Attraction Explained

The science of how we form relationships

Viren Swami

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000358322
• Edizione: 2
• Argomento: Psychology
• Categoria: Social Psychology

When it comes to relationships, there's no shortage of advice from self-help 'experts', pick-up artists, and glossy magazines. But modern-day myths of attraction often have no basis in fact or – worse – are rooted in little more than misogyny. Based on science rather than self-help clichés, psychologist Viren Swami debunks these myths and draws on cutting-edge research to provide a ground-breaking and evidence-based account of relationship formation.

At the core of this book is a very simple idea: there are no 'laws of attraction', no fool-proof methods or strategies for getting someone to date you. But this isn't to say that there's nothing to be gained from studying attraction. Based on science rather than self-help clichés, Attraction Explained looks at how factors such as geography, physical appearance, reciprocity, and similarity affect who we fall for and why.

With updated statistics, this second edition also includes new content on online dating, queer relationships, racism in dating, shyness, and individual differences. It remains an engaging and accessible introduction to attraction relationship formation for professionals, students, and general readers.

1
CUPID’S ARROW

OR, A BRIEF HISTORY OF ATTRACTION THEORIES, WHY WE NEED A SCIENCE OF RELATIONSHIP FORMATION, AND WHAT THIS BOOK IS ALL ABOUT

The first time Scott sees the delivery-woman on rollerblades, at the Wychwood Branch of the Toronto Public Library, he’s lovestruck. For those of you who don’t know him, Scott Pilgrim (age: 23; rating: awesome) is a jobless slacker living with his cool gay roommate Wallace Wells (age: 25; rating: 7.5/10) in a one-room basement apartment in Toronto. Scott plays bass guitar in a band called Sex Bob-omb with his friends Stephen Stills (guitar) and Kim Pine (drums), whom he once dated in high school. Oh, and Scott hates smoking and considers anyone who smokes to be evil. Still carrying some baggage from a previous bad breakup, Scott has begun dating Knives Chau (age: 17), a high-schooler, mainly because he finds the relationship easy – all they do is ride the bus together and talk about her school. Despite Scott’s questionable relationship choices, for some time now he’s felt an increasing sense of loneliness, a feeling that something isn’t quite right.

Anyway, back to the story. Scott is at the Toronto Public Library one day when he spots a mysterious pink-haired woman on rollerblades delivering a package. He’s instantly smitten. Later, he finds he can’t stop thinking about her. The strange ‘ninja delivery girl’ even appears in his dreams, skating away before he has a chance to ask her anything. Life just isn’t the same for Scott anymore. He’s distracted when on dates with Knives and band practice is frequently interrupted by Scott’s daydreams. Luckily, he’s at a party not long later where he sees the pink-haired woman again. Asking around, he finds out that her name is Ramona Flowers and that she’s just moved from New York to Toronto, where she now works as a delivery-woman for the online retailer Amazon. Scott goes up to her and, failing rather spectacularly in his attempts to chat her up, promises to leave her alone forever … but then stalks her until she leaves the party (not cool, Scott).

The next day, completely forgetting ignoring his (pseudo) relationship with Knives, Scott orders some CDs from Amazon, hoping to get another chance to meet Ramona. Sure enough, Ramona arrives a few days later with Scott’s package. Not missing a beat, he asks her out. Umming and ahhing, Ramona reveals that the reason Scott has been dreaming about her is because she’s been using the Subspace Highway running through his head as a shortcut for her deliveries. She finally agrees to go on a date with him as compensation for using his mind as a shortcut. This is the moment we’ve been waiting for: the start of Scott Pilgrim’s long journey to win Ramona’s love. Along the way, he has to – among other things – defeat Ramona’s seven evil exes, find closure over his past relationships, earn various swords and power-ups, and learn self-acceptance through struggle. Should be easy.

These scenes, which I’ve borrowed from the first of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s six graphic novels about Scott Pilgrim,^* set up one of the most common and powerful tropes in popular culture: the formation of a relationship between two people. But understanding this process can sometimes be tricky. What is it that draws Scott to Ramona? Why Ramona and not anyone else? What shapes the extent to which that attraction might be mutual? What specifically determines whether Scott and Ramona might form some sort of relationship? And how do two people, complete strangers to each other, go on to consider each other special and unique, to form a lasting relationship with each other?

