One of the more interesting books that I read last year was The Mating Game: A Primer on Love, Sex and Marriage by Pamela C. Regan. The author is a professor of psychology and this book claims to be a “comprehensive, multidisciplinary, introductory text about human mating relationships aimed specifically at a university audience.” The book is a “comprehensive review of theory and empirical research … on the fundamental human experiences of love, sex, and the formation of romantic relationships.” The next paragraph contains a very brief summary of the topics covered in the book, while the rest of this post contains the notes that I took when I read the book. These notes certainly don’t cover everything contained in the book, and there are many very interesting things not included here. These notes (and therefore the page numbers) are for the second edition of the book.

The book is divided into four parts. Part one is on mating relationships, which looks at mate preferences (what we look for in a mate), attraction (and how it is communicated to the other party), courtship (what happens on the first date, and how an intimate relationship forms), relationship development, marriage (which covers everything from the differing forms of marriage around the world to marital satisfaction), conflict, dissolution (why and how relationships end) and intervention (how to identify distressed relationships, and how to treat them, and whether it works). Part two is all about love, looking at theories of love (building frameworks to explain the different forms of love), passionate and companionate love (comparing and contrasting them), and some problematic aspects of love (such as obsession and loss of passion). Now that all the immature people have left due to boredom, part three is on sex, looking at sexual attitudes (beliefs about sex in varying stages of relationships), sex in beginning relationships, sex in established relationships, and problematic aspects of sex (such as dissatisfaction, aggression, infidelity and jealousy). Part four is on individual differences, looking at maleness and femaleness (and what this means and how it’s measured), personality (and how they relate to mating relationships) and interpersonal belief systems (how people expect relationships to work and how this affects there relationships).

p12) Most desired characteristics in a marriage partner according to one study using self-report (top 10, in descending order of importance):

Men: Good overall personality; honesty and trustworthiness; attractive appearance; intelligence; good health; kindness and compassion; good sense of humor; self-confidence; attentive to one’s partner; easygoing nature.

Women: Honesty and trustworthiness; kindness and compassion; good overall personality; intelligence; attentive to one’s partner; good sense of humor; self-confidence; good health; attractive appearance; easygoing nature.

p13) The only major difference between male and female mate preference is that males value physical appearance more highly, while females value social/economic position.

p16) People tend to moderate their ideal mate characteristics based on how they evaluate their own desirability in those characteristics (i.e. people who consider themselves attractive will seek somebody who they consider attractive).

p25) Flirting (smiling, moving closer and gazing into her eyes, laughing, grooming (self-touching), compliments) appear to work for both sexes.

p28) A study found that very few men (4% of the participants) would ask a girl out if she displayed no interest in him (liking hinting, or even asking for a date), no matter how much he liked her.

p29) Fear of rejection is a major reason why people fail to initiate dating relationships.

p29) Pluralistic ignorance: where people observe similar behavior to their own, but attribute different causes to their own behavior compared with that of others. A study found that if two people got on great at a party (similar interests, equally physically attractive, good conversation), but never went any further, 74% of participants wouldn’t have done anything due to fear of being rejected, while 71% assumed the other person’s inactivity was due to lack of interest.

p30) Signal amplification bias: where one person believes their social overtures communicate more romantic interest to potential partners than is actually the case. (Where one person thinks they’re being really obvious, but the other person has no idea.)

p57) The more satisfied and invested in a relationship, and the lower the perceived quality of the alternatives, the stronger the commitment people have to their current relationship (as Interdependence Theory suggests).

p63) Even in societies that permit polygynous (multiple wives) marriages, only a fraction of the men (10% in one study) actually have multiple wives.

p64) “Is monogamy natural? Yes. There certainly are exceptions. Given the opportunity, men often opt for multiple spouses to further their genetic lines. Polygyny is also natural. Women join harems when the resources they can garner outweigh the disadvantages. Polyandry is natural. But co-wives fight. Co-husbands argue too. Both men and women have to be cajoled by riches to share a spouse. Whereas gorillas, horses, and animals of many other species always form harems, among human beings polygyny and polyandry seem to be optional opportunistic exceptions; monogamy is the rule. Human beings almost never have to be cajoled into pairing. Instead, we do this naturally. We flirt. We feel infatuation. We fall in love. We marry. And the vast majority of us marry only one person at a time. Pair-bonding is a trademark of the human animal.” Fisher, H. E.(1992) Anatomy of love: A natural history of mating, marriage and why we stray (p72)

p64) “Although customs surrounding the marriage ceremony vary widely from culture to culture, all known human societies practice and endorse this type of long-term pairing.”

