Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [87]
Don’t be afraid to reach out and touch someone. In one study, a volunteer would pretend to be taking a survey and would stop someone. The volunteer would then drop the surveys and see who helped pick them up. The biggest effect? When a woman volunteer touched someone on the upper arm. That single gesture created, by far, the biggest boost in people offering to help pick up the surveys. It even works for women in the workplace. Researchers studied what happened when hand touching occurred in a professional situation. While the effect was ambivalent for men who touched women’s hands, the results were uniformly positive for women who touched men’s hands.
NOT FOR HIM OR FOR HER
I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t provide you with a list of turnoffs as well as turn-ons. A dating service called “It’s Just Lunch” did a survey of the biggest pet peeves, and they provide a useful overview of things to avoid. Most of them are things that any person with common sense would steer clear of, but the fact that they all appear on this list means that common sense does not play as big a role in guiding behavior as one would hope.
46% listed answering a cell phone call during the meal.
41% said being rude to the waitstaff.
26% of men and 37% of women complained of their lunch partners talking too much about themselves.
30% listed talking about an ex.
45% of men objected to women who talked about their weight or their newest diet.
56% of women complained about men showing more interest in the waitress than in them.
The good news for women is that men remain much less picky, even when it comes to annoying habits. Only 42 percent of women said they would go out on a date with a man who exhibited one of her pet peeves compared to 71 percent of men.
6
The End of Dating
What I Learned About Marriage
IF THERE IS AN UNSPOKEN BIAS TO MY APPROACH, IT IS MY hope that you will find a long-term relationship. That’s why I’m ending a book about dating and attraction with a chapter about marriage. It didn’t seem right to stop at the altar. Getting happily married is of little use if you can’t stay happily married. And it’s the staying married that is the problem.
I’ve only been married a few years, so I certainly can’t claim any expertise based on personal experience. The funny thing is, though, that even longtime couples don’t have a clue what the secret to success is. When I asked them why they had thrived, most laughed and said something along the lines of, “Who knows?” The good news is that researchers have spent a lot of time examining marriages and have come up with some surprising answers about why a marriage does or doesn’t work.
WHY YOU SHOULD TIE THE KNOT
For people still on the fence about marriage who think that maybe the healthiest response is simply to avoid the entire institution, there is abundant evidence that you will be better off in the long run as part of a married couple. Most important, you will very likely lead a happier life because of it. In one recent survey, 40 percent of married adults said that they were very satisfied compared to only 25 percent of people who had never been married (a result duplicated in a number of other studies). Single people also suffer from depression at far higher rates. Marriage proved more important as a predictor of happiness than one’s job or one’s finances or one’s community. Why? It turns out that there are all sorts of built-in benefits for married couples.
Let’s start with sex. Although the marital bed has long been a source of humor, married couples are having more and better sex than the swinging singles. According to a national survey, 42 percent of married women said that their sex lives were extremely emotionally and physically satisfying compared to 31 percent of single women who had a sexual partner. How important is sex to happiness? If I were going to write the world’s shortest self-help book, it would be: more sex! A slew of studies