Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [1]
I realize that the scientific approach is not one that comes naturally to people interested in falling in love, but I believe that is because we are the victims of hundreds of years of stories and novels and plays and poems and movies and television shows about a certain version of love. These stories have hammered into us a collective wisdom about what it means to be in love and how to go about finding that love—or what I call the romantic story line. As soon as you look for it, you realize that it’s everywhere. George Orwell’s worst nightmare of mind control never achieved anything like the stranglehold that the romantic story line has over all of us. It wouldn’t matter so much—we all carry around many mistaken beliefs about life—except that it has become a source of misery to many single people and quite a few couples as well. With a divorce rate hovering near 50 percent, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that something has gone seriously awry.
If using science to find love seems crazy, though, imagine how insane our current system would look to an anthropologist from Mars. Our Martian—let’s call him Zog—would soon learn that finding a romantic partner is just about the most important thing most of us do. We lavish vast amounts of time and effort and money on the search. But, despite our best efforts, almost half of us will end up divorcing that same person we worked so hard to find. And then we will begin the search all over again. What else could Zog say, except that we are mad for love?
If the extraterrestrial perspective is too far out, let’s make a quick comparison between our model of romantic choice and arranged marriages, an approach that runs counter to every aspect of the romantic story line. The divorce rate in this country is close to half, while the divorce rate for arranged marriages is almost zero. Talk about a stark contrast. In our culture, by the time we are teenagers we don’t even let our parents choose our clothes, let alone our partners. And we devote huge amounts of energy to the search for love. What is our reward for all of our efforts? Seemingly nothing but heartache, frustration, and failed marriages.
Of course, this comparison is not apples to apples or even apples to oranges (more apples to mangoes, really). There are obviously a host of factors that can influence divorce rates, and Americans have a more tolerant view of divorce than many other countries. But this also tells us something revealing about our romance with romance. The ready acceptance of divorce is itself a sign of how deeply embedded the romantic story line is in our culture, because it depends on one of the deep-seated myths of romantic love, the idea of “the one.” When our marriages fall short of the idealized visions many of us have, we often see it as a sign that we have made a mistake, and our current partner is not really “the one.” The only cure? Divorce and a renewed search for love. Guided by the enormous expectations of the romantic story line, we dive into relationship after relationship only to have almost all of them end in disappointment. And when they do, we rarely question our approach. We simply start a new search for love.
The good news is that the problem is largely not our fault (at least not personally); instead, our difficulties arise from the romantic story line itself, which has become enshrined as virtually the only arbiter of any relationship. It wasn’t always this way. A group