The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (34 page)

Two years after Anna died, Lou prepared for his first date with an odd ritual. “I remember that I called the synagogue first. First buy my burial plot next to Anna, pay for it, and only then go out on a date,” he recalled. When I asked why, he sighed. “Now we’re getting to the heart of things. This has nothing to do with Natalie, whom I hadn’t met yet. But the idea was that whoever the woman is who is going to come in the future has to understand that I had a life before—thirty-seven years—and even though I’m going to continue living, they have to realize that I’m still part of … that I’m still close to Anna. And I want my kids to see that.”

Apparently four years was long enough after Anna’s death to be able to discuss it, but not so long that the pain of losing her had dissipated. And even though he had just remarried, he still felt a “tug-of-war between letting myself enjoy life with Natalie and being in mourning.” Fortunately, he said, Natalie could tolerate this ambivalence. They could talk about the tough stuff without too much preamble, he told me. “From the very first, I brought up the question of how she could go out with me when I am still so attached to Anna. But that was discussed! On the first date! And
she said to me that as long as I can be present for her in the now, it doesn’t matter to her if I have an attachment in the past. She can live with it. That is what she said, and that was huge for me.”

Lou didn’t have to give anything up—not his feelings about Anna, nor his relationship with his adult kids, nor his ties and responsibilities to Anna’s parents, who were still grieving and fragile. “Still, I am more and more allowing myself to enjoy life again with Natalie, while still dealing with the loss,” he said. After Anna’s death, Lou made paintings and composed a love song as a tribute to the woman with whom he had built the first part of his adult life. “But now I must start my romance with Natalie. Part of that is I tell her that I will love her more every year, and that I am very lucky to have her. I feel a lot of gratitude not to be alone.”

RELIGION AND THE FIRST DATE

Natalie and Lou got married, at least in part, because they happened to find themselves at synagogue on the same Saturday morning, observing their fathers’ yahrzeits (the yearly anniversary of a loved one’s death, according to the Hebrew calendar). They had known each other superficially from Bakol retreats, and when they met up again two years after Anna’s death, Lou felt a little less raw and a little more willing to take a chance on a post-synagogue walk in the freshly fallen snow with an attractive woman.

You might not expect matching yahrzeit dates to be an auspicious omen. But as the astute British writer Alain de Botton points out in
Religion for Atheists
, religion seems tailor-made to foster trust between strangers—even strangers who do not believe in God.

Say what you like about religion, it has a way of bringing like-minded people together and binding them with songs, prayers, stories, and acts of kindness that make them feel good about themselves and the people around them. When congregants get together they often sway, bow, kneel, chant, or rock, as if moving as one organism. Indeed, synchrony is a well-known evolutionary trick.
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Neuroscientist David Eagleman writes that religions “define groups, coordinate behavior and suppress selfishness in favor of cooperation,” which, like other signs of group cohesion, grease the wheels of survival and make us feel like “the smartest, boldest, best guys that ever were.”
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That feeling, a byproduct of the village effect, can be one hell of an aphrodisiac.

It makes sense. Religious rituals lean heavily on the honest signals that establish mutual trust. At one California megachurch service I attended, along with about 2,500 parishioners seated comfortably in red plush seats, the pastor, Dick Bernal, peppered his sermon with regular entreaties to make eye contact with adjacent strangers. “Look at your neighbor and say, ‘You and me are a majority,’ ” he intoned. Then he paused so everyone could do just that, as a huge video camera on a twenty-foot boom zigzagged slowly over the huge sanctuary. After some storytelling and vamping from an R&B band on the podium, he asked us again. “Look at your other neighbor and say, ‘We’ve got a job to do.’ ” Then, after some scripture reading, another entreaty: “Turn to your neighbor and say, ‘I need you and you need me.’ ” And again: “Your neighbor is right there for you. So say, ‘Hang on, baby, hang on.’ ”

It was as if the pastor were applying research by neuroscientist Andrew Newberg and his wife, Stephanie. They devised a ten-minute exercise that trains strangers to make eye contact and hold a
“compassionate thought about the person with whom they are sitting.” Practicing this several times resulted in a 20 percent increase in participants’ willingness to feel close to and spend time with an unfamiliar person.
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Simply making eye contact and empathizing with a stranger relaxed their anxieties about meeting someone new. I wonder if religious gatherings have the same effect. By bringing potential couples together in an environment that relieves their standoffishness, they’re acting as de facto matchmakers.

