Unexplainable - What is love?

Episode Date: February 15, 2023

Can science help us predict whether a relationship will succeed? Or is it all just chaos? This episode originally ran on February 9, 2022. For more, go to http://vox.com/unexplainable It’s a great place to view show transcripts and read more about the topics on our show. Also, email us! [e-mail] We read every email. Support Unexplainable by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Every February we hit Valentine's Day. Some of us eat chocolates, some of us buy flowers, some of us forget, sometimes, maybe. But do we ever stop and call out the elephant in the room, that big, empty box at the center of it all? What is love? How does it work? Why does it work? So this Valentine's Day, we're sharing a favorite episode of ours with you. It's all about the quest for a scientific answer to one of life's most confounding mysteries. Look, I'm a romance novelist.

I know the money is in those beginning feelings. Sarah McClain, Casey McQuiston, Talia Hibbert, and Emily Henry are all romance authors and some of the biggest names in their field. So these are the experts in figuring out how to make two people fall in love. Every time I sit down to write a new book, I have to think, okay, why should these people be together? When I set two characters on page to fall in love. It's kind of an instant feeling of familiarity and of knowing someone. There is that adrenaline rush and giddiness that if you were in a slightly different situation, you'd be like, oh, I'm in danger. I need to run and hide.

When it's good banter you click with somebody, it's like this high. For some reason, they make you a little bit shinier, and they make you, you know, smarter, funnier, or more compassionate and kind of. and that's exhilarating to see in characters. But sometimes the hardest part of the job is getting those characters to cooperate. Characters might seem like they're exactly right for each other. And then you put them on the page and you think, oh, no, this won't work. I thought I wanted to write this one type of pairing.

And then this other character just kept jumping and being like, actually I'm way more compatible with your protagonist. Because in my mind, I'll have this idea of like a person like this would fall in love with a person like this. But when I'm trying to write them, it's just very awkward and it's lurching. And it is a bit like going on like a really bad first date, right? And you're just sitting there and you're like, so. And even though these authors are in total control of the worlds and the characters that they're building, sometimes those characters just don't click.

It feels like pulling teeth. It feels like you are at a cocktail party being forced to talk to somebody. There just won't be chemistry and I have to completely rebuild the main characters. You know, we call it chemistry, and there really is, it's like this chemical reaction. It can't just be two things that fit. They also have to make a spark. Even for these experts, chemistry can be pretty unexplainable. You know, it's a very bizarre feeling to sit down for the day and then have your characters do something you didn't expect them to do.

Because I still am in control of them, am I not? I don't know. I would like to talk to some scientists about why my characters do not do what I ask them to do. So this Valentine's Day, we're doing just that. We're talking to scientists all about the mysteries of chemistry. Hey, Unexplanable. I'm Noah Massenfeld, here with Brian Resnick, science editor. Hi.

And Meredith Hodnott, senior producer. Hey. So it's Valentine's time. Valentine's Day's around the corner. But what exactly did you ask these scientists about? The mysteries of love. So mysterious. We've been spending the last few weeks talking to, you know, the scientists who might have some insights here.

And basically just asking them, like, what don't you understand about love? And we kind of quickly stumbled on, like, a really big question that the field grapples over. The big mystery is, do you really know who you want? This is Dan Conroy Beam. He's a researcher at UC Santa Barbara. So, you know, to what extent do your first do you know, preferences actually matter in predicting your choices. And also, how good of a job can I actually do at predicting who you're going to find interesting as a partner? So this is basically asking

something like, do we actually know what we want in a relationship? Like, does what we think we want actually predict whether a relationship will work? Yeah. Yeah. And the reason why scientists want to study this is they have those same questions that the romance novelists have. And they study them because these questions really matter. Who you choose as a partner is the biggest decision that most people ever make in their entire lives. Who you end up in a long-term relationship with affects where you live, where you work. Who you consider your friends and family.

And that's going to affect every corner of your life, right? That's going to affect your happiness. It's going to affect your health. It's going to affect your overall well-being. How we click and connect with people has some pretty profound consequences. So how do scientists actually study this? Well, in the beginning. In the beginning, scientists just asked people what they thought.

For a long time, for several decades, a big chunk of the research people did in this field was basically just going around the world and asking people, you know, think of your ideal romantic partner. What kind of characteristics do they have? Scientists just kind of assume that people knew what they wanted in a partner. This is how physically attractive I'd like my partner to be. This is how tall I'd like my partner to be.

