Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love (35 page)

In addition to the different expectations we had from the relationship, the incompatibility between myself and the Heidelberg guy may well have resided in the ways each of us received love from our own parents, especially our mothers, and the way we exercised that pattern over the years and through other experiences. Bad habits ossify fast, especially if taken up at an early age. Even when it comes to refusing love, or having to struggle for attachment, if we have done it a couple of times, we learn how to do it again.

I admit I was almost frozen with unease by the fact that the way my mother raised me, especially during my early years, must critically influence my choice of partner. It gave me a pretty clear picture of what I was up against when relating to potential partners – and what they were up against when meeting me! Such truth had been handed down to me through concepts in psychoanalysis, as well as Larkin’s poem. Neuroscience gave me an additional piece of information. It made me realize that maternal care modifies the expression of some of my genes. This was disquieting, but not totally discouraging. No parent is perfect, but neither is he or she disastrous.

Even though there may be a certain coherence between the kind of person with whom we tend to fall in love and an earlier attachment pattern, we must not think of attachment or parenting styles as shackles that chain people to an immutable sentimental fate. Whether a parent is cold and neglectful or warm and caring is merely the initial impetus in the trajectory of an individual’s life. Across the years we can undergo so many changes and accumulate such diverse experience that much of the way we relate to other people is influenced by a lot more than just our parents. As we learnt in chapter 3 in the case of fear, the brain is plastic: its neuronal wiring and the genetic expression underlying it can be actively changed. Epigenetic modification continues even after childhood. Whatever happened in childhood, there is still room for change, development and discovery. Getting tangled up in a pattern is way easier than getting out of it, but the reverse is not impossible. We just need to work towards it, sometimes very hard.

The love supermarket

My unfortunate experience with the stranger from the cinema confirms that love is blind and that Cupid’s lack of judgement can let him make silly, undesirable mistakes on our behalf (or, as Bowlby would explain it, on behalf of our parents). And, when a relationship ends, nobody knows when Cupid will reappear. Nevertheless, for as long as lovers have sought romance, others have tried to meddle, uninvited. Whether they be parents, priests or rabbis, friends or professional matchmakers, third parties have long operated as intermediaries and interfered with the normal course of courtship and flirting, thinking they knew what encouraged lovers to pair off better than the lovers themselves. Most often, they stood against Cupid’s arrow so that people would make marital choices that suited social realities. Conventional go-betweens and marriage brokers still exist, but in today’s world a new form of matchmaking has come to the fore: online dating.

The online dating industry has become a multi-billion-dollar affair that has continued to prosper even through the ongoing recession, with about twenty-five million individual users around the world having accessed an online dating site at least once in 2011.
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Online dating has profoundly changed romance. Most of the time, our encounters are random and unplanned. They occur on the bus, on the street, while we stand in line for coffee, at the supermarket, at a departmental reception, on a plane, or on a boat. We may meet an eligible partner through friends, at weddings or bar mitzvahs, at a dinner party or, as happened to me, in front of the cinema . . . Thus, infatuation with a person begins with only a brief glimpse of who they are. We then gradually discover more and more of their personal qualities, good or bad (or rather, as I emphasized earlier, those qualities we wish to see in them). Nobody can guarantee the success of the relationship, but we embark on it, enjoying the other person for as long as the relationship lasts and is mutually rewarding.

One of the advantages offered by online dating is that, in principle, a new subscriber to a dating site has access to a much larger number of potential lovers than he or she could possibly meet in a more traditional fashion. Compare the dozen or so people you could screen and talk to at a party with the thousands of profiles you can scroll through on your screen. Certainly it would be impossible in practice to meet all users, but a systematic search among them helps the selection, all from the comfort of a desk.

For a fee, dating websites will collect and offer to their subscribers all sorts of basic information about a user: gender and physical attributes as well as self-reported data about personality, background, hobbies, interests and visions of what a relationship should be. All in the form of a refined standard profile and accessible with a couple of clicks. Dating websites ask you to fill out a psychological questionnaire. Once that’s done, they pull out matches for you based on compatibility algorithms. On most websites, users can also integrate their basic profiles with unique information through the use of self-descriptions. This is their chance to whet the appetite of those who visit their profiles. To get the feel of such paragraphs, I signed up on one of the dating sites (an action that requires on average a good thirty minutes of your time if you want to answer all the psychological questions) and found that they actually often end up pretty much alike and are written in a repetitive language. Many online daters are not always truthful in reporting their basic information. Of course, in traditional face-to-face dating too, people often tend to strategically offer a slightly better version of themselves to impress the other. However, this deceitful attitude is easier online because of the safe cyber distance. A study of eighty online daters revealed that 81 per cent of them lied about their weight, their height or their age.
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Online dating overrides the traditional role of sight in instigating romance.

Courtship is profoundly a physical experience. The standardized profiles, even though incorporating photographs, deprive their subjects of one dimension. Men and women are reduced to two-dimensional profile pages with no movement, glittering glance, or indeed unique smell. Such a system does not remove all element of surprise, possibly unwelcome surprise: a large number of romances begun over the internet end when the prospective lovers meet face to face.

Emotions best travel between us through our bodies. We need the kind of skin reaction offered by a physical encounter, which no computer-based acquaintance can replace. Even the most recent, honest and undoctored pictures can deviate from reality. An attractive photograph may show a pair of finely cut cheekbones, a well-proportioned nose, chiselled lips, even a fit body. But it won’t supply the feeling of what it means to be in the presence of those bodily attributes. If, as we have seen, meeting a lover for real sends us on a spectacular trip of fantasy, think how our imagination might travel in the absence of a physical encounter. Well, appropriately, it would go at the speed of the internet.