p65) Men and women tend to marry spouses who resemble themselves in a number of ways.

p67) Traditional marriages (where tasks and roles are split based on gender) often involve little direct or overt expression of emotion between the spouses (spouses then rely on relatives and same-sex friends).

p69) Marriages typically start with a very high level of satisfaction that slowly declines over the next several years, before stabilising (often from the fourth to the sixth year of marriage), and then remaining stable or continuing to decline. However, although happiness declines, it starts off at a euphoric high, and does not inevitably become unhappiness. The decrease in happiness is often stronger for wives than for husbands.

p71) Love and affection have become the primary basis for marriage (rather than economic security or reproduction etc.) in modern Western societies. Only 40 years ago (1967), 35% of men and 76% of women would have married somebody who they did not love but who had all the other qualities they desired in a spouse according to one study. In 1986, the same question was asked, and only 14% of men and 20% of women would have married in the same circumstances.

p75) “Cohabitation has seemingly joined marriage as an almost universal life experience.”

p75) Cohabiting relationships tend to be shorter lived than marriages, but the people in them tend to be younger.

p80) Married couples tend to have one to three disagreements per month.

p84) In a happy relationship, a partner’s good behaviour (‘remembered my birthday’) is attributed to internal disposition (‘kind and thoughtful person’) which will remain stable over time (‘you always treat me this way’) and this type of behaviour extends globally – to a wide variety of marital situations (‘you are thoughtful in many areas of our relationship’), whereas a partner’s bad behaviour is attributed to external circumstances (‘work is busy’) which is unstable (‘it won’t happen again’) and is specific (‘it won’t happen again’). This is positive attribution. However, in an unhappy relationship, the reverse attribution style exists (good things are one-offs, bad things are the norm), which is called negative attribution.

p87) For couples who make negative relationship attributions, there is a strong and negative correlation between stress (sum of both partners) and marital quality. However, there is no correlation between stress levels and marital quality for couples who make positive relationship attributes.

p89) To resolve conflict: communicate opinions, positions and wants openly and honestly; focus on the issue; attempt to understand the other person’s perspective; be positive and suppress negative feelings and expressions; make the goal to reach an equitable solution, not win – be willing to compromise and negotiate.

p89) In the US, 50% of all first marriages and 60% of all remarriages end in divorce or permanent separation.

p90) Married heterosexual couples are more likely to stay together than cohabiting heterosexual and homosexual couples.

p91) Common reasons for conjugal dissolution around from different societies are (in decreasing importance): infidelity; sterility (normally female); cruelty (normally male); displeasingness/personality conflicts; polygyny (also, wives in polygynous marriages typically have lower rates of marital satisfaction and higher rates of psychological distress).

p93) There are four/five phases/processes in a terminating relationship: one partner (or both) becomes too dissatisfied, and privately focuses on the partner’s behaviour to identify causes of dissatisfaction; the person confronts the other person with their issues, and they choose to either repair or terminate the relationship; both partners get used to being single and create a story of why the relationship failed (including blame); both partners engage in a retrospective analysis of the relationship and its death and creates a personal story of what happened; both partners learn from their mistakes.

p100) People who are better able to conceptually organise and understand a breakup are typically more adjusted to the loss of their romantic relationship.

p104) Four behaviours that are particularly corrosive to marital happiness: criticism (not just complaints, typically including generalisation); contempt (statements intended to directly insult the partner, or body language to communicate a lack of respect); defensiveness (denying responsibility, making excuses, and cross-complaining); withdrawal/stonewalling.

p105) “Contempt is so corrosive to a relationship’s health that Gottman stated that it ought to be banned from all marital interactions.”

