by David Brooks
One of the by-products of this pattern is that people tend to unwittingly pick partners who have lived near them for at least parts of their lives. A study in the 1950s found that 54 percent of the couples who applied for marriage licenses in Columbus, Ohio, lived within sixteen blocks of each other when they started going out, and 37 percent lived within five blocks of each other. In college, people are much more likely to go out with people who have dorm rooms on the same hallway or the same courtyard. Familiarity breeds trust.
Rob and Julia quickly discovered they had a lot in common. They had the same Edward Hopper poster on their walls. They had been at the same ski resort at the same time and had similar political views. They discovered they both loved Roman Holiday, had the same opinions about the characters in The Breakfast Club, and shared the same misimpression that it was a sign of sophistication to talk about how much you loved Eames chairs and the art of Mondrian.
Furthermore, they both affected discerning connoisseurship over extremely prosaic things such as hamburgers and iced tea. They both exaggerated their popularity while reminiscing about high school. They had hung out at the same bars and had seen the same rock bands on the same tours. It was like laying down a series of puzzle pieces that astoundingly matched. People generally overestimate how distinct their own lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them like a series of miracles. The coincidences gave their relationship an aura of destiny fulfilled.
Without realizing it, they were also measuring each other’s intellectual compatibility. As Geoffrey Miller notes in The Mating Mind, people tend to choose spouses of similar intelligence, and the easiest way to measure someone else’s intelligence is through their vocabulary. People with an 80 IQ will know words such as “fabric,” “enormous,” and “conceal” but not words such as “sentence,” “consume,” and “commerce.” People with 90 IQs will know the latter three words, but probably not “designate,” “ponder,” or “reluctant.” So people who are getting to know each other subconsciously measure to see if their vocabularies mesh, and they adapt to the other person’s level.
The server stopped by their table, and they ordered drinks and then lunch. It is an elemental fact of life that we get to choose what we will order, but we do not get to choose what we like. Preferences are formed below the level of awareness, and it so happened that Rob loved cabernet but disliked merlot. Unfortunately, Julia ordered a glass of the former, so Rob had to select a glass of the latter, just to appear different. The food at their lunch was terrible, but the meal was wondrous. Rob had never actually been to this restaurant, but had selected it on the advice of their mutual friend, who was highly confident about his own judgments. It turned out to be one of those restaurants with ungraspable salads. Julia, anticipating this, had chosen an appetizer that could be easily forked and a main dish that didn’t require cutlery expertise. But Rob had selected a salad, which sounded good on the menu, composed of splaying green tentacles that could not be shoved into his mouth without brushing salad dressing three inches on either side of his cheeks. In some retro-nostalgia for 1990s tall cuisine, his entrée was a three-story steak, potato, and onion concoction that looked like the Devils Tower from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Getting a biteful was like chipping off a geological stratum from Mount Rushmore.
But none of it mattered, because Rob and Julia clicked. Over the main course, Julia described her personal history—her upbringing, her collegiate interests in communications, her work as a publicist and its frustrations, and her vision for the PR firm she would someday start, using viral marketing.
Julia leaned in toward Rob as she explained her mission in life. She took rapid-fire sips of water, chewing incredibly fast, like a chipmunk, so she could keep on talking. Her energy was infectious. “This could be huge!” she enthused. “This could change everything!”
Ninety percent of emotional communication is nonverbal. Gestures are an unconscious language that we use to express not only our feelings but to constitute them. By making a gesture, people help produce an internal state. Rob and Julia licked their lips, leaned forward in their chairs, glanced at each other out of the corners of their eyes, and performed all the other tricks of unconscious choreography that people do while flirting. Unawares, Julia did the head cant women do to signal arousal, a slight tilt of the head that exposed her neck. She’d be appalled if she could see her supposedly tough-as-nails self in the mirror at this moment, because there she was like any Marilyn Monroe wannabe—doing the hair flip, raising her arms to adjust her hair, and heaving her chest up into view.
Julia hadn’t yet realized how much she enjoyed talking to Rob. But the waitress noticed the feverish warmth on their faces, and was pleased, since men on a first date are the biggest tippers of all. Only days later did the importance of the meal sink in. Decades hence, Julia would remember the smallest detail of this lunch, and not only the fact that her husband-to-be ate all the bread in the breadbasket.
And through it all the conversation flowed.
Words are the fuel of courtship. Other species win their mates through a series of escalating dances, but humans use conversation. Geoffrey Miller notes that most adults have a vocabulary of about sixty thousand words. To build that vocabulary, children must learn ten to twenty words a day between the ages of eighteen months and eighteen years. And yet the most frequent one hundred words account for 60 percent of all conversations. The most common four thousand words account for 98 percent of conversations. Why do humans bother knowing those extra fifty-six thousand words?
