The Red Flags of Romantic Chemistry

David Robson in The Guardian




 
For centuries, our romantic fates were thought to be written in the stars. Wealthy families would even pay fortunes to have a matchmaker foretell the success or failure of a potential marriage.

Despite the lack of any good evidence for its accuracy, astrology still thrives in many lifestyle magazines, while the more sceptical among us might hope to be guided by the algorithms of websites and dating apps.

But are these programs any more rigorous than the signs of the zodiac? Or should we put our faith in love languages and attachment theory? (That’s to name just two fashions in pop psychology.)

The world of matchmaking is riddled with myths and misunderstandings that recent science is just starting to unravel. From the inevitably messy data, a few clear conclusions are emerging that can help guide us in our search for love.

If you are looking for the secrets of romantic success, the most obvious place to start would seem to be the science of personality. If you are an outgoing party animal, you might hope to find someone with a similar level of extraversion; if you are organised and conscientious, you might expect to feel a stronger connection with someone who enjoys keeping a rigid schedule.

The scientific research does offer some support for the intuitive notion that “like attracts like”, but in the grand scheme of things, the similarity of personality profiles is relatively unimportant.

“Yes, it is true that people are more likely to experience chemistry with someone who is similar to them in certain ways,” explains Prof Harry Reis at the University of Rochester, New York. “But if I brought you in a room with 20 people who are similar to you in various ways, the odds that you’re going to have chemistry with more than one of them are not very good.” It is only the extreme differences, Reis says, that will matter in your first meetings. “It’s not likely that you would have chemistry with somebody who is very dissimilar to you.”

The rest is just noise. The same goes for shared interests. “The effects are so tiny,” says Prof Paul Eastwick at the University of California, Davis.

Eastwick found similarly disappointing results when he looked at people’s “romantic ideals” – our preconceived notions of the particular qualities we would want in our dream partner. I might say that I value kindness above all other qualities, for instance, and you might say you are looking for someone who is adventurous and free-spirited.

You’d think we’d know what we want – but the research suggests otherwise. While it’s true that certain qualities, such as kindness or adventurousness, are generally considered to be attractive, experiments on speed-daters suggest that people’s particular preferences tend to matter very little in their face-to-face interactions. Someone who stated that they were looking for kindness, for example, would be just as likely to click with someone who scored high on adventurousness – and vice versa. Despite our preconceptions, we seem open to a wide variety of people showing generally positive attributes.

“We can’t find evidence that some people really weigh some traits over others,” Eastwick says. He compares it to going out to a restaurant, ordering a specific dinner, then swapping food with the table next to yours. You’re just as likely to enjoy the random dish as the one you’d originally ordered. 

Given this growing body of research, Eastwick is generally very sceptical that computer algorithms can accurately match people for chemistry or compatibility. Working with Prof Samantha Joel at Western University in Canada, he has used a machine learning program to identify any combinations of traits that would predict mutual attraction.

Each participant completed a 30-minute survey, with detailed questions about their personality traits, their physical attractiveness, their political and social values and their dating preferences (whether they were looking for a fling or a long-term relationship). “It was very much a ‘kitchen-sink’ approach,” says Eastwick. The researchers then put the participants on blind dates and questioned them about whether they were likely to hook up afterwards.

Pubgoers at a speed-dating event in 2021. Experts find that we bin our romantic ideals at such gatherings. Photograph: Alberto Pezzali/AP

Surprise, surprise? The algorithm could accurately pick out the participants who were generally considered to be more attractive to a larger number of people. And it could pick out those who were generally less picky and more open to second dates with a larger number of people. On predicting the particular level of attraction between two specific people, however, it performed no better than chance. There was no magic formula that could ensure a sizzling first date.

Most dating apps and websites keep the details of their algorithms secret, but Eastwick thinks it is unlikely that these companies have stumbled upon some secret that is missing from the psychological literature. Indeed, he suspects that romantic attraction may be an inherently “chaotic” process that inherently defies accurate prediction. 

Reis is similarly downbeat about the chances of algorithms correctly predicting the prick of Cupid’s arrow. “The evidence that they have is very, very low-quality work.” In his opinion, these apps may rule out the people with the most extreme differences in personality and interest – but beyond that, it’s largely chance.

According to psychological research, we are much more likely to be swayed by the flow of the conversation and people’s nonverbal cues. “It’s whether the other person is smiling at the right moments, whether they’re really listening and showing that they understand what you’re saying,” says Reis. That’s impossible to gauge before the encounter from data gathered in a survey.

An additional problem is that the questions on a survey are necessarily rather abstract; they can’t capture the tiny details of someone’s life that might promote bonding. You might not bond over a general love of travel, but your mutual love of a particular location that you just happen to mention in your conversation. You might even start out with differences, but then change your mind on a certain topic as your date persuades you to see things their way – a process of reaching a joint understanding could provide the point of connection. “No algorithm is going to be able to tell us that’s going to happen ahead of time,” says Eastwick.

Even after couples have started dating, it can be tricky to work out which relationships will last in the long term. Analysing data from more than 11,000, Eastwick and Joel found that someone’s perception of their partner’s commitment was far more important than particular personality traits in determining their satisfaction in the relationship.

If you are au fait with self-help literature, you might have come to believe that “attachment styles” might explain your relationship woes. These are supposed to describe different ways of forming relationships with others, based on someone’s childhood experiences with their caregivers. The terms are fairly self-explanatory – you can have “secure”, “avoidant” or “anxious” attachment styles. You will find articles arguing that someone who has an anxious attachment style may find that an avoidant partner only exacerbates their insecurities.

Eastwick and Joel’s data suggest that attachment styles do play some role in people’s relationship quality. Even so, we must be careful not to overexaggerate their influence on our romantic fates. Prof Pascal Vrtička, a social scientist at the University of Essex, points out that our attachment styles can change with time. With the right partner, someone might move from anxious to secure, for instance. “It might take some time to lose some of your insecurity, but it is possible.” Once again, our attachment styles are one factor in a dynamic process, rather than determining the health of our relationships from the very beginning.

Evidence suggests that dating app algorithms produce rudimentary matches. Photograph: Koshiro K/Alamy

The same can be said of “love languages”. While people’s style of expressing affection and appreciation for their partner – whether we prefer praise, or gifts, or hugs and kisses to show our affection – can influence a couple’s initial compatibility, it is possible to adapt and change over time.

Ultimately, our beliefs about relationships and the ways they ought to progress may be just as important as the initial compatibility of any two people. Our love lives, like so many areas of health and wellbeing, are the subject of expectation effects.

To get a flavour of this research, consider the following statements:

Potential relationship partners are either compatible or they are not

Relationships that do not start off well inevitably fail

And

The ideal relationship develops gradually over time

A successful relationship evolves through hard work and the resolution of incompatibilities

People who endorse the first two statements are said to have a “romantic destiny” mindset, while those who endorse the last two statements are said to have a “romantic growth” mindset. (Some people will fall in between – they might believe that relationships need to start out well, but that they can also develop over time.)

