Falling in love

I have been inspired to write on this topic after reading a post by mud who is feeling a bit forlorn about the whole bizz.

The post attracted a bunch of comments, as you might expect. And quite a few of them were along the lines of "it just happens, and sometimes when you least expect it". That is endorsed by no less than Helen Fielding, author of Bridget Jones' Diary, which was, perhaps, a tad autobiograhical. I read an article by Fielding describing her long wait for the right man, whom she did eventually find, and thinking to herself afterwards "why was I so anxious?"

Anyway, that had me reflecting on love and thinking about how effing useless psychology is when it comes to these important things. We probably learn more from the language around love. For example we have

- "falling in love" which is suggestive of its involuntary and random nature (as when we fall over an obstacle)
- "love struck" much the same
- "love is blind" which is probably a reference to 'blind eye' but in effect says it is hard to predict
- "love sick" which captures its rather overwhelming visceral effects

The first three support the view that love "just happens", can't be hurried along, and can't be engineered.

So what, and perhaps more important, why is love?

We already like to have sex, a handy side effect of which is reproduction, so love doesn't seem to be a necessary condition for anything. But it's here. How come? Well it's a biological truism that we fall in love because those people who did, in the geological past, had better breeding success than those that did not.

Which is interesting.

Perhaps it has to do with what Desmond Morris called "pair bonding". Pair bonding keeps the breeding couple together for all those years it takes to get offspring from infancy to independence. Falling in love initiates the bond, which is then supported and maintained by lashings of sex over the years. Well, quite, but it's true you know. Nothing in the animal kingdom goes in for bonking as we do.

Anyway, none of this gets me nearer to mud and love, so I'll take my chances and move on to what I think it's all about:

attraction -> approach -> reciprocity -> sex -> love (then lots more sex, but we've been there already)

Or for the more romatically inclined, reverse the last two.

First, attraction. Now this is a real mystery. I think we all know that sudden jolt when you find someone attractive; but could we define what it is? Hard for any one of us I suspect but science does provide some clues.

What makes for a beautiful woman? Apparently an "average" woman. You doubt that? Well take some female faces and crank them through a computer to get the morph average. The result is surprisingly pleasing. This photograph is one I made earlier, morphing just 10 random female faces. It's fun to do, and you can make your own average here. BTW, all this works for male faces too.

Why? Most faces are slightly asymmetrical; the more symmetrical a face is, the more attractive it is judged. Apparently symmetrical faces are advertising hordings that say "I've got good genes, choose me". And the morphing process tends to balance out asymmetries.

Another thing that has men interested is the waist-to-hip ratio. You measure your waist at the narrowest point and your hips at the widest point and get the ratio waist/hips. A ratio of 0.7 seems to be rated universally as the most attractive which is interesting because that is the best predictor of fertility. Apparently Marilyn Monroe had it as does the skinnier Kate Moss.



And so amazingly does the classic Coke bottle; I did some consumer research that showed men find it attractive. Sad buggers.



There is much else; have a look at this article on attraction.

I personally think that attraction is a must. But I have a friend who has been married for 35 years and has grown-up children. He married because their families kind of expected them to. There was really no attraction or love, I don't think.

Next, check that it is reciprocated. It may not be, but that's not the end. I've known people become attracted later, as it were, a kind of catastrophe switch from non-attraction to attraction. I think that sex itself can cause this to happen, but don't do it just because I said so.

If the attraction is mutual you are kind of home and dry. If not, it's uphill work, and in the end unrewarding.

Well, I say home and dry, but that's not quite true. The suggestion is that the more alike the two of you are in background, social standing, education, economics and even genetics, the more likely the relationship is to succeed (boring, but there you go).

Based on my own experience I would say that if it turns out your love is not reciprocated, cut and run no matter how attractive you find them. You may be unhappy now, but boy are you going to be unhappy later if you don't.

Anyway, I think this is why people say well it just comes along, you don't know when, then bam etc etc. The whole attraction thing is very statistical (symmetry and various ratios notwithstanding).

So for two people to get the hots for each other at the same time is just improbable - though completely possible. It just takes time. If you think it is happening, then go for it, and be prepared to make the running.

Postscript: This post was much harder to write than I thought. And a whole lot less useful. But it's late and I'm off to bed.

Sexologist: a tough job, but someone's got to do it

I grew up in what can only be described as the black hole of sexual knowledge. I've got that wrong. I mean that I was outside the black hole and all the sexual knowledge in the universe had been sucked into it.

Yes, folks, I'm talking about the 50s. Actually it was probably a bit patchy before then, but compared to the halcyon times to follow, it was a sparse period indeed.

I received absolutely no sexual information from my parents, and I think that was true for most of my contemporaries. However, between us we gleaned and we pooled what little information there was. The outcome was not a happy one. There was talk of having to put excretory organs together, of weeing, of tadpoles escaping and goodness knows what else.

Interestingly enough, these new and rather disgusting theories did not displace the prevailing theory, that one prayed for babies. In fact one of the polls we took on a regular basis was who would use which method. Most of us decided that we would pray for babies when it was time, and looked askance at those who professed otherwise.

