Decoding Love (22 page)
Authors: Andrew Trees
So just what sort of partner should you be looking for? A dazzling array of tests and profiles have been developed to parse personalities and answer this question. As I discussed earlier, many of these tests have already been pressed into service in one form or another to try to help Internet dating services predict with some degree of accuracy which people might be suitable for one another. We are going to ignore all the complicated ins and outs of those theories for a simple reason that involves some good news and some bad news. First, the bad news. No formula has yet been able to crack the mystery of why two people end up together. That is exactly what most of us would predict, even though dating services like to make extravagant claims to the contrary. Now, for the good news. If you give up on coming up with some perfect formula for finding “the one,” understanding what sort of personality might be attractive to you is fairly simple and straightforward. I can give you a few helpful ideas that, if they won’t pinpoint the perfect match, will at least point you in the right direction.
As I said, we are all looking for the same things, which can be boiled down to three areas. An infinite number of variations of these three exist, and the importance any one person gives to each of them will vary. When it comes to a long-term partner, though, these three categories are the foundation. They are:
1. warmth/loyalty;
2. vitality/attractiveness;
3. status/resources.
That is a wide swath of possibilities, but there is one way we can narrow down those three. Studies have found a strong correlation between your self-perception and your ideal for a mate. If you think of yourself as someone who prizes loyalty above all else, you will want to look for someone who has that same quality. Or if you feel that sensitivity is essential, you should look for someone who shares that feeling—actually, according to a recent study, we want someone who is slightly better than we are, so you will probably want someone even more loyal or sensitive than you are. This is especially true for women who are, to repeat myself, the choosier sex. The first step in finding a partner, then, is to identify what qualities about yourself you most value.
Unsurprisingly, both sexes also share similar feelings about what qualities are the most important. In one 1990 study, both men and women considered warmth and consideration the most important qualities. When it comes to intelligence, both sexes want at least average intelligence in someone they are dating, although if the question is whether or not to have sex with someone, men are willing to sleep with someone of less than average intelligence, while women seek someone of more than average intelligence. Women do place a greater emphasis on sincerity, which David Buss argues is a code word to judge a man’s commitment. Women also place more emphasis on having a sense of humor.
Humor deserves its own special treatment. As anyone who skims through the personal ads knows, sense of humor is an absolutely essential quality. Everyone wants it in his or her partner, and no one will admit to lacking it. Any time I asked men or women what qualities they looked for, sense of humor was at or near the top of the list. Why should that be the case? Researchers did a very interesting study that helps provide some answers. They asked a group of women to read vignettes about various men. The key variable that changed from story to story was the man’s sense of humor. In some stories, the fictional man had an excellent sense of humor. In others, he had an average one. And in still others, he had a poor sense of humor. The study found that men with an excellent sense of humor were endowed by female readers with all sorts of other good qualities. Women saw them as more sensitive, more adaptable, happier, more intelligent, more masculine, and even taller. All of these additional attributes were not because of anything in the vignette. They were entirely the result of the man’s sense of humor. In other words, women unconsciously use sense of humor as a proxy for many other traits, such as creativity and intelligence. This helps explain why humor is always high on the list of desired qualities. It is not just for that quality in and of itself but because it acts as a signal for so many other sought-after qualities as well.
To see how deeply this is woven into our psyches, you only need to look at the results when the researchers took into account a woman’s fertility. When a woman was at her peak fertility and looking for a short-term relationship, her attraction to the man with an excellent sense of humor spiked sharply. Men with average or below-average humor found their ratings unchanged, which confirms that humor acts as a proxy for good genes in general. Humor may even be worth the importance that so many of us place on it. One study revealed that women’s humor rating of their partners significantly predicted their general relationship satisfaction. But there remains a crucial difference between the sexes. Studies show that men tend to be the ones who make the jokes, and women tend to be the ones who laugh at them.
Unfortunately, none of this is the holy grail of dating. At best, it gets you only a small way toward figuring out what to look for in a partner. When it comes to personality, science still only has a rudimentary understanding of why one person is attracted to another.
Many of you clever readers probably have a nagging question in the back of your minds going all the way back to those provocative lap dancers at the start of the chapter. All well and good to give us this advice about things to look for and how to attract a mate, you’re thinking, but it sounds as if none of this might be in our control. After all, if attraction is tied to things like a woman’s fertility cycle, who cares who is batting whose eyes at whom? And you would be quite right to raise that objection. While it doesn’t negate the previous pages, it does leave one area unexplored, and that area may be the most powerful of all: our own body chemistry, those signals ranging from smell to ovulation to hormones over which we have no control.
There is a great deal of emerging scientific evidence that being in love does strange things to the brain. According to functional MRI scans, infatuated love activates the same brain circuits as obsession, mania, and intoxication. One study found that the areas of the brain activated by cocaine were the same ones that became active when lovers were shown photographs of their partners. People in love also have high levels of PEA, a natural amphetamine found in chocolate. It may be what helps fuel the sudden ability to go without sleep as you stay up all night with your lover. Louann Brizendine, a neuropsychiatrist, has compared the brain activity of a person in love to that of a drug addict craving his next fix. And when people talk about the pain of a broken heart, they are being more literal than you would think. Rejection activates the same brain circuits as physical pain. In fact, being in love literally rewires the brain. One of the chemicals released is oxytocin. Along with causing feelings of euphoria, it also appears to melt old neural connections so that large-scale changes in the brain can take place. This makes it easier to learn new things, such as replacing feelings of love for an old partner with feelings of love for a new partner.
