Attraction, love, and communication - a summary of chapter 11 of Understanding human sexuality by Hyde and DeLamater

Sexology
Chapter 11
Attraction, love, and communication

Attraction

The girl next door

Our opportunities to meet people are limited by geography and time.

We tend to be more attracted to people with whom we have had contact several times than we are to people with whom we have had little contact.
Mere-exposure effect: the tendency to like a person more if we have been exposed to him or her repeatedly.

Birds of a feather

We like people who are similar to us.
We are attracted to people who are approximately the same was we are in age, race or ethnicity, and economic and social status.
Homophily: the tendency to have contact with people who are equal in social status.

We are attracted to people whose attitudes and opinions are similar to ours.

Reasons to be attracted to a person similar

• We get positive reinforcement from that person agreeing with us.
• Similarity in attitudes is important, in personality is not
• Similarity on attachment styles is associated with indicators of marital satisfaction
  Similarity in attitudes is not

Physical attractiveness

Individuals prefer partners who are more physically attractive.
This effect depends on gender to some extent.
Physical attractiveness is more important to males evaluating females than it is to females evaluating males.
Our perception of attractiveness or beauty of another person is influenced by our evaluation of their intelligence, liking, respect, and our own objective attractiveness.
This phenomenon is somewhat modified by our own feelings of personal worth.

The interpersonal marketplace

Whom we are attracted to and pair off with depends a lot on how much we think we have to offer and how much we think we can ‘buy’ with it.
Matching phenomenon: the tendency for men and women to choose as partners people who match them. Who are similar in attitudes, intelligence, and attractiveness.

Generally, the principle seems to be that:

• Women’s worth is based on their physical beauty
• Men’s worth is based on their success

For both men and women, the person’s physical attractiveness is highly correlated with his/her education, income, and a measure of social status.
Attractiveness in high school is associated with greater social integration and favourable treatment by teachers and classmates.
This predicts education, work, and mental health outcomes as the person becomes an adult.

From the laboratory to real life

Perceived similarity: extent to which the individual believes his or her partner is similar on important characteristics.
Both perceived and actual similarity are associated with interpersonal attraction.
Perceived similarity is more important.

The nature and importance of matching varies as relationships develop.
Each individual’s rating on self-worth predicted the level of physical attractiveness of the partner they choose.

Attraction online

Technology has created a new way to meet potential partners.
Social forces at work for the growth of this phenomenon

• A growing proportion of the population is single, so more people are looking
• Career and time pressures lead people to seek more efficient ways to look
• Single people are highly mobile, increasing the difficulty of meeting people
• Workplace romance is less acceptable due to concerns about sexual harassment

Users say that one advantage of meeting on the Net is that the technology forces you to focus on the person’s interests and values.
You do not have access to body language and can sometimes not see the person.
Your impressions are heavily influenced by imagination, which can create a powerful attraction to the other.

The downside of meeting online can be the relative lack of information about the person.
The person may bot be at all who she or he claims to be, or how you imagine the person to be in your mind.

The appeal of online dating is that there are hundreds of prospects available with a few clicks of the mouse, giving the users a great sense of control.
If you arrange a date, anything can happen, doubts rise whether to go (most don’t).
Most of those first dates are last dates.
This variety of outcomes reflects the lack of scripts of these dates.

Three classes of influence on relationships success

• Personal characteristics
• Individual change
• External uncontrollable events

Online dating can only measure and provide information about variables in the first group.

If a long-term intimate relationship is your goal, online dating is not likely to get you there.

Explaining our preferences

Reinforcement theory: Byrne’s law of attraction

We tend to like people who give us rewards an to dislike people who give us punishments.

Donn Byrne
Our attraction to another person is proportionate to the number of reinforcements that person gives us relative to the total number of reinforcements plus punishments the person gives us.
We like people who are frequently nice to us and seldom nasty.

According to this explanation, we prefer people who are similar because interaction with them is rewarding.

The implicit egotism perspective.
We are attracted to persons who are similar because they activate our positive views of ourselves.

Sociobiology: Sexual strategies theory

Sociobiologists view sexual behaviour within an evolutionary perspective.
Historically, the function of mating has been reproduction.
Men and women who selected mates according to some preferences were more successful than those who chose them based on other preferences.

