The second major flaw of the checklist method is that it focuses on the qualities of a perfect person rather than the qualities of a perfect partner, thereby failing to take into appropriate account the connection between the would-be couple. This is a big problem, since the suitability and interactions between the partners are of far greater significance in long-term profound love.
Benjamin Franklin was one of America’s Founding Fathers and a genius. Back in 1758, Franklin wrote that “an investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” Franklin counseled his nephew to use knowledge to find a wife: one should proceed like a bookkeeper, he advised—list all the pros and cons, weigh up everything for two or three days, and then make a decision. Gerd Gigerenzer shows that computer-based versions of Franklin’s rational bookkeeping manner—a program that weighed eighteen different cues—proved less accurate than following the rule of thumb “Get one good reason and ignore the rest of the information.”6
In Graeme Simsion’s popular novel, The Rosie Project, Don Tillman, a university professor seeking a wife, prepares a detailed list of the characteristics he desires in a woman: intelligence, good cook, nonsmoker, teetotaler, physically fit. He rules out many women until he meets Rosie, a bartender who smokes, drinks, and otherwise lacks most of his criteria. Together, they search for Rosie’s biological father, and in the process, Don falls in love with Rosie. It is not her individual characteristics that generate his love. It is the harmony he feels while spending more and more time with her, which makes all the difference.
Love at First Sight: Attraction at First Meeting
This is going to sound crazy, but . . . from the moment I first set eyes on you I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you.
LEIGH FALLON, Carrier of the Mark
It wasn’t love at first sight. It took a full five minutes.
LUCILLE BALL
Choosing a romantic partner on the basis of love at first sight is also a superficial way with which to determine the value of the other, as it does not necessarily identify the absence or presence of the prospective partner’s more profound qualities.
Love at first sight is intense love. The physical attraction strikes you like a flash of lightning and you want to spend forever with the other person. Love at first sight can be the basis of profound, long-term love, if characteristics revealed in later acquaintance enhance—or at least do not contradict—those assumed initially. Love at first sight cannot be profound, as there has been no time for creating such profundity. However, this kind of love should not be described as shallow; it is just that the issue of profundity is not yet relevant. Shallowness might arise when the phenomenon does not last long, but it cannot be said to be present when the phenomenon just begins. In the same manner, after thirty seconds of a football game, we would not say that the team’s performance is shallow because no goal has been scored yet, or no impressive action has yet occurred. The most we can say is that so far we cannot tell whether their performance is shallow, but based on the high level of the team’s engagement, such a conclusion is probably unwarranted.
The survival chances of initial love increase when we do not speak about love at first sight, but about love at first meeting (or acquaintance). Such a meeting provides more time to get to know other characteristics of the person, like sense of humor and kindness, and to become involved in common first activities, such as conversation. Moreover, signs of a unique, instant, intimate connection between the two agents might clearly appear at the first meeting and might be expressed, for example, in admiring the person’s wittiness and wisdom, mutual attraction, enjoying the conversation, the wish to be closer to each other, and “accidental” touching. Love at first sight expresses the aforementioned “attractiveness halo,” in which a person who is perceived as beautiful is assumed to have other good characteristics as well. Love at first acquaintance relates to the “personality halo,” in which a person who is perceived as having a certain positive personality trait is perceived to be valuable and assumed to have some other positive characteristics. It should be noted that although attractiveness has a powerful impact at first sight, the weight of this impact decreases as time passes and after we get to know the person’s other characteristics. Likewise, wittiness has a powerful impact at first chat, but its impact can decrease once we know the person’s other traits.
The connection between love at first sight and the quality of a subsequent relationship is mainly influenced by two opposing factors: (1) the initial positive impression has a positive impact upon the quality of the relationship, and (2) the brevity of time in which the partner is selected prevents a person from identifying profound compatibility, which is vital for long-term profound love.
Research has demonstrated that initial evaluations have significant influence on long-term relationships.7 The positive evaluations present in love at first sight therefore have a positive impact upon the relationship. In this sense, if love at first sight develops into a long-term relationship, that relationship has a greater chance of achieving higher quality. The importance of first impressions is illustrated in the well-known saying “You never get a second chance to make a (good) first impression.”
