Climbing out of the rabbit hole

After a long hiatus I have decided to add to this little blog some more. I stopped for so long because my previous posts sent me down an unexpected rabbit hole. What was supposed to be a simple question, “what are emotions?” which I was asking simply to lay the foundation for a different question, put me onto a mission to find and explore what I believe to be a better answer than what was available. I stopped blogging because I was initially hoping to publish these ideas and, for some academic journals, blogging constitutes publishing in another venue. Since then, though, my life plans have moved away from academia and racking up publications is no longer that important. I have other goals for my work so I am not ready to spell everything out (the model has come a long way since the previous posts on this blog) but thinking and learning about emotions has led me to enough tangential ideas that I think I can justify taking another crack at blogging. So, let me tell you about my adventures in Wonderland…

Tuesday 12 November 2013

The Love Equation

Love is a complicated thing and finding someone who you can love and who will love you back is the first step down that desirable but complicated path. Making a romantic match is like matching two puzzle pieces when each piece is a puzzle itself. We have to consider all the complexities of each person and then only once we have a good picture of the individuals can we consider how well they would fit as a couple. But what actually determines fit? Both old wisdom and new science tell us a lot about what makes a good fit and the list is pretty long. It includes similar social and economic class, similar intelligence and physical attractiveness, similar political and religious views, difference in dominant vs. submissive, etc. These factors are a jumble, though, they all seem to help but none of them appear necessary or sufficient. Dating services work by shoving all of these factors together and then rating partners on how well they match up. This works because that’s the best service they can offer since they have a limited pool. They match you with your first, second, third, etc. best match until enough of the unmeasured factors also match up. What dating services can’t do is identify that threshold point between success and failure. To do that we need a unified framework that considers all of the factors together. This is where ecology steps in [1].

Saturday 2 November 2013

Many fish in the sea: what biodiversity theory tells us about finding love

How do we find love?

It may feel like I am jumping the gun a bit, coming back after two years and jumping straight to such a big question, but those two years have been spent doing the experiments for my PhD thesis on the evolution and ecology of species coexistence. While I generally consider my thesis work and my emotions work as two separate bodies, this series of posts on romantic love is the most natural launching point as it represents the overlap of the two. It is a great transition from my pure science to thinking about more applied questions.

And anyways, people don’t really want to know what love is. What they really want is to know how to find it! People’s drive to find love (I will focus on romantic love as that is the most complete case) is a huge industry. Actually, multiple industries, fueling match-making websites and consulting services, countless books and talk shows, therapists, speed-dating events, and billions of man-hours of gossip and conversation.