Lies and deception may be a good thing after all

An interesting article, entitled "Truth or date?", appeared in the Post Magazine today. The text was taken from New Scientist. It talks about how misinterpretation, self-deception and biases can actually help us find happiness in love. I am still struggling to agree with what is said in the article (because it basically throws pure true love and romance out of the window), but some of the findings mentioned in this article do bear a degree of truth.

On soul mate --

"The idea that your sweetheart is your soul mate or one true love is unlikely on statistical grounds: we will meet only a few hundred or thousand of the billions of potential partners on Earth. So why do we kid ourselves?...If we were rational beings and looking for the best possible mate, we'd never stop - there are far too many people for us to assess...So we have to have some sort of mechanism that puts an end to the search, at least temporarily...Falling head-over-heels in love is one solution to the problem of mate choice."

"From childhood our experience of the world provides a template for the kind of person we think we are suited to...a "love map"...Then when you're looking around and find someone who fits within your love map, you are primed to fall in love...As a result, although we can list what we don't like about our sweetheart, we sweep these facts aside and focus on what we adore."

On how people view their partner --

"95 per cent of people...believed their partner was above average in appearance, intelligence, warmth and sense of humour."

On comparison between current and ex- partner --

"...people tend to paint their current partner as a "winner" - open-minded, outgoing and confident - and their former partner as losers - closed-minded, emotionally unstable and disagreeable...It can't be the case that the 300 people we studied all happened to now be with ideal mating prospects, while all their 300 prior partners were duds."

"...we have the evidence for what Chaucer said: 'Love is blind'."

According to the article, true love and romance is all about reproduction and evolution, and that we would unconsciously, and under the influence of hormones, fool ourselves into a relationship (which may or may not turn out to be a happy one). Kind of depressing, hmm.