While positive first impressions increase the likelihood of long-term profound love, the superficial manner of choosing the partner in love at first sight can have a negative impact upon the subsequent relationship. The fact that the beloved was a complete stranger to you gives rise to the possibility that you do not have much in common. The love might be intense, but not profound. Indeed, studies have found that partners who fell in love at first sight, in comparison to partners who got involved more gradually, entered into intimate relationships more quickly after they met and had mates with less similar personalities, especially with regard to levels of extraversion, emotional stability, and autonomy. This, however, does not necessarily lead to a low relationship quality, as the positive impact of the first impression can compensate for the superficial manner of choosing the partner.8
The volatile nature of love at first sight is vividly expressed by a married man in the following description:
The very first time that I laid eyes on her from across the room I knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. I was currently married to someone else at the time, and this was the first time that had ever happened to me. It had nothing to do with sexual attraction or lust, as she was pretty ordinary-looking. We did end up getting married a few years after my divorce and had a mostly positive marriage. No real issues until I was deployed for eighteen months and when I came home, she had fallen in love with someone else. We divorced shortly after. To this day, she is the only woman that I have ever truly loved. I love her as much now as I did then. I believe that she was my one true love. It just stinks that I wasn’t hers.
Falling in love in cyberspace is akin to love at first sight: we do not have all the required information, but we fill in the gaps with idealized assumptions. As in love at first sight, the chat skips, in a sense, the usual process of information processing, and is directly “injected” into the brain evaluative centers. Thus, we can speak about “love at first chat.” For example, one might detect in the first chat a sense of humor and wittiness, and instantly fall in love with the sender.9 As in the case of attractiveness in offline relationships, humor also has a powerful impact at first chat, but this impact can decrease once the person’s other characteristics begin to surface. If wittiness is perceived as superficial, and more profound characteristics such as kindness and wisdom are found to be wanting, the weight of the initial positive impact of wittiness is likely to diminish.
Although love at first chat can reveal more profound qualities than those involved in love at first sight, those qualities might still be superficial, as the agent has no way of knowing whether the prospective partner is presenting herself authentically. And even if love at first chat does reveal profound qualities, the spectrum is too short for having a comprehensive, complex communication. However, when
the first chat turns into an online relationship, and then an offline one, the likelihood of finding profound love increases.
Interestingly, although sight, which is significant in generating physical attraction, plays a substantial role in falling in love, research indicates that voice-only communication increases empathic accuracy over communication across senses. Hearing is more accurate than sight when it comes to identifying someone’s emotions; accordingly, it might sometimes be easier to perceive the other’s emotions over the phone than when meeting face-to-face.10 Online conversations are a kind of intellectual interaction; the fact that they have a powerful impact on falling in love is another indication that love can be ignited by many different ways of interacting. In successful cases, greater diversity increases profundity, since such diversity can reveal more aspects of the prospective partner.
There Is Nothing Wrong with Him: Detecting the Profound Negative
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
WILLIAM JAMES
Unlike the two previous methods of choosing a romantic partner, this way takes into account profound qualities, and when no such negative qualities are detected, the prospective partner can be accepted. Compared to the checklist manner, the manner of detecting profound flaws is more sophisticated and realistic. It assumes the presence of flaws and so focuses merely on profound flaws. Here, we find the assumption that whereas one can learn to live with superficial flaws, profound flaws pose a real danger to a long-term loving relationship.
Lori Gottlieb tells the story of Madathil, an Indian-born researcher in the United States, whose parents arranged her marriage. When she met her prospective husband, there was no spark. Although Madathil could have met as many men as she wanted until she found the right match, she nevertheless decided to marry him. Her reason was that “there was nothing wrong with him.” Now, after ten years of marriage, they are profoundly in love with each other. Madathil’s process in evaluating her prospective partner was also focused on detecting negative qualities, but her hierarchy of values excluded a mechanical count of negative qualities. Here, the process aims to determine whether the person is “harmless,” and this becomes a significant reason for giving the person a further chance. This method of seeking a partner doesn’t totally devalue appearance, but it does not rank it as most valuable in an enduring relationship. Thus, Madathil said: “Physical appearances matter—I thought, yeah, he looks cute. But he didn’t have to be gorgeous.”11
In contrast to the almost universally positive effects of increased levels of attractiveness on new relationships, there is no significant association between levels of attractiveness and the subsequent quality of marriages, except for the fact that more attractive husbands were found to be less satisfied when their level of attractiveness was greater than that of their spouses.12
Focusing on profound flaws seems to be a smart decision, but it involves a more complex search and a greater investment of time. Thus, detecting profound qualities, such as insensitivity, is more difficult than detecting superficial qualities, such as not being tall. Detecting compatibility—in the spirit of “there is nothing wrong with him”—is valuable, but in many cases, it is insufficient. We should also detect profound positive qualities.
Bringing Out the Best in Each Other: Accentuating the Profound Positive
You make me want to be a better man.
