Decoding Love (26 page)
Authors: Andrew Trees
I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t provide you with a list of turnoffs as well as turn-ons. A dating service called “It’s Just Lunch” did a survey of the biggest pet peeves, and they provide a useful overview of things to avoid. Most of them are things that any person with common sense would steer clear of, but the fact that they all appear on this list means that common sense does not play as big a role in guiding behavior as one would hope.
46% listed answering a cell phone call during the meal.41% said being rude to the waitstaff.26% of men and 37% of women complained of their lunch partners talking too much about themselves.30% listed talking about an ex.45% of men objected to women who talked about their weight or their newest diet.56% of women complained about men showing more interest in the waitress than in them.
The good news for women is that men remain much less picky, even when it comes to annoying habits. Only 42 percent of women said they would go out on a date with a man who exhibited one of her pet peeves compared to 71 percent of men.
6
The End of Dating
What I Learned About Marriage
I
F THERE IS AN UNSPOKEN BIAS TO MY APPROACH, IT IS MY hope that you will find a long-term relationship. That’s why I’m ending a book about dating and attraction with a chapter about marriage. It didn’t seem right to stop at the altar. Getting happily married is of little use if you can’t stay happily married. And it’s the
staying
married that is the problem.
F THERE IS AN UNSPOKEN BIAS TO MY APPROACH, IT IS MY hope that you will find a long-term relationship. That’s why I’m ending a book about dating and attraction with a chapter about marriage. It didn’t seem right to stop at the altar. Getting happily married is of little use if you can’t stay happily married. And it’s the
staying
married that is the problem.
I’ve only been married a few years, so I certainly can’t claim any expertise based on personal experience. The funny thing is, though, that even longtime couples don’t have a clue what the secret to success is. When I asked them why they had thrived, most laughed and said something along the lines of, “Who knows?” The good news is that researchers have spent a lot of time examining marriages and have come up with some surprising answers about why a marriage does or doesn’t work.
For people still on the fence about marriage who think that maybe the healthiest response is simply to avoid the entire institution, there is abundant evidence that you will be better off in the long run as part of a married couple. Most important, you will very likely lead a happier life because of it. In one recent survey, 40 percent of married adults said that they were very satisfied compared to only 25 percent of people who had never been married (a result duplicated in a number of other studies). Single people also suffer from depression at far higher rates. Marriage proved more important as a predictor of happiness than one’s job or one’s finances or one’s community. Why? It turns out that there are all sorts of built-in benefits for married couples.
Let’s start with sex. Although the marital bed has long been a source of humor, married couples are having more and better sex than the swinging singles. According to a national survey, 42 percent of married women said that their sex lives were extremely emotionally and physically satisfying compared to 31 percent of single women who had a sexual partner. How important is sex to happiness? If I were going to write the world’s shortest self-help book, it would be: more sex! A slew of studies have found connections between healthy sexual activity and longevity. In one study, the death rate for the least sexually active group was twice as high as the most active group. Economists have even quantified the benefits in dollars. As I mentioned in the chapter on economics, increasing the frequency of sexual intercourse from once a month to once a week generates the same amount of happiness as earning an additional $50,000 a year. Economists have also placed a value on marriage itself. A lasting marriage is the equivalent of earning an extra $115,000 annually.
Scientists have discovered all sorts of benefits due to regular sex—better blood flow and circulation, boosting the immune system, warding off colds and infections, making us less susceptible to depression. A survey of 16,000 Americans found that those who had the most sex were also the happiest. What does this have to do with getting married? Married people have a huge built-in advantage when it comes to regular sex for the simple reason that they have a lifelong sexual partner. That’s not to say that they don’t face their own challenges, such as maintaining passion for one another over the years, but they do have more sex—on average 30 percent more—and better sex, according to the studies.
There are other benefits as well. Even leaving sex aside, marriage improves your health. As we saw in chapter 3½, single people have significantly higher rates of mortality (50 percent higher for women, and a whopping 250 percent higher for men), and not being married reduces the average man’s life more than heart disease. Not being married shortens a woman’s life more than cancer or living in poverty. There are a host of reasons for this. Men are likely to cut back on a range of unhealthy activities, such as drinking, when they get married. Marriage also brings significant economic advantages. Married men and women enjoy higher average household incomes. In 1997, married couples averaged $47,129 compared to $26,203 for single men and $15,892 for single women.
Perhaps most important, there are the subtle and less quantifiable benefits. What sort of value do you place on companionship? It is difficult to put a number on that, but studies have shown that loneliness causes stress and weakens the immune system. We are social beings, and marriage is the great bulwark against finding ourselves alone. Luckily, most seem to realize this. When people are asked to name their top goals, a happy marriage always heads the list. For those who want more evidence on the benefits of matrimony, I invite you to read Maggie Gallagher and Linda Waite’s
The Case For Marriage
, which systematically lays out all of these advantages and numerous others that accrue to happily married couples. But these numbers come with a big caveat—an unhappy marriage can turn these rosy statistics in the other direction. According to one study, an unhappy marriage increases your chances of getting sick by 35 percent and shortens your life by an average of four years. And economists have estimated that getting divorced is the equivalent of losing $66,000 annually.
The Case For Marriage
, which systematically lays out all of these advantages and numerous others that accrue to happily married couples. But these numbers come with a big caveat—an unhappy marriage can turn these rosy statistics in the other direction. According to one study, an unhappy marriage increases your chances of getting sick by 35 percent and shortens your life by an average of four years. And economists have estimated that getting divorced is the equivalent of losing $66,000 annually.