This is how funny I'd like my partner to be. This is how smart I would like my partner to be. They were looking for patterns. There's a lot of questions here about, like, human mate choice and evolution. But, you know, it came down to the general thinking was, like, if you wanted someone who's smart and who's funny and is at least six feet tall, it's kind of like you fill out a scorecard for them in your head. And, you know, you add up the totals and, you know, if someone is smart and tall, you give them a passing score. This went on for decades, and it wasn't until, you know, mid-2000s up until now that people really really,

thought to ask, well, to what extent do these preferences really matter? So scientists in this field were really starting to wonder, like, how useful was this data in the real world, like outside of a questionnaire? Okay. This was like the mid-2000s, so researchers turned to something that was pretty popular at the time, which was speed dating. Speed dating is, you know, kind of, in some senses, a really nice invention for psychologists. In my mind, scientists were just like, oh, that looks like, that looks like an experience.

Can we get in on that? I mean, it seems like a really convenient way to test a lot of people in a quick amount of time, right? Exactly, yeah. You can ask them before the speed dating session, what does your ideal partner look like? You can ask them, you know, during the speed dating session, what was that person you just talked to like? You know, did they match your ideals? And then you can see at the end, who did they actually say they wanted to go on another date with? And how did they line up?

Did people's preferences dictate who they ended up with at the end of the night? No. Not at all. No. Much to a lot of people's support. Right. Okay, great. Okay. So if it's not preferences in this scenario, like, what is it? Like, what is happening here that leads someone to say yes to someone and no to someone else?

If it's not seemingly related to like these basic questions around, like, who do you want to be with? So do our preferences matter at all? Yeah. Dan's big idea here is that preferences, they don't necessarily reveal who we decide to date, but they're still a part of. our mental software that guides us to that person. So, you know, when we're making decisions, dating decisions, it's not a simple arithmetic. It's not that tallying up a scored card. He thinks it's more like this complicated calculation. We make tradeoffs. Like you might want someone who's really smart, like super intelligent, but you wouldn't want to be with them if they were also really arrogant. And so we have to sort of, we have to use approaches that are able to capture

these tradeoffs that people are making. The speed dating studies, and the research before that, it's kind of approaching these preferences in isolation. But Dan is trying to look at how those preferences work in the mix with everything else. Like, what is it about the interactions of your preferences that lead to your decisions? And also, you know, human may choice is mutual, right? You've got to pick the one that's best for you, but they've also got to pick you back. Okay.

So what does the, so what's his research look like? So Dan is building a computer model to try and get a better understanding of what those complicated calculations those tradeoffs might look like. But in order to build this model, he needs something to train his computer on. So Dan takes real couples. He makes little like sim agents of them and puts them in a computer. And once Dan has a bunch of these little sims walking around, he basically wipes all their memories of ever being in a relationship and gets these newly single sims starting

to mingle, starting to couple up. And Dan wants to know, like, how many of the Sims end up with their real-life partners and how many end up with somebody new? We can see, you know, what kinds of decisions actually do a good job of putting people back with their real-world partners. One way to think about the simulation is, like, if you take two people, very happy relationship, been together for a while now, and then you erase their memories of ever being together.

Then you take these two people, put them back into the world. into like a, I think Dan called it a mating market, which seems like a very clinical term for like a bar? Call it like a dating reality show, I don't know. A dating reality show. Let's get them on the circle. No, that one's a little more complicated. Let's get them on The Bachelor.

Okay. And watch, like, do these two couples who were originally in a happy relationship but now have amnesia, do they find each other again? And the thinking behind this is like, if preferences matter, and Dan can figure out how to model how those. preferences guide our decision-making, then people will end up making the same decisions that they made in the past.

I feel like this was a sci-fi movie that I've seen, or was this like a Black Mirror episode or something? Yes, it was exactly a Black Mirror episode. Did he get the idea from Black Mirror? I don't know, that's a good question. What presided what? Maybe the Netflix folks got a hold of some of dance papers. Okay.

