Can science find love?
Currently the divorce rate is one in two, maybe higher in some regions of the country. Our culture is so saturated with scandal and heartbreak that the statistic barely raises an eyebrow — even in more traditional and conservative circles.
While married couples tell only of their own experience, the experts talk about marriage and love as they would about a science, as if there were some way to predict, control or warranty the outcome. On website after website, in book after book, they tell us what to do and what to look for.
Scientific American Mind ran an article entitled “The Happy Couple.” In it, the author, Suzann Pileggi, said that how your mate responds to good news was as important, if not more important, than how well they support you when times are difficult. “In the past few years positive psychology researchers have discovered that thriving couples accentuate the positive in life more than those who stay together unhappily or split, do. They not only cope well during hardship but also celebrate the happy moments and work to build more bright points into their lives.”
So people who have a good time together and have a good time having a good time stay together? Stunning.
Another writer, Dee Anne Merriman, chose seven match areas to consider: physical appearance, emotional maturity, lifestyle choices, financial style, value structure, marriage and sex, and intelligence. These make fine sense until you begin to notice the inherent problems: They are presented as though, one, there were a sure-fire way to gauge or assess those match-areas, two, a way to centrifuge and separate a person as though he or she were a blood sample, and, three, even an idea of how to line those areas up between two complex beings to produce the perfect relationship.
