The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (35 page)

Sexual attraction is a lot like what they say about art. Or wine. Or porn. You can’t put into words what you like about it, but you know it when you see it.
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One of Finkel’s experiments asked 106 research subjects to come up with three essential traits in an ideal romantic partner. They also asked for three of the least important or least desired qualities in a mate. Would you absolutely require your future beloved to be ambitious? Affectionate? Broadminded? Generous? It was like the task Natalie faced in the Meet the Man of Your Dreams workshop, and a lot like what dating sites ask of us—to describe exactly what we want. “You fill out a bunch of questionnaires about an ideal partner, then later you encounter something like that person. We rigged it so that the person matches or mismatches your ideal mate,” is how Finkel explained his experiment.

The results showed that their university-aged subjects were predictably keen to meet someone whose profile matched their must-have criteria—at least on paper. But when they were actually thrown together in a room with that perfect match, the subjects weren’t all that attracted to their dreamboats. In a live, face-to-face situation, their criteria didn’t predict who they found hot any more than their list of “avoids” predicted revulsion.
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It turns out that most of us don’t know who will turn us on any more than we can predict what will make us happy in the future.
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WHAT A PIECE OF WORK

When it comes to attraction, something mysterious is going on. Before I get to that, though, consider that online dating sites ask people not only to list the traits they hanker after in a mate but also to describe themselves faithfully. But as we’ve seen, humans are not particularly gifted at either task, perhaps one of the reasons why marriage rates haven’t budged since the online dating revolution began. We lie outright or unconsciously delude ourselves about how slender, accomplished, and winsome we are. Notwithstanding the ancient Greek maxim “Know thyself,” self-awareness is not really our strong suit.

“What a piece of work is man!” Hamlet observes, “How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” While Shakespeare asks you to acknowledge the ineffability of human nature, eHarmony asks you whether you often leave your socks on the floor. Among its several hundred questions, I was asked to click a box indicating whether I prefer that a future partner “do things according to plan.” Well, yes, if there’s a plane to catch. But no, once we’ve touched down in Venice. And while I like a tidy environment, my husband of thirty years surrounds himself with leaning stacks of yellowing paper and assorted musical instruments in various states of repair. Still, I’d trade a clean surface any day for a taste of his sly humor.

And there’s the rub. “People are incredibly complex and are not reducible to a set of characteristics you enter into fields,” says Eli Finkel. “You may say you like someone who’s proud, but it’s hard to differentiate between arrogance and confidence without face-to-face contact.” Distilling what a person is like from their online profile is like knowing what a meal will taste like from a list of ingredients, he told me. “That’s just not how the mind works.” Yet
all dating sites profess an oracle-like ability to match up future couples based on lists of their self-reported personality traits. For example, eHarmony advertises a “patented Compatibility Matching System™ that narrows the field from millions of candidates to a highly select group of singles that are compatible with you.”

But if you’re lonely and believe such claims, you’ve succumbed to “smoke and mirrors,” says Harry Reis, a psychology professor at the University of Rochester who has spent his career researching successful relationships. “There’s just no evidence that any dating algorithm that’s ever been used is any better than chance.” Meeting someone who elicits that flash of mutual attraction and finding a long-term partner with whom to build a life together are two completely different things. Though most dating sites (and most of us) conflate them, there’s no evidence that online dating sites can predict either one, he tells me.
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True, 5 percent of people who meet each other on eHarmony get married (well, according to a study conducted by eHarmony). “But if thirty million people sent me their names and I randomly paired them up and sent them an email saying, ‘This person is your soulmate,’ I might do just as well. But no one has ever tested that,” says Reis, chuckling at the thought.

Though the evidence is deflating, I learned some facts every single person should know. First, one of the bedrock claims of dating sites—that parallel personality types will be compatible—is “pseudoscience” and “monkey business,” according to Reis. Matching people based on paper or screen-based personality assessments has not been shown to be a useful metric in the real world, so why would it work in a virtual universe? Plus, the cues available online are too paltry to assess what
really
matters: whether there’s a sense of rapport between two people. “It’s very clear that compatibility is determined by things that can’t be assessed on paper or on the screen. Hundreds of studies show that nonverbal rapport predicts relationship happiness,” Reis said, referring to whether someone looks you in the eye during conversation,
synchronizes his emotions or movements with yours, and confides in you when you’re together. Second, the fact that you’re both introverts or both love
Seinfeld
reruns says a lot about initial attraction, but nothing about how long your union will, last or how happy it will be.
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Similar personality traits and interests mean that you may fight less over the TV remote. But this basic sorting process doesn’t predict how much TLC you’ll get from your main squeeze when the chips are down.

THE HOLY GRAIL

What does predict whether a romantic union will last? “How do you react when you taste my cooking? Do you like my family? How well do you solve problems together? Do you help each other through personal issues and share in each other’s pleasures and good fortune?” Reis asked me, adding a string of other rhetorical questions to the list. Enjoying sex together is in there, but it’s not number one. Being able to solve problems is. “How do you deal with a very sick child or a dying parent together? How do you help each other with personal problems?” It turns out that the ability to face adversity together and its converse—to have fun as intimate buddies—is more important in the long run than being matched on eHarmony’s 29 dimensions of personality.
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When I asked him whether dating websites can assess any of those things, Reis responded with another question: “How can you measure any of that without putting people together to solve problems, face-to-face?”