Yeah, so basically the idea of like this type of approach in science, He's basically building like a toy model, like a model of like the solar system. And the idea is like if you can get the model to recreate something that happens in the real world, then like maybe your model reflects the real world. And these are the things that they say they're happy within their relationship, the things they say that they're not happy within their relationship. And like how do you weight those things? What is the right combination of variables to get these couples to find each other again? When we do these simulations, Babe Stoughton people's data preferences, we have. actually do a pretty good job of reconstructing the relationships there is inside these simulations.

So I think the best simulations we've run tend to reproduce somewhere in the neighborhood of about 45% of the couples that we've sampled. Is that, is, I feel like depending on the context, 45% could be, you know, it's great for a batting average in baseball. It's not very good for like a grade on a science test. How do we feel about 45%? Is that good? So he said if this was just totally random and, you know, you.

You just scramble these people up in the computer. Maybe you'd expect about 3% or so of the couples to get back together. When I started doing this work, I was, you know, hoping that, you know, on a good day, we'd hit 20% or something like that. So the fact that we're already hitting a 45% mark, even though this work is relatively new, I think it suggests we're doing a good job. But, you know, 45 is also pretty far from 100. So it also tells us we are missing things in our models.

We have a lot of work left to do, too. So as Dan builds this model as he keeps training it on more and more real-life couples, he hopes to start predicting brand-new couples before they even meet in real life. Okay, I have a big question here. Like, isn't Dan's model kind of assuming that preferences are what got them together in the first place? Yeah. So a part of like a huge, you know, like thing to flag here is that so far this program is based on like in a very American-onized. conception of dating, like you are in an individual agent going out and making decisions for yourself. You know, I go out onto the mating market alone, and I pick the partner that, you know,

maximizes my happiness. And we're definitely undervaluing, you know, how important other people are, right? How much does your family weigh in? Can you do a model of, like, my mother in this? Absolutely, yeah. We absolutely can. I have a grad student who's actually a little bit interested in doing that. I mean, it's, what are your mother's decision rules, right? And how is she, influencing your behavior, right? We can simulate your mom in our simulations. No problem. Like, yeah. Is there going to be one model that defines how everyone makes decisions? No. And there's still a lot of work to be done here. You know, he still needs to see if this model can help make future predictions about couples that don't exist yet. And he hopes that, like, if this approach works, if he can figure out what the optimized system in this simplistic model is, he can help people make better decisions about.

who to date. The people that we predict accurately with our models, on average, are happier across the board with their relationships than the people that we don't predict accurately. So that gives us some hope that if we can harness these models to make recommendations, right, to say this is a partner that our model says would be good for you, then maybe that would be a good application of this research to actually help people form relationships that will be happier. Maybe there's something there that we can take and move forward, project forward. If you can like figure out what the formula is to get these people to get happy couples together like that's

yeah the secret to happiness and love yeah that's the secret you know like and even if it's not like getting people to like the correct answer because it's probably not just one you know this is a problem like dating is a problem people spend a lot of time on they grapple with it and if you can just help people like make decisions or or like kind of get through the muck of the dating zest pool a little quicker, you know, that's a hopeful idea. That's really interesting. Yeah, but not everybody agrees with this, you know, that there is something big to predict here.

There's another perspective saying that attraction is inherently unpredictable. It's like an earthquake. What else do you think it could come down to? Chaos. Chaos. Chaos. We'll tell you after the break. It's all about you.

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Habiniero? More like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. Unexplanable. We're back here with Meredith and Brian. Hey, hey. Hi. We left off with this black mirror experiment, this idea that if couples lose their

memory and are sort of coded into a. a program, would they match together? Would they end up together again? What does the alternate perspective look like? Take a happy couple and you wipe their minds, there is a very good chance that you would get a very different outcome. So we talked to Paul Eastwick from UC Davis. He's a social scientist that studies this stuff too. There is nothing about the truth of those two people separately from each other that does a very good job at predicting where they're going to end up. It was about choices that they made along the way and the other chance circumstances that were happening at the time. Where Dan looked at those speed dating studies and was like, oh, we just need to think about preferences in this complex and holistic system.

Paul actually took away a very different set of questions. Where does compatibility come from? If it's not about you and them, it has to be coming from something that is, you and them, it has to be coming from something that is, created along the way. So he's basically saying preferences irrelevant. Well, maybe not quite irrelevant, but like definitely not something that you could use to predict if two people will hit it off.

Paul started off by saying like, our preferences are tied to our lived experiences. I've never been in a relationship with somebody who exercised with me regularly. So if I were forming a new relationship, that would not be top of mind. But maybe the next partner I'd end up with, that would be something that we could do together. And maybe that would be amazing.

So there's just like a hard limit to what we can even know about what we want. Yeah. And there's also the reality that like, you know, society kind of prevents us from really having a truly diverse dating pool, either because of prejudice or because of like... Yeah, socioeconomic status. Yeah, exactly. Or because of like the physical realities of where certain people live. And, like, even if we do just focus on the preferences that, you know, you do know about yourself, the things that you do know that you want, and that leads you into a relationship, that relationship is really hard to study because, you know, it's this unfolding thing. Like, it could go in so many different directions.

You can imagine somebody coming in and looking at a chessboard that's already sort of, you know, 15 moves in, right? And maybe a real master could look at that. and sort of retrace every step and put things back to the way that it was at the beginning and be able to tell you, okay, with that first move, you know, this is how it was all going to unfold. But for the most part, when we try to understand a relationship, we're already seeing something that is several, several moves in. And it's already pretty hard to undo what has already taken place.

So preferences are basically just that first chest move, not, you know, the whole rest of the game. Yeah, it kind of leads us up into really Paul's unifying theory that preferences don't matter, or they might matter a little bit, but they don't have a sizable effect when you count for really the major ingredient of what's happening here, and that is chaos. It's worth having some humility about the role of luck and chance in getting this couple to this point. A chaotic system, and I think we've talked about some of these on the show before, but, Basically, a chaotic system is like when small changes lead to big effects. As Jeff Goldblum clearly explained to us all in Jurassic Park, these small decisions that happen early on end up having outsized unpredictable consequences later.

You know, we're always making decisions. We're always choosing to do one thing or another or say one thing or another. And then, you know, things happen to us that put us on one path or another. Like, you know, you approach a person and, you know, maybe you have a bad feeling from something that happened at work that day and that influenced your mood and that influenced their impression of you. And like, maybe that's why you don't get a second date. And then there's, like, later on, there are decisions of, like, when to be kind, when to listen, when to, you know, text back immediately, when not to. All these moments that build up our relationships, like, are just like a continual stream of decisions.

Yeah, and those decisions aren't necessarily tied to your initial preferences. I guess the real metaphor here is that, like, Paul thinks, like, relationships are something that are built and not discovered. So in the former view where, you know, we're thinking preferences matter and there's something to predict here, like, you're trying to find, like, your, you know, kind of magnetic opposite. The puzzle piece that fits. Yeah, the puzzle piece that fits. What Paul's saying is that, you know, you have to kind of like cut your own contours of the puzzle piece. If Paul thinks that sort of the meat of where we should be studying is like the building of the relationship, what kind of research does he want to, is he trying to do his own black mirror experiment and figure out, you know, what building a successful relationship looks like?

It's all about like finding out like where does the compatibility happen. And he basically thinks that it will be revealed in not simulating life, but following it. You need to find people when they're just starting a relationship or before they even start a relationship. And get them in a study that tracks them for many months or long time, asking what decisions are you making? What are the moments that truly matter in building the sense of compatibility with someone? The philosophical term for this idea is called path dependence. It refers to this idea that you can't really understand what a thing is unless you understand how it got there. Paul was sifting through the mess of life here, right?

And trying to pull out threads, trying to pull out little patterns. So you can say, like, on average, this type of moment or this kind of forking path was an important pivot point for a lot of couples. Yeah. One kind of really nice thing I like from this perspective that is actually actionable is that, you know, Paul was saying that like, don't let like kind of like early stumbles become a stop sign. So like if you have like a bad first date, maybe the circumstances, maybe like chaos was just like conspiring for you to have a bad first date, for you to like not be in the mood to like receive someone's joke for you to like accidentally say something maybe offensive or. I don't know. Like, there are paths here. Sometimes things look great at date five when they looked bad at date one. And sometimes they look terrible at date five when initially they looked great at date one. Now, in the online dating realm, where you've got all this choice and all these people you could be dating.

Instead, that's tough. In today's environment, you maybe have to make a deliberate choice if you're going to give people second, third, or fourth chances. Ultimately, we don't have the answers. But I'm convinced the questions matter. Like, is there something, like, predestined about love? Is there something unique about an individual pairing where it feels like the entire force of your life was, like, leading to this moment? Versus, you know, if you catch a good wave in the ocean, which is generated by chaos,

like, you still write it. Yeah, and I like to think it's who you're going to build a family with. And if we kind of take it out of this romantic framework, I think that's also true. for your chosen family, your friends, the people you surround yourself with. And, you know, if we can better understand a little bit of that magic, maybe we can build happier lives for ourselves. I'm just curious, you know, to both of you, you've talked to these researchers who are scientists, who are also interested in love, is either of these interpretations, like

love is based on preferences or love is based on chaos. Or somewhere in between, I mean, are either of these interpretations more attractive to you? I fell in love with my wife when I was 17. Like, I am definitely not the same person that I was when I was 17. And, like, I sure as hell didn't know what I wanted in a partner then. But I also wasn't like, oh, this is the girl I'm going to marry either. Like, it was just like a series of small decisions where we learned how to adult together and built a life together,

and now we've been married for five years. It's not anything that I could have predicted or, like, accounted for. Yeah. I initially was in this camp of, like, oh, relationships are things you should build. But then, you know, as somebody who's, like, single, do I wish, like, there was something that would have made some of these choices easier? Do I wish maybe I wouldn't have spent some time with people who ultimately weren't compatible, like, I don't know, like, I don't want to get my life going, you know? So, like, if there

was that kind of app that made those more robust predictions, I think, like, would you spend less time in your life wallowing in the, like, oh, dating sucks, you know? Yeah, I mean, I feel like I don't have a ton of experience dating. Oh, the only people who, like, dating are sociopaths. Well, yeah, I mean, when I think about this, like, I mean, maybe this is counterintuitive, but I feel like the love at first sight thing is so not romantic. To me, romantic is the change that is inherent in a relationship. Like, that seems romantic. The other one just seems like boring almost.

Yeah. The lines of the scientific debate here, like, it's funny. Like, they kind of match on to the stuff that poets and authors write about. is the one thing, which is a question that I think we all noodle, not just romance novelists. Maybe we noodle it a little more than most people, but I think we've all had that question, you know, is that really real? We asked our reporter, Bird Pinkerton, to talk to some romance novel authors, the ones you heard from at the top of the show, and Bird asked them to wrestle with some of these questions.

I feel like if you're looking for an answer that's, like, grounded in reality, I'm the wrong person to ask, because I am a hopeless romantic. I am an astrology gay. You know, I believe in all of that stuff. And so I kind of do believe in not necessarily soulmates, but people who are meant to be in your life, who you'll cross paths with no matter what, and who will be important to you no matter what.

Humans are changing every single second. I'm not the person I was even 10 minutes ago. So I think that's why science is tricky, and that's where romance can fill in the gaps, because romance is all about that journey and changing and the importance of changing together if you are trying or aiming to be in a committed relationship. There has to be this elasticity for something to last,

and it's the same with friendships where it's like what we're all looking for is someone that we can grow and change with. Love is about the promise of a future. It's about the same. of feelings in the moment, but it's also about like, I want to feel this forever, right? There's so much hope in what is to come and hope in the possible in love, that it feels like it kind of can't be science-sized.

How do you turn hope into science? This episode was produced and reported by Meredith Hodnott and Brian Resnick with a little love from me, Bird Pinkerton. Catherine Wells edited the episode along with Jillian Weinberger and Noam Hassamfeld, who wrote the music. Richard Seema, Tech the Facts, Christian Ayala did our mixing and sound design. Manding Nguyen is just a really good egg. Special thanks to Lily Herman for her help. And thanks also to our amazing romance authors, Sarah McClain, Casey McQuiston, Talia Hibbert, and Emily Henry.

If you want to hear more of their thoughts on love, we have a piece. on the site with more of their interviews and a lot more about their excellent books. And finally, if you have thoughts, email them to us. We are at Unexplanable at Fox.com. Or if you wanted to give us some love, a nice review or a rating, wherever you listen, would be just about the best Valentine that I can think of. Unexplanable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we are off next Wednesday, but we are coming back in two weeks with a new

three-episode series, all about the origins of life on Earth. Keep an ear out for it on March 1st. Every marvelous living creature on our Earth is built of complex living cells. Life is made up of atoms and molecules and chemical reactions. But what makes them alive? How awake we didn't have water. How is this come about? What is life?