Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [5]
You don’t have to hook your date up to a car battery just to spur a little romance. All you need is something at least mildly scary. In a famous study, an attractive young woman waited for men to cross the Capilano Canyon Suspension Bridge in Vancouver. The bridge is only a few feet wide, more than four hundred feet long, and is constructed of wood boards and cables that tilt and sway in the wind. And if you fall off the bridge, you face a 230-foot drop into rocks and shallow water—just the kind of thing to get the heart racing. Once a man crossed the bridge, the woman in the study would walk up to him and tell him that she was doing a project on attractive scenery. She would then ask him some questions. At the end, she would write down her name and phone number and invite the man to call her if he wanted to talk more about the study. As a control group, a similar experiment was run at a much safer bridge nearby. Once the men had been primed for arousal by crossing the suspension bridge, how much more likely were they to call the woman? A lot more likely—eight times more likely, in fact. Once we are aroused, whether it is from fear or anger or desire, that arousal will change how we look at someone so that a person we might never have noticed becomes someone we feel a strong attraction to.
Before you go out and start trying to prime some romantic prospect, though, be forewarned. All of these effects were the product of controlled environments in which the participants had no idea they were being primed. Consciously setting out to manipulate another person is more difficult and comes with a big risk—if the person becomes aware of the manipulation, not only does it fail to work, but it tends to backfire. And you can’t make someone who isn’t attracted to you become attracted just by scaring him or her. Priming will only intensify the feelings that are already present so that if someone finds you unattractive, this type of priming will only make him or her find you even more unattractive.
All of this may seem far-fetched, but my interviews have turned up countless stories about more idiosyncratic flashpoints that have sparked romantic desire. Call them our personal primers. Something as prosaic as gardening will do. One woman traveled from England for a conference and found herself seated next to a man at breakfast. She never said a word to him. She said that she simply hadn’t had her coffee, although he claimed that she seemed to dislike him and scowled at him the entire time. Later, they ended up at a bar with some other people from the conference, where she remained utterly uninterested in his charms—until they started talking about gardening. It was, she said, “as if the lightning bolt struck.” Why gardening? It conjured up some of her favorite memories as a child playing in the garden with her sister. Even though she lived in a different country than the man and left the day after meeting him, the two married ten months later. Others recounted similar experiences involving different priming—drinking bourbon, discovering that the person went to the same high school, even a certain perfume (which the man later realized was the same one that his mother wore, leading to a most uncomfortable Oedipal moment). The likelihood is that we all have these personal trigger points, even though we are usually unaware of them. We are all also primed by the romantic story line itself, which teaches us to expect love to occur in a certain manner, although that manner may be a largely false and misleading construction. For instance, we tend to believe that a couple should immediately