p113) Distressed couples who undergo therapy are typically less distressed than those who don’t (some therapy is better than none), but most (35-41%) don’t move into the non-distressed range after therapy.

p120) The triangular theory of love conceptualises three basic components of love (intimacy, passion and decision/commitment) as vertices on a triangle. This leads to eight kinds of love relationships: nonlove (N, N, N), liking (Y, N, N), infatuation (N, Y, N), empty love (N, N, Y), romantic love (Y, Y, N), companionate love (Y, N, Y), fatuous love (N, Y, Y), consummate love (Y, Y, Y). However, studies that have tried to measure the three aspects of love find that the three aspects are highly intercorrelated.

p125) The varieties of love are likened to primary and secondary colours in the colours/styles of love theory. The three primary love styles are: eros, an intensely emotional experience, with immediate and powerful attraction, constant contact, strong erotic desires; ludus (game-playing), love is a game to be played with skill and possibly with multiple people simultaneously, no intention of marriage, commitment-phobe, worries about growing attachment or involvement from the partner, believes lies and deception are justified; and storge (pronounced stor-gay), stable, based upon trust, respect and friendship, physical and emotional attraction aren’t experienced, non-sexual, enjoys talking about and engaging in shared interests. The primary love styles can be combined to form secondary love styles, which take features from the primary styles but possess their own unique characteristics: pragma (storge + ludus), “love that goes shopping for a suitable mate”, pragmatic lover has a shopping list of desired features and looks for a partner, a fast acting version of storge; mania (eros + ludus), lacking the self-confidence of eros and the emotional self-control of ludus, obsessive, distrusting, possessive and jealous, attempts to force affection from the beloved, inability to trust any affection the beloved actually displays, often unhappy; agape (eros + storge), all-giving, selfless, no expectation of reward, purely altruistic, believes all are worthy of love and that love is a duty of the mature person, this style is considered ideal by many.

p127) The Love Attitudes Scale appears to reliably measure the six love styles.

p127) Women score higher with storge and pragma; men score higher with ludus and agape. There are also cultural differences: Americans tend to exhibit higher levels of storge and mania, and lower levels of agape, than the French.

p133) In a study, maternal love was rated as the most prototypical form of love, followed by parental love, friendship, sisterly love, romantic love, brotherly love, and familial love. Infatuation, sexual love and puppy love were considered the least prototypical. The most important features of love were: trust, caring, honesty, friendship, respect, concern for the other’s well-being, loyalty, and commitment. Unimportant features were see only the other’s good qualities, butterflies in stomach, uncertainty, dependency, scary. The 68 love features could be reduced the three dimensions of the triangular love theory.

p138) It was not until the 1970s that theorists and researches began to recognise that passionate love was more than an intense version of liking. Now, most social and behavioural scientists hold a distinction between exciting, intense passionate love, and stable, affectionate, companionate love.

p138) Loss of passionate love seems to be a factor in relationship dissolution.

p139) Passionate love occurs when a person is extremely aroused physiologically and when they believe the arousal is caused by the partner. In a study, an attractive woman approached men on two bridges to fill out a brief questionnaire and provided them with her phone number if they wanted to ask additional questions or talk further. When asking on the control bridge, a big, solid and safe bridge, 12.5% of men called her back. When asking on the Capilano Canyon Suspension Bridge, a 130m long, thin bridge that wobbles in the wind and has a 70m drop, 50% of the men called her back. The men experienced physiological arousal because of the life-threatening nature of the bridge, but attributed it to the pretty woman.

p143) “Sexual activity is one of the primary ways in which couples express and communicate their feelings of passionate love.”

p144) Sexual desire, more than sexual activity, is seen as an indicator of passionate love.

p150) Sex hormones (especially testosterone, the most potent androgen) is associated with sexual desire, but this does not produce the state of ‘being in love’.

p152) The experience of passionate love may be associated with brain neurochemistry, specifically high levels of dopamine and norepinephrine and low levels of serotonin. One study found that a group of people who were in the early stages of ‘falling in love’ had approximately the same level of serotonin as a group of people diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, significantly lower than a control group of healthy participants not currently in love.

