Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [3]
In fact, if I am really going to follow the truth in advertising approach, I should tell you that this book is not intended primarily as an advice book. Don’t worry. It contains advice along the way. But the deeper interest for me—and I hope for you—is to understand the elusive elements involved when one person is attracted to another and to use that as a window into that which makes us most human. In the end, I hope that this book will provide insight not just into your love life but into your life.
I don’t want to present myself as an infallible expert. My research has only deepened my sense that relationships are far more complex than I thought and that when it comes to understanding love, we all know less than we think we do. I have been struck again and again by a simple thought: we are sophisticated and advanced in so many ways, yet when it comes to love, it often seems as if we haven’t left the sandbox. Decoding Love is my attempt, if not to get us out of that sandbox, then at least to give us a sense of what strange things might be buried within us. After reading it, I hope you will never think about attraction in quite the same way again.
1
The Dating Mind
What I Learned About Dating from Freud—Or at Least from the Subconscious
“Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.”
—Bertrand Russell
LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO A STRANGER I THINK YOU are going to like—yourself. That’s right. I know you’ve been spending a lot of time with this person. Perhaps you’ve even grown tired of him or her, and in the great American tradition you hope to exchange your old, boring self for an entirely new one. Before you do that, though, consider the possibility that you scarcely know who you are.
I should be a little more precise when I say that you don’t know yourself. I don’t mean that you are somehow unaware of what you like and don’t like. I mean that your conscious mind is far less aware of the reasons you do things than you think it is. As study after study has revealed, our conscious mind is usually playing catch-up with what is actually going on. It is a little like a busybody who shows up at an accident after it has occurred and then runs around trying to explain to everyone what happened. It tries to come up with explanations that make sense. But those explanations are after the fact and often woefully wrong. As you might imagine, this can have a profound influence on your life, especially your love life.
TOO SEXY FOR MY MIND
Consider sexual desire, something we have all felt so many times that I’m sure everyone reading this book can confidently state the order in which it occurs. For example, a man sees a woman across the room and finds her attractive. His desire leads to arousal, and he heads across the room to talk to her. There are countless variations of this, but in each one we would predict that desire precedes arousal—and we would be wrong! New evidence reveals that arousal precedes desire, that “desire” is merely the conscious label we put on physical sensations that have already begun to occur. Not persuaded? In one study, sexual images were flashed so briefly that they were not consciously seen, and the body still reacted physically to those images, even though the conscious mind remained unaware of them. Simply put, we are not the “deciders” we think we are.
Scientists have even figured out how to manipulate our responses through something psychologists call “priming” (think of priming a pump). In layman’s terms, priming is simply using a certain stimulus to influence how people will react. The ability to “prime” individuals has been shown again and again in all sorts of contexts. Do you want to motivate people to compete more when they play an investment game? Leave them alone with a black briefcase. Do you want them to cooperate more? Put a backpack