02.26.06

Love is…scientifically verifiably chemical compatability

Posted in Sunday Times Columns at 6:10 pm by Sarah

It happens every few years. Once, I was killing time waiting for a plane and a colleague introduced us. We chatted about work and mutual acquaintances for twenty minutes. Flights were called. Hands were shaken; we said our goodbyes. Before I’d taken half a dozen steps I felt a tug at my heart, stopped and turned. He’d stopped too. We looked at each other in puzzlement for a few seconds before waving wistfully and continuing on our way. Had we just fallen in love? Was Mr. Right flying out of my life as quickly as he flew into it?
Fortunately I met several Mr. Right’s over the years so missing out on this one didn’t prove disastrous to my happiness. Sometimes he was with someone else, or I was, or he was a commitment phobe or I thought he was Mr. Right, and actually he was just a psycho that my unique collection of neuroses had mistakenly identified as a potential Mr. Right.
I suppose there are two points to this story. The first is that there isn’t just one person out there for everyone. There are loads. The trick is to meet them at the precise moment in time when you are both available and willing to get involved. The second is that in those first few moments when your eyes meet and your heart soars, it’s very, very hard to tell - will this pass or is this it?
Wouldn’t it be great if you could spare yourself the heartache of trying to establish if the person you are with is the person you should be with? Wouldn’t it be a relief to know, definitively, if airport Mr. Right was a real Mr. Right or just a momentary spark that would extinguish as soon as he started to bore me on the subject of the wretched Champions League?
Unfortunately, the failure of modern physicists to open up the space-time continuum, like they do on Star Trek, means I’ll never know if in another parallel universe I am as happy, if not happier, with Airport Guy than I am with my husband. However, modern psychologists and neuroscientists are doing their best to put us out of our misery in the relationship department.
The art of matchmaking has like all industries, moved from the village to the Internet. Intuition is out and science is in. In the US the first online dating service Match.com launched in 1995 and gave single people access to thousands of others looking for love. It allowed singles to select possible partners based on criteria such as race or religion, or eye color and drinking habits. The scale of the enterprise gave you more opportunities to meet people with the qualities you thought you wanted in a partner. But that didn’t necessarily result in a successful match.
Two recent entrants to the world of online dating have raised the game onto a new level.  Eharmony.com and Chemistry.com are companies run by academics, lured from university departments. They are not content with simply introducing people who live in the same area and have similar interests. They are engaged in a massive social experiment involving their millions of users. The Atlantic magazine interviewed the new generation of love scientists and observed “All have staked their success on the idea that long-term romantic compatibility can be predicted according to scientific principles and that they can discover those principles and use them to help their members find lasting love. The question at the heart of this grand trial is simple: In the subjective realm of love, can cold, hard science help?”
Dr. Neil Clark Warren, founder of Eharmony and his team of researchers ask their clients to answer 436 questions. The answers are fed into a computer programme before matches are suggested. What is the computer looking for? Before Warren’s team came up with their model they needed to know what made a relationship successful in the long term. So they interviewed 5,000 couples who had been happily married for a very long time. The research provided a very simple answer - similarity. The members of a happy couple are far more similar to each other than are the members of an unhappy couple. Compatibility rests on shared traits. It seems blindingly obvious.
There is a proviso of course. There are some traits you really don’t want to share with your partner. As Warren tells The Atlantic, “You don’t want two control freaks in a marriage. Fifty percent of the ball game is finding two people who are stable”. That made me laugh. At least fifty percent of the people I know are inherently unstable. Most of them are married.
Still, the computer isn’t doing too badly. A recent poll found that between September 2004 and September 2005, Eharmony facilitated the marriages of 33,000 people – 46 marriages per day. That’s pretty impressive.
The interesting thing about the success of Eharmony is that they don’t attempt to match people based on short term attraction. They accept that they can’t programme for the magnetism you feel when you meet Airport Guy. However, the point is that short term attraction seems to be completely irrelevant to long term compatibility. The problem is that short term magnetism is the fun bit. That’s we what all really want.

At Chemistry.com, Dr. Helen Fisher is an anthropologist whose research focuses on the brain physiology of romantic love. She recognizes that you can walk into a room full of men from the same background and with similar interests and only fall in love with one. Her theory is that the thing we call chemistry, is in fact chemistry. People’s personalities are based on the hormones and chemicals that were present in different proportions when the fetus was being formed. Her 146 item compatibility questionnaire relies on collecting evidence of their levels of various chemicals.
One question, for instance, offers drawings of a hand, then asks:
Which one of the following images most closely resembles your left hand?
Index finger slightly longer than ring finger
Index finger about the same length as ring finger
Index finger slightly shorter than ring finger
Index finger significantly shorter than ring finger

Fisher explains that elevated fetal testosterone determines the ratio of the second and fourth finger in a particular way as it simultaneously builds the male and female brain. So you can actually look at someone’s hand and get a fair idea of the extent to which they are likely to fit into a particular personality type. Identifying personality type is one half of the equation – matching it with the right one is the hard bit.
Fisher thinks that eHarmony places too much emphasis on similarity and thinks that “complimentarity” is just as important. As she says “We also want someone who masks our flaws”. But that assumes that we know our own flaws.
As Dr. Pepper Schwartz of Perfectmatch.com says; “How can you pick somebody else if you have no insight into yourself?” Before any of us start searching for love we should get pyschoanalysed. It might spare us considerable trouble.
If we start going out with someone because the chemistry seemed right, what should we do when the doubts about long term compatibility start to creep in? We get torn between walking away or staying to see if works. But many got caught in the trap of staying so long that walking away became impossible, even if it’s the right thing to do.
Perhaps this is where the internet scientists can really help us. After you meet someone and the lust and love is exploding all round you, why not pause for an hour or two? Both parties sit down at the computer and take the tests. Dr. Pepper advises letting the science serve as a reality check – as a way of not letting that initial rush of attraction cloud your judgment when it comes to compatibility. So if you meet Airport Guy on your travels, don’t let him go. Swap email address and take the test. If you pass, then it’s worth moving. If you don’t, kiss him goodbye.

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