I checked out my hypothesis with Michael Inzlicht, a Canadian psychologist who studies the neural underpinnings of religious belief, and he thought it plausible. Inzlicht’s research has shown that people with religious faith show more sluggish activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC, a neural area that registers social anxiety. The distress that accompanies social rejection and anxiety about making social blunders, as well as its converse—the feeling of complete existential acceptance that is part of romantic love—is observable via the rate of activity in the ACC.
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Interestingly, Inzlicht and his colleagues found it is also implicated in religious conviction. The ACC becomes activated during periods of social exclusion; it is quieter during religious observance, which believers find soothing.
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Whether it’s a romantic or a religious experience, the ACC helps us monitor where we stand in relation to others. Being included is adaptive and therefore feels good in the here and now, while being ostracized rings physiological alarm bells.
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The role of belief and ritual in stilling these alarms may be one reason why religious practice has persisted. Having linked attendance at religious services to greater happiness and lower rates of cardiovascular disease and death, some epidemiologists have suggested that going to church is more effective than Lipitor, adding an average of two to three years to a person’s life.
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But religious practice also works at the group level, helping people stick together and solve internal conflicts.
⁵⁵
In
The Righteous Mind
,
psychologist Jonathan Haidt quotes a study showing that of two hundred utopian communes founded in nineteenth-century America, only 6 percent of the secular ones survived, compared to 39 percent of the religious ones. The groups with the highest rates of survival required their members to visibly alter their behavior or appearance to show that they belonged, by changing their hair, dress, or diet, or by giving up alcohol, meat, or tobacco.
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This brings to mind the extraordinary longevity of the socially cohesive, vegetarian, nut-eating, teetotaling Seventh-day Adventists we met in
Chapter 2
, and the survival, despite centuries of persecution, of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish “black hat” communities that maintain the strict diet, style of dress, and moral codes of their ancestors in medieval Europe.

As a face-to-face activity that could set the stage for love, religions have a head start. They quell social and existential anxieties. They regularly gather similar people in the same place and make them feel that they belong together. In church, synagogue, temple, or mosque, everyone coordinates their activities, believing their efforts to be in the service of something bigger than themselves. And religious practice encourages the exchange of honest signals. But what happens if you’re having trouble meeting people and you don’t belong to a religious group? Extending the romantic options beyond the immediate locale and capable of sorting people in a number of ways, the Internet seems perfect for putting the right people together. But along with its obvious matchmaking successes come a few tradeoffs.

ONLINE DATING

I confess that I have occasionally acted as a behind-the-scenes social connector. Having watched many of my single friends struggle to meet partners, I introduced a longtime writer friend to one of my former newspaper editors, a delightful fellow who had suddenly found himself single again. As if to illustrate the power of three degrees, I then received this email from a friend of my writer friend:

We met at my local café on a rainy afternoon. Like millions of other people around the globe, one thing she’d tried was online dating—venturing into the questionnaire-heavy waters of PlentyOfFish (POF), eHarmony, OkCupid, and Yahoo Friends. Her best prospect, “Vic,” whom she’d met on POF, seemed promising after some online and telephone banter, jibing nicely with her list of requirements: over six feet tall; currently employed; no health problems; liked the arts and, in particular, photography. But she ultimately discovered that he was mainly interested in phone sex. “I kept saying, ‘Tell me where you are and I’ll meet you.’ But he wasn’t interested in a face-to-face. All he wanted to know was, ‘What room are you in now? Why don’t you describe your sheets to me?’ And that’s the thing about online dating. You can have the most wonderful email exchanges, but then the guy doesn’t turn out to be who he says he is.”

If there’s one constant on the Internet, it’s dissimulation. On Second Life, for example, your (much more attractive) digital avatar can have an affair with another avatar, or a one-off with a virtual prostitute. Catching him doing just that is what sparked David Pollard’s wife, Amy Taylor, to file for divorce in 2008. The British couple had met online and married—twice. First their avatars married; the well-toned, topcoat- and medallion-wearing “Dave Barmy” wedded “Laura Skye,” a svelte and busty six-foot-tall DJ clad in a skintight purple gown. Their vows were exchanged on a tropical fantasy island. Somewhat later, the couple married in real life, at the more lackluster registry office in Cornwall. But when Taylor, an unemployed waitress originally from London, woke from a nap one afternoon to find Pollard’s avatar having virtual sex with a prostitute on Second Life, it was the beginning of the end of their real-world marriage. “It’s cheating as far as I’m concerned, but he didn’t see it as a problem and couldn’t see why I was so upset,” Taylor told the
Times of London
.
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Former couple Amy Taylor and David Pollard with their avatars, Laura Skye and Dave Barmy
. (Image and Figure Credits
8.1
)

Bizarre as this tale is, it illustrates the ease with which people blur fact and fiction in cyberspace. This is especially true of online dating sites, where most people lie about themselves, some shading the truth just a little, others quite a lot. Ron James, who over an eighteen-month period emailed six hundred women he had “met” through JDate (ultimately dating forty to fifty of them), discovered that many of the women had lied about their ages, posted old photos, and misrepresented what they did for a living. “I learned to watch out for sunglasses,” James said.
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“Four out of five people misrepresent themselves,” Eli Finkel, a Northwestern University psychology professor, told me after he had analyzed all the science on online dating he could find. One of the studies, led by Catalina Toma at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, surveyed eighty online daters. After they had created their profiles, the researchers followed up with a tape measure, a scale, and a request to see their driver’s licenses. The results? Eighty-one percent of the online daters had fibbed, inaccurately reporting their
basic details in ways they hoped wouldn’t be detected (women made themselves 8.5 pounds thinner, on average).
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Together with several colleagues, Finkel conducted several lab experiments that mimicked the main features of online dating. In the process he happened on some unsettling findings. “Women are heavier than their profiles say they are. Men are a bit shorter and have fewer resources than they say they do. But the biggest problem,” he said, “is not that people misrepresent themselves, but that we’re not very good at describing what attracts us. When you meet someone you’re attracted to, you just don’t have the insight about why.”