Miller believes that humans learn the words so they can more effectively impress and sort out potential mates. He calculates that if a couple speaks for two hours a day, and utters on average three words a second, and has sex for three months before conceiving a child (which would have been the norm on the prehistoric savanna), then a couple will have exchanged about a million words before conceiving a child. That’s a lot of words, and plenty of opportunities for people to offend, bore, or annoy each other. It’s ample opportunity to fight, make up, explore, and reform. If a couple is still together after all that chatter, there’s a decent chance they’ll stay together long enough to raise a child.
Harold’s parents were just in the first few thousand words of what, over the course of their lifetimes, would be millions and millions, and things were going fabulously. You’d think, if you listened to cultural stereotypes, that women are the more romantic of the sexes. In fact, there’s plenty of evidence that men fall in love more quickly, and subscribe more to the conviction that true love lasts forever. So much of the conversation, for this first night and for several months thereafter, would be about getting Julia to let down her guard.
Rob would have been unrecognizable to his buddies if they could see him now. He was talking knowledgably about his relationships. He seemed completely unaware of his own physical gifts, though he’d been known in other circumstances to stare admiringly at his own forearms for minutes at a time. All trace of cynicism was gone. Though men normally spend two-thirds of their conversational time talking about themselves, in this conversation he was actually talking about Julia’s problems. David Buss’s surveys suggest that kindness is the most important quality desired in a sexual partner by both men and women. Courtship largely consists of sympathy displays, in which partners try to prove to each other how compassionate they can be, as anybody who has seen dating couples around children and dogs can well attest.
Of course, there are other, less noble calculations going on as people choose their mates. Like veteran stock-market traders, people respond in predictable, if unconscious, ways to the valuations of the social marketplace. They instinctively seek the greatest possible return on their own market value.
The richer the man, the younger the woman he is likely to mate with. The more beautiful the woman, the richer the man. A woman’s attractiveness is an outstanding predictor of her husband’s annual income.
Men who are deficient in one status category can comp
ensate if they are high in another. Several studies of online dating have shown that short men can be as successful in the dating market if they earn more than taller men. Guenter Hitsch, Ali Hortacsu, and Dan Ariely calculate that a man who is five foot six can do as well as a six-footer if he earns $175,000 a year more. An African American man can do as well with white women if he earns $154,000 more than a white man with similar attributes. (Women resist dating outside their ethnic group much more than men do.)
Along with everything else, Rob and Julia were doing these sorts of calculations unconsciously in their heads—weighing earnings-to-looks ratios, calculating social-capital balances. And every signal suggested they had found a match.
The Stroll
Human culture exists in large measure to restrain the natural desires of the species. The tension of courtship is produced by the need to slow down when the instincts want to rush right in. Both Rob and Julia were experiencing powerful impulsion at this point, and were terrified of saying something too vehement and forward. People who succeed in courtship are able to pick up the melody and rhythm of a relationship. Through a mutual process of reading each other and restraining themselves, their relationship will or will not establish its own synchronicity, and it is through this process that they will establish the implicit rules that will forever after govern how they behave toward each other.
“The greatest happiness love can offer is the first pressure of hands between you and your beloved,” the French writer Stendhal once observed. Harold’s parents were by this point engaging in the sort of verbal interplay that was less like conversation and more like grooming. When they got up from the table, Rob wanted to place his hand on the small of Julia’s back to guide her to the door but was afraid she might be displeased by the implied intimacy. Julia silently regretted bringing her day bag, which was roughly the size of a minivan, and big enough to hold books, phones, pagers, and possibly a moped. She’d been afraid that morning that bringing a small bag would look too hopeful—too datelike—but here she was at one of the most important meals of her life, and she was misbagged!
Rob finally touched her arm as they walked out the door, and she looked up at him with that trusting smile. They walked down the sidewalk past the high-end stationery stores, unaware they were already doing the lovers’ walk—bodies close to each other, beaming out at the space in front of them with a wide-open glee. Julia really felt comfortable with Rob. Throughout the meal he’d looked at her intently—not with that weird obsessive look Jimmy Stewart gave Kim Novak in Vertigo, but with an anchoring gaze that pulled her in.
For his part, Rob actually shivered as he escorted Julia back to her car. His heart was palpitating and his breathing was fast. He felt he’d been extraordinarily witty over lunch, encouraged by her flashing eyes. Vague sensations swept over him, which he didn’t understand. Brazenly, he asked if he could see her tomorrow, and of course she said yes. He didn’t want to just shake her hand, and a kiss was too forward. So he squeezed her arm and brushed his cheek against hers.
As Julia and Rob semi-embraced, they silently took in each other’s pheromones. Their cortisol levels dropped. Smell is a surprisingly powerful sense in these situations. People who lose their sense of smell suffer greater emotional deterioration than people who lose their vision. That’s because smell is a powerful way to read emotions. In one experiment conducted at the Monell Center, researchers asked men and women to tape gauze pads under their arms and then watch either a horror movie or a comedy. Research subjects, presumably well compensated, then sniffed the pads. They could somehow tell, at rates higher than chance, which pads had the smell of laughter and which pads had the smell of fear, and women were much better at this test than men.
