Decoding Love - Andrew Trees [98]
Even with the latest research, there remains something unknowable about love. Why do you choose one person rather than another? Why do two people fall out of love? Or remain happily married? Scientists’ incomplete answers to the fundamental questions of attraction teach us an important lesson about our own love lives. Love is endlessly elusive, not a final result but an achievement, one that requires a daily attempt to throw a rope across the chasm that separates us from each other. Perhaps the most that all of this scientific research can do is help us understand our experiences in ways that will improve our chances of finding love and give us the equanimity to bear the inevitable disappointments that will come along the way.
Although I have tried to knock the romantic story line off its pedestal, I never wanted to suggest that we remove it entirely from our lives, because the best lives, the happiest lives, are those that approach life not as a tragedy or as a farce but as a romance. Even with all the difficulties of romance in the modern world, each of us can name inspiring stories of love that really did conquer all. Childhood sweethearts who are as in love at eighty as they were at eighteen. Long-lost love that burns just as brightly when the lovers are finally reunited. I even spoke to one couple who went through a painful divorce only to fall in love again years later and remarry, a testament to the possibility of finding love in the most unlikely places. As E. M. Forster wrote in the epigraph to Howard’s End, “Only connect,” which serves as useful advice not just in our search for love but in the most basic expression of our humanity.
Acknowledgments
WRITING A BOOK IS A LITTLE LIKE A LONG-TERM RELATION- ship that comes to an end. It begins with great enthusiasm. There are periods in the middle when you find yourself wondering what you are doing and worrying that you have made a terrible mistake. It usually goes on far too long. And when it’s finally over, you look back and try to remember what happened.
With that said, I owe a debt to many people who helped me hang in there and see the relationship through to its end. I want to thank Judith Riven, my agent, for reacting with excitement to my initial idea, even though the more usual response might have been an attempt to dissuade me from ranging so far afield. I also want to thank my editor, Lucia Watson, and my publisher, Megan Newman, who were enthusiastic about this project right from the start. In addition, I want to express my gratitude to the rest of the team at Avery who all did an outstanding job.
I am enormously grateful to the New York Public Library, particularly for librarian extraordinaire David Smith. The library’s collections and its generosity in providing work space made this book possible. I also am indebted to the many men and women who were kind enough to share their experiences with me.
And since our parents play a key role in shaping most of our ideas about relationships, I would like to thank my own for planting the seeds, directly and indirectly, for Decoding Love. My mother passed along her interest in relationships, and my father taught me to question the things we assume we know. He deserves an extra thanks for providing the inspiration for Decoding Love by giving me a book about economics. It gives me great pleasure to think that this is probably the first book on attraction ever inspired by the dismal science.
Most of all, I want to thank my wife, Heesun, for being so supportive throughout the inevitable vicissitudes of writing a book, despite her being busy with the trials of pregnancy. She was too kind to point out which gestation was more difficult.
Bibliographical Essay
DECODING LOVE COULD NEVER HAVE BEEN WRITTEN WITHOUT all the outstanding work done by scholars in a variety of fields. To make this book more reader friendly, I have avoided the usual scholarly apparatus of footnotes and bibliography, but I would like to acknowledge