Younger women are more likely to be fertile than older women.
A physically attractive person is more likely to be healthy and fertile than someone who isn’t.

Some evolutionary analysist have argued that the critical feature of an attractive face is symmetry.
Fluctuating asymmetry: asymmetry of bilateral features that are on average symmetrical in the population.
Asymmetry is said to reflect developmental instability (DI).
DI could have caused other anomalies that could impair reproductive success.

Women must make a much greater investment than men in order to reproduce.
They want to select mates who are reproductively valuable, leading to the preference of good-looking mates.
Men also must have resources in order to invest in children.

Sexual strategies theory asserts that gender differences in mate preferences reflect genetic predispositions based on universal biological roles of men and women in reproduction.
An alternative view is that preferences reflect current sex roles in specific cultures.
Gender differences in mate preferences decline as gender parity increased.

Intimacy

Intimacy is a major component of any close or romantic relationship.
Intimate relationships are important to us for two reasons

• The desire to someday have children and the awareness that raising a child is a lot easier if there are two people
• To obtain the benefits of mutual trust and reciprocal recognition by the other person
  This benefit is increasingly important in an impersonal and sometimes cruel world that is very stressful for some people.

Defining intimacy

Intimacy: a quality of relationships characterised by commitment, feelings of closeness and trust, and self-disclosure.
Closeness or sharing has three dimensions

• Affective (emotional)
• Cognitive
• Physical

While intimacy must be reciprocal, it need to be equal.
While intimacy has a physical dimension, it need not be sexual.

Intimacy and self-disclosure

Self-disclosure: telling person things about yourself.
Self-disclosure leads to reciprocity.

• Disclosure by our partner may make us like and trust that person more
• Simple modeling and imitation may occur
  One partner’s self-disclosing serves as a model for the other partner
• Norms of equity may be involved

There is a positive correlation between the extent of a couple’s self-disclosure and their satisfaction with the relationship.
Self-disclosure of sexual likes and dislikes is associated with sexual satisfaction.

Self-disclosure promotes intimacy in a relationship and makes us feel close to the other person.
Self-disclosure and intimacy mutually build on each other.

Theory of love

Triangular theory of love

Love has three fundamental components

• Intimacy
• Passion
• Decision or commitment

Three components of love

Intimacy
The emotional component.
Includes our feelings of closeness and bondedness to the other person.
It is present in many relationships besides romantic ones.

Passion
The motivational component of love.
Physical attraction and the drive for sexual expression.
Physiological arousal.
Passion differentiates romantic love from other kinds of love.
Intimacy and passion are often closely intertwined.

Decision or commitment
The cognitive component.
Has two aspects

• The short-term aspect
  The decision that one loves the other person
• The long-term aspect
  The commitment to maintain that relationship
  What makes relationships last.

The triangular theory

The triangle metaphor allows us to show how the two people in a couple can be well matched or mismatched in the love they feel toward each other.

When there is a good match between the two partner’s love, the partners tend to feel satisfaction with the relationship.

Love in action

Each of the three components of love must be translated into actions.

Evidence for Sternberg’s triangular theory of love

There is support for it.

Attachment theory of love

One hypothesis is that the early attachment profoundly affects us for the rest of our lives, and particularly affects our capacity to form loving attachments to others when we are adults.

According to the attachment theory, adults are characterised, in their romantic relationships, by one of three styles.

• Secure lovers
  People who find it easy to get close to others and are comfortable having others feel close to them
  Mutual dependency in a relationship feels right
  They do not fear abandonment
• Fearful or avoidant lovers
  Uncomfortable feeling close to another person or having that person feel close to them
  It is difficult for them to trust or depend on a partner
• Preocupied or anxious-ambivalent lovers
  Want desperately to get close to a partner but often find the partner does not reciprocate the feelings
  They are insecure in the relationship, worrying that the partner does not really love them

Separation from parent in childhood is not related to adult attachment styles.

The person’s perception of the quality of the relationship with each parent predicts the attachment style.

Adults bring to any particular romantic relationship their own personal history of love and attachment.
The forces of that personal history can be strong.
Conflict in some relationships may be caused by a mismatch of attachment styles.
Jealousy is most common among anxious-ambivalent lovers.

