A Woman Like Me...A Man Like You: Relationships & Dating Revisited in the 21st Century

More popular users are contacted more and, therefore, are less likely to respond to any one user.

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In a study, Fiore and Judith Donath Massachusetts Institute of Technology examined messaging data from 65, users of a United States-based dating site. They found that users preferred sameness on all of the categories they tested a variety of features from child preferences to education to physical features like height. But some factors played a larger role than others, with marital status and wanting or already having children showing the strongest same-seeking. Fiore has also found that women responded more frequently to men whose popularity on the site a measure based on the average number of people contacting the user per day was similar to their own Fiore, Hitsch and colleagues found that similarity was strongly preferred in a variety of factors, including age, education, height, religion, political views, and smoking.

They also found a strong same-race preference. Interestingly, women have a more pronounced same-race preference, and this preference is not always revealed in their stated preferences Hitsch, et al.

Online dating service users tend to contact people who are about as attractive as they are, but does your own attractiveness level influence how attractive you believe others to be? The site was launched in purely for users to rate each other on how attractive or, obviously, not they were. Later, the site added an online dating component. Consistent with previous research, this study, published in Psychological Science , found that people with similar levels of physical attractiveness indeed tend to date each other, with more attractive people being more particular about the physical attractiveness of their potential dates.

Compared to females, males are more influenced by how physically attractive their potential dates are, but less affected by how attractive they themselves are when deciding whom to date. But these findings about gender bias in attraction are being challenged in other studies — more on this later. Assessing potential partners online hinges on other users being truthful in their descriptions. Psychological scientists have turned to online dating to examine how truthful people are in their descriptions of themselves, both with themselves and to others.

Online daters walk a fine line — everyone wants to make themselves as attractive as possible to potential dates, making deception very tempting. Catalina Toma, Jeffrey Hancock both at Cornell University , and Nicole Ellison Michigan State University examined the relationship between actual physical attributes and online self-descriptions of online daters in New York. They found that lying was ubiquitous, but usually fairly small in terms of magnitude. Men tended to lie about height and women tended to lie about weight. Another modern dating innovation may provide a better solution: Since then, speed dating has spread around the world, giving millions of singles a chance at love.

It also gives savvy researchers an unprecedented chance to study attraction in situ.

Modern Love: Scientific Insights from 21st Century Dating

This hunch was confirmed by a speed dating outing with several other Northwestern colleagues, and the researchers embarked a new track of speed dating work. No word on whether the outing was a success from other standpoints. As Finkel and Eastwick point out in a study published in Current Directions in Psychological Science , the popularity of speed dating allows the collection of large, real world samples across cultures, ethnicities, and socioeconomic levels.

The speed dating design also lets researchers to study both sides of a dyadic process. Also, speed dating allows for exploring reciprocity effects. A Psychological Science article Eastwick et al. Speed dating empowers researchers to study interactions as they happen, rather than post-hoc reports. It also allows for testing actual versus stated preferences.

One speed dating study showed that stated preferences do not match actual preferences and called into question the gender biases in attraction that have been well-documented elsewhere i. Speed dating studies also allow researchers to study the implications of simple changes in dating paradigms.

This idea holds true at speed dating events, where women generally stay seated while the men rotate. This set-up stems from vague notions of chivalry, but also from more mundane purposes — according to one speed dating company executive, women tend to have more stuff with them, like purses, and are therefore less efficient movers.

Could this set-up in itself affect attraction?

Modern Love: Scientific Insights from 21st Century Dating – Association for Psychological Science

Turns out that it can. In most speed dating scenarios as in most attraction scenarios in general women are more selective. But, when women rotated, this effect disappeared and they became less selective than the men. Research into online matchmaking and speed dating is providing valuable insight into the human quest for romance, and this is only the beginning.

Most of the research in this area to-date focuses on dating behavior of heterosexuals in the United States. More work is necessary to determine if the findings so far also apply to international daters and to understand the dynamics of homosexual pairings. Emerging methods may also bring new insight into dating dynamics.

Finkel and Eastwick have begun using a coding scheme to study exactly what participants are saying during their dates, allowing them to potentially code what exactly makes a date great or awkward. Is it better to communicate independence from or interdependence with your partner? Selective versus unselective romantic desire: Not all reciprocity is created equal. Psychological Science , 18 , — Sex differences in mate preferences revisited: Do people know what they initially desire in a romantic partner?

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 94 , Arbitrary social norms influence sex differences in romantic selectivity. Psychological Science , 20 , It was so much better than the one she had three years ago. And Michael is actively looking for a mistress. He has no intention of leaving his wife. He doesn't want to try dating sites designed for people seeking illicit affairs; some of his friends have done just that, but Michael thinks they're for amateurs.

He wants "to do it the old-fashioned way…". THere are few reliable statistics relating to rates of infidelity. It's not the kind of thing people tell the truth about, or have ever told the truth about. Psychologists think men traditionally overstate their infidelities, while women understate. From Discovery to Recovery in Seven Steps says he's seeing more of it in his practice. And it may be because all the technology that makes it easier to cheat also makes it easier to get found out. Logic would suggest we're having more affairs than ever.

