These are some of my favorite things: the color blue, strawberries, and love. But what exactly is romantic love? Depends on who you ask.
Most of us are pretty sure we know what love is when we feel it. Yet the emotion, the state of mind, of love is so much more complex and varied than any one person, even one specialist, can describe fully. What you find depends on which part of the elephant you touch.
Books offering fresh insights about love have been authored by a variety of scholars, including a philosopher, a mathematician, and a psychologist. From three of these new books, I’ve gathered 11 common myths.
11 LOVE MYTHS
1. Love is an irrational emotion that you either are “in” or not “in.” Not so, according to Berit Brogaard, a philosopher and author of On Romantic Love: Simple Truths about a Complex Emotion. In fact, love admits of degrees, insists Brogaard. You can love a little, a lot, or not at all. Sometimes your feelings are quite rational, while at other times, they’re utterly irrational.
2. You can’t make yourself fall out of love. But you can. Emotions are subject to a kind of rational control. You can use strategies to help you fall out of a love that’s wrong for you, claims Brogaard, whose book is a pleasant mix of strong opinion, detailed anecdote, and academic credibility.
3. Falling in love is a unique physiological state. Not really, writes Brogaard. It’s a lot like what happens when you react to perceived danger with a rush of cortisol and other hormones that prepare you to flee or fight. Due to a new potential love’s mystery and sexual attraction, your amygdala hyper-activates. Neurotransmitters signal the adrenal glands that something exciting, scary, and mysterious is happening. Love can feel and act in your brain a lot like cocaine.
4. The emotional pain of a failed romantic love is unlike any other. Not true, claims Brogaard, citing studies that found the same neurons firing when a person experiences either physical or psychological pain.
PICK A NUMBER, PICK A MATE
5. Meeting the right person is a random toss of the dice. Not so, posits Hannah Fry, a mathematician and complexity scientist who is the author of The Mathematics of Love: Patterns, Proofs, and the Search for the Ultimate Equation (a TED Original). She offers a tactic to increase your odds: be less picky. Rather than insist you’re only attracted to and willing to date a small percentage of those you meet (who fulfill your age and educational preferences), raise that percentage and see your odds improve. Also, don’t insist on someone having every one of your ideal attributes. Many happy couples have shared that they never thought they’d find joy with someone like their beloved, someone who perhaps kills spiders or hates jazz.
6. If you’re not gorgeous, forget about finding a great mate. Not true. According to Fry, when someone is trying to decide, say at a bar or party, whether to ask someone out, they make that choice based on who else is nearby. She suggests making use of the same decoy effect used for ages by marketing types: when you go out seeking a date or mate, take a friend with you who looks a bit like you, but who is slightly less attractive. The Mathematics of Love, by the way, is quite brief and breezily written, so the math never overwhelms.
7. There’s always someone out there who would be better suited as your life partner. Not necessarily. According to “optimal stopping theory,” writes Fry, you would figure out the length of your dating life, then reject the first 37 per cent of those you date, opting to stick with the next person who was better than those you’d previously rejected. Of course, explains Fry with a delightfully wry sense of humor, there are flaws in this scenario. She explores those in some depth, leaving readers to choose for themselves, after all, the hazards of choosing too soon or of being too choosy altogether. [Join Fry on Twitter @fryrsquared]
SCIENCE TRIES ITS HAND
8. Taking turns sharing what you resent about one another is a valid therapy technique. No way, writes John Mordechai Gottman, a psychology and relationship researcher for the past 40 years in his Principia Amoris: The New Science of Love.In fact, anger does not bring about catharsis. By freely expressing your most negative thoughts, you end up even angrier.
9. To get, you have to give an equal amount. But that doesn’t work well at all, insists Gottman. Quid pro quo thinking has been found to be a hallmark of relationships that are failing. In the best relationships, each gives without expecting a return. (Also see “A Marriage Manifesto: Beyond Tit-for-Tat”)
10. Love is unpredictable. The course of love is not unpredictable at all, writes Gottman. Many replicable studies have demonstrated that love is quite predictable. In his own lab, Gottman has been able to predict divorce over a six-year period with 90 per cent accuracy. Much of that predictability is based on how couples handle conflict and how many positive vs. negative comments they make to each other.
11. Couples will inevitably stop having much sex. Ah, but Gottman refutes this common misconception beautifully: “Using the math of game theory I proved that a couple will stop having very much sex if there is any negative cost at all to saying ‘no’ to sex. As long as the cost of saying ‘no’ to an invitation to sex by one’s partner is just slightly positive (and not zero), I showed that the couple will have a lot of sex.” (A fuller explanation of this surprising and important statement is on page 51 of Principia Amoris, a book I highly recommend.)
Copyright (c) 2015 by Susan K. Perry, whose novel Kylie’s Heel features some of the pitfalls of love. Also see her Loving in Flow: How the Happiest Couples Get and Stay That Way.