In general, people with the romantic destiny mindset will place more importance on the initial chemistry of the first encounter and if that goes well, they may be quick to fall in love. But they do not cope well with disagreements and may lose interest as potential incompatibilities come to light and may even engage in toxic behaviours to extricate themselves. Recent research suggests that people with the destiny mindset are more likely to “ghost” partners, for example. Those with the romantic growth mindset, on the other hand, tend to work harder to cope with the challenges, rather than looking to start again whenever differences come to light.

That’s the romantic side. Prof Jessica Maxwell, a social psychologist at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, and colleagues have found similar patterns of behaviour in the bedroom. People with a “sexual destiny mindset” endorse statements such as:

If sexual partners are meant to be together, sex will be easy and wonderful


It is clear right from the start how satisfying a couple’s sex life will be over the course of their relationship

Maxwell’s studies show that people with these kinds of beliefs can fare very well, but they tend to be fatalistic if issues emerge. People with a sexual growth mindset, however, are more proactive about navigating their disappointments and looking for ways to improve their own and their partner’s satisfaction.

Research shows that shared interests only give a minor boost to romantic chemistry. Photograph: Dmytro Sidelnikov/Alamy

Some relationships, however, are best left on the scrapheap; even those with a growth mindset need to acknowledge when things simply aren’t going to work out. And if there is no chemistry on a first date, there is no need to put yourself through another excruciating encounter.

But we should also be wary of having too many fixed preconceptions. Whether you are focused on finding someone with a particular profession, personality profile or planetary alignment, overly rigid ideas can blind you to the potential in the people around you.

If the science tells us anything, it is that love is inherently unpredictable. In matters of the heart, we should always be prepared to be surprised.

Neoliberalism is killing our love lives

Dependency and power imbalances brought on by capitalist financial insecurity are the enemies of true romance writes Bhaskara Sunkara in The Guardian


 

A broken heart drawn by a patron is shredded at Bottom Line, a bar and dance place in downtown D.C., which invites people to come and shred photos and cards from ex-spouses and lovers in honor of Valentine’s Day. 


For many of us, Valentine’s Day is a reminder that our love life sucks. Maybe we just had an unhappy end to a relationship, maybe we’re struggling to keep alive an existing one. For those of us, the conventional advice we receive is drab and unconvincing. Sure, having a regular date night to “keep the love alive” is just fine, I suppose. But if you really want to get the sparkle back, why not engage in a militant class struggle this Valentine’s Day instead?

You see, countries with powerful working-class movements tend to have more social rights and guarantees. And those protections can make your love life a lot less stressful.

Most Americans feel overwhelmed by their financial obligations, and it’s the leading cause of friction in relationships. That’s no surprise in a country where life is so precarious – where a trip to the hospital, a layoff, or shifts in the housing market can change everything. We’re overworked at our jobs and underpaid. Powerless to bargain for a better deal from our bosses, we zero-in on our partners’ spending habits or priorities instead.

Our financial insecurity also keeps us unhappily wedded to relationships we should leave. The median wage for a worker in the United States is $857 a week before taxes – most of us would struggle to take care of children on one income. For women, shouldering most of the burden of unpaid household work and dealing with workplace pay disparities, the situation is especially bad. What’s more, a quarter of women under 64 get their health insurance from their spouse’s plan. Loving marriages can be wonderful, but dependency and power imbalances are the enemies of true romance. 

Things don’t have to be like this. And we needn’t imagine what a better alternative looks like – it already exists, just not here. A century ago, life in Scandinavia was just as cutthroat as it was in the United States. A 1902 New York Times articles describes Sweden as “the most feudal and oligarchical country in Europe” – only rivaled by Tsarist Russia. Contemporaries called the country an “armed poorhouse”. But, over time, capitalism in the region was humanized by socialists and trade unionists. Working people joined vast labor confederations to collectively demand higher wages and shorter workdays from their employers. They also joined new parties set up to fight for the interest of regular people in government.

As well as more fairly distributing income for workers, the system allowed people to meet their basic needs outside the workplace. Even at the peak of social democracy, life wasn’t perfect, but the changes were especially profound for women. Child allowances, family leave, child care, even the provision of school meals – all eased the pressures placed on them by society. Beyond such legislation, the principle of “equal pay for equal work” and industry-level trade union bargaining favored sectors that disproportionately employed women.

During the 1960s in Sweden, still not content with the progress toward sexual equality, the governing social democrats and feminists took steps to generate policy that encouraged “free development” for women, challenged traditional sex roles, and expanded abortion rights. Despite rollbacks to its welfare state, the country is still one of the most equal in the world (and parents there are still entitled to 480 days of paid parental leave, compared to zero days in most of the United States).

Kristen R Ghodsee, in her book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, observes a similar phenomenon in the Eastern Bloc. “Women [had] no economic reason to stay in abusive, unfulfilling, or otherwise unhealthy relationships” in countries where state guarantees meant that “personal relationships could be freed from market influences.” Of course, states like East Germany and Czechoslovakia were marked by political repression. But the experience of European social democracy shows that the same positives can be achieved in a far more liberal political environment.

And yes, as far as Ghodsee’s book title goes, there is proof that more secure people have better sex and are more sensitive lovers.

Will all these protections cure heartache? Are all your relationship woes rooted in economic anxiety? Absolutely not. But by organizing collectively, we can become more empowered as individuals. And when strong, free individuals decide to love they make for better partners.

What is love – and is it all in the mind?

Hannah Devlin in The Guardian


What do you get when you fall in love?

We crave romantic love like nothing else, we’ll make unimaginable sacrifices for it and it can take us from a state of ecstasy to deepest despair. But what’s going on inside our heads when we fall in love?

The American anthropologist Helen Fisher describes the obsessive attachment we experience in love as “someone camping out in your head”.

In a groundbreaking experiment, Fisher and colleagues at Stony Brook University in New York state put 37 people who were madly in love into an MRI scanner. Their work showed that romantic love causes a surge of activity in brain areas that are rich in dopamine, the brain’s feelgood chemical. These included the caudate nucleus, part of the reward system, and an ancient brain area called the ventral tegmental area, or VTA. “[The VTA] is part of the reptilian core of the brain, associated with wanting, motivation, focus and craving,” Fisher said in a 2014 talk on the subject. Similar brain areas light up during the rush of euphoria after taking cocaine.

 MRI scans of the brains of those in love found surges of activity of dopamine. Photograph: Daisy-Daisy/Alamy

During the early stages of love, the emotional excitement (or some might say stress) raises the body’s cortisol levels, causing a racing heart, butterflies in our stomach and inconveniently sweaty palms. Other chemicals in play are oxytocin, which deepens feelings of attachment, and vasopressin, which has been linked to trust, empathy and sexual monogamy.

So it’s a total eclipse of the head, not the heart?

Actually … in a case of science imitating poetry, the heart has been found to influence the way we experience emotion.

