The look of love

An interesting article in Time magazine this week, which I tend to read on the loo (too much info, yeah?), It was an investigation into the nature of romance. An unexplainable intangible you may say, and to a large degree that’s true, but here’s the theory.

People tend to search for the most attractive person they can pull (to paraphrase). The evidence is, and we all know… 10s tend to marry 10s, 7s tend to marry 7s etc. People also tend to,  marry in their late 20s when they start to feel the need to ‘settle down’ find that special person and start a family.

So to be unromantic about it, if you are going out with someone in your late 20s, you get on really well with them, are attracted to them, and feel that you’re probably not going to do any better - then you marry them. BUT… that’s the theory… in truth, people ‘fall in love’ they have this extra, irrational ‘love’ thing, romantic love. So why is this - in an evolutionary sense.

Here’s the interesting theory - if you ‘settle’ for the best you can get at the time when you want to get married theres always the chance, in fact the probability that later in life someone better will come across your radar, and be interested in you -and if you are being rational about it you will say… ok, here is someone better for me - so I’ll move on.

This is of course bad for the species, breaking up families and taking away our sense of security that our partner is going to leave us if someone better comes along. So apart from our moral consciences what makes us stay with our partners? The fact that we didn’t rationally decide to love them, we irrationally fell ‘in love’ and that connection is intangible.

I’m always warning single people not to be too picky - but this article got me thinking - maybe they should all wait until they find that spark, that romantic tremor, embrace it and don’t down play it as something that wears off.