The Science of Happily Ever After: What Really Matters in the Quest for Enduring Love
“How did you know when you had found ‘the one’?” The typical answer is usually less than satisfying. “You just know.” This is like asking a chef who has crafted a wonderful meal behind closed doors, “How did you make this?” only to have her or him respond, “You just cook it.”
Why Happily Ever After Is So Hard to Find
"Love" is an ambiguous word. It contains many facets including fellowship (togetherness), compassion (caring, helping), lust (sexual), and passion (physiological arousal and obsessive thought). With long-term romantic love, we expect our partner to be able to satisfy all of these and more.
After marriage, the honeymoon period pushes marriage satisfaction scores up ~1 sd for the first year and declines for the 20 following years, particularly during first couple years:
50% of marriages end in divorce, 10-15% of couples are permanently separate but not legally divorced, and 7% live married together but are chronically unhappy. In other words, only 1 in 3 marriages end in a happily ever after. This book is concerned about how to make you one them.
The ability to "like" someone develops in childhood with the development of kindness, fairness, loyalty. Then, puberty introduces lust. For boys lust manifests itself rather indiscriminately. For girls, it generally goes hand in hand with liking someone. Note, that while liking has components that tend to reinforce itself (fairness and loyalty), lust is a pure biological urge. As a result lust decays much more quickly (8% per year) than liking (3%).
Our environments and culture strongly shape how we look for love. In particular, today TV (90%) instructs kids on romance far more than mothers (33%) or fathers (17%). Unfortunately, TV and stories portray love with their own motivations and, in a word, unrealistically: love at first sight, having a "one and only", the role of fate, etc.
Why You Get Three Wishes For Love (And No More)
A trait is a quality inherent to someone that doesn't change much over time. One of the biggest mistakes is to hope a partner's trait will dramatically change. Unfortunately, at the start of a relationship evaluating these traits is hard because we are under the spell of endorphins and because each partner is strategically presenting themselves in a positive light.
There are two key questions to consider when developing a smart strategy for selecting a good partner. First, how much can you reasonably wish for in a partner? And second, how should those wishes be spent
Each criteria for a partner narrows down the field, much like the Drake equation Drake equation. Indeed, just by requiring your partner be a woman, aged 20-40, with a college degree narrows the field about 20-fold.
This is important, because if you don't find a match on all the traits, you keep searching until you settle for a partner with a haphazard collection of traits. If you don't prioritize intentionally, you end up prioritizing randomly. The author recommends focusing on three wishes.
Why We Squander Our Wishes
In the US, you don't get much by investing in "reproductive fitness" anymore since virtually everyone survives to adulthood and gets married. This frees you up to prioritize other things.
The "mate dollars" game is a game where you are presented with a list of traits you want your partner to have, you choose the percentile you want on each trait, and the sum of those percentiles must not exceed your "budget". When subjects play these games with different budgets you can see what priorities they place on different traits. Both genders mostly prioritize social level, kindness, and attractiveness. Females tend to prioritize wealth while men tend to prioritize physical attractiveness - findings consistent with evolutionary biology.
Studies are one thing. Real life studies of what makes people choose who to date find another: that physical attractiveness matter most and that people segregate by level of physical attractiveness and socioeconomic status. However, there was little assortative mating for personality - though there is a mild anti-correlation for extraversion.
There are some differences between what people want from short- vs long-term mating situations, but, in reality, most long-term situations emerge naturally from short-term ones, so the same general selection pressures apply.
Escaping the Beauty Trap
Physical attractiveness features derives from three aspects: symmetrical features (beautiful), average features (cute) and prominent features (sexy). The latter come from high levels of testosterone in men (causes broad shoulders) and estrogen in women (causes a high waist-to-hip ratio).
There is a strong halo effect around beauty, probably driven partly by evolutionary forces since beauty was a good proxy for mate quality in the ancestral environment. Today, however, beauty is a rather poor predictor of reproduction, health, IQ, mental health, social skills, or marital satisfaction in developed nations. They are 2pp more likely to marry.