Of course, if a happy marriage was easy to achieve, we’d have a much lower divorce rate and far fewer affairs. Unfortunately, it’s much easier to fall in love than it is to stay in love. Just as we can use the body’s own chemistry to chart the effect of infatuation, we can also use it to understand that waning desire is a natural part of any long-term relationship. As Oscar Wilde said, “The essence of romance is uncertainty,” but uncertainty is precisely what you are giving up when you get married. Sadly, finding the right person can never be reduced simply to smelling sweaty T-shirts, appealing though that prospect might be. As studies have shown, this chemical element of romance lessens over time. One researcher has found that the altered brain chemistry of falling in love lasts roughly six to eight months. Others have found that it takes two to three years for the feelings of infatuation to fade to feelings of neutrality—not mild attraction but neutrality!
The problem with relying on our passion to guide us is that a marriage has to stand the test of time to be successful. Some people may feel relieved when they get divorced, but I don’t think anyone has ever counted it as a success. To base a long-term relationship on short-term chemistry alone is a little like buying a car based on how it’s going to run for the first one hundred miles.
This isn’t a marital problem. It’s a human problem. We all experience this waning of desire in countless ways. The excitement of anticipation gives way to the dullness of routine. If you have ever bought a new car or started a new job, you have experienced this sensation. This isn’t such a big deal when it comes to a car purchase. If you have the money, it’s a relatively simple matter to get a new car. But it is a huge deal when it comes to marriage. The funny thing about the waning of our desires is that even though all of us have gone through this multiple times, studies show that we forget about it each and every time. We also do a terrible job of predicting how we will feel in the future, always expecting that it will be more like that present than it is. You can imagine how potentially destructive these habits of mind are for a couple who marries while still infatuated with each other.
If you are one of those people who simply refuse to accept this and want your passion to burn as brightly after forty years as it does after one day, there is one possible solution—more sex. According to several experiments, animals show less habituation to positive feelings when given oxytocin, which is released during sex. It’s not clear how much sexual activity it will take to hold habituation at bay, but I invite any energetic readers to give it their best shot. For the rest of us, it’s time to come to terms once again with the cost of the romantic story line.
Perhaps the biggest single problem for many married couples today is the enormous expectations that are routinely loaded onto marriage by both the culture at large and the couples themselves. Just think of the various social roles that have been conflated into the marital relationship—best friend, closest kin relationship, sexual playmate, and economic partner to name just a few. So many extravagant hopes are now built into marriage that some researchers have dubbed it “the cult of the couple”—a cult that can even prove fatal. According to research, men who murder their wives are especially strong believers in the idea of finding a soul mate and practicing strict monogamy. Traditionally, though, this was not the case. Your wife or husband was just that, and people did not expect their partners to perform numerous other roles, such as best friend.
Of course, traditionally, marriage itself was based on a number of considerations of which love was only one. A whole array of forces—economic, religious, and societal—buttressed the commitment between a man and a woman, but that has changed. Today, for example, fewer women are having children, and more women are economically independent than ever before. In many ways, that’s a wonderful development. But it means that even the economic and parental bonds that used to tie a husband and wife together are disappearing. As these traditional ties disappear, the only thing left holding the relationship together is love, and that is a very fragile reed on which to rest so much weight. With all of those other bonds stripped away, marriage is dependent solely on personal fulfillment—or, to put a fig leaf on it, love. But this shift has only worsened the problem. The more committed we become to the narrow idea that marriage should be the source of most of our happiness, the more dissatisfied we inevitably become with the relationship itself. In the early 1970s, the percentage of men who described their marriage as “very happy” was 70 percent. By the mid-1990s, that number had fallen to 64 percent. Women have experienced the same drop, the number of “very happy” falling from 67 percent to 62 percent. It’s no accident that this has occurred at precisely the same time that love has been enshrined as
the
key to marriage.
the
key to marriage.
At the very least, we need to recognize that marriage is not a solution to all of life’s problems. In
A General Theory of Love
, the authors declare, “When they do get down to relating, Americans find they have been tutored for years in the wrong art. In a dazzling vote of confidence for form over substance, our culture fawns over the fleetingness of being
in love
while discounting the importance of
loving.
” In fact, the relationship itself, for all of its benefits, creates a number of problems all on its own, so much so that one psychologist has called marriage “a disagreement machine.” Evolutionary psychology itself provides little comfort for those who would like to believe that a happy marriage is a simple and natural achievement. As David Buss has noted, “Humans were not designed by natural selection to coexist in niceness and matrimonial bliss. They were designed for individual survival and genetic reproduction. The psychological mechanisms fashioned by these ruthless criteria are often selfish ones.”
A General Theory of Love
, the authors declare, “When they do get down to relating, Americans find they have been tutored for years in the wrong art. In a dazzling vote of confidence for form over substance, our culture fawns over the fleetingness of being
in love
while discounting the importance of
loving.
” In fact, the relationship itself, for all of its benefits, creates a number of problems all on its own, so much so that one psychologist has called marriage “a disagreement machine.” Evolutionary psychology itself provides little comfort for those who would like to believe that a happy marriage is a simple and natural achievement. As David Buss has noted, “Humans were not designed by natural selection to coexist in niceness and matrimonial bliss. They were designed for individual survival and genetic reproduction. The psychological mechanisms fashioned by these ruthless criteria are often selfish ones.”
Although a successful marriage does bring all sorts of wonderful benefits, we would all be much more likely to achieve that goal if we lowered our expectations about what marriage will do for us. Actually, you can make the argument that we would be better off if we lowered our expectations across the board. When it comes to life satisfaction, Danes easily outclassed the competition in an international survey. One of the reasons is that they have consistently low expectations for the future. But to return to the question of love, it’s not that we shouldn’t include it as one of the considerations when we get married. However, love alone is not enough. Perhaps the question is not why almost half of our marriages end in divorce but, given our exalted expectations, how half of them manage to succeed. I hope this chapter can offer some answers to that question.
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