Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [2]
The time has come for us to throw the romantic story line overboard and fix a cold, clinical eye on love and its attendant complexities—less romance and more science. While we have continued to struggle along without making any discernible progress in our love lives, science has made significant advances. For example, various methods can now predict with more than 90 percent accuracy whether or not a couple will divorce. In other words, hard as this is to believe, when you are sitting at a candlelit dinner and looking into the eyes of the man or woman you think is Mr. or Ms. Right, you are less likely to make the correct decision about marrying that person than someone in a white lab coat using nothing more than a videotape of the encounter or a multiple-choice test.
Decoding Love is my attempt to regain a place at the table for science. We tend to treat finding love as we do making sausage—we don’t want to look too closely at what goes into it. Well, this book is going to look closely, and it is not always a pretty story. In fact, some of the insights into relationships are distinctly upsetting, particularly if you cling to lily-white ideas about human nature. But my mission is not to tell us flattering truths about ourselves. It is to try to show us as accurately as possible who we are and why we do the things we do.
There is one enormous hurdle, though, which you must get past if you are going to be open to the information in Decoding Love—you must be willing to set aside your own common-sense assumptions and consider with an open mind the research that I am going to present. I know how difficult this is. When I first read much of the material for this book, my own reaction was skeptical, and my wife serves as a continuing reminder of the difficulty of discarding our romantic prejudices. Whenever I came across an interesting study, I would share it with her. She then considered it against her own experience and decided whether she agreed with it or not. If the study failed to align with her experiences, so much the worse for the study. There are various evolutionary reasons for this, but suffice it to say that we are all deeply resistant to impersonal information, especially when it clashes with our own experiences. And it will clash! All of the research in here focuses on the average person’s response. Part of what makes us fascinating is that as individuals we all differ from the average in lots of idiosyncratic ways. So, all of this will not apply to all readers, but some of it will apply to each reader.
In the interest of truthful advertising, I should let everyone know that Decoding Love has no magic bullet for finding love. I wish it did. If only it were as easy as telling you to put down this book, trundle yourself off to the supermarket, and wait for a mysterious stranger in aisle five looking for lentils. I can promise that the foundation of the book will be based on the latest scholarly advances in a number of different fields to try to understand something at once utterly familiar and deeply mysterious, the relationship between a man and a woman. You may find it hard to believe that some of the things I discuss have been studied—I found it hard to believe myself at times—but rest assured that I am not simply making things up.