So using one of your three wishes to maximize physical attractiveness in potential partners seems like a poor investment, if only because doing so precludes you from getting other traits in a partner that are much better predictors of long-term relationship quality. However, it also seems reasonable to say that kissing your partner should not feel the same way as having to eat your broccoli as a kid. The practical implication is that you want to feel some attraction to your partner, but you need to be thoughtful and to use reason when it comes to setting your point of diminishing return.
Can't Buy Me Love
Like the desire for physical attractiveness, the desire for wealth probably have evolutionary origins and is ironically outdated as a predictor of evolutionary success.
Psychological health generally follows a U-shaped curve, with middle class folks being the best off.
The impact of income on relationship quality is best explained by the family stress model:
Basically, money matters only up to the point where lacking it places clear strain upon partners.
Seeing Your Romantic Future with Your Crystal Ball
Researchers have found that they can predict divorces with 90% accuracy by watching a couple discuss a disagreement or events of the day for 15 minutes. Even untrained undergrads could achieve 81% accuracy. What is obvious to strangers but not to couples? (besides simple bias)
Traits are stable and predictive, which makes them a good thing to focus on early on. Examples include personality, values, interests, and attachment styles.
The Power of Personality
A person's personality can be more accurately evaluated by friends and family than by their partner or themself. For this reason, it's useful to seek others' opinions.
The most important personality trait in predicting relationship dissatisfaction and stability is neuroticism. Signs of neuroticism include a history of unstable relationships with others, making bad decisions for immediate rewards (e.g. staying in bed instead of going to work), and "freaking out" about a stressful situation.
Another trait to watch out for is novelty seeking
Finally, agreeableness is one of the best predictors of long-term relationship happiness. In particular, men who are more agreeable tend to be more kind and more likely to keep sexual desire alive in a relationship.
Why the In-Laws Matter
According to attachment theory, there are three styles of attachment:
- secure - find it easy to get close to and rely on other people and vice versa; does not worry about being abandoned or someone getting too close
- avoidant - uncomfortable being close to, trusting, or depending on others; nervous when anyone gets too close
- anxious - want others to get closer than they do; worry others don't really love them or will leave them; want to merge completely with another person, which scares others away
Studies indicate attachment style as an infant predicts behavior while dating; sadly, when children do change it is usually for the worse.
Although people tend to prefer people with similar attachment styles in practice
Anxious attachment is characterized by more noticeable or active relationship emotions and behaviors, which is to say that when anxiously attached individuals are coping with their insecurity, their partners can see it or feel it. Avoidantly attached partners exhibit indifference and generally invest less in the relationship emotionally and show less affection, so their coping with insecurity is less obvious to the naked eye, but nonetheless, it would contribute to lower relationship quality over time compared to that of anxiously attached individuals.
Red Flags in Relationships
The task is to distinguish which traits in partners are annoying but inconsequential in the long run and which traits are red flags for serious problems in the future...
We’ll see that paying attention to a partner’s thoughts about why problems occur in relationships, their patterns of actually discussing problems and their responses to positive events can help us forecast future relationship satisfaction and stability.
A study had couples discuss a problem in the relationship. Researchers found that a good predictor of relationship satisfaction and stability four years later was whether the ratio of positive to negative behaviors in the discussion exceeded five. Watching this ratio (less literally) is important during the early stages of a relationship.
Another red flag to watch out for is if your partner frequently blames one of you for things rather than specific actions, aspects of the relationship, or outside factors.
Another pair of red flags similarly relate to discussing problems:
- demanding - using pressure or blame to get what you want
- withdrawing - giving up or actively avoiding discussing the problem
Unfortunately, one partner demanding often causes the other to withdraw, which reinforces the demanding as effective. Both patterns predict significant drops in satisfaction over the next couple years - especially when the female demands and the male withdraws.
Finally, capitalization "is when you share a positive event and your partner matches your degree of enthusiasm in his or her response." Doing this predicts daily relationship satisfaction and intimacy. This ties back into relationship styles: avoidant people may choose not to share and anxious people may not believe your capitalization is genuine.
How to Make Your Wishes Come True
One key to achieving your goal of love is behavioral activation: when you start doing things that move you towards a goal, it makes you feel more optimism and self-worth, and it gives you less time to engage in destructive behaviors.
The author spends some time on an overall strategy and some more time breaking it into more concrete steps to help the reader. I'll let you buy the book to read it.