Dear Friends,
Happy Valentine’s Day for tomorrow to those who celebrate it. Although Mrs. B and I are still in love after lo, these many decades, we don’t much observe the holiday. Being of foreign birth, she always regarded it cynically as an event, like so many of our unofficial holidays, made up by marketers. (Which, you might be thinking, is no worse than a holiday made up by politicians.)
Even so, I often take the occasion to write a bit about romantic love, which is an endlessly fascinating topic for behavioral scientists like me—not least because it’s a perfect example of a research topic that is actually me-search. Romantic love can reduce even the most grizzled, logical scientist to a quivering, limbic mass of desire, passion, and regret.
But enough about my problems.
Last Sunday’s column in The Free Press talked about how people can love each other deeply across language barriers. As a dedicated me-searcher, I included the example of my own marriage, which was built on zero languages in common and even linguistic confusion at our wedding ceremony. I also took the opportunity to connect this topic to the uproar over Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny’s all-Spanish Super Bowl halftime show. That created its own uproar, sending me down six rings of internet hell as seemingly half of America schooled me about Señor Bunny’s morally dubious themes and spicy politics.
For example, one reader wrote:
It’s not the Spanish language here that is the objection, it’s the suggestive and gross dancing, crotch grabbing, and, oh yeah, THE LYRICS.
Okay, fair enough. But my point was that we truly can love each other across big cultural and linguistic differences—and even because of them. This might even be biological. Consider the famous 1995 shirt-sniffing experiment, in which young men wore the same T-shirt for two nights. Then young women sniffed these T-shirts and rated the men on attractiveness based purely on odor. Women preferred the shirts worn by men whose major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes were different from their own. (Different MHC genes indicate immune-system differences, so this study tells an evolutionary story: The more different our mate’s immune system is, the wider array of defenses from disease our potential offspring will have.)
One reliable way to find attractive differences, short of sniffing one another like dogs, is meeting people who speak languages that aren’t yours, as Mrs. B and I did. Predictably, doing so also produces communication difficulties that initially reduce emotional understanding for about half of such couples. But, for the great majority, this effect dissipates very quickly, within months. (After about eight weeks of dating Mrs. B, we could still barely communicate in words, but I knew full well when she was mad at me. Boy, was that clear.) Other research shows that very culturally diverse couples are no less satisfied in the long run compared with those who are culturally homogeneous.
Here’s the bottom line: Differences enhance attraction, but they don’t diminish ultimate compatibility. So, if you have dated a good many people but haven’t felt much of a spark with anybody, the answer might be to stop looking for your cultural twin: Being alike is not hot. Instead, try looking for someone who excites you because their background, upbringing, and opinions are so different. Then, once you have the irresistible attraction, learn to live together in harmony.
With love,
Arthur
P.S. Valentine’s Day actually does have special significance for me: It was my father’s birthday. He died in 2002, but this year he would have turned 90. A brilliant statistician and lifelong college professor, he was, in fact, a direct intellectual descendant of the great 19th-century mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss, insofar as my dad’s doctoral dissertation adviser’s adviser’s adviser (and so on) was Gauss.
Early on in his career as a poorly paid assistant professor with a young family, my father took on summer jobs, like driving a city bus, to make ends meet. Below is a watercolor I painted, when I was 4, of my dad behind the wheel of his bus.
I miss mine too.
What a beautiful painting! Your dad died far too young. May he rest in peace.