Situations Matter

by Sam Sommers

  Quite simply, forbidden relationships entice and shared secrets intoxicate.

  3. Similarity. It’s not only sharing a secret that draws us closer to someone. A wide range of common experiences also makes attraction more likely. Like interacting with a stranger and finding out that this person likes (or dislikes) the same band you do. Or laughs at the same joke. Or just gives the same answer to a sentence completion task in a research study.10 Sharing a response to even the most trivial of events provides a moment of connection to other people.

  Other forms of similarity are powerful as well. James Carville and Mary Matalin aside, more often than not we wind up in relationships with others of similar attitude, life experience, and demographics. In large part, this is explained by our tendency to be most comfortable around people like us—to move to neighborhoods, join organizations, sit at cafeteria tables, and sign up for dating websites composed of similar others. While the unfamiliar can be exotic, opposites don’t attract as often as folk wisdom might suggest.

  In fact, our tendency to be drawn to those who are similar can even be seen in terms of physical beauty. Attractiveness may be a subjective determination, but you still find reasonable consensus when people rate the appearance of others. There’s a reason we do a double take when we see celebrity pairings like Julia Roberts/Lyle Lovett, Christie Brinkley/Billy Joel, Paulina Porizkova/Ric Ocasek: studies indicate that most couples are fairly well matched on attractiveness, whether assessed by outside observers or the individuals themselves.11 This is a research analysis you can duplicate on your own—just head to your local bar, rate the people you see on a scale of 1–10, and count how many couples match up with similar numbers. All you need to pull off this study is the cover charge, paper and pen, and a ready-made excuse for why you’re staring at strangers and scribbling down notes.

  Such matching by beauty reflects the market-driven nature of real-life relationships. Sure, all else being equal, we tend to prefer the most attractive partner out there. In the end, though, reality usually trumps fantasy, and we gravitate toward mates who are in our own league—those whom we believe to be less likely to reject outright our advances. Unless you’re a 1980s-era recording star, that is.

  SO YOU CAN ADD to the list a number of other situational forces that affect relationships: reciprocity, obstacles, and similarity, for starters. And this doesn’t even touch on other contextual influences on attraction like power, social status, or earning potential. Even though we defer to thinking of attraction in face/butt/wit terms—as revolving around preferences for internal traits and physical characteristics—external forces dictate how and when we’re drawn to others. As magical an experience as falling in love can be, it’s still one governed by mundane considerations like geography and tempered by the cold-blooded, free-market realities of supply and demand.

  HEARTS AFLUTTER

  Our shortsightedness when it comes to how attraction really works goes beyond a WYSIWYG fixation on physical and personality traits. A wide range of assumptions about falling in love just don’t stand up to scientific scrutiny. And since this chapter has already started to profane the sacred view of love as inscrutable or too magical for the whims of mundane context, why not go for broke and debunk a few other old myths while we’re at it?

  Take, for instance, our rudimentary understanding of the physiology of attraction. Clearly, there’s a biological component to falling for someone, whether a pounding heart, shallow breathing, or sweaty palms. At least, that’s what the song lyrics from a wide range of tracks in my iTunes collection tells me. But is this right? Is it valid to assume that falling in love brings about a specific set of physical changes? Because some evidence—scientific as well as cinematic—suggests otherwise, indicating that attraction can actually result from arousal rather than cause it. You may recall this being one of the recurring precepts of that astute mid-1990s celluloid commentary on the human condition, Speed. That’s right, the Keanu Reeves bus movie.

  In the film, Sandra Bullock finds herself behind the wheel of a bus wired with a bomb. In order to prevent it from detonating, she has to weave in and out of traffic, maintaining a speed above fifty miles an hour (or, as some might suggest, driving like a regular city bus driver). As Bullock’s character starts to bond with Keanu’s transit cop, she warns him about the dangers of falling in love under such harrowing conditions: “relationships that start under intense circumstances, they never last.”

  In other words, sometimes it’s the arousing situation that causes attraction rather than vice versa. Once the extreme conditions that forged the strong feelings have subsided, so do the feelings. It’s a surprisingly trenchant analysis of human nature from an action film, not to mention surprisingly prescient screenwriting that provided a built-in explanation for Keanu’s (wise) decision to opt out of appearing in the disappointing sequel.

  So what’s the true nature of the relationship between arousal and attraction? Is bodily change simply a response to falling for someone, or can it also be a precursor of romantic feelings? Can a racing heart actually bring about feelings of love instead of vice versa? To answer these questions, there’s really only one place to go. No, not Paris, Venice, or even Monte Carlo. It’s North Vancouver, British Columbia. Naturally.

  THE CAPILANO SUSPENSION BRIDGE spans 450 feet and is touted as Vancouver’s oldest visitor attraction. The bridge rests 230 feet above the Capilano River. But “rests” is a misnomer.

  A more apt description of the bridge would be that it’s a five-foot-wide pedestrian pathway constructed of pliable wooden planks attached to flexible wire cables. When people walk across the bridge, it sways. Not to mention bounces, teeters, wobbles, and lurches. Footage of the Capilano during a windstorm would make the slow-motion movie clip hall of fame.