The mother of a friend must have had an eroded cervix, because we were assured by him that after his parents had "done it" there was blood on a towel. We were horrified, and I don't think any of us looked at our obviously brutish fathers in quite the same way again. Though of course almost all of us were convinced that none of our parents were doing it any more. I mean, why bother after the birth of the last sibling? I think we felt very sorry for any child whose parents were sufficiently depraved to continue such practices after the necessity had passed.

Literature was of little help either. There were only three sources that I knew of.

The first was the problem page of my mother's magazine, which may have been called "Woman". Since both the problems and the advice were veiled, they tantalised rather than informed. "The best thing would be to hold your breath and cross your legs. If you need more help, please write again enclosing a self-addressed envelope". Or "If you find that you cannot help yourself, you might try wearing gloves before you go to sleep". What on earth was that about?

The second was an infamous book called "What Every Young Boy Should Know". Despite the title, it was a deeply unhelpful book and scarred most of us for life. I think it was published late 19th century but was still doing the rounds when I was a lad. To cut a long story short, we were to avoid, at all costs, a self-stimulating activity that would lead to a "spasm of the nerves" which would surely result in imbecility, madness or even death. From the same source I learnt that a drop of semen was worth a pint of blood. No wonder I'm so anaemic.

The last was "Ideal Marriage" by van de Velde. This wasn't such a bad book in fact, just constrained by the times. In those days books couldn't extol the "joy of sex" directly; they were required to take the form of text books of the medical genre. It thus featured some details you would rather not know, but also an intriguing illustration of a woman with three pairs of breasts. Apparently we have a "milk line" as other mammals do (such as cats and dogs) and while more than one pair along the line is unusual, it is not impossible.

By the time I got to university and was doing psychology I was able to buy such books openly (I have to admit buying van de Velde mail order when I was 17 - far too embarrassed to do so across the counter).

And thus a new world opened to me, the world of sexology. First, an important aside, the phenomenon of self-selection. Why are people drawn to (that is self select) certain professions? To be a surgeon, minister, psychologist, whatever? And what the heck are the self-selection dynamics for sexologists?

Consider for example Havelock Ellis, one of the first well known sexologists, who was breaking the mold back in the late 19th century. Difficult times. A bookseller was prosecuted in 1897 simply for stocking a book he had co-authored on homosexuality.

In many ways Ellis seemed more like a candidate for treatment than one to administer it. He married Edith Lees, a writer, in 1891. He was 32 and still a virgin. She was a professed and openly practising lesbian. After their honeymoon, he went back to his bachelor pad, and she stayed where she was. He was also impotent his whole life, but that changed when he was 60 when he discovered that he was sexually aroused by the sight of a woman urinating. There was a possible link with his childhood. His devoted, yet clearly insane mother, used to slap him playfully in the face with his wet nappies.

Slightly predating Ellis was Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing, an Austro-German sexologist and psychiatrist. He wrote Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). This documented different forms of sexual perversion that he had encountered. I read parts of this as a student, and the juiciest bits were in Latin. This was not so in the first edition, but its fame was so widespread that "ordinary people" began to buy it. It was to protect them (and me, alas) that the Latin was instituted.

Although it may not sound like a fun book, and to be honest it wasn't, a lot of people benefited. If you were a shoe fetishist in the 19th century, you probably thought you were the only one on the planet. It was of genuine benefit to people like that to realise they were not alone.

Enter Kinsey. Alfred Kinsey is generally regarded as the father of sexology, and immortalised in the Kinsey Reports starting with the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948, followed in 1953 by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. According to some authorities these are still the bestselling scientific books of all time. Curiously enough, before sex, his scientific interest had been focused on the Gall Wasp.

These studies were statistical - and we were to learn, as never before, who did what to whom and how often.

Less well known was that Kinsey (it has been rumoured) participated in unusual sexual practices, including bisexual experiences and masochism. He encouraged group sex involving his graduate students, wife and staff. Kinsey filmed these sexual acts in the attic of his home as part of his "research".

Masters (him) and Johnson (her) took this a stage further. Questionnaires and statistics were one thing. Actual hands on (ahem) laboratory research another. Between 1960 and 1990 they delved into the Human Sexual Response, which was also the title of the book they coauthored and published in 1966. They had a busy life and documented something like 10,000 episodes of what were euphemistically described as "complete cycles of sexual response". Nice work if you can get it.

But, as with all the others, good things came from it. They established inter alia that older people did have sex, that there was no difference between vaginal and clitoral orgasm, that there were clear stages to sexual arousal and probably did more than anyone else to establish workable sexual therapies.

So there you have it. In one lifetime (mine) we have gone from woeful ignorance to more sexual information than you can shake a stick at. In fact there is probably more sexual knowledge in one issue of Cosmo than in my university library when I was an undergraduate.

Has it helped? Without doubt. Has it done harm? Without doubt.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, I never did become a sexologist. It was all just prurient curiosity. My speciality was visual perception. Ho hum.

The trouble with women

I pass on the following bit of pre-Cosmopolitan trivia. It was volunteered by a sexologist of the early 60s, haven't a clue who, so I regret it must go unattributed. Though could have been Oswald Schwartz now that I think about it. Anyway, who cares? Here is a paraphrase which may cast some light on sexual politics.

"The trouble with women is that they have an inexhaustible capacity for enjoying sex but practically no need to actually have it".