p153) Companionate love is a tender affection characterised by emotional intimacy (trust, caring, respect, loyalty, supportiveness and friendship), durability (may even increase over time as it is grounded in intimacy) and closeness (the partners’ lives are “deeply entwined”).

p162) In a study, 53% of would-be suitors looked back at a time when they had unrequited passionate love with some degree of positive feeling, despite the suffering and disappointment; and positive feelings (happiness, excitement, anticipation) outweighed the negative during the experience. 25% of rejectors felt flattered, 51% annoyed, 61% uncomfortable about delivering rejection messages, and only 33% recalled the experience with any positivity in retrospect. “Unlike the would-be lover, it was hard for the rejector to feel that his or her life had been enriched by this experience. For many, apparently, it was a useless and pointless set of aggravations. They were forced to respond to a situation they never wanted, and these responses were difficult for them, bringing uncertainty, guilt, aggravation, all of which went for naught. For some, a valued friendship was destroyed in the bargain. Thus they had plenty to resent and regret.”

p168) There is a tendency for lovers with one particular love style to join up with another with the same love style.

p169) A study found that partners of women who were eros or agape lovers were highly satisfied, while partners of females who scored highly in ludus (game-playing) were not.

p169) A study found that men and women who endorsed an erotic or storgic approach to love tend to be highly satisfied with their relationships.

p169) “Taken as a whole, these results suggest that game-playing, lack of friendship, and lack of passion are not conducive to interpersonal happiness.”

p177) Society has become more sexually permissive: according to one metastudy, 12% of women and 40% of men surveyed in the 1950s approved of premarital sex, while 73% of women and 79% of men surveyed in the 1980s approved of premarital sex.

p178) Men consistently believe that sex is appropriate at an earlier stage of a relationship than do women.

p179) Women are more likely than men to associate sex with love and intimacy (and men and women know this), but this is not to say that women do not experience sexual desire, they prefer a greater amount of emotional commitment prior to sexual involvement.

p181) Men tend to hold more permissive views about extramarital sex, and is tolerated more for men (although it is not generally considered appropriate for either sex).

p182) Sexual and reproductive decisions (initiating sexual activity, frequency, timing and number of children, contraception etc.) have traditionally been the responsibility of the male spouse. Up to the 1960s sex manuals emphasised differences between male and female sexuality and the complementarity of sexual roles, but by the late 1970s sex guides depicted both sexes as autonomous sexual beings and were more egalitarian.

p187) Men and women from a variety of cultures rate “average” faces with symmetrical features as especially desirable.

p211) In a recent study, more than half of men (56%) were the sexual initiators (with 25% egalitarian and 19% female dominated), although most (72%) wanted a more egalitarian pattern.

p212) Sexual satisfaction and relationship satisfaction are closely related, although the direction of causality is not clear.

p220) Most sexual assault is made by men against women who they know. In a study, 55% of the women were in love or married to the man who assaulted them, 22% knew the man quite well, 19% didn’t know the man well, and only 4% didn’t know the man at all.

p223) The vast majority of married people remain faithful while the marriage is intact.

p223) The main causes of sexual infidelity are: emotional incompatibility, sexual boredom (or desire for adventure), sexual incompatibility, anger/desire to punish partner, flattery from extrarelational partner, love for extrarelational partner, desire to end relationship with current partner. Emotional incompatibility and general relationship dissatisfaction appear to be the most powerful.

p224) “Most research indicates that the negative consequences of infidelity far outweigh any potential benefits.” Negative consequences include: guilt about deception and the violation of personal and moral standards; anxiety about STDs; pregnancy; fear of getting caught.

p224) Infidelity is one of the leading causes of relationship dissolution across cultures. Virtually all societies punish those who participate in extramarital relationships.

p225) Both men and women usually say their partner’s emotional infidelity (a deep emotional attatchment) would be more upsetting than sexual infidelity. More men than women find sexual infidelity more upsetting.

p227) That men find sexual infidelity more upsetting than emotional infidelity given the choice may be an experimental artifact, as sex differences disappear when both types of infidelity are treated separately, with both types being regarded as highly distressing. Also, in a forced-choice study where the participants had been in a relationship where there was infidelity, male and female participants were both evenly divided, with 53% of both men and women saying the sexual aspect was worse, while the other 47% saying the emotional aspect was worse.