MELVIN UDALL, in the movie As Good as It Gets
We have learned that detecting negative qualities is more important than detecting positive qualities. But this does not mean that detecting positive qualities is of no value at all. In establishing long-term love, profound positive qualities are very important. A positive quality that is particularly valuable for maintaining and enhancing the connection is the ability to bring out the best in each other. This is the aforementioned “Michelangelo Phenomenon” in which close romantic partners behave toward each other in a manner that is congruent with their own self-ideal, spurring them to move nearer to their own ideal self and thus feel good about themselves. Sometimes, as Finkel argues, we see the Michelangelo Phenomenon in reverse—cases in which relationship partners bring out the worst in each other, rather than the best. The two kinds of sculpting can be done by our parents, siblings, and children.13
Detecting profound positive qualities that are valuable for a long-term relationship is complex, in part because they are more clearly revealed through shared activities that take place over time. Since, at the beginning of a relationship, we do not have all the relevant information concerning these profound positive qualities, trying to predict the partner’s future behavior by calculating the qualities in the checklist manner doesn’t work well. Instead, we might have to imitate the experts: use rules of thumb that increase the probability of solving problems without deliberative thinking, which cannot be used when we lack relevant information.
Here, the decision is made by assuming a hierarchy of values and focusing on the significant positive or negative qualities. If you believe that your prospective partner is likely to bring out the best in you, you have a very good reason to choose this person as your life companion. This method, which seems helpful for finding profound love, can hardly be used in the fast and superficial world of dating sites. The profound positive qualities that bring out the best in each other require ongoing, shared experiences and joint activities.
The first two ways of choosing a partner—that is, the checklist and love at first sight—are shallow processes that, despite offering certain benefits particularly in eliminating unsuitable candidates, often have limited value in the long run. The other two ways—that is, detecting profound flaws and bringing out the best in each other—are more profound and combine intellectual and emotional processes crucial for the development of profound love. Although we tend to focus more on the partner’s negative qualities at the choosing-a-partner stage, it seems that in the long run, positive qualities gain at least the same importance and might eventually outweigh negative qualities.
Online Dating Sites and Romantic Profundity
In the end when the sexual rush dissipates, the novelty of an online extramarital affair is gone and the lack of profoundness becomes clear. . . . Online relationships leave me feeling empty.
A MARRIED WOMAN
In recent years, online dating has exploded in popularity. Online matchmaking sites promise to facilitate two different types of romantic activities: (1) identifying romantic partners and (2) developing long-term profound love.
These sites excel at the first objective, and today the internet is the foremost place where singles met their last first date. Indeed, a greater percentage of romantic partnerships are created through the internet than offline. The value of an online search is especially evident in locating potential partners for individuals who face a thin dating market, such as gays, lesbians, and middle-aged heterosexuals; these are also the groups that are most likely to rely on the internet to find their partners. Whether or not these matchmaking sites fulfill the second objective remains unclear. The algorithms used by these sites can be highly predictive in avoiding pairings that are unlikely to succeed, which constitute most possible pairings, but they still leave a considerable minority from which to choose.14
I am not suggesting that the online origin of romantic partnering is, in itself, an obstacle to developing profound love. Rather, I am suggesting that dating sites, which provide many alluring romantic options, do not encourage nurturing a single person as long-term partner. Similarly, the breakup rate is scarcely influenced by whether the couple met online or offline. However, couples who have been together longer, especially couples who are married and coresidential, are much less likely to break up.15 Spending time together increases the cost of separation and enables the partners to develop romantic profundity.
Because profound love is generated by many and various joint activities, the limited types of such activities available online reduce the likelihood of generating profound love. It
is very hard to accurately identify the major profound flaws and advantages of your partner through online dating alone. One cannot bring out the best in the other when the relationship lacks diverse mutual interactions and hence a profound dialogue. Indeed, Finkel and colleagues argue that the matchmaking sites’ claim that the essential qualities of a relationship can be predicted from characteristics of the potential partners that exist before they have met counters substantial scientific research indicating that preexisting personal qualities account for a small percentage of variance in relationship success.16 This is even truer in cases where the matching, and sometimes even the wedding, are done without the two even meeting each other.
It is usually good to integrate the advantages of offline and online activities. Such integration occurs when online dating is used to locate possible suitable candidates with whom to start a romantic relationship, after which the partners meet and then establish a relationship offline, where the traits essential for profound love can be more reliably detected. This subsequent offline relationship should not eliminate online communication between the two—on the contrary, such communication can reveal additional significant information about each other.
Harmful integration between online and offline dating occurs when, together with the offline relationship, each person continues her activities on dating sites to further examine other possible candidates. Continuing such use of online dating services is a major cause of failing to achieve profound love, as it is very difficult to develop romantic profundity when alluring romantic options are further explored. These dating sites are excellent tools for locating possible romantic candidates, but they are less successful in establishing long-term profound love. The sites are best used like a kind of a virtual café, mainly to locate and get an initial impression of a prospective partner to date offline from then on.
The Arc of Love Page 19