Too much online dating can cause a desertification of our emotions, to the point that we prefer the two-dimensional profile picture of a body on a screen to a real person at the other side of a table, or in our beds for that matter. People become shopping items, and the dating world a marketplace.
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There is so much choice available that it is possible to fill a virtual shopping cart, pick and discard at random, and always find a replacement when one of the selected products does not really work out. Thus, rather than educating our senses and emotions to focus on what and who uniquely fulfils our needs and desires – and then work towards achieving that relationship – it becomes easier to quickly consume one product after another. There will always be some other choice. Selecting a potential match online becomes a mechanical, controlled action, comparable to ticking a box in a questionnaire, in stark contrast to the unpredictable and erratic dynamics at work between people in person. Such widespread methods and mentality in love matters corrode the poetry and, ultimately, the trust that we need to build to establish any long-lasting bond.

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If online dating in general substitutes calculation for intuition, this is even more the case when biological information is introduced into the business.

An increasing number of innovative dating services, such as Scientificmatch.com, Genepartner.com and Chemistry.com, have integrated their customers’ biological information into their selection methods, to match people on the basis of their genetic and chemical profiles. Through the inclusion of this type of data, microscopic fragments of the body enter the picture. These new services have achieved huge popularity – millions of users, at least in America, choosing to consign their romantic fates into the hands of science – and have raised hopes of swift and better success among those seeking their sister soul. Users are persuaded that the help of brain chemistry may be more effective than traditional methods in reversing their repeated failure to find love. But, is it so?

Helen Fisher, one of the first scientists to study love in a brain scanner, has helped build the matching system Chemistry.com. The system was developed around the identification of four main personality types, each reflecting differing levels of two principal neurotransmitters – dopamine and serotonin – and two sex hormones – testosterone and oestrogen.
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The personality types are the Explorer, the Builder, the Director and the Negotiator.

When you subscribe to the service, nobody will measure your levels of neurotransmitters and hormones directly, but you will be asked to complete a psychological questionnaire of approximately sixty items that help trace back to them. The questions are based on genetic and neurochemical information linking these four chemicals to personality traits. According to the answers given, you will be attributed a primary and a secondary personality type.

One of the questions is to compare and measure the length of the index and ring fingers of your right hand, when you look at it with its palm up. Why on earth would one want to do that? This again has to do with your mother’s influence on your behaviour, which begins in the womb. Chemistry.com looks primarily at the levels of oestrogen and testosterone that filter through the foetal brain. If, as a foetus – male or female – you were exposed to more testosterone, your ring finger will be longer in relation to your index finger. This also reflects higher circulation of testosterone in your body as an adult. A long ring finger and more testosterone means you would be deemed at Chemistry.com to be a Director, a personality type characterized by features such as decisiveness, dominance, directness and self-confidence. Dopamine is connected to a tendency to seek novelty and adventure. Dopamine levels are, therefore, brought into consideration by asking the user how applicable they find such statements as ‘I am always looking for new experiences’ or ‘I find unpredictable situations exhilarating’ or ‘I do things on the spur of the moment’. If you can strongly relate to these statements, you are labelled as an Explorer. Builders are concrete, cautious, grounded, orderly and with a solid sense of duty. Fisher believes that such properties in a Builder are predominantly orchestrated by serotonin and its in- fluence on the metabolism of hormones and other neurotransmitters. For instance, a Builder’s friendliness and tendency to create a family may reside in serotonin’s capacity to trigger the release of oxytocin, which, as I explained above, facilitates attachment. Conversely, a Builder’s calm and caution may be in part due to the ability of serotonin to suppress the release of testosterone and dopamine.

Negotiators are intuitive, expressive, pleasing and empathic. They appreciate emotional intimacy and are curious about other human beings. Negotiators have high levels of oestrogen, inherited in the womb from their mother’s blood and placenta. Chemistry.com tests the presence of excess oestrogen in Negotiators by checking if their index finger is equal or longer in length than the ring finger. A Negotiator’s high oestrogen levels are also assessed on the basis of their enhanced imagination and ability to connect and integrate thoughts and different kinds of information in novel, unexpected ways – in part due to oestrogen’s ability to build a high number of nerve connections across distant brain regions within each hemisphere, and between the two hemispheres.

We are left with the question of whether online neuroscience-based matching systems might really be more effective than traditional methods in scouting for an ideal partner. Helen Fisher has helped thousands of romance-seekers find their perfect match.

Patiently, and with a lot of curiosity, I took the test and I can proudly announce that I am a Negotiator-Explorer. Many of the features corresponding to these personality types, as described on the website – such as my high regard for emotional intimacy and the desire to seek new adventures – do actually correspond to some of my dispositions and how I see myself. My ring finger is indeed shorter than my index finger. Yet I am uncomfortable with limiting the totality of who I am to these two attributes. As we saw in chapter 4, conjecturing and identifying ‘types’ among individuals is not a recent enterprise. Ancient doctors parcelled their population into exemplars of sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic tempers. Modern psychology has developed and consistently relied upon inventories of personalities.
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The desire to understand ourselves, describe our behaviour or intuit that of others is relentless.

It is important to remind ourselves that the four dating types and the matches built with them are not an exact reflection of levels of serotonin, dopamine, oestrogen and testosterone. Being a Negotiator cannot only be the result of an excess of oestrogen and personality types are never the outcome of a single or just a few biological factors. As Fisher acknowledges, ‘families’ of chemicals and neurotransmitters concoct the types she designed. Behavioural and emotional features arise from a biological architecture that makes them possible, the variation of which confers on individuals personal and unique shadings of those features. Then, as we have seen, chapters in our biographies, environmental circumstances and social and cultural influences play a huge role, too.