We're presented with more opportunities to cheat. We work more and travel more, and consequently are more absent from our homes. The evolving landscape of technology means we are connected — sometimes intensely and continuously — with many more people than before. Technology also means that the very definitions of infidelity have broadened. Emotional infidelities are increasingly an issue; entire affairs are played out online; intense relationships — which may or may not blur the line on friendship, who knows? And yet we're still incredibly reverent about, and attached to, the ideal of monogamy.

Both the major political parties are attempting to enshrine monogamy in pro-family policy; both made monogamy a cornerstone of their election campaigns. En masse we are critical of other people and their infidelities. We're fantastically sanctimonious regarding celebrity transgressions. We were glad that John Terry was stripped of his captaincy; delighted that Tiger Woods lost his endorsement deals as a consequence of his alleged infidelities; overjoyed that Cheryl gave Ashley the boot.

We condemn the unfaithful publicly and gossip about them privately. We condemn ourselves when we transgress; we lose ourselves to guilt and suffer identity crises: This isn't who we are! Why are we living this dichotomy? Why do we support the idea of monogamy so heartily while not managing to be monogamous? Why do we persist in having affairs, persist in believing in monogamy, when we're not comfortable with or especially capable of either? Esther Perel thinks she knows.

She's a New York-based couples therapist; a Belgian-accented, year-old minx of a shrink. She's a self-styled "voice on erotic intelligence… a sexologist", and she peddles what is possibly the most insightful, revelatory and controversial line on sex and love and marriage of our times. I first met her three years ago in her offices — a suite of rooms on Fifth Avenue right next to New York's Museum of Sex — to discuss Mating in Captivity: Sex, Lies and Domestic Bliss , the book she'd just published about sex in long-term relationships.

Then, her main point was that eroticism comes not from closeness, not from intimacy, but from precisely the opposite. From distance, from moments of jealousy, from a constant awareness that you do not own your partner no matter how long you've been together; that other people fancy them, that they always have the potential to sleep with someone else. I remember at the time being both genuinely shocked by her thinking and completely poleaxed by how right it seemed.

It was instantly familiar. It resonated like the chorus of an incredibly good pop song. Perel's newest obsession is infidelity. She began writing about and considering it in earnest as far back as ; after the publication of Mating in Captivity she discovered that faithless love was all anyone really wanted to talk about, and demand for her unique perspective escalated.

She's been chairing workshops on it and speaking at conferences about it ever since. Perel began refining her ideas on affairs and monogamy, and concluded that pervading notions and received wisdom on both are unhelpful, outdated, reductive and ineffectual. Perel believes that if we can revisit our ideas on infidelity, start properly understanding why we do it, become more tolerant of the fact that we do it, then we're in with a better chance of maintaining a happy marriage. When I interview her via Skype which is how, she says, she spends half her life these days.

We will get very intimate, just you wait and see! Perel, who was an actor before she became a psychotherapist, is not afraid of ramping up the impact of her discourse with high drama. It tops them all. Infidelity, she says, is one of the great recurring themes of the human experience. Monogamy is human, but human beings are not monogamous! Historically we have always been unfaithful — and always condemned infidelity.

For a glimmer of passion, or whatever, people have been willing to risk everything. Women more so than men. Still, today, there are eight countries where women can be killed for being unfaithful.

And before, there was no contraception! Everything about female sexuality was more dangerous. Rates of female infidelity have grown enormously, in accordance with women's economic independence. In Latin American countries it's a social phenomenon. When I went to Argentina all they wanted to talk about was female infidelity.

It's [a marker of] acute social change. It's not just a few women. It really toppled the traditional male privilege. What does it mean when this happens in a society where it was never accepted, where men were allowed to roam around but women never could? When women begin to do what was traditionally a privilege of men, what does it do? It changes the dynamic of power! You can always use infidelity to track social changes. And yes, female infidelity is a statement of female empowerment; but then again, infidelity is a statement of empowerment for anyone who practises it. It is a rebellion.

This is what Esther Perel does. She re-spins affairs, throws new light on them, offers completely new perspectives. She can make affairs seem positive: Fascination and disillusion stare at each other. She can transform the revelation of infidelity into the catalyst for the rebirth of a relationship: But there are others. Affairs also are enormously enlivening. They balance the marriage. People who have affairs don't always want to leave the marriage. Sometimes, often, they are looking for a way to stay! And perhaps most surprisingly, most controversially, she takes the traditional cliche of the faithless man or woman and refashions it: This is not a mild act!

We have affairs to beat back the sense of deadness. We have affairs not because we are looking for another person, but because we are looking for another version of ourselves. It's not our partner we seek to leave with the affair, it's ourselves. It's what I've become that I don't like. It's how I've truncated myself. That there are parts of me that I have been so out of touch with, for decades… And of course, we live twice as long.

We are different with different people. Whatever else, Perel says, we do not have affairs simply because we are bad by nature; or deceptive, or selfish, or cruel. Particularly in America and in the UK, this is what we say about affairs. We talk about cheater. If it's not all those condemning words, then it goes to pathology.

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We hide behind moral condemnation, or pathologising. This is not helpful, and not true. If it is true, then there are a lot of us suffering with childhood trauma and borderline personality disorders, and we have been suffering from them throughout history! We need to start to understand infidelity in terms of the complexities of life today. We need to think in terms of the failed ambitions of love. Esther Perel is an impassioned, intoxicating speaker.

She talks fast and hard and she weaves her clients into her monologue. She references them constantly: