okok. I know from the previous post I said I wanted to put on something which I've read like long time ago.. But I just dont have the incentive to do so.. BUT, was FB-surfing on a friend's profile and I came across this very interesting chapter which he read in a book. Thought I would like to "kop" from his FB note and post it here..

The book is How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker (book is available at Borders at $30)

Chapter 6 Hotheads
"Fools for Love."

Why does romantic love leave us bewitched, bothered, and bewildered? Could it be another paradoxical tactic like handcuffing oneself to railroad tracks? Quite possibly. Offering to spend your life and raise children with someone is the most important promise you'll ever make, and a promise is most credible when the promiser can't back out.
Unsentimental social scientists agree that dating is a marketplace. People differ in their value as potential marriage partners. Almost everyone agrees that Mr or Mrs Right should be good looking, smart, kind, stable, funny and rich. People 'shop' for the most desirable person who will accept them, and that is why most marriages pair a bride and groom of approximately equal desirability. Mate-shopping, however, is only part of the psychology of romance; it explains the statistics of mate choice, but not the final pick.

Somewhere in this world of six billion people there lives the best looking, richest, smartest, funniest, kindest person who would settle for you. But your dreamboat is a needle in a haystack, and you may die single if you insist on waiting for him or her to show up. Staying single has costs, such as loneliness, childlessness, and playing the dating game with all its awkward drinks and dinners(and sometimes breakfasts).At some point it pays to set up house with the best person you have found so far.

But that calculation leaves your partner vulnerable. The laws of probability say that someday you will meet a more desirable person, and if you are always going for the best you can get, on that day you will dump your partner. But your partner has invested time, money, childrearing, and forgone opportunities for/during the relationship. If your partner was the most desirable person in the world, he or she would never have nothing to worry about, because you would never want to desert. But failing that, the partner would have been foolish to enter the relationship.

Marriage laws work a bit like leases, but our ancestors had to find some ways to commit themselves before the laws existed. How can you be sure that a prospective partner won't leave the minute it is rational to do so, say - a 10 out of 10 partner moves in next door? One answer is, don't accept a partner who wanted you for rational reasons to begin with; look for a partner who is committed to staying with you because you are you. Committed by what? Committed by an emotion. An emotion that the person did not decide to have, and so cannot decide not to have. An emotion that was not triggered by your objective mate-value and so will not be alienated by someone with a greater mate-value(desirability). An emotion that is guaranteed not to be asham because it has physiological costs like tachycardia, insomnia and anorexia. An emotion like romantic love.

"People who are sensible about love are incapable of it" wrote Douglas Yates. Even when courted by the perfect suitor, people are unable to will themselves to fall in love, often to the bewilderment of the matchmaker, the suitor, and the person himself or herself. Instead it is a glance, a laugh, a manner that steals the heart. We fall in love with the individual, not with the individual qualities. The upside is that when the Cupid does strike, the lovestruck one is all the more credible in the eyes of the object of desire. Murmuring that your lover's looks, earning power, and IQ meet your minimal standards would probably kill the romantic mood, even though this statement is statistically true. The way to a person's heart is to declare the opposite - that you're in love because you can't help it.


haha! take some time to read through and disgest.. It is a really interesting chapter.. Hmm.. =)