Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [0]
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1 - The Dating Mind
Chapter 2 - The Dating Animal
2 ½ - The Dating Animal, Part II
Chapter 3 - The Dating Culture
3 ½ - The Dating Culture, Part II
Chapter 4 - The Dating Game
Chapter 5 - The Dating Dance
Chapter 6 - The End of Dating
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Bibliographical Essay
Index
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Trees, Andrew, date. Decoding love : why it takes twelve frogs to find a prince and other revelations from the science of attraction / Andrew Trees. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-440-68590-3
1. Sexual attraction. 2. Dating (Social customs). I. Title.
HQ23.T
306.73—dc22
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To Heesun,
for saving me from having to go on any more first dates
Introduction
Romance and Its Discontents
RELATIONSHIPS SHOULD BE SO SIMPLE. YOU MEET SOMEONE. You fall in love. If all goes well, that person falls in love with you. And as the fairy tale says, you both live happily ever after. But the reality is rarely so simple. My goal is to explore why that is the case by taking a rational approach to that most irrational of pursuits, the search for love. Imagine Jane Austen’s romances rewritten by people like Charles Darwin and Adam Smith, and you will have some idea of what sort of book this is. The simple premise behind Decoding Love is that despite our ingrained prejudice, our current model of finding love is deeply flawed, and science can actually provide a great deal of insight into our quest for romance. It will take something we think we know well—how to find love—and reveal that many of our assumptions are wrong.
There are any number of shocking discoveries that researchers have uncovered in recent years. For instance, did you know that women generally make the first move in a bar? That men find women who are ovulating more attractive? That human testicle size is an indication of how promiscuous women are? That what you can put into words about