Our brain and heart are known to be in close communication. When faced with a threat or when we spot the object of our affection in a crowded room, our heart races. But recently, scientists have turned the tables and shown that feedback from our heart to our brain also influences what we are feeling.

What the heart is doing can influence how strongly our brain processes emotion. Photograph: Borja Suarez/Reuters

One study, led by Prof Sarah Garfinkel of the University of Sussex, showed that cardiovascular arousal – the bit of the heart’s cycle when it is working hardest – can intensify feelings of fear and anxiety. In this study, people were asked to identify scary or neutral images while their heartbeats were tracked. Garfinkel found they reacted quicker to the scary images when their heart was contracting and pumping blood, compared with when it was relaxing. Her work suggests that electrical signals from blood vessels around the heart feed back into brain areas involved in emotional processing, influencing how strongly we think we’re feeling something.

Finally, in what must be a contender for one of the most romantic (or mushy) scientific insights to date, couples have been shown to have a tendency to synchronise heartbeats and breathing.

Why is it a crazy little thing?

Love is merely a madness, Shakespeare wrote. But it is only recently that scientists have offered an explanation for why being in love might inspire unusual behaviour.

Donatella Marazziti, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pisa, approached this question after carrying out research showing that people with obsessive compulsive disorder have, on average, lower levels of the brain chemical serotonin in their blood. She wondered whether a similar imbalance could underlie romantic infatuation.

She recruited people with OCD, healthy controls and 20 people who had embarked on a romantic relationship within the previous six months (it was also specified that they should not have had sexual intercourse and that at least four hours a day were spent thinking of the partner). Both the OCD group and the volunteers who were in love had significantly lower levels of serotonin, and the authors concluded “that being in love literally induces a state which is not normal”. When the “in love” group were followed up six months later, most of their serotonin levels had returned to normal.

A separate study found that people in love have much lower activity in their frontal cortex – an area of the brain crucial to reason and judgment – when they thought of their loved one. Scientists have speculated an evolutionary reason for this which could be termed the “beer goggles” theory: the suspension of reason makes coupling, and hence procreation, far more likely.

So all in love is fair – regardless of sexual orientation?

Sexual orientation has several components, including behaviour, identity, attraction and arousal.

Many scientific studies have been based on who people say they are attracted to, and surveys typically find that same-sex attraction accounts for fewer than 5% of the population, and this figure has remained relatively stable over time. But people’s behaviour and the labels they use to describe their sexual identity appear to be influenced to a greater degree by social and cultural factors.

For instance, in the UK there has been a sharp rise in the proportion of women reporting having had a sexual experience with another woman, from 1.8% in 1991 to 7.9% in 2013, according to the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, which is carried out each decade.

As with any scientific investigation, the way questions are framed also makes a difference to the answer. So studies that ask people to pick between two or three categories would miss any more subtle gradations. As Kinsey wrote in 1948: “The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behaviour, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.”

Women are considerably more likely than men to rate themselves on a continuum of sexuality, Photograph: Sam Edwards/Getty Images/Caiaimage
There is growing support for the idea of a continuum, in particular for women who are considerably more likely than men to rate themselves as intermediate categories such as “mostly heterosexual” (10% v 4%), when given those options.

It’s worth noting that a 2011 study found no differences between brain systems regulating romantic love in homosexuals and heterosexuals.

Is there a gay gene?

It has been known for decades that sexual orientation is partly heritable in men, based on studies of identical and fraternal twins. In the 1990s, a specific region of the X chromosome was linked to male homosexuality and more recent two specific genes have been found to be more common in gay men.

However, the genetic factors that have been identified so far only play a small part in determining sexuality – not all men who have these genes are gay. Research on the genetic basis of female sexuality lags behind, which some have attributed to it being more difficult to study. Others might conclude that there has simply been less effort to understand this topic.

There are other biological factors at play as well. One of the most robust findings in sexual-orientation research is the fraternal-birth-order effect: gay men tend to have a greater number of older brothers compared with straight men. This is a biological influence rather than a social one and is a big effect, increasing the odds of a man being gay by roughly a third. In women, there is evidence that pre-natal hormone exposure can make a difference to sexual orientation.

Let’s get chemical: do humans give off pheromones?

Pheromones are chemical signals that are used to communicate and alter the behaviour of others. The first pheromone discovered, in the 1950s, was a substance called bombykol that female silkworms emit to attract males. Ever since then, the search has been on – not least by perfume manufacturers – to find a human equivalent. There have been some tentative claims.

A pheromone present in male pigs, androstenone, has also been found in the human armpit. Photograph: Joe Pepler/Rex Features

For instance, a known pig pheromone, androstenone, has been found in the human armpit. When female pigs on heat get a whiff of the substance, which is found in boars’ saliva, they adopt the mating stance. However, there is not yet any convincing evidence for real-life “Lynx effect” chemicals in men and women. The strongest contender to date for a human pheromone is a chemical secreted from glands in the nipples of breastfeeding mothers. When wafted under any sleeping baby’s nose, the child responds with sucking and rooting behaviour.

Your cheating heart – how uncommon is it?

Cheating is widely disapproved of, but is not that uncommon. According to the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, men are on average more likely than women to be unfaithful – 20% of men and 13% of women reported that they’ve had sex with someone else while married.

However, the figures shifted across age ranges, with women in the youngest age range (18-29) being marginally more likely (11% v 10%) to have cheated, with the widest gender gap in the 80+ range where 24% of men and just 6% of women said they had been unfaithful.

Recently scientists have shown that some people may be genetically predisposed to being unfaithful. One study of nearly 7,400 Finnish twins and their siblings found a significant link between the vasopressin gene and infidelity in women.

Another study, by scientists at the Kinsey Institute, in Indiana, showed that certain variants of the gene for the dopamine receptor were more likely to be unfaithful and also more likely to be repeatedly unfaithful.

How economists view love, marriage, and Valentine’s Day

Pramit Bhattacharya in Live Mint

Can the dismal science of economics throw light on the seemingly irrational phenomenon of love? For a long time, economists did not consider love to be within the ambit of their study, and ignored it altogether even as they used the economic lens to study other esoteric subjects such as crime and fertility. The neglect of love ended in the 1970s, when the Nobel winning economist Gary Becker for the first time laid out a framework to analyse love and marriage in a series of research papers. 

Using simple economic tools and high school algebra, Becker showed how seemingly irrational life choices and decisions could in fact be explained by rational choice theory. Becker’s analysis was based on two simple principles. First, given that marriage is almost always voluntary, either by the couples or their parents, the theory of preferences can explain marriage and couples (or their parents) can be expected to derive more satisfaction (or higher utility) from being married than from remaining single. Second, Becker held that a market in marriages can be presumed to exist since many men and women compete as they seek mates. Each person tries to find the best mate subject to market conditions. 

Based on these two principles, Becker draws out a theory of marriage that says that each person will tend to pair with someone with whom the chances of maximizing their household production of goods and services are the highest. The set of household goods and services include tangible goods the market provides as well as non-market goods such as shared pastimes, or the joys of raising children. The couple’s level of satisfaction is determined both by market and non-market earnings. But, given that time and effort spent on raising market earnings can diminish non-market earnings, each couple uses economic principles to allocate the scarce resource of time. 