* There’s also a film adaptation of the graphic novel series, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, starring Michael Cera as Scott and Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Ramona. In case it isn’t obvious, Scott and Ramona aren’t real people. But we can still learn a lot about relationship formation from these fictional characters, so they’ll crop up quite a bit over the course of this book. Oh, and you should get yourself O’Malley’s graphic novels – you won’t be disappointed.

Unsurprisingly, attempts to answer these sorts of questions have a rather long history. It fascinated the Roman poet Ovid in about 1 ce. His Metamorphoses, a fifteen-book narrative poem that has been described as containing ‘many large-scale psychological studies’,¹ presents one of the earliest attempts at explaining romantic attraction. In the very first erotic adventure of the Meta-morphoses, Apollo the archer boasts of his prowess in overcoming the monstrous Python, but makes the mistake of provoking Cupid, the god of attraction and love:

Thou lascivious boy,

Are arms like these for children to employ?

Know, such achievements are my proper claim;

Due to my vigour, and unerring aim:

Resistless are my shafts, and Python late

In such a feather’d death, has found his fate.^*

The love-god’s arrows, Apollo claims, have no place in an epic. Instead, Cupid should be content with stirring the concealed fires of romance with his burning torch. Cupid’s reply is to shoot two arrows. One, with a sharp golden point, strikes Apollo and he immediately falls in love with Daphne:

So burns the God, consuming in desire,

And feeding in his breast a fruitless fire:

Her well-turn’d neck he view’d (her neck was bare)

And on her shoulders her dishevel’d hair;

Oh were it comb’d, said he, with what a grace

Wou’d every waving curl become her face!

He view’d her eyes, like heav’nly lamps that shone,

He view’d her lips, too sweet to view alone,

Her taper fingers, and her panting breast;

He praises all he sees, and for the rest

Believes the beauties yet unseen are best.^**

But Cupid isn’t finished yet. He shoots another arrow at Daphne, only this one is lead-tipped and blunt – an antaphrodisiac – and ‘swift as the wind, the damsel fled away’.² Cupid’s retaliation is striking because, with Apollo’s own weapon of choice, Cupid demonstrates his superiority in gloria – it is Cupid that is supreme among all gods. But there’s a deeper significance in Ovid’s telling of this myth: attraction is literally an act of god. To be attracted to another is reduced to the scheming of an arrow-wielding love-god. Later depictions of Cupid even portrayed him as blind, not so much in the sense of being sightless, but rather as blinkered and capricious. Hasty, childlike Cupid shoots his arrows and anyone lucky (or unlucky) enough to be struck is spurred to love.

* If, like me, you find Early Modern English difficult, Anthony Kline’s translation might help: ‘Impudent boy, what are you doing with a man’s weapons? That one is suited to my shoulders, since I can hit wild beasts of a certainty, and wound my enemies, and not long ago destroyed with countless arrows the swollen Python that covered many acres with its plague-ridden belly’.

** Kline’s translation: ‘… so the god was altered by the flames, and all his heart burned, feeding his useless desire with hope. He sees her disordered hair hanging about her neck and sighs, “What if it were properly dressed?” He gazes at her eyes sparkling with the brightness of starlight. He gazes on her lips, where mere gazing does not satisfy. He praises her wrists and hands and fingers, and her arms bare to the shoulder: whatever is hidden, he imagines more beautiful’.

By the Middle Ages, Cupid’s arrow had begun to be reinterpreted in terms of developments in optical theory. In Cligés, a poem by the medieval French poet Chrétien de Troyes from around 1176, two characters – Alexander and Soredamors – have fallen painfully in love with each other and reflect on the source of their suffering. While Soredamors blames herself, reproaching herself for her lack of self-control, Alexander entertains a more elaborate series of explanations. He proposes that he has been shot through the heart by Love’s arrow,^* but he’s still confused by how it might have reached his heart without leaving a mark. His conclusion? That the arrow pierced his eyes … although this raises an even more difficult question: how did the arrow pierce his eyes without leaving a wound there either?

* In medieval poetry, it wasn’t always clear where the darts came from, whether they were shot by Cupid, released by the person being gazed upon, or emerged from some other place entirely.

