The Attractionologists

Separation Distress Among Romantic Partners and its Lessons for Human Mating

Paul Eastwick — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:47:14 +0000

When I was 11 years old, I remember my stepmother describing to me how she broke down one day while traveling abroad in China. She was away from home and away from my father for 5 weeks, and at the time of one of their scheduled phone calls, she couldn't find a way to connect to the United States. At the time, I remember thinking, "wait, seriously?" My Dad's a terrific guy, don't get me wrong, but wasn't this a bit of an overreaction?

Fast forward 15 years, and I'm on a trip with my father and stepmother. A cruise, actually. At this point, I had been dating my girlfriend for about 18 months - not exactly marriage, but not exactly a fledgling relationship either. So what did I do when the ship arrived in Civitavecchia, a rather nondescript port town on the Western coast of Italy? Did I hop on a bus to Rome and see the Coliseum? Did I visit the Spanish Steps or the Vatican?

Hardly - instead, I spent approximately 4 hours tracking down a phone card, the holy grail that had been eluding me since I left and had become my single obsession. Finally, after being away from home for a mere week, I could finally forgo all the excitement and adventure of being in Europe and burn through the full 90-minute phone card talking to my girlfriend (now fiancée).

For people not currently involved in a romantic relationship, it all probably sounds rather lame, if not downright nauseating. But at long last, I have been vindicated by an article in this month's issue of the scholarly periodical Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. As it turns out, my experience was hardly unique and says a great deal about the workings of the human mating psychology.

In this article, Lisa Diamond of the University of Utah and her colleagues Angela Hicks and Kimberly Otter-Henderson report on a study of couples who were separated for 4-7 days from their romantic partners. The scholars hypothesized that these separations would be associated with a variety of negative outcomes, and this was indeed what they found.

For example, the participants tended to report more emotional distress when the separation began, but this distress subsided again once they were reunited. Both partners reported difficulty sleeping when separated. And to the extent that the participants were anxious about their relationships in general, their emotional outcomes were considerably worse; they even showed significant increases in the stress hormone cortisol during the separation periods. In fact, only a long phone conversation-not a bonanza of emails, texts, or voice messages-was effective at ameliorating these participants' negative experiences brought on by the separation.

These findings will no doubt sound intuitive to many people, and so we must be careful not to overlook what this study tells us about human beings and how they mate. These findings only make sense if we take seriously one simple idea: that romantic partners become attached to one another, much in the same way that infants attach to caregivers. We become so attached that separations may literally cause our bodies to start to give out from under us.

Our tendency to attach to our romantic partners is a central and vital component of the human mating psychology that often goes underappreciated. It is not as exciting as some other human mating behaviors that make for scandalous headlines, but it is surely relevant to the emotional well being of countless Holiday Inn patrons who will be dining alone tonight at Bennigan's. And for every solo traveler who might decide to take the opportunity abroad to have a short-term sexual dalliance, countless others are desperately scouring the Italian countryside for a phone card or pleading with a Chinese operator to accept a credit card.

(This post was co-authored with Eli Finkel.)

It’s Your Wedding Day … Should You Vow You’ll Love Your New Spouse Forever?

Eli J. Finkel — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:08:27 +0000

As your friends and family look on, you look into your new spouse's eyes and see your loving gaze returned. The sun shines, the smiles radiate, and your heart wells up with a profound sense of joy and fulfillment. How wonderful it is to have found your life mate! You experience overwhelming certainty that you will love this person forever. Should you solemnly vow that you will do so?

The answer largely depends upon on the degree to which you can accurately forecast your future emotional states. Love is, after all, an emotion - and just like anger, despair, or euphoria, it can be insubordinate to our conscious wishes. So what does the scientific literature have to say about people's ability to forecast their future emotional states?

Alas, the news isn't good. Following in the footsteps of affective forecasting pioneers Daniel Gilbert (Harvard University), Timothy Wilson (University of Virginia), George Loewenstein (Carnegie Mellon University), and Daniel Kahneman (Princeton University), dozens of scholars have presented evidence that people are surprisingly inaccurate when forecasting their own emotional reactions to future life events.

Whether people are forecasting their emotional reactions to future election results, football games, or unpleasant medical procedures, their forecasts generally don't match their actual experiences. In one recent study, we and our collaborators examined how accurate people are at predicting their emotional responses to romantic breakup. At study entry, the participants in our college student sample were involved in reasonably serious romantic relationships (the average relationship duration was over a year). They completed an online questionnaire every two weeks asking them about diverse aspects of their personal and professional lives. Embedded in each questionnaire were questions asking them to forecast how distressed they would be (2, 4, 8, and 12 weeks out) if their relationship were to end within the next 2 weeks. Even after breaking up with their partner, they continued completing questionnaires, which enabled us to compare their forecasted distress to their actual distress (for example, to compare the distress they predicted they would experience 8 weeks later to the distress they actually experienced 8 weeks later).

On average, participants significantly overestimated how distressed they would be, and this affective forecasting bias was evident almost immediately after the breakup. In addition, those individuals who made their forecasts when they were strongly in love with their partner were the most inaccurate. They forecasted that they would experience bottomless devastation, but they tended to pull through the breakup more-or-less okay. In fact, they were only slightly more distressed following the breakup than were participants who were not especially in love, despite the enormous discrepancy in the pre-breakup distress forecasts between those who were deeply in love vs. those who were not.

To be sure, breaking up is not fun, and we don't recommend it for weekend entertainment. The results of our study suggest, however, that most people find the distress following a breakup to be significantly less painful than they anticipated it would be, especially if they were strongly in love with their partner when making the forecast.

What does this affective forecasting research have to do with the vows you should make on your wedding day? It suggests that you should be wary of making promises about your future emotional states. Of course, since "we'll see how it goes" does not make for compelling matrimonial theater, you should instead consider all the things you can promise that happen to be in your control. For example, you can promise that you will always strive to treat your spouse with decency and respect, even when you are angry. Or you can promise that you will never engage in an extrarelationship sexual liaison. These things, and many others that are essential to long-term relationship well-being, are in your control.

But can you solemnly vow that you will experience love for your partner not only tomorrow, but also in 20 or even 50 years from now? There's a decent chance that you really will love your spouse until death do you part, but promising that you will do so seems dangerous, especially if you're the sort of person who takes your solemn vows seriously.

So, tell us in the "Comment" box below: What is the perfect wedding vow?

(This post was co-authored with fellow attractionologist Paul Eastwick.)

Should You Play Hard to Get?

Eli J. Finkel — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 06:55:46 +0000

Your heart goes out to Jessica Simpson. Not only is her relationship struggling, she is also forced to endure the inevitable barrage of magazine articles scolding her for her missteps: If only you didn't screw up, Jessica, your man wouldn't be thinking of leaving you.

One such article, which appeared in last month's issue of In Touch magazine, was written by Sherrie Schneider. Schneider is a co-author of the best-selling book series on "The Rules" a woman must follow to reel in a good man. In the In Touch article, we learn that Jessica's relationship with Dallas Cowboy's quarterback Tony Romo is cratering because she failed to play hard to get. She called him too frequently and wasn't sufficiently preoccupied with non-Tony activities.

This explanation for the deterioration of Simpsomo (or is it Tonica?) is intuitively appealing. You read it in the magazine and almost slap your own forehead in bewilderment at her stupidity. How could she have attended all of those games in a pink Cowboys jersey decked out with Tony's uniform number? Shame on her for being so eager!

There's only one problem with this Monday-morning quarterbacking of Jessica's tactics: She actually played it just right. For almost 40 years now, social scientists have tested whether women who play hard to get light men's fire. In 1973, Elaine Hatfield (formerly Walster) and her colleagues published six experiments designed to test the hypothesis that men desire hard-to-get women more than easy-to-get women. In one study, for example, women who initially declined a date with a man before eventually accepting it were no more or less desirable to the man than women who eagerly accepted the date right away. The first five experiments failed to yield any support for the hard-to-get hypothesis.

After these five experiments failed, Hatfield finally recognized that there are two distinct ways in which a man can think of a woman as hard to get: (1) how hard it is for me to get her and (2) how hard it is for other men to get her. In her sixth and final study, Hatfield discovered the truth: Men are most attracted to women who are hard for other men to get - but easy for themselves to get!

We and our co-authors recently used speed-dating procedures to extend these findings. Results from our 2007 study suggest that a speed-dating Jessica Simpson would have had the best chance of landing Mr. Romo if she both (1) desired him more than the other women at the event desired him, and (2) disliked the other men at the event. People can tell lickety-split whether you have a special attraction for them, and this special attraction seems to inspire their attraction in return.

Of course, it's never good to be desperate, either. The key is to be selectively hard to get. If you're interested in somebody, make sure he knows you like him, but do so in a way that doesn't suggest that you'd take just anybody. It's okay to be eager, as long as you do it with dignity.

(This post was co-authored by fellow attractionologist Paul Eastwick.)