Becker argued that the division of labour within the family is driven by the differences in market earnings, which in turn are determined by the marginal productivity of the two partners. The partner with a higher wage then specializes in the production of market goods and services, while the partner with the lower wage specializes in the production of non-market goods and services. Other things being equal, a high-earning male is more likely to marry a low-earning female and vice-versa. Of course, if women are perceived to have a comparative advantage in the production of non-market goods (such as those involved in raising children), it is likely that the marriage market equilibrium will tend to have many more pairs where men rather than women are the sole wage earners. 

While spouses are likely to differ in market earnings, both theory and empirical evidence suggested likes tend to attract more when it comes to other attributes such as education or physical attractiveness, wrote Becker. He argued such attributes as education or beauty are complementary inputs in the production of non-market goods and services whereas wage income could be substituted by one partner for the other. The lack of complementary attributes could well explain a significant chunk of separations among couples, Becker hypothesized. 

The gains from marriage are determined by how the division of labour occurs. If a lot of effort is expended on policing whether a partner is performing his or her assigned role, then the net gains to the couple will be relatively less (the gains are essentially reduced because of transaction costs). The gains also depend on whether a sizeable fraction of the output generated after marriage can be jointly shared. Love accentuates the gains from marriage because each partner then cares about the satisfaction (or utility function) of the other. Consequently, with love, transaction costs are lowered and the gains from marriage increase. Love also increases the likelihood of increased production of shared family goods, thereby raising the gains from marriage further. 

Becker was among the first economic imperialists who extended the reach of economics to analyse complex social behaviours that were considered the exclusive domain of sociology. Social scientists initially ignored, then mocked, and finally began accepting some of Becker’s key insights into the nature of marriage. Later work by economists and sociologists have refined, extended and, in some cases, revised Becker’s framework. 

A 1997 review essay by economist Yoram Weiss of Tel-Aviv University succinctly summarizes some of the key economic insights into marriage. Weiss lists four key economic reasons for marriage. First, division of labour after marriage tend to raise joint gains. Second, with imperfect credit markets, marriage can solve credit intermediation problems, with one partner investing in the other. For instance, if both partners work but one has a greater ability to earn, it may be profitable for the partner with the lower ability to earn to fund his or her partner’s education while he or she takes care of home expenses. Such arrangements are indeed common in the modern world. Thirdly, marriage leads to the production of shared family goods (more technically, public goods, which are non-rivalrous and non-excludable). Finally, marriage leads to risk-pooling when two partners have uncertain but different sources of income. 

An influential 1999 study of cohabiting couples by sociologists Julie Brines and Kara Joyner extended Becker’s framework of married couples to analyse the behaviour of people living together. The duo analysed data on both married and cohabiting couples to find that although there was some evidence pointing towards specialization among married couples, the evidence was weak. 

There was no evidence to suggest specialization among cohabiting couples. On the contrary, live-in relationships tended to be durable when both partners shared equally in domestic work. Unlike married couples who have a more collectivist approach, cohabiting couples tend to display a more individualist streak. Hence, cohabiting couples tend to balance their individual interests by basing their behaviour on the principle of equality. 

More interestingly, the chances of a break-up were far higher among cohabiting couples than among married ones when women earned substantially more than men. In contrast, the chances of a break-up are much smaller when a wife begins to earn more than her husband. While cohabitation seems to be based on the premise of equality and rejects traditional gender roles, it is not immune to them, the study suggests. It is marriage that seems to withstand unorthodox economic power relations better. 

“Cohabitation draws part of its appeal from an image that promises greater flexibility and experimentation,” wrote Brines and Joyner. “In short, it bespeaks few ‘rules.’ For a relationship to persist, however, some operating principle must mediate the tension between the interests of the parties involved. For husbands and wives, the marriage contract helps to manage these interests, encourages joint investment, and permits some flexibility around the norm of male providership…. For cohabitors, uncertainty and implied contracts intensify the tension between the interests of the two partners and place greater stress on a bargaining principle that is difficult to adhere to over time. Thus, we find that breaking the rule in an arrangement ‘without rules’ is more disruptive than any comparable violation in marriage.” 

As Weiss pointed out in her essay, economics alone is not enough for marital analysis. Very often non-economic considerations do play a dominant role in romantic relationships. Yet, economics can provide valuable insights into the nature of relationships, which together with observations from other disciplines such as sociology can feed into a unified theory of relationships. 

The power of economics stems from its ability to explain how rational calculations underlie seemingly irrational behaviour. Even romantic melodrama, such as a lover fasting outside his beloved’s house, can be explained by rational choice theory. Such an act is a powerful way of signalling commitment, according to the Nobel economist Michael Spence. 

Do Valentine’s day gifts also satisfy the test of economic rationality? Neil MacArthur and Mariana Adshade use game theory to show why it is best to avoid such gifts, especially if a couple is already committed. 

“Valentine’s Day, essentially, is a game in which each person who is in a relationship must choose between two strategies; buy a gift for their significant other or do nothing to celebrate the day,” the duo writes. 

Given that there are two players, each with two strategic options, there are three possible outcomes that can happen on the day. The first outcome is that both buy gifts, and are satisfied to learn that their partner is committed to the relationship. But that satisfaction comes at a huge cost as most Valentine day gifts are over-priced. The second outcome is that one partner buys a gift and the other does not. One need not explain the consequence. Suffice to say that break-ups tend to spike up in the second half of February, according to Facebook data. The third outcome is that neither gifts. 

“The best strategy would be for couples to ignore the holiday altogether, but they won’t because there is just too much pressure to conform to the holiday traditions from both inside and outside the relationship. From a game strategic perspective, participating in the holiday just leads to sub-optimal outcomes,” the duo argues. 

How internet dating became everyone's route to a perfect love match

The algorithm method: how internet dating became everyone's route to a perfect love match

Six million Britons are looking for their perfect partner online before Valentine's day on Friday, but their chance of success may depend on clever maths rather than charisma

• James Bridle
• The Observer, Sunday 9 February 2014

Six million Britons visit dating sites each month. Photograph: Tom Merton/Getty Images/OJO Images RF

In the Summer of 2012, Chris McKinlay was finishing his maths dissertation at the University of California in Los Angeles. It meant a lot of late nights as he ran complex calculations through a powerful supercomputer in the early hours of the morning, when computing time was cheap. While his work hummed away, he whiled away time ononline dating sites, but he didn't have a lot of luck – until one night, when he noted a connection between the two activities.

One of his favourite sites, OkCupid, sorted people into matches using the answers to thousands of questions posed by other users on the site.

"One night it started to dawn on me the way that people answer questions on OkCupid generates a high dimensional dataset very similar to the one I was studying," says McKinlay, and it transformed his understanding of how the system worked. "It wasn't like I didn't like OkCupid before, it was fine, I just realised that there was an interesting problem there."