Partners with a secure style reported the greatest commitment to and satisfaction with their relationships.
Attachment style affects relationships by affecting the way the partners interact.

Love as a story

Stories about love shape our beliefs about love and relationships, and our beliefs in turn influence our behaviour.

There is more to love than interaction.
What matters is how each partner interprets the interaction.
To make sense out of what happens in our relationships, we rely on our love stories.

Love story: a story about what love should be like, including characters, a plot, and a theme.

• Two central characters, who play roles that complement each other
• The plot details the kinds of events that occur in the relationship
• The theme is central, and it provides the meaning of the events that make up the plot and gives direction to the behaviour of the principals.

According to this view, falling in love occurs when you meet someone with whom you can create a relationship that fits your love story.
We are satisfied with relationships in which we and our partners match the characters of our story.

Many stories have their origins in culture, folk tales, literature, theatre, films and television.
The cultural context interactions with our personal experience and characteristics to create the stories that each of us has.
As we experience relationships, our stories evolve, taking into account unexpected events.
Each person has more than one story, and the stories often form a hierarchy.

Love stories derive their power from the fact that they are self-fulfilling.
We create events in our relationships according to the plot and then interpret those events according to the theme.
Our love relationships are social constructs.

Passionate and companionate love

Passionate love: a state of intense longing for union with the other person and of intense physiological arousal.

• Cognitive
  Preoccupation with the loved on e and the idealization of the person or of the relationship
• Emotional
  Physiological arousal, sexual attraction and a desire of union
• Behavioural
  Taking care of the other and maintaining physical closeness

Companionate love: a feeling of deep attachment and commitment to a person with whom one has an intimate relationship

Passionate love is often the first stage of a romantic relationship.
As the relationship progresses, a gradual shift to companionate love takes place.

Sexual desire and romantic love may often be independent processes.
Sexual desire is a motivational state leading to a search for opportunities for sexual activity.
It motivates proximity seeking and contact, and leads to feelings of passion.
Romantic love is a motivational state leading to attachment and commitment.

The biology of love

Bodily chemistry and neural activity are the causes of love.
There are specific patterns of neurochemical activity that are associated with mating and pair-bonding.

• Dopamine enhances the likelihood of pair-bonding

The frequent presence of the loved one, produced initially by passionate love, triggers the production of prolactin and oxytocin.

• The levels of prolactin rise following orgasm in humans and are related to pair-bonding in voles.
• Oxytocin may contribute to long-term relationships
  It plays an important role in pair-bonding in some animals
  It is stimulated by touch.
  Correlates positively with levels of interpersonal trust.

Dopamine is important in the experience of love.

Visual stimuli associated with the lover stimulate subcortical activity in the ventral tegmental area, caudate nucleus, and putamen.
These are the areas associated with motivation, reward, and euphoria.
Activity also occurs in areas associated with complex cognitive processing.

Both passionate love and sexual desire activate the same reward-related and higher-order cortical areas in the brain.
But, love is associated with reduced activity in the hypothalamus, amygdala, and somatosensory cortex, compared to sexual desire.

Love is more than sex.

Research on love

Operational definition: defining some concept or term by how it is measured.

Measuring love

There is a passionate love scale.

Love and adrenaline

Two-component theory of love

Two-component theory of love: the theory that two conditions must exist simultaneously for passionate love to occur.

• Physiological arousal
• Attaching a cognitive label (love) to the feeling

An emotion consists of a physiological arousal state plus the label the person assigns to it.

Evidence for the two-component theory

Several experiments provide evidence for Berscheid and Walster’s two-component theory of love.

Misattribution of arousal: when a person in a stage of physiological arousal attributes these feelings to love or attraction to the person present.

Cross-cultural research

Cultural values and the meaning of love

Two dimensions in which cultures vary

• Individualism-collectivism
  • In individualistic cultures, behaviour is regulated by individual attitudes and cost-benefit considerations
    Love is the basis for marriage
  • In collectivist cultures, the self is defined by its group membership, behaviour is regulated by group norms and attachment to and harmony within the group are values
    Marriages are arranged, and the primary criterion is that the two families are of similar status
    The person finds intimacy in relationships with other members of the family
• Independence-interdependencey
  • Many Western cultures view each person as independent, and value individuality and uniqueness
  • Many other cultures view the person as interdependent with those around him or her
    The self is defined in relation with others

Cultural influences on mate selection

Beauty varies by culture.

