridge too far and requires a kind of “emotional gymnastics” that few can achieve. Although the team’s conclusions proved controversial, especially with many relationship counselors who seemed wedded to the notion of active listening, other research also failed to provide evidence that active listening forms the cornerstone of a successful relationship.
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So if listening to and responding to a partner’s comments is not the best way forward, what is? The Gottman study suggests that couples in long-term and happy heterosexual relationships tend to exhibit a very particular pattern in times of conflict. The female usually raises a difficult issue, presents an analysis of the problem, and suggests some possible solutions. Males who are able to accept some of these ideas, and therefore show a sense of power sharing with their partner, are far more likely to maintain a successful relationship. In contrast, couples in which the males react by stonewalling, or even showing contempt, are especially likely to break up.

Teaching couples to change the way they respond to each other when the going gets tough is possible, but time-consuming and difficult. However, the good news is that there are several techniques that are surprisingly quick to learn and that can also help people live happily ever after. The only requirement is the ability to write a love letter, place a photograph above the fireplace, and turn back the hands of time to your very first date.

IN 59 SECONDS

According to research conducted by John Gottman, the extent to which you know the minutiae of your partner’s life is a good predictor of how long your relationship will last. The following fun quiz will help evaluate how well you and your partner know each other. You should answer the questions by trying to guess the answer that your partner will give. Your partner then tells you the actual answer, and you award yourself one point for each correct response. You then swap roles and repeat the process. Finally, add your two scores together, which will result in a total between 0 and 20.