McKinlay started by creating fake profiles on OkCupid, and writing programs to answer questions that had also been answered by compatible users – the only way to see their answers, and thus work out how the system matched users. He managed to reduce some 20,000 other users to just seven groups, and figured he was closest to two of them. So he adjusted his real profile to match, and the messages started rolling in.

McKinlay's operation was possible because OkCupid, and so many other sites like it, are much more than just simple social networks, where people post profiles, talk to their friends, and pick up new ones through common interest. Instead, they seek to actively match up users using a range of techniques that have been developing for decades.

Every site now makes its own claims to "intelligent" or "smart" technologies underlying their service. But for McKinlay, these algorithms weren't working well enough for him, so he wrote his own. McKinlay has since written a book Optimal Cupid about his technique, while last year Amy Webb, a technology CEO herself, published Data, a Love Story documenting how she applied her working skills to the tricky business of finding a partner online.

Two people, both unsatisfied by the programmes on offer, wrote their own; but what about the rest of us, less fluent in code? Years of contested research, and moral and philosophical assumptions, have gone into creating today's internet dating sites and their matching algorithms, but are we being well served by them? The idea that technology can make difficult, even painful tasks – including looking for love – is a pervasive and seductive one, but are their matchmaking powers overstated?

 The Kiss, 1901-4, by sculptor Auguste Rodin. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

In the summer of 1965, a Harvard undergraduate named Jeff Tarr decided he was fed up with the university's limited social circle. As a maths student, Tarr had some experience of computers, and although he couldn't program them himself, he was sure they could be used to further his primary interest: meeting girls. With a friend he wrote up a personality quiz for fellow students about their "ideal date" and distributed it to colleges across Boston. Sample questions included: "Is extensive sexual activity [in] preparation for marriage, part of 'growing up?'" and "Do you believe in a God who answers prayer?" The responses flooded in, confirming Tarr's suspicion that there was great demand for such a service among the newly liberated student population. Operation Match was born.

In order to process the answers, Tarr had to rent a five-ton IBM 1401 computer for $100 an hour, and pay another classmate to program it with a special matching operation. Each questionnaire was transferred to a punch-card, fed into the machine, and out popped a list of six potential dates, complete with address, phone number and date of graduation, which was posted back to the applicant. Each of those six numbers got the original number and five others in their response: the program only matched women with their ideal man if they fitted his ideal too.

When Gene Shalit, a reporter from Look magazine, arrived to cover the emerging computer-dating scene in 1966, Operation Match claimed to have had 90,000 applications and taken $270,000 in revenue. Even at the birth of the computer revolution, the machine seemed to have an aura about it, something which made its matches more credible than a blind date or a friend's recommendation. Shalit quoted a freshman at Brown University who had dumped her boyfriend but started going out with him again when Operation Match sent her his number. "Maybe the computer knows something that I don't know," she said. Shalit imbued it with even more weight, calling it "The Great God Computer".

The computer-dating pioneers were happy to play up to the image of the omniscient machine – and were already wary of any potential stigma attached to their businesses. "Some romanticists complain that we're too commercial," Tarr told reporters. "But we're not trying to take the love out of love; we're just trying to make it more efficient. We supply everything but the spark." In turn, the perceived wisdom of the machine opened up new possibilities for competition in the nascent industry, as start-up services touted the innovative nature of their programs over others. Contact, Match's greatest rival, was founded by MIT graduate student David DeWan and ran on a Holywell 200 computer, developed in response to IBM's 1401 and operating two to three times faster. DeWan made the additional claim that Contact's questions were more sophisticated than Match's nationwide efforts, because they were restricted to elite college students. In essence, it was the first niche computer-dating service.

Over the years since Tarr first starting sending out his questionnaires, computer dating has evolved. Most importantly, it has become online dating. And with each of these developments – through the internet, home computing, broadband, smartphones, and location services – the turbulent business and the occasionally dubious science of computer-aided matching has evolved too. Online dating continues to hold up a mirror not only to the mores of society, which it both reflects, and shapes, but to our attitudes to technology itself.

The American National Academy of Sciences reported in 2013 that more than a third of people who married in the US between 2005 and 2012 met their partner online, and half of those met on dating sites. The rest met through chatrooms, online games, and elsewhere. Preliminary studies also showed that people who met online were slightly less likely to divorce and claimed to be happier in their marriages. The latest figures from online analytics company Comscore show that the UK is not far behind, with 5.7 million people visiting dating sites every month, and 49 million across Europe as a whole, or 12% of the total population. Most tellingly for the evolution of online dating is that the biggest growth demographic in 2012 was in the 55+ age range, accounting for 39% of visitors. When online dating moves not only beyond stigma, but beyond the so-called "digital divide" to embrace older web users, it might be said to have truly arrived.

It has taken a while to get there. Match.com, founded in 1993, was the first big player, is still the biggest worldwide, and epitomises the "online classifieds" model of internet dating. Match.com doesn't make any bold claims about who you will meet, it just promises there'll be loads of them. eHarmony, which followed in 2000, was different, promising to guide its users towards long-term relationships – not just dating, but marriage. It believed it could do this thanks to the research of its founder, Neil Clark Warren, a then 76-old psychologist and divinity lecturer from rural Iowa. His three years of research on 5,000 married couples laid the basis for a truly algorithmic approach to matching: the results of a 200-question survey of new members (the "core personality traits"), together with their communication patterns which were revealed while using the site.

Whatever you may think of eHarmony's approach – and many contest whether it is scientifically possible to generalise from married people's experiences to the behaviour of single people – they are very serious about it. Since launch, they have surveyed another 50,000 couples worldwide, according to the current vice-president of matching, Steve Carter. When they launched in the UK, they partnered with Oxford University to research 1,000 British couples "to identify any cultural distinctions between the two markets that should be represented by the compatibility algorithms". And when challenged by lawsuits for refusing to match gay and lesbian people, assumed by many to be a result of Warren's conservative Christian views (his books were previously published in partnership with the conservative pressure group, Focus on the Family), they protested that it wasn't morality, but mathematics: they simply didn't have the data to back up the promise of long-term partnership for same-sex couples. As part of a settlement in one such lawsuit, eHarmony launched Compatible Partners in 2009.

Carter says: "The Compatible Partners system is now based on models developed using data collected from long-term same-sex couples." With the rise of Facebook, Twitter, and celebrity-driven online media, have come more personalised and data-driven sites such as OkCupid, where Chris McKinlay started his operation. These services rely on the user supplying not only explicit information about what they are looking for, but a host of assumed and implicit information as well, based on their morals, values, and actions. What underlies them is a growing reliance not on stated preferences – for example, eHarmony's 200-question surveys result in a detailed profile entitled "The Book of You" – but on actual behaviour; not what people say, but what they do.