  Capilano Suspension Bridge, North Vancouver, British Columbia

  [Credit: Photo courtesy of Lisa and Pat Shin]

  Despite the rocky canyon and shallow rapids below, the wire handrails on the Capilano are quite low—for most adults, no higher than the nipple neighborhood. This makes walking across it a hair-raising experience, which is why each year three-quarters of a million people agree to cough up the $26.95 CAD for the pleasure. So crossing the bridge leaves visitors with the very same physiological symptoms identified above as potential signs of attraction: shortness of breath, elevated blood pressure, quickened pulse.

  In an ingeniously creative series of studies designed to assess the possibility that arousal can be the cause rather than symptom of attraction, University of British Columbia researchers Donald Dutton and Art Aron capitalized on the spine-tingling nature of their local Capilano. 12 Essentially, they tested whether the experience of crossing the bridge could trick people into feeling like they were falling in love.

  They arranged for a female interviewer to approach men aged eighteen to thirty-five right in the middle of their bridge crossing. The interviewer claimed to be researching how scenic views affect creativity. So she asked respondents to spend a minute looking at an ambiguous picture of a young woman who was covering her face with one hand and reaching out with the other. Then she asked them to write a couple of sentences to describe what they saw in the image.

  It wasn’t an ordinary request, to be sure—I don’t know about you, but I rarely do my best writing while perched precariously over rocky terrain. But the interviewer asked politely, she provided a pen and paper, and the respondents went along with it. After the men wrote their quick work of high-elevation fiction, the interviewer offered polite thanks and said she’d be happy to explain the study in more detail at a later date. She tore off a slip of paper, wrote down her name and phone number, and gave it to the participant before walking off for her next interview.

  The same procedure was repeated at another site upriver: a heavy cedar bridge running a mere ten feet above a shallow stream. This bridge was wider and sturdier than the Capilano—think Monet oil painting, not Indiana Jones chase scene. But everything else remained identi
cal, right down to the same female interviewer and the request to write a brief story.

  After their outdoor adventure had ended, the researchers examined the brief stories written by each respondent. These compositions were evaluated for sexual content—the thinking being that when sex is on the mind, it seeps unconsciously into how we see the world. Basically, the researchers treated the nonsexual image the men wrote about as a social inkblot test. They wanted to see if the arousing experience of crossing the bridge could morph into other, more emotional forms of arousal. They predicted that men on the Capilano would be more likely to inject sexual content into their analysis of an otherwise ordinary situation—you know, much like how I unnecessarily used the phrase “nipple neighborhood” when describing something as prosaic as handrail height a few paragraphs ago.

  So they showed the men’s stories, anonymously, to people who weren’t working on the research study but were trained in the practice of scoring narratives for sexual content. The experts knew what they were looking for, but they didn’t know which anonymous stories were written on the Capilano and which were written on the smaller, sturdier bridge. What did the experts conclude? That the descriptions penned by the Capilano men contained 75 percent more sexual imagery and language than those written on the other bridge.

  Of course, it’s possible that much like moths are drawn to light, authors with a penchant for erotic composition somehow gravitate to risk-seeking venues like Capilano. To rule out this possibility, the researchers conducted a follow-up study comparing men still on the bridge to those who had cooled down after having crossed ten minutes earlier. The results were the same: the men’s writing was more sexually charged when they were on the bridge in an aroused state. It’s a finding that leads one to wonder just how rickety the infrastructure must have been wherever Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake drew up the choreography for their Super Bowl halftime show.

  The men on the Capilano weren’t just thinking about love and sex in general terms, though. They found a specific target for their newfound arousal: the female interviewer. Remember how she had given out her phone number so that the men could call for more information about the study? Well, she always used the same number, but she went with a different false name in the two locations. To the men she encountered on the Capilano, she was Donna. On the other bridge upriver, she was Gloria.

  Over the days that followed, “Donna” wound up with more than four times as many phone calls as “Gloria.” In fact, half of all the men from the Capilano Bridge eventually called Donna, compared to a paltry 13 percent from the other bridge who phoned poor Gloria. The arousing bridge had kindled a lot more than scientific curiosity.

  Now, I’m not suggesting that all feelings of attraction are driven by unrelated bodily arousal. And I don’t mean to imply that when our blood pressure rises or the bridge we’re on bounces, we inevitably latch on to the next mate we see. We’re far from helpless in the face of such transfer of arousal from one source to another. In fact, the whole process works only when you aren’t aware that it’s happening: had the Capilano interviewer started her conversations with “Wow, this bridge sure has my heart racing,” the men would have had a clear reminder of why they were aroused. Awareness of the true causes of our feelings usually prevents us from misattributing them.

  Still, the study makes clear once again that contrary to intuition, even your most personal of feelings are shaped by the circumstances around you. Remember, for example, the “Suproxin” study a few chapters ago, in which respondents inferred their own emotions by looking to the behavior of those around them, and then labeled their feelings accordingly? Experiencing unexplained arousal, those participants seated next to someone angry decided that they, too, felt anger; those seated in a room with a guy twirling hula hoops decided that they, too, were happy. While the idea may be anathema to die-hard romantics, feelings of attraction operate in much the same way.