p234) Men and women communicate differently: Women prefer discussing feelings and personal issues, while men prefer discussing impersonal topics (sport, politics etc.); women enjoy sharing details of their daily lives, while men prefer discussing big events; women value talking about the state and internal dynamics of their romantic relationships more than men; women engage in more conversational maintenance (invite others to speak, ask questions, encourage elaboration, respond to statements etc.) than men.

p236) There are many ways to respond to somebody’s problem: give advice; express sympathy; ask questions; offer help; minimise situation (it’s not that bad); affirm/encourage the other person (you’ll do great); share a similar problem; assign blame (you should have seen it coming). Men are more likely to offer advice than women, while women are more likely to offer affirmation and help.

p239) The Bem Sex Role Inventory is commonly used to identify psychological gender, where people are ranked on two scales, femininity and masculinity, and classified as feminine, masculine, androgynous (both) or undifferentiated (neither). When psychological gender matches biological sex, the person is identified as traditional or sex-typed.

p242) In a study that got a sample of couples from the general population and a sample of couples seeking marital therapy, androgynous husband-androgynous wife was the most common pairing from the community at large and the least common pairing amongst those undergoing therapy, while undifferentiated husband-undifferentiated wife was the most frequent pairing for the clinic couples and the least common for non-clinic couples. Couples with only one androgynous spouse were more common amongst the non-clinic couples than the clinic couples. Androgynous-androgynous couples also ranked highest in marital satisfaction, and couples with one androgynous partner almost always ranked higher than average for marital well-being. Couples with at least one feminine spouse also ranked highly. The only sex role orientation associated with lack of marital well-being was undifferentiation.

p247) There are five basic personality traits (supertraits) that are heritable, stable across the life span and culturally universal: extraversion, neuroticism, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

p248) The degree of extraversion is not conclusively linked with any particular marital outcome. In one study, it was found that partners who were more extraverted made more positive supportive statements (emotional support, esteem support, information support and tangible aid).

p249) Neuroticism (emotional instability or negative emotionality) is bad for relationships. One longitudinal study found that marital dissolution and satisfaction were predicted by initial levels of neuroticism. Women with high pre-marriage neuroticism were less satisfied and more regretful about their marriages later on. Over one third of divorced spouses cited neuroticism (emotional overreactions etc.) as reasons for divorce.

p253) “Although support provision is associated with negative affectivity [neuroticism] for husbands and wives, it is the husband’s negative affectivity that may have the most detrimental effect on actual interactions between husbands and wives.”

p254) Self-monitoring refers to a tendency to monitor and regulate the image that one presents to others. High self-monitors treat social interactions as performances, while low self-monitors are more authentic and show their true identity. Men are typically more self-monitoring than women. High self-monitors are less commitment oriented and tend to have less stable and satisfying relationships.

p257) Sociosexualtiy reflects the amount of emotional intimacy and commitment before becoming sexually involved with a partner. Unrestricted (less commitment necessary) people place more importance on physical attractiveness and less importance on dispositional qualities (kindness, shared values, etc.). One study found that the more unrestricted people were, the less affectionate love their partners felt for them, the less likely their partners believed the relationship would last, and the more attractive their partners were.

p264) Attachment style is typically measured along two dimensions, anxiety (worries about being rejected or unloved) and avoidance (avoids intimacy and closeness). Secure (low anxiety, low avoidance) people believe they are worthy of love and expect to receive it and are comfortable with closeness and believe relationships can be highly rewarding. Securely attached men and women report higher levels of satisfaction, trust, intimacy, love and commitment than people with high levels of anxiety and/or avoidance.

p268) Rejection sensitivity is the tendency to anxiously anticipate, readily perceive, and emotionally and behaviorally overreact to rejection from significant others. Increased sensitivity is linked with less satisfying and more unstable relationship.

p271) Men tend to be more romantic than women (according to the Romantic Beliefs Scale, with questions like “I am likely to fall in love almost immediately if I meet the right person”). Romantic people tend to be more satisfied and committed to the relationship, more passionate, more in love and more positive.