In 2007, Gavin Potter made headlines when he competed successfully in the Netflix Prize, a $1m competition run by the online movie giant to improve the recommendations its website offered members. Despite competition from teams composed of researchers from telecoms giants and top maths departments, Potter was consistently in the top 10 of the leaderboard. A retired management consultant with a degree in psychology, Potter believed he could predict more about viewers' tastes from past behaviour than from the contents of the movies they liked, and his maths worked. He was contacted by Nick Tsinonis, the founder of a small UK dating site called yesnomayb, who asked him to see if his approach, called collaborative filtering, would work on people as well as films.

Collaborative filtering works by collecting the preferences of many people, and grouping them into sets of similar users. Because there's so much data, and so many people, what exactly the thing is that these groups might have in common isn't always clear to anyone but the algorithm, but it works. The approach was so successful that Tsinonis and Potter created a new company, RecSys, which now supplies some 10 million recommendations a day to thousands of sites. RecSys adjusts its algorithm for the different requirements of each site – what Potter calls the "business rules" – so for a site such as Lovestruck.com, which is aimed at busy professionals, the business rules push the recommendations towards those with nearby offices who might want to nip out for a coffee, but the powerful underlying maths is Potter's. Likewise, while British firm Global Personals provides the infrastructure for some 12,000 niche sites around the world, letting anyone set up and run their own dating website aimed at anyone from redheads to petrolheads, all 30 million of their users are being matched by RecSys. Potter says that while they started with dating "the technology works for almost anything". RecSys is already powering the recommendations for art discovery site ArtFinder, the similar articles search on research database Nature.com, and the backend to a number of photography websites. Of particular interest to the company is a recommendation system for mental health advice site Big White Wall. Because its users come to the site looking for emotional help, but may well be unsure what exactly it is they are looking for, RecSys might be able to unearth patterns of behaviour new to both patients and doctors, just as it reveals the unspoken and possibly even unconscious proclivities of daters.

 Tinder is a new dating app on smartphones.

Back in Harvard in 1966, Jeff Tarr dreamed of a future version of his Operation Match programme which would operate in real time and real space. He envisioned installing hundreds of typewriters all over campus, each one linked to a central "mother computer". Anyone typing their requirements into such a device would receive "in seconds" the name of a compatible match who was also free that night. Recently, Tarr's vision has started to become a reality with a new generation of dating services, driven by the smartphone.

Suddenly, we don't need the smart algorithms any more, we just want to know who is nearby. But even these new services sit atop a mountain of data; less like Facebook, and a lot more like Google.

Tinder, founded in Los Angeles in 2012, is the fastest-growing dating app on mobile phones but its founders don't like calling it that. According to co-founder and chief marketing officer Justin Mateen, Tinder is "not an online dating app, it's a social network and discovery tool".

He also believes that Tinder's core mechanic, where users swipe through Facebook snapshots of potential matches in the traditional "Hot or Not" format, is not simple, but more sophisticated: "It's the dynamic of the pursuer and the pursued, that's just how humans interact." Tinder, however, is much less interested in the science of matching up couples than its predecessors. When asked what they have learned about people from the data they have gathered, Mateen says the thing he is most looking forward to seeing is "the number of matches that a user needs over a period of time before they're addicted to the product" – a precursor of Tinder's expansion into other areas of ecommerce and business relationships.

Tinder's plans are the logical extension of the fact that the web has really turned out to be a universal dating medium, whatever it says on the surface. There are plenty of sites out there deploying the tactics and metrics of dating sites without actually using the D-word. Whether it's explicit – such as Tastebuds.fm, which matches up "concert buddies" based on their Spotify music tastes – or subtle, the lessons of dating research have been learned by every "social" site on the web. Nearly every Silicon Valley startup video features two photogenic young people being brought together, whatever the product, and the same matching algorithms are at work whether you're looking for love, a jobbing plumber, or a stock photograph.

Over at UCLA, Chris McKinlay's strategy seems to have paid off. After gathering his data and optimising his profile, he started receiving 10-12 unsolicited messages every day: an unheard of figure online, where the preponderance of creeps tends to put most women on the defensive. He went on 87 dates, mostly just a coffee, which "were really wonderful for the most part". The women he met shared his interests, were "really intelligent, creative, funny" and there was almost always some attraction. But on the 88th date, something deeper clicked. A year later, he proposed.

Online dating has always been in part about the allure and convenience of the technology, but it has mostly been about just wanting to find "the one". The success of recommendation systems ,which are just as applicable to products as people, says much about the ability of computers to predict the more fundamental attractions that would have got McKinlay there sooner – his algorithms improved his ability to get dates, but not much on the likelihood of them progressing further.

In the end, the development of online dating tells us more about our relationship with networked technology than with each other: from "the Great God Computer", to a profusion of data that threatens to overwhelm us, to the point where it is integrated, seamlessly and almost invisibly, with every aspect of our daily lives.

Is compulsory coupledom really the best way to live?

We are in thrall to the amped-up rhetoric of romance, but the primacy of the couple has political and social consequences

• 
• • Priyamvada Gopal
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 13 February 2013 14.45 GMT

'What we rarely do is question whether pairing off into hypothetically permanent monogamous units … are really where we must all want to end up.' Photograph: Mode Images Limited/Alamy

 

Now that parliamentary sanction finally extends to gay couples who wish to marry, could the floor be opened for a different sort of discussion? As the 10 Best Knickers recommendations, the dinner-for-two vouchers, and well-meaning How-to-Survive-Valentine's-Day-If-You-Don't-Have-a-Date advice tumble out of newspaper pullouts and special "love-and-marriage" issues this week, riffing on poet Adrienne Rich's resonant phrase "compulsory heterosexuality", I think we should talk about "compulsory coupledom".

In this country, we tend to flinch at the mention of "arranged marriages", that process whereby family and friends hunt out a compatible mate for you based on social, religious, lifestyle and economic indicators, or at least, offer you one to choose from a bouquet of options they come up with. Yet we are riveted by reality shows or blind date wedding triumphs, which offer us versions of this controlled mate-choosing but accompanied by the amped-up rhetoric of romance, sexual attraction and individual choice. An economist has just written a book about how market principles might be applied to romance, which people find a bit disturbing because we like to tell ourselves that rationality doesn't enter into the process.

Stories of other people's marriages, whether royal, rich and impossibly perfect or dismally toxic and dysfunctional, keep us in thrall. What we rarely do, though, is question whether pairing off into hypothetically permanent monogamous or even serially polygamous units are really where we must all want to end up. Given its less than inspiring statistical showing: a 50% failure rate and that's not counting unhappy marriages that carry on – the ugly end of the Huhne-Pryce marriage provided the depressing counter-notes to the chorus of joy over gay matrimony – should permanent coupledom really continue to be touted as the best possible way of organising our emotional, sexual and social lives? With tax breaks likely for all who obtain state-regulated matrimony, gay or straight, and with pressure to extend civil partnerships to straight couples – are there any dissident relationship possibilities left?