Later in their relationship, Rob and Julia would taste each other’s saliva and then collect genetic information. According to famous research by Claus Wedekind at the University of Lausanne, women are attracted to men whose human leukocyte antigen code of their DNA are most different from their own. Complementary HLA coding is thought to produce better immune systems in their offspring.
Aided by chemistry and carried along by feeling, Rob and Julia both sensed that this had been one of the most important interviews of their lives. In fact, it would turn out to be the most important two hours that each of them would ever spend, for there is no decision more important to lifelong happiness than the decision about whom to marry. Over the course of that early afternoon, they had begun to make a decision.
The meal had been delightful. But they had also just been through a rigorous intellectual exam that made the SAT seem like kindergarten. Each of them had spent the past 120 minutes performing delicate social tasks. They’d demonstrated wit, complaisance, empathy, tact, and timing. They’d obeyed a social script that applies to first dates in their culture. They had each made a thousand discriminating judgments. They had measured their emotional responses with discriminations so fine no gauge could quantify them. They had decoded silent gestures—a grin, a look, a shared joke, a pregnant pause. They had put each other through a series of screens and filters, constantly evaluating each other’s performance and their own. Every few minutes they had admitted each other one step closer toward the intimacy of their hearts.
These mental tasks only seemed easy because the entire history of life on this earth had prepared them for this moment. Rob and Julia didn’t need to take a course in making these sorts of social-bonding decisions the way they had taken a course in, say, algebra. The mental work was mostly done unconsciously. It seemed effortless. It just came naturally.
So far, they couldn’t put their conclusions into words, because their sensations had not cohered into any conscious message. But the choice to fall in love would just sort of well up inside of them. It didn’t feel like they had made a choice, but that a choice had made them. A desire for the other had formed. It would take each of them awhile to realize that a ferocious commitment to the other had already been made. The heart, Blaise Pascal observed, has reasons the head knows not of.
But this is how deciding works. This is how knowing what we want happens—not only when it comes to marriage but in many of the other important parts of life. Deciding whom to love is not a strange alien form of decision making, a romantic interlude in the midst of normal life. Instead, decisions about whom to love are more intense versions of the sorts of decisions we make throughout the course of life, from what food to order to what career to pursue. Decision making is an inherently emotional business.
Love’s Role
Revolutions in our understanding of ourselves begin in the oddest ways. One of the breakthroughs that helped us understand the interplay between emotion and decision making began with a man named Elliot, whose story has become one of the most famous in the world of brain research. Elliot had suffered damage to the frontal lobes of his brain as the result of a tumor. Elliot was intelligent, well informed, and diplomatic. He possessed an attractively wry view of the world. But, after surgery, Elliot began to have trouble managing his day. Whenever he tried to accomplish something, he’d ignore the most important parts of the task and get sidetracked by trivial distractions. At work he’d set out to file some reports, but then would just sit down and start reading them. He’d spend an entire day trying to decide on a filing system. He’d spend hours deciding where to have lunch, and still couldn’t settle on a place. He made foolish investments that cost him his life savings. He divorced his wife, married a woman his family disapproved of, and quickly divorced again. In short, he was incapable of making sensible choices.
Elliot went to see a scientist named Antonio Damasio, who evaluated him with a battery of tests. They showed that Elliot had a superior IQ. He had an excellent memory for numbers and geometric designs and was proficient at making estimates based upon incomplete information. But in the many hours of conversation Damasio had with Elliot, he noticed that the man never showed any emotion. He could recount the tragedy that had befallen his life without the slightest tinge of
sadness.
Damasio showed Elliot gory and traumatic images from earthquakes, fires, accidents, and floods. Elliot understood how he was supposed to respond emotionally to these images. He just didn’t actually feel anything. Damasio began to investigate whether Elliot’s reduced emotions played a role in his decision-making failures.
A series of further tests showed that Elliot understood how to imagine different options when making a decision. He was able to understand conflicts between two moral imperatives. In short, he could prepare himself to make a choice between a complex range of possibilities.
What Elliot couldn’t do was actually make the choice. He was incapable of assigning value to different options. As Damasio put it, “His decision-making landscape [was] hopelessly flat.”
Another of Damasio’s research subjects illustrated the same phenomenon in stark form. This middle-aged man, who had also lost his emotional functions through a brain injury, was finishing an interview session in Damasio’s office, and Damasio suggested two alternative dates for their next meeting. The man pulled out his datebook and began listing the pros and cons of each option. For the better part of half an hour, he went on and on, listing possible conflicts, potential weather conditions on the two days in question, the proximity of other appointments. “It took enormous discipline to listen to all this without pounding the table and telling him to stop,” Damasio wrote. But he and his fellow researchers just stood there watching. Finally Damasio interrupted the man’s musings and just assigned him a date to return. Without a pause, the man said, “That’s fine” and went away.