  Conventional wisdom says that you see a hot guy on the adjacent elliptical machine and your pulse quickens accordingly. But the Capilano Bridge studies indicate otherwise: arousal often precedes attraction. You feel your heart race or temperature rise, and only then do you look around to figure out who’s responsible. Chew on that the next time you’re trying to decide who to sit next to in spinning class—your choice could have life-altering consequences.

  LOVE ON MARS AND VENUS

  Still other misconceptions about love revolve around a topic explored by the previous chapter: gender difference. As with a variety of cognitive and social aptitudes, we assume that men and women also diverge when it comes to attraction and intimate relationships. After all, “boys being boys” refers to frequent wrestling and rolling around on the playground but also to frequent rolling in the hay. Like other intuitions regarding relationships, however, common wisdom about gender often fails to stand up to close analysis: the presumed differences between love on Mars and Venus are not as reliable or biologically dictated as we think they are.

  Take, for example, the notion that women are pickier than men when choosing a partner. We think of women as selective—shooting down strangers at happy hour, deflecting direct propositions, even playing hard to get with those suitors they’re willing to talk to. Men are the opposite, the thinking goes. Men will have sex with anything that moves. (And a few things that don’t.)

  This is how we see the marketplace of heterosexual dating, in terms of male pursuit and female response. While we expect the man to initiate the courtship process—to strike up the conversation, to make the approach at the bar, to call to ask for the date—it’s the woman who holds all the cards. The woman decides who can sit next to her, whether a date will happen, and how heated things get afterward.

  There’s good reason for these intuitions. Empirical evidence confirms that when responding to personal ads or face-to-face solicitations, women are more selective than men. Consider research conducted two decades ago at Florida State University.13 In these studies, male and female experimenters approached fellow students of the opposite sex and said that they had noticed them around campus and found them attractive. The experimenter then followed up with one of three blunt requests:1. “Would you go out with me tonight?”

  2. “Would you come over to my apartment tonight?”

  3. “Would you go to bed with me tonight?”

  Female students agreed to a date 56 percent of the time, but their consent rate for requests numbers two and three were only 6 percent and 0 percent, respectively. Many a female respondent reacted to these direct solicitations with irritation and even anger.

  The men? Only 50 percent of male students said yes to a date, but they were much more agreeable to the more intimate requests. A full 69 percent said they’d make an apartment visit, and 75 percent agreed to go to bed. Men who turned down these latter requests often apologized or gave excuses (e.g., “I’m in a relationship”). And at least one particularly agreeable soul asked why they had to wait until the evening to consummate. Seriously.

  Twenty years later, in 2009, different researchers ran a variation on this study and found comparable results among American, German, and Italian college students. 14 So, clearly, gender differences in mate selectivity exist and they don’t seem confined by era or culture. Where do they come from? Some would suggest that it’s all about evolution. Over time, the thinking goes, natural selection has led men and women to develop wholly distinct relationship tendencies. From a purely Darwinian standpoint, the primary objective of life is to ensure that one’s genetic material survives into the next generation, and women and men face different obstacles in pursuit of this goal.

  The evolutionary argument is that women have to be picky when it comes to mating. In life span terms, their window of fertility is relatively narrow, especially compared to men’s. For women, each decision to reproduce also requires at least nine months of time and resources, not to mention the primary child-rearing responsibilities that usually follow. Thus, women can’t afford to make mating m
istakes.

  Men are not similarly restricted. The human male remains reproductively viable for the majority of his life. In what might well be the euphemism of the century, successful male reproduction requires but a minimal, one-time investment.

  According to evolutionary theorists, these different reproductive constraints have guided women and men to evolve into very different sexual beings. Consider jealousy, for instance. Evolutionary analysis suggests that men are more upset than women by sexual infidelity. After all, in the days of our genetic ancestors, Maury Povich wasn’t around to help confirm a baby’s paternity. The only way for a man to ensure that he was the biological father of the children in his home was to remain vigilant over his mate’s relations. Similarly, evolutionary forces are used to explain why women appear to be picky and men anything but. Sure, we remain independent entities who exercise free will in deciding with whom we’re willing to go on a date or have sex, but our default tendencies are encoded into our DNA and, thus, require concerted effort to override.

  Or so the evolutionary theorist would have us believe.

  Because if these tendencies are so deeply ingrained—if the male as hunter and female as hunted are roles hardwired into our genetic code—then a minor change in situation here or there shouldn’t make much difference. And yet it does, as researchers at Northwestern recently demonstrated by hosting their own speed-dating events.15

  Participants in this study had brief conversations with a dozen different individuals of the opposite sex. In each speed-dating session, twelve women remained seated while the twelve men in attendance rotated around the room, spending four minutes with each prospective dating partner before moving on to the next person. At the end of the session—after each of the twelve women had been visited by each of the twelve men—all participants completed a questionnaire assessing their attraction to each potential mate. Later, from the comfort of their own computers, they also recorded on the study website whether or not they’d be interested in seeing each person again.