Blink, Speed Dating, and Delusional Marriages

The other day, I saw a video by a VLOGger I was unfamiliar with, and it was a sweet VLOG. It was a VLOG about looking for someone. My initial reaction was to post his video on my site and say, "check out Omar." But then I thought, "Most of my readers are either (1) guys or (2) lesbians. Er, not quite the pool of potential mates for a heterosexual male.

So, instead, I wrote the following response:

Crap, I wrote a great response to you, that was clever, intellectually stimulating, and well-written. Thus, YouTube ate my response.

I wanted to tell you about Blink, a book by Glaswell (I can't remember his first name, but he also wrote "The Tipping Point." It's a book about rapid cognition. When you meet someone for the first time, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. And these initial impressions are normally spot on.

Well, add in some clever things, and that is about what I said. Oh, and I did not write you to get you to read my blog.

They did not have speed dating when I was dating. I had to endure dates that you know are going badly, but you have to continue on the date. You can't just "go to the ladies room" and call a cab to get the hell out of here. Oooops. I did not mean to say that.

Well, good luck with your search. You seem sweet.

I wish I could have listed my initial response, but, you know, I was just typing in YouTube. Did I mention I hate YouTube's email interface?

Then, I pop onto ~deb's site, and she was writing about relationships as well. In it, she lets us know about a site concerning the Law of Attraction. A really interesting movie.

And it sort of reminds me of what I wanted to write about today. Well, I was going to write about it some time. Today seemed like a good enough day as any.

I read something on marriage the other day, and it resonated with me. In any field, we make assumptions which may or may not be true. For instance, in the area of relationships, sometimes we spend a lot of energy looking at failed marriages (labeling them as bad marriages) in order to see what the components of a good marriage are. If a bad marriage has two people with little in common, we reason, things in common may be essential for a good marriage. But we really can't make that jump. Thinking of this another way, let's say you have a meal that you don't like, and it has MSG in it. One could think, "MSG is bad in meals. Eliminating MSG will make for a good meal" Two fallacies: (1) perhaps MSG is important in a different meal, and without it, the meal would be less special, and (2) simply eliminating MSG does not make a meal good.

Well, part of this research was fascinating, because they found that realistic views of a marriage (something most of us would want) actually decrease the chances of having a successful marriage. The study did this by surveying couples – in good and in bad marriages (they defined good verses bad, but for sake of discussion, let's assume they got it right). In bad marriages (or divorced couples), both the man and women answered consistently about the traits of each other. That is, they both had consistent viewpoints of their spouse. But in good marriages, the man, for instance, thought better of the woman than the woman thought of herself, and visa versa. That is, they were a bit delusional.

I was a bit disturbed by these findings, at first. But it makes sense.

Think of it this way: Lets say that your spouse is bull-headed; very opinionated. Well, you can label that as bull-headed, or you can say that your spouse is "focused." One word has negative connotations, one positive. And if you feel more positive about your spouse, well, you probably treat him better, say more complimentary things, and the like.

Now some might say that you are tricking yourself into a better marriage if you do this, but you know, our thoughts and feelings are only chemical reactions in the brain anyway. And I would not mind tricking myself to a better marriage? Wouldn't you do it as well?