Having considered things some more, Alexander concludes that the ‘arrow’ is actually an image of Soredamors. His eyes rely on their transparency to convey or reflect the image of Soredamors to his heart, where it is interpreted and ‘sets the heart on fire’.³ In this interpretation, the eyes are a mirror for the heart and the arrow is a sensation or a sense impression. So, the passage of the arrow from the eyes to heart becomes, in Cligés, a metaphor for the reception of an image, harmless until it is comprehended by the heart. It is the heart, and not the eyes or even the brain, that judges the images it receives, liking or disliking them, falling in love or not. But of the many images that Alexander’s eyes receive, why is it the image of Soredamors in particular that leads him to fall in love? The image of Soredamors, he says, was deceptively beautiful, an inaccurate representation of the world, causing his heart to be led astray.

CUPID’S STORY REDUX

There’s something comical in the image of Alexander, the hapless lover blaming his eyes and heart for deceiving him into falling in love. But it’s also in the pages of Cligés that we find one of the earliest attempts at understanding attraction and relationship formation from a scientific perspective.⁴ In assimilating the emerging science of perception and optics into his poetry, Chrétien not only provided Cupid with a newfound relevance, he also attempted one of the earliest scientific explanations of how we form relationships with other people. But progress was slow. By the mid-nineteenth century, the seat of perception had moved from the heart to the brain, but the process of attraction itself continued to be explained largely in terms of visual imagery and its effects. Part of the reason for this slow progress, I think, was the belief that studying attraction or relationships scientifically destroys the magic and mystery of it all.

The notion of relationship formation as mysterious and magical is one that remains popular. In the late 1980s, the psychologist Arthur Aron and his colleagues invited university students to take part in a study about their experiences of being attracted to another person and falling in love. The participants, all of whom had ‘become strongly attracted’ or ‘fallen in love’ in the eight months prior to the study, were asked to think about their experiences before writing in detail about the situation in which they first felt that attraction. When the participants’ accounts were analysed, the researchers found that almost 10 per cent of respondents believed that the attraction had been sparked by ‘mystery’ – either something mysterious about the other person or in the situation itself. When a larger group of university students were asked to rate a list of items that they believed had influenced their feelings of attraction, 30 per cent said mystery had a strong impact.⁵

The desire to retain some of that mystery by keeping scientists away is perhaps understandable. When lonely, eccentric scientists with their weird-looking hair^* come along, there’s a real fear that they will destroy the magic of attraction, reducing everything to formulas and numbers. Except, there’s no real evidence that studying attraction scientifically makes it any less enthralling. In fact, a scientific approach to attraction and relationships often raises new questions that need answering, uncovering mystery in everyday or mundane behaviours. Nor will a scientific approach be able to explain everything about relationship formation. In the study I just mentioned by Aron and his colleagues, respondents frequently highlighted very specific, idiosyncratic cues – some characteristic of the other person, such as their voice or posture – that were enough to elicit a strong attraction. The scientific study of attraction can help us understand some of those idiosyncrasies, but it’s unlikely to be able to explain every such case.

* When children are asked to draw a scientist, they typically draw a White man, wearing a lab coat, with strange-looking, dishevelled hair and crazy sideburns. Adults, too, have similar stereotypic perceptions of scientists.

A different critique of a science of attraction and relationships comes from those who say that scientists have very little to add beyond what we already know through common sense. When I tell people that I am a psychologist, I’m almost always asked if I can read their minds.^* Once that minefield has been safely navigated and I tell them I’m interested in the study of attraction and the formation of relationships, I’m then usually met by incredulous stares. I know what they’re going to say: ‘Surely studying attraction scientifically will only tell us what we already know’. My response is that common sense about attraction is often wrong and sometimes dangerously so. To demonstrate this point, humour me a moment and answer this question: do you think opposites attract? Do you think that people who are opposite to each other in their personalities or beliefs are more likely to be attracted to each other?

* I can, but only when I’m wearing my mind-reading hat and cloak.

If you said yes, opposites do attract, you’re not alone. In one study, my colleagues and I asked university students from the United Kingdom to indicate whether they believed in the idea that opposites attract (along with forty-nine other common-held beliefs related to psychology). Just over 48 per cent thought it was true. In the same study, about a fifth of respondents from among the public in central Europe also believed that opposites attract, whereas among North American undergraduates the figure rises to whopping 77 per cent.⁶ If so many people believe in this seemingly common-sensical idea, that must make it correct, right? Well, no. It turns out that when it comes to relationship formation, opposites very rarely attract. As we’ll see in Chapter 6, the evidence from science indicates that there’s a much greater tendency for similar people to be attracted to one another, but...