Love and marriage

Individualistic cultures place a high value on romantic love, while collectivist cultures emphasize the group.
In more collectivist countries people marry someone although they don’t love the person.

The pattern of the cross-cultural findings

Some phenomena are similar across cultures (valuing intelligence, kindness, and understanding) and some differ across cultures (love being a prerequisite for marriage).

Communication

Communication and relationships

Distressed couples tend to have communication deficits.
Unrewarding, ineffective communication precedes and predicts later relationships problems.
Distressed couples do not differ from non-distressed couples in their communication skills or ability, but some distressed couples use their skills as weapons, to send negative messages.
Four destructive patterns of interaction

• Criticism
  Attacking a partner’s personality or character
• Contempt
  Intentionally insulting or orally abusing the other person
• Defensiveness
  Denying responsibility, making excuses, replying with a complaint of one’s own, and making other self-protective responses instead of assessing the problem
• Withdrawal
  Not reacting

Being an effective communicator

It is important to recognize the distinction between

• Intent: what the speaker means
• Impact: what someone else understands the speaker to mean

Effective communicator: a communicator whose impact matches his or her intent.
To be an effective communicator, you may need to plan out our strategy.

Good messages

Every couple has problems.
The best way to voice them is to complain rather than to criticise.
‘I’ language: speaking for yourself, using the word ‘I’, not mind reading.
‘I’ language is less likely to make your partner defensive.

Mind reading: making assumptions about what your partner thinks and feels.
Mind reading is more common among distressed couples than among nondistressed couples.
You can avoid this with ‘I’ language or giving and receiving feedback.

Documenting: giving specific examples of the issue being discussed.
An important component of giving good messages.

Another technique in giving good messages is to offer limited choices.
Offer a set of acceptable limited choices.

Leveling and editing

Leveling: telling your partner what you are feeling by stating your thoughts clearly, simple, and honestly.
This is often the hardest step in communication, especially when the topic is sex.
In leveling, keep in mind that the purposes are to

• Make communication clear
• Clear up what partners expect or each other
• Clear up what is pleasant and what is not
• Clear up what is relevant and what is not
• Notice things that draw you closer or push you apart

Editing: censoring or not saying things that would be deliberately hurtful to your partner or that are irrelevant.

The trick is to balance levelig and editing.

Listening

One of the most important things is that you must really listen.
Trying to understand what the person is saying.
Good listening involves positive nonverbal behaviours.
Be a non-defensive listener: focus on what your partner is saying and feeling, and don’t immediately become defensive or counter-attack with complains of your own.

The next step is to give feedback.
Often involves brief vocalisations.
Paraphrasing: saying, in your own words, what you thought your partner meant.
It’s also a good idea to ask for feedback form your partner.

Body talk: non-verbal communication

It is important to bee good at reading your partner’s non-verbal messages.
Non-verbal communication: communication non through words, but through the body.

In communicating about sex, we need to be sure that our non-verbal signals help to create the impact we intent rather than one we don’t intent.

Validating

Validation: telling your partner that, given his or her point of view, you can see why he or she thinks a certain way.
A good technique in communication.
It is good to understand the other’s viewpoint.

Validating doesn’t necessarily solve a disagreement, but it has left the door open sot that you can make some progress.

Accentuate the positive

It is also important to communicate positive things about sex.
You will be giving your partner positive reinforcement.

Fighting fair

Arguments are a natural part of a relationship and are not necessarily bad.
It is useful if you and your partner have agreed to a set of rules.
Fighting fair: a set of rules designed to make arguments constructive rather than destructive.
Some basic rules

• Don’t make sarcastic or insulting remarks about your partner’s sexual adequacy
• Don’t bring up names of former spouses, lovers, boyfriends, girlfriends to illustrate how all these problems didn’t happen with them
• Don’t play amateur psychologist
• Don’t threaten to tell your parents or run home
• If you have children, don’t bring them into the argument
• Don’t engage in dumping
• Don’t hit and run
• Don’t focus on who’s to blame

Checking out sexy signals

One of the problems with verbal and nonverbal sexual communications is that they are often ambiguous.
Check out sexy signals, don’t make any assumptions about the meaning of ambiguous messages.