Despite the downsides of the medium—the never-satisfied, Christmas shopping feeling it instills, the commodification and unrealistic expectations of future love objects it promotes—one indisputable advantage of online sites is that they do increase your chances of meeting new people. And it can also be expedient in ruling out gross mismatches and false starts. “Before you’ve even had an email contact, you can find all sorts of red flags to tell you they’re not a good match, such as their political bent, their degree
of religiosity, and how rough they like their sex,” wrote one friend in an email. “People can be surprisingly open in an anonymous forum.” As JDate posts on its site, “This is WAY better than the bar scene. For the price of a few drinks, you can subscribe for a month and meet a new person every day if you like.”

But meeting is key. Prolonged online interaction promotes a false sense of intimacy, Jan told me ruefully (she’s the friend I fixed up with my editor). Confidences can be shared online by people who can’t manage intimacy in a real encounter. Insults, too. (Like many writers, I’ve faced lurid venom from online attackers—trolls—who would not exist without the shield of anonymity the Internet provides.) Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist who is an expert on sexual attraction, puts it bluntly: Online sites just provide the introduction. You have to do the rest. “You’ve got to get out there. You’ve got to meet them yourself. You’ve got to bring your own algorithm to the party,” she told me.

When it comes to love and trust, research confirms Fisher’s assertion that the human brain has evolved its own inimitable algorithms. Studies have shown that people who interacted face-to-face “felt greater oneness with their partner than did participants who interacted over the computer,” according to research led by psychologist Bradley Okdie. The effect is cumulative: the more real, live interaction, the greater the attraction. Apparently familiarity does
not
breed contempt.
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In the study’s comparisons of screen versus live interaction, the couples who first met each other in person (as opposed to online) liked their potential partners more and found the dating experience more fun than the digital discovery process. For one thing, it didn’t involve building up one’s hopes based on an online profile, only to have them dashed—or being summarily rejected—once you meet face-to-face.
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In some ways, though, meeting someone at the laundromat or at a supermarket checkout line is also a challenge, especially for introverts. Processing a blast of simultaneous information from eye contact, facial
expressions, and the social environment is far more taxing, cognitively, than reading text on a screen, not to mention the fact that approaching an attractive stranger doesn’t guarantee that she’s single or interested in meeting people.

But courting face-to-face can also be more rewarding. Tim Kreider, a New York–based writer, decided to try online dating “after meeting my one millionth attractive, intelligent, funny woman who turned out to be married.” But reviewing women’s online profiles turned out to be a depressing type of channel surfing, he wrote, the vetting process being “driven by the anxiety that you might be missing out on something just a little bit better.” Eventually he left the site to go back to what he called the analog approach. And that’s when he fell in love with a woman he met at a friend’s brunch. Until he looked up her work online and saw her photo there, he didn’t realize they’d already “met” each other once before—on the dating site. Kreider writes:

MAGNETS VERSUS GLUE

Returning to my friends Lou and Natalie, I could ask whether this couple, who met through face-to-face social networks, has a better chance of succeeding as a unit than two strangers who meet online. No one has the answer to that question—no scientist has ever asked. But we do know that Lou and Natalie survived their first
test. Before they married, the two wilderness lovers decided to go on a camping trip. The destination was a family wedding, where Lou was to introduce Natalie to his extended clan for the first time. The night before the wedding they stopped to pitch their tent at a campsite not far from the event. It was eleven p.m. and raining hard. “And we arrive to discover that we forgot the tent poles,” recounts Lou, his brow furrowing. “But we managed, in the dark, to make a makeshift thing with ropes tied to the trees. What I liked is we really cooperated quickly and there was no ‘Who forgot the poles?’ There wasn’t a whole story about it. And I thought,
This is a woman I can live with
.”

Similarity and common social bonds were likely Lou and Natalie’s first magnets. But they’ll likely stay together not because they’re similar but because they
see
themselves as like-minded. This is what the research tells us. Similarity may bring couples together at first, But being similar to your partner is not what matters to your success and happiness as a couple.
Perceiving
yourselves as sharing common values and traits is what matters to a relationship’s success. In Chengdu, in western China, couples have even pursued matching cosmetic surgery because they see themselves as similar and want to look more alike.
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Whether or not you’re literally a matching pair, thinking that you are makes a couple feel
bashert
—like they belong together. That, along with the ability to solve problems and have fun together, forms much of the glue.
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“Sharing a life’s journey is more pleasant if you and your partner are on parallel paths—literally,” says Irene Huang, a social psychologist. After running tests in both countries, Huang found that American and Chinese couples who chose to take exactly the same route to work—whether or not they left home at the same time—were the happiest with each other.
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Their matching journeys implied matching goals. This synchrony resonated with the couple as yet another confirmation of their bond. Every seemingly
coincidental overlap in their thoughts, habits, or behavior reminded them of what had attracted them to each other in the first place.

Like attracts like, homophily, assortative mating, birds of a feather—whatever you want to call it, we know that people who are already similar are drawn to each other. They live in the same neighborhoods, eat the same foods, have similar worries, pray in the same way, and often do business together. The question we’ll explore in the next chapter is whether this magnetic attraction is always a force for good.