In her bracing polemic, Against Love – required reading for anyone desperately seeking an antidote to this week's excesses of retail heavy breathing – Laura Kipnis observes that refusing to participate in the required regimen of modern love and its elevation of the couple form is seen as both tragic and abnormal. To not conform willingly to the curiously uniform arrangements of modern coupledom is to be not so much dissident – you are certainly not accorded the dignity of choice – as either psychologically deficient or, in benevolent Channel 4 lingo, "undateable" (though that can be remedied, they say). Labour-intensive mantras now permeate the language of relationships. To refuse to "work" on achieving or preserving couple status is to be an irresponsible skiver, an emotional benefits cheat who undermines the social good.

To question the unchallenged primacy of the couple form isn't about advocating 60s-style "free love" or hip polyamory (itself not necessarily a radical option). Human beings, after all, have infinite ways of expressing love and being committed to ideals. But the way we are made to think about the right ways to love and establish relationships has decisive social and political consequences. It is unlikely to be an accident that a government that wishes to be seen as progressive in its extension of traditional matrimonial domesticity to all, seeks at the same time to viciously target those who are simultaneously economically vulnerable and living outside of the cosy middle-class ideal of two parents with a small posse of putatively well-behaved children. The disgrace that is the bedroom tax will overwhelmingly penalise those whose domestic arrangements fall outside of the idealised format – single parents, the widowed, the elderly, the disabled and carers.

The narrowly defined "love" and "commitment" touted by David Cameron and his ministers is so severely contingent on economic privilege and security that it is nothing more than rampant individualism in pairs with the recommended option of reproducing. You can certainly choose to be single if you can pull it off economically – no mean feat. The most gutting Valentine you will read this year is to Cameron from a fibromyalgia patient called Julia Jones who will now lose the 1.5-bedroom bungalow she shared with her husband who died of cancer and whose ashes are buried in the garden. Childless and living on £70 a week, she cannot afford the punitive tax to stay on and retain her loving local support network.

It is a given that people should be able to love whom and how they want and if pairing off for any length of time is what appeals, then that's fine. But it's time that coupledom stopped being touted as the best option, an idea reinforced not just by state approval and resource allocation, but also by religion, the market, popular culture, assorted therapists and our own anxieties.

Resisting the consolidation of invidious forms of social exclusion, it's time to get beyond the notion that yoking together love, coupling, marriage and reproduction is the only way to achieve happiness. The scare stories about single people dying earlier or loneliness becoming a pandemic must be seen in the larger context of a social order that is hostile to non-couples and an economic order to which the collective good seems to be anathema. Our own imaginations – and hearts – can come up with better.

Hasya Kavi Sammelan - Sampat Saral

My Weltanschhaung - 14/02/2012

Being Valentine's Day, I am reminded of the guy who spoke at IIT-Kharagpur's humour festival - "Yeh Valentine day kya hai? Yeh to ek soone ka hiran hai jo dhanush banane wale companiyon ne bazaar me chhod rakha hai.! Translation, 'This Valentine's Day business is a golden deer released in to the market by firms selling bows'.

I am shocked at the competence of the managers of Jet Airways and Kingfisher Airlines who have not paid their staff salaries for two months. These are supposedly market savvy, professional and efficient firms.
What shocks me the most is the statement by Sanjay Aggarwal CEO of Kingfisher,  "We got hit by a couple of large unanticipated payments which had to be addressed on an emergency basis." 
How can you be unaware of such large payments coming up? Is there no penalty for not paying salaries on time? I think both these firms tactics aim to scupper any relief and rescue of Air-India, stating that they all need relief from the government.

I am surprised that the Israeli Prime Minister knew who attacked his staff in New Delhi even before the local police. The Israelis and its allies have been assasinating Iranian nuclear scientists without the same publicity though. The bomb blast in Delhi may be aimed at preventing India from signing up a bilateral treaty with Iran. Will the Indian government buckle under the pressure?

The best chat-up lines in the world

With Valentine's Day just a week away and Britain's single men honing their (usually drunken) chat-up lines, Times foreign correspondents reveal how bachelors in other countries do it. We can learn something from them all - except, perhaps, Australia . . .

