Deception and Romantic Relationships

[Anomaly]

Here's an excerpt from a book named The Owner's Manual for the Brain.

The Ideal Mate

David Buss (1994), with a group of international collaborators, polled over ten thousand men and women from the United States to Indonesia in an effort to determine what people want in the ideal mate. Buss, who was schooled in the evolutionary biology tradition sees contemporary behavior as the result of natural selection, found that after intelligence and kindness (which both sexes ranked as the top feature of the ideal mate), men preferred women who were physically beautiful and youthful over those with high earning potential, while women preferred good earning capacity and ambition over physical attractiveness. In a related study, William Tooke of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh found that during courtship, men tend to exaggerate their earning potential and ambition and women tend to exaggerate their youthfulness and beauty, each relaxing into their more natural levels of ambition and appearance after attachment has been secured.

Emphasis mine. As good as this material is on its own, I'm compelled to follow it up with content from several pages back.

Helen Fisher, a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, describes the physiological changes that accompany the recognition of the ideal partner as involving a rush of phenylethylamine (PEA) , dopamine, and norepinephrine, all natural amphetamines. The feeling of euphoria associated with this neurochemical flooding can last up to three years, then weakens. Divorces and separations multiply around the end of the fourth year of love relationships. Having a second child can prolong the physiological state for another for years... Anthony Walsh (1996), a psychobiologist at Boise State University in Idaho, observes that the natural amphetamines associated with attraction and its attendant euphoria act pretty much like pharmaceutical amphetamines: people build up a tolerance over time and need an increasingly large dose to be satisfied. At around the third year of the cycle, the body can't produce enough PEA to maintain the attraction.

Emphasis mine. Although I'll withhold anecdotal "evidence" that I so cynically want to present, I will follow this up with the last excerpt that I found to be rather humorous.

First, as Swiss researchers reported, females have clear preferences for certain male body odors (Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 1995). Namely, they prefer the smell emitted by men with major histocompatibility complexes (MHCs) that are most different from their own. A complicating factor is that women on the birth control pill prefer men with similar MHCs; so what happens when a woman who is on the pill falls in love, marries, and goes off the pill, and wonders how she got attached to the smelly partner beside her.

I'm not sure that newer birth control pills have the same effect, but I find that hilarious nonetheless.

The opinion I've long-held is that people put up a show for others in order to present themselves as more attractive to that specific person and that such a show cannot be kept up forever. Such sentiments probably originated long before and were probably passed off as the rantings of old men. I was a bit surprised when I found studies in support of my opinion.

You will notice that only the first excerpt has to do with deception, but the following information presented is helpful, I think, in understanding how such relationships proceed nonetheless. I think this serves as a good primer for discussion and I would like to hear your thoughts on this.

 

[Lorraine Manca]

anomaly, i found all of that absolutely hilarious. thanks.

 

[Lorraine Manca]

heres my question though, why dont parents ditch their kids after three years? if baby billy aint givin mama a buzz anymore, why doesnt she chunk him in foster care

 

[Hadron]

A study wasn't necessary in order to determine these findings. I thought this was all common knowledge.

 

[Anomaly]

A study wasn't necessary in order to determine these findings. I thought this was all common knowledge.

One would wonder why so many people go into marriages, knowing full-well that about half of them end in divorce -- yet people continue to get married. It's somewhat paradoxical.

heres my question though, why dont parents ditch their kids after three years? if baby billy aint givin mama a buzz anymore, why doesnt she chunk him in foster care

I suppose incest is hard to address in this ::

Actually, the child just helps the bond between the mother and father. The chapter was solely on romantic relationships.

 

[Hadron]

One would wonder why so many people go into marriages, knowing full-well that about half of them end in divorce -- yet people continue to get married. It's somewhat paradoxical.

I rather suggested that the existence of such behaviour is common knowledge; not that everyone who got married knew their partner full well, inside-out. And that they'd definitely end up divorced.

 

[Anomaly]

I rather suggested that the existence of such behaviour is common knowledge; not that everyone who got married knew their partner full well, inside-out. And that they'd definitely end up divorced.

I used it as a statistic, nothing more. I think it's well-documented and can be considered "common knowledge."