These physical manifestations of what once seemed to be merely metaphoric descriptions are not surprising when you start to explore how much
physical
space our sexual organs monopolize in our brains. Stefan Klein writes, “If the size of individual organs were commensurate with the space given them in the brain, the penis and the vagina could easily outweigh the entire upper body.” In fact, it’s not much of a stretch to say that the brain itself is the most important sexual organ in the body and that, as Helen Fisher claims, the search for love is a fundamental drive like hunger or thirst.
physical
space our sexual organs monopolize in our brains. Stefan Klein writes, “If the size of individual organs were commensurate with the space given them in the brain, the penis and the vagina could easily outweigh the entire upper body.” In fact, it’s not much of a stretch to say that the brain itself is the most important sexual organ in the body and that, as Helen Fisher claims, the search for love is a fundamental drive like hunger or thirst.
When we fall in love or even when we simply experience desire, a whole slew of chemicals is involved—dopamine, nor-epinephrine, phenylethylamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin to name just a few. Of course, what goes on in men’s brains and what goes on in women’s brains are quite dissimilar. For instance, women in love have activity in different regions of their brain than men in love. This difference can be seen in a wide number of related areas as well. Take, for example, the issue of women’s sexuality. It is a much more elusive phenomenon than men’s sexuality. Physical cues, such as wetness or swelling, do not necessarily indicate sexual arousal or appetite, and according to one study, while heterosexual men were predictably turned on by footage of naked women, the opposite was not true. Videos of naked men did not necessarily cause more arousal for women than the control footage of snowcapped mountains. What really got women going was the degree of sensuality. When that was present, women put men to shame in the polymorphous nature of their desires. Not only did they respond to videos of naked men—they also responded to videos of naked women. In another study, women were even genitally aroused by footage of bonobo chimps mating (which evoked no response from men), although the women did not consciously experience any sense of arousal.
Studies of our neurochemistry can tell us a great deal about the nature of sexual attraction. For example, the waning of desire is a common problem for all couples—and not just the human ones. Researchers have dubbed this the Coolidge effect because of a famous incident involving the former president and his first lady. According to the story, the first couple were separately touring a government farm. Mrs. Coolidge noticed a rooster mounting a hen and asked how often the rooster copulated. The answer was dozens of times a day, to which she replied, “Please tell that to the president.” When Coolidge was later told about this exchange, he asked if the rooster always mated with the same hen and was informed that the rooster copulated with different hens. Coolidge smiled pleasantly and said, “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”
Scientists can now offer concrete evidence of the Coolidge effect by monitoring the level of dopamine in animals before and after copulation (dopamine has been dubbed the “molecule of desire” because it is the chemical that motivates us to attain our goals). Take a recent study of rats. When a male rat was shown a new female, his dopamine rose 44 percent, a number that continued to increase before sex but that dropped off drastically after the rat climaxed. The second time he copulated with the same female, the spike in dopamine was smaller, and after several times, the dopamine level hardly rose above normal. If you placed a new female rat on display, though, the male rat’s dopamine rose by 34 percent. In our age of casual sex, all of this has major implications for our relationships, and a strong chemical argument could be made that people looking for long-term partners would be best served by prolonging the period of courtship. Unfortunately, for the swingers among us, it appears that our grandparents’ advice about people not wanting to buy cows when they can get the milk for free has a scientific basis.
Our brains have a funny quirk built into them that enhances this effect. They thrive on a challenge as long as that challenge is not so difficult that it seems impossible. It is the expectation of a reward, rather than the reward itself, that appears to stimulate dopamine production. We all have experienced this at one time or another. Just think back to the last time you deeply longed for something and how achieving that goal proved far less exciting than thinking about it. In fact, even meaningless goals, such as reaching a new level on a video game, can activate our neurons and get our hearts pumping faster. What this means for women is that their best strategy for ratcheting up a man’s level of dopamine and making herself more irresistible is to make sex with her a challenging goal. Once sex occurs, a man’s dopamine level and his desire will inevitably fall off, although a woman can probably maintain it at a higher level if sex does not become a foregone conclusion but something that a man has to earn on a continual basis.
Of course, once scientists started to consider the chemical basis for love, they realized that what frequently underlies attraction is not strangers in the night exchanging glances but exchanging smells. For a long time, scientists dismissed as preposterous the whole idea that humans could be attracted to one another based on smell. In recent years, though, they have discovered that smell can and often does play a crucial role, which brings me to one of my favorite experiments—the smelly T-shirt test.
It could have been worse. Scientists could have asked us to smell one another’s urine. The first inklings that smell might play a role in human attraction came not from humans but from rats, specifically from a segment of DNA called the major histocompatibility complex or MHC for short, a sequence of more than fifty genes located along a single chromosome that is different for each and every individual. The reason behind this almost infinite diversity is that the MHC acts as a kind of warning system for the body by detecting disease and alerting the body’s defenses to attack, and it has to deal with a bewildering multitude of attackers.
One of the unusual aspects of the MHC is that it is codominant, rather than dominant. With a trait controlled by a dominant gene such as eye color, only the version from one parent will be expressed. With codominant genes, though, both versions continue to function in the offspring. This is a great advantage when it comes to fighting disease. If a father’s genes contain immunity to one variant of the disease, while a mother’s genes contain immunity to a different variant of the same disease, the offspring will have immunity to both versions of the disease.
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