GERMANY
German men see the conquest of German women as an extreme sport, a physical activity that is up there with bungee jumping and paragliding. It boils down to three essentials: stamina, technique and the right kit. The charm thing doesn't really come into it, any more than it does with mountaineering. One chat-up line suggested by the much-visited German site Flirt-mit-mir (Flirt with me) is: "Your eyes are the same colour as my Porsche." Apparently this works quite well, even better than, "Do you want to see my gun collection?"
There is a growing awareness though that this might not be quite enough. The fact that Germany's most celebrated beauties are falling for foreigners (Claudia Schiffer for Matthew Vaughn, Heidi Klum for Seal) is beginning to be seen as a national problem. The columnist, Jochen Siemens, views German men as suffering from Caligynephobia (also known as Venustraphobia) – the fear of chatting up beautiful women. "The fact is that a beautiful woman undermines the illusion that one is leading a happy life," he says, "doubts begin to gnaw at us." And, since there is no chat-up line in the German language that can overcome this kind of brittle masculine self-confidence, the country is now brimming with flirt academies and seminars. Here, German men are taught supposedly romantic lines such as "Life is a big jigsaw puzzle – and you are the missing piece". And that it is not absolutely necessary to line up your mobile phones on the restaurant table, or casually drop your car keyring (with Jaguar symbol), or to flash photographs of your villa in Spain.
Surveys usually find that German women prefer men who listen to them. For all the obvious reasons this message has yet to be taken on board. But part of the problem, of course, is that German women cannot quite distil what they want from a man into a text-book formula. The journalists Stephan and Andreas Lebert recently interviewed women on this subject for their book Instruction on How to be Manly. One typical response: "A man shouldn't be a fretter, someone who is always asking how you are, or who is checking whether the yoghurt in the fridge has passed its sell-by-date. He should be able to show feelings and weaknesses, but not be a wimp, that's the worst, not a gossip, no, no, but he should have the gift of the gab, that's the most important, oh yes, and a sense of humour and, he should be, you know, a bit of a cowboy." That's it, then. Back to the classroom, Hans
Roger Boyes
UNITED STATES
Strategy, planning, opportunism, execution – all feature in the American heterosexual male's pursuit of the opposite sex. Take, for example, my American friend Jim's recent flight to Spain. On the plane was a conspicuously attractive Spanish attendant, who was receiving a great deal of attention from the Brits at the back. The Brits had calculated that if they ordered as much booze as possible from her, then with every repeat order, they would get more confidence and therefore another opportunity to charm her with their self-deprecation.
Jim had also taken a fancy to this stewardess. He was polite, he smiled, he made eye contact. He also made sure to get her name and repeat it often. And then, when the plane landed, he went straight to the newsagents' to buy an envelope, a pen, and some notepaper. At a nearby caf� he composed a letter to the airline congratulating it on its excellent cabin service – in particular the helpfulness and professionalism of a certain Spanish flight attendant, whom he named as a tribute to the values of the organisation. He included his name, number, and e-mail address, and posted the letter right there. Two weeks later the woman called him to say that his letter had earned her a bonus and that could she please go out for a drink with him next time she was flying through LA. "The idea just came to me, as soon as we landed," Jim explainsto me. "I didn't expect it to actually work."
Hogwash. American men know very well that this kind of thing works. The very fact that I have two American male friends who have successfully charmed flight attendants – a career that surely represents the most fortified beachhead of womankind's defence against unwanted romantic advances – suggests that it was no accident. In a culture where the drunk'n'lunge method most definitely doesn't work (although it has been known to happen), it's a necessity.
In terms of romantic pursuit, the American male is simply a more evolved creature than his British counterpart. It's been this way for a while: take the plot of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, in which the quiet American in question arrives in Vietnam and uses a letter-writing campaign to steal the girlfriend of the hero, a foreign correspondent for The Times. The key to the American strategy is deferred gratification: what my Dad still calls "courting" and what the Americans call "dating". Essentially, the American seduction comes in three stages: a conversation, a phone number, and then a date. Strategy, planning and execution.
As for opportunism – look no farther than Jim's letter to the airline.
Chris Ayres
ITALY
It's lunchtime at a high school (Liceo) in Rome's historic centre, and older pupils are milling about discussing plans for the evening. I ask one of the girls, Francesca, if Italian boys are shy about asking her out. She looks at me fairly witheringly. "Nowadays we do the asking," she says.
My friend Fabio agrees. "It's not so much that we have lost the art of seduction as Italian women become more feminist and independent. It's more economic. Italian men tend to be old fashioned and think they should pay for everything. But times are hard, and we sometimes hesitate to make a date because it means asking the girl to go halves, even for a film and a pizza, which is not very romantic. So they take the initiative."
Changes in the law have also had an effect: Italy has caught up with the concept of sexual harassment, with the result, Fabio says, that Italian men have discovered "there is a fine line between making advances and molestation. Making what you think is an innocent gesture can nowadays land you in trouble."
The same evening, Rome's youngsters are gathered on the cobbled piazza of Campo de' Fiori, still in groups, though some will pair off later. In Italian socialising there is often little need to break the ice: going to a disco, club or pub is a group activity involving school or university friends, the extended family, friends of friends. Singles bars are thin on the ground in Rome, and speed-dating never really took off. Nor is there much binge drinking compared with Britain: Campo de' Fiori is lined with bars but the only people getting legless are foreigners.
In the end, though, someone has to make a play for his or her object of desire – and despite economic constraints and fear of harassment allegations, young Italian men can still cut it, according to Daniela, a blonde Alitalia stewardess. "Italian men are pretty forthright. They don't hesitate to compliment you in the street on your beauty, ciao bella and all that. They even whistle." Does she mind? "Don't be silly."
What Italian men do not do, Daniela says, is drink to work up courage. Francesca agrees. "If they did it would be counterproductive," she says, looking appalled. "If a boy came up to me and asked me out smelling of drink, I would tell him he was schifoso (disgusting)." And that would be that? "And that would be that."
Richard Owen
FRANCE
For younger Frenchmen, dalliance with the opposite sex is no longer the elegant dance of their fathers' days. A smile and a flash of wit used to go a long way, even between strangers in the street. "I used to prefer galleries and caf�s," remembers François, a lawyer in his late fifties whose recent divorce has put him back on the market. "Women were playful. There was time. Now everyone is in a rush and they are suspicious and don't flirt with strangers. You have to meet at a dinner party, and even then it can be hard work."
Nicolas, 24, an accountant in Montreuil, Paris, says that he is quite successful with women but the old pickup places such as the street or disco no longer work. "The disco is absolutely out these days. Everyone is with their mates," he says. "I have joined a salsa dance class and that's great. It's a super plan de drague (pickup method)." As for the approach, Nicolas sticks to the age-old one. "I improvise depending on the girl's personality. There's no set line. The thing is to try to make her laugh."
A common complaint from Frenchwomen young and d'un certain âge is that younger men no longer know how to make a delicate approach. "Too many guys come on heavy and they tell lies," says Mireille, a 34-year-old secretary in the posh 16th Arrondissement. Muriel, a recently divorced sales executive in her mid-forties, says: "Men nowadays don't have the old panache. They' re not romantic. They used to know how to make compliments and put you at ease.
Now they just come at you."
Christine, a publishing editor in her fifties, who has lived in London, says that there is still a big difference in the art of flirting on each side of the Channel. "Englishmen do not look at you in the street, perhaps because Englishwomen do not know what to do. Frenchwomen love being looked at. You miss it when you go abroad – those glances exchanged in the street, on public transport, the little smile of admiration," she says.
"Frenchmen still know that an admiring look flatters a woman and gives them pleasure. No more than that. It doesn't mean the man wants to put you in his bed."
Charles Bremner
AUSTRALIA
Six months ago a larrikin Australian mineworker woke after four hours' sleep, following eight at the bar, and saw a man in the mirror with a thousand-yard-glass stare.
Ian Green might finally have caught 40 winks, but none of those he gave to the girls the night before had got him a phone number. Ditto his mate, Brett – but they had a plan.
"We walked up to the shopping centre and we went, 'Righto, let's just approach 25 girls we don't know'," he says. "By the time we left we had phone numbers galore. We actually met up with two of them that night out in a club."
The 30-year-old health and safety adviser, in the macho state of Queensland, explains that the hangover has the same bracing effect as the brews that got him there – giving him that "what the hell" confidence.
Australian blokes may revel in a manly reputation and prefer – in the words of one comedian – to have their shirt ironed while it's on their back. But anecdotal evidence suggests that they would wilt in the presence of a wildflower if not for a little liquid courage.
"If you're sitting there at a barbecue, and you've got a beer, a girl's drinking the exact same drink, well then you've got something in common just to start up with," Ian says.
Jeff Cashen, of Sydney, says that most of his mates need a couple of drinks to up their swagger. But the singer-songwriter and emergency doctor says that now he's 35 years old, girls expect a more mature approach and he has studied the little black books of Neil Strauss, the American seduction artist.
"A couple of my friends have done a lot of reading on strategies. We've tried a lot of those strategies – in fact, more work than don't," he says.
One common strategy is noted by Katherine Feeney, an internet agony aunt. In this game plan, as one fella locks on to a female target, his "wingman" steps in to distract her friends with a little witty banter and, yes, a little more social lubrication. But there are some more redeeming features to the Australian – and British – male.
"There's a whole sort of larrikin spirit that you can't overlook and self-deprecating humour, which is fairly strong in Australian culture and it's accepted that that is a way to open up conversation," Katherine says. "In comparison with Poms, I have met a heap of English guys who are wittier, and that's a bit of a winner with Aussie girls, I think."
Sarah Miller, 22, of Mackay on the central coast of Queensland, agrees that confidence is the key to success in the dating game but that alcohol more often than not encourages a straight-up proposition – small talk not included.
Does she mind? "Not really, if they're hot it doesn't matter."
Paul Larter

---

Everything in one place… All new Windows Live!