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By Root 406 0

relationship changed their attitude. Some became more positive, and some became more negative. It would be tempting to point to this and say that, in contrast to the poster study, this reflection helped sharpen people’s sense of the relationship. But this was not the case. What the researchers found was that people came up with thoughts about their relationship that had nothing to do with their initial feelings (which were measured before the study began). Did they question those thoughts? No! They changed their feelings to fit with the reasons they had come up with. Although it took them longer, the other half of the participants also had their attitudes changed just as much, simply by answering questions about their relationship. It would be nice to think that these changes occurred because the couples had recently started dating and would understandably be susceptible to changes of heart, but other studies have revealed that this explanation is highly unlikely. Even when married couples and couples who have dated one another for longer periods of time were used, the results were the same.

Another study found that the attitudes of students who had not analyzed their relationship with their partners were actually a far better predictor of whether the couple would still be dating several months later than the attitudes of students who had analyzed their relationship. Once again, the study found a disconnect between the things people could articulate and the things they actually felt. As numerous studies have found, when we are forced to analyze our preferences for everything from why we like someone to what food we prefer, the reasons we come up with only rarely have anything to do with the actual reasons. As Alexander Pope warned, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing—a warning that is particularly relevant when it comes to thinking about relationships, which are by their very nature complex and difficult to pin down.

What all this should teach us is a certain humility about our own explanations, particularly if we do not have expertise in a particular area. While an art historian can easily provide an array of sophisticated reasons for the superiority of van Gogh to Dilbert, we non-art historians would be better off simply trusting our intuition. The same holds true for dating. Despite what we may think, the vast majority of us should not consider ourselves experts when it comes to relationships, no matter how great a blow that is to our own egos. We can go wrong in all sorts of ways. If someone fits the profile we think we are supposed to love, we may ignore how we actually feel. If our feelings conflict with some larger belief that we have (I could never love a smoker) or that the culture fosters (love should feel like X), we are likely to ignore our feelings and cling to the belief.

All of this is especially true for women, who are more likely than men to spend time analyzing their relationships. No, I’m not being a chauvinist—studies have shown that women tend to analyze their romantic relationships much more than most men. One woman I interviewed said that when she had gotten serious about finding someone to marry, she and a girlfriend decided to meet for lunch to analyze every new candidate. While the lunches themselves proved enjoyable, they were no help at all when it came to her dating. Forced to state exactly why she should or shouldn’t keep seeing someone, she developed increasingly bizarre criteria. She realized things were getting out of hand when she found herself rejecting one man because his ears were too low on his head. She called off the lunches and now tries to curb her need to talk about her dates.

Not only do we do a poor job of figuring out what is important to us about other people, we also don’t know ourselves nearly as well as we think. In one study, people were asked to describe how other people viewed them. The average correlation between how people thought they were viewed and how they were actually viewed was a distinctly lackluster 0.40 or so (one would mean perfect correlation,