What Does Love Mean?

What does "Love" actually mean?

'Worthless' gifts get the good girls

Men who spend big money wining and dining their dates are not frittering away hard-earned cash. According to a pair of UK researchers, they are merely employing the best strategy for getting the girl without being taken for granted.

27 July 2005
NewScientist.com
Anna Gosline

Using mathematical modelling, Peter Sozou and Robert Seymour at University College London, UK, found that wooing girls with costly, but essentially worthless gifts – such as theatre tickets or expensive dinners out – is a winning courtship strategy for both sexes.

Females can assess how serious or committed a male plans to be and males can ensure they are not just seducing 'gold-diggers' – girls who take valuable presents with no intention of accepting subsequent dates.

Sozou came about the idea after reading about a man in his local newspaper. The man had been paying the rent of a woman he considered was his girlfriend – he was giving her a valuable gift. But she had been heartlessly manipulating him, dating another man on the sly while accepting money from her unwitting sugar daddy.

"It spurred me onto thinking that if he had just been buying her expensive dinners, and not paying her rent, she wouldn’t have strung him along so much," says Sozou.
Dating and mating

So he and Seymour built a model based on a series of dating decisions. In the model males had to decide what kind of gift to offer females – valuable, extravagant or cheap – based on how attractive he finds her. The females had to either accept or decline the gift and then decide whether to mate with the gift-giver – a decision also weighted on the 'attractiveness' of their prospective partner.

When they measured the different outcomes of all the steps, they found the best solution for the males was to give extravagant, but intrinsically value-free gifts the vast majority of the time, while giving gifts of material value very occasionally.

The model showed that if males gave valuable gifts too often, the females would start to exploit them: the males have no clue as to the females’ real intentions in the model. Put simply, the females just take the diamonds and run. But when the gifts are worthless, an uninterested female has little incentive to accept, gaining no return on what could be just turn into the simple waste of an evening. Only girls who are serious would bother to go the distance.
Worthless balls

Sozou and Seymour believe their conclusions about people find support in the actions of animals, such as the dance fly. Males of this species give worthless cotton balls to entice partners into mating – and they work – although other scientists interpret this as male trickery.

Alison Lenton, a social psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, questions some of the model’s assumptions, however. For example, one assumption is that females obtain a negative outcome for accepting an unattractive, though committed, male. Women have been shown to prioritise traits associated with good parental care above physical attractiveness, she says.

The model also fails to take the potential effects of cheating females into account. “Some female birds raise their chicks with a 'nice' male and engage in short-term copulations with an attractive male - there is similar evidence among humans. In this way, females may get the best of both worlds.”

And what is more, says Lenton, psychologists have found that experiential purchases – like theatre tickets – make people more happy in the long run than material purchases. "I do not necessarily agree that theatre tickets are 'worthless'," she says.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B (DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2005.3152)

Is it over?

Falling out of love can sometimes be just as easy as falling in love. Working out whether it's just a phase or if your relationship has reached the end of the line is one of life's hardest decisions. Relationship psychotherapist Paula Hall asks the difficult questions.

17 July 2005

The pros and cons

When people try to decide if their relationship's over, they often find themselves weighing up the pros and cons.

On the pros side they put all their partner's positive character traits, the happy memories and the advantages of being together.

On the cons they list all the things they don't like about their partner, the painful memories and the reasons why living together sometimes feels impossible.

The problem with this system is that they're never measuring like for like. For example, when listing personal qualities, how many negatives would it take to counteract being an excellent mother? And how many happy memories does it take to outweigh an affair?

Unfortunately, there's no formula and no conclusive tests when it comes to deciding whether your relationship's over. All you can do is ask yourself some difficult, soul-searching questions and see what the answers bring.
Is love enough?

Love means different things to different people and at different stages of their lives, so can it be relied on in the decision-making process? For example, one woman may spend years in an abusive relationship, saying "I love him," while another will walk away from a seemingly idyllic marriage because she's no longer "in love".

Love can sometimes blind us to the reality of what we really have. And although it's difficult, we can choose to love someone and we can choose to stop loving them. As well as being a feeling, love is something we do.
Do you like your partner?

Before you can love someone, you have to like them.

If you enjoy being with your partner, agree with how they think and behave, and share the same dreams in life, you're doing well. If your partner is also someone whom you respect, trust and feel affection for, you have all the basics for love to grow.
Can you communicate?

All relationships hit problems at one time or another; the key to overcoming them is communication.

Within your relationship, there needs to be a genuine capacity for sharing and expressing your thoughts and feelings in a way that feels OK for you both. There also need to be ways to resolve conflict and for you both to address any unmet needs.
Is change possible?

If there's a particular issue that makes you want to leave, you first need to consider whether it's possible to make changes to resolve the problem.

Is the problem something you can let go, or is it fundamental to your happiness? If it's the former, you have to ask yourself if you can change; if it's the latter, can your partner do the changing?

If your partner doesn't agree that there's a problem, they won't change. If they do agree and are willing to change, you have to decide whether you believe they have the capacity to change.
Is it too late?

There's no doubt that some situations do get better with time. Even the most painful betrayals can become less significant if there's an ability to forgive and move on.

But if either you or your partner has been hanging on to a grudge for years and there's no indication that the pain has eased at all, you may decide it's too late for a resolution.

Another indication that it may be too late to save the relationship is if one of you has already started to develop a life that excludes the other. This might include a change in career or lifestyle, or starting another relationship that you don't want to end. If this is the case, then even though you haven't made a verbal decision to end the relationship, it may be that emotionally you've already left.
Further help

Deciding to end a relationship is extremely difficult and not a decision to be taken quickly or lightly. Many people find that talking through their thoughts and feelings with a counsellor can help. To find out more, see Do you need counselling?
Recommended reading

Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay: A Step-by-Step Guide to Resolving Your Relationship by Mira Kirshenbaum (Michael Joseph)

How do I love thee? Which of the nine ways?

Next time you board the streetcar named desire, ask yourself: is this hedonistic love, or are you already in a role-bound relationship? If the first, your love will be gone with the wind. If the second, brace yourself for a brief encounter.

Tim Radford, science editor
June 8, 2005
Guardian

Simon Watts of Nottingham Trent University and Paul Stenner of University College London analysed the nature of modern love by asking 34 women and 16 men to agree or disagree with a set of 60 propositions. They identified nine varieties of love, reported in the British Journal of Social Psychology today. They are:

· A grown-up version that involves mutual trust, recognition and support

· The "Cupid's dart" variety, in which couples - think Antony and Cleopatra or even Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity - are swept away by blind passion

· Hedonistic love, concerned with personal and perhaps fleeting pleasure, the theme of much Hollywood film noir

· Love as the ultimate connection: an essentially romantic view

· Demythologised love that recognises the need for hard work, patience and compromise to make things work

· Love as transformative adventure: the emotional rollercoaster experience of a Bridget Jones figure

· From Cupid's arrow to a role-bound relationship dictated by society's expectations - the experience of the tortured couple in David Lean's film Brief Encounter

· From Cupid's arrow to the security of close friendship

· Dyadic partnership love, in which two people become a single unit (and tend to finish each other's sentences)

"I wanted to try and find a way of capturing people's experiences that went beyond asking them," said Mr Watts. "When you do ask them they are very rarely able - even if they wish to - to tell you the whole story, to get it into words. We want to map the cultural state of love. What is the climate of love at the current time?" he said.