Psych: romance and choice

Breathless Books, Assent Publishing

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It's likely you don't choose a romantic partner the same way you choose a car. True? Me, I go out into the world and whoever clicks, clicks. Most of the time I go home alone. Aaron Ben-Zeév, Ph.D., writing in Psychology Today says:

We have 3 common approaches, but 2 are fatally flawed.

His article also says:

One important aspect of choosing a romantic partner is the weight we give to bad (negative) and good (positive) qualities. Although we tend to focus more on the partner's bad qualities at the stage of choosing a partner, it seems that in the long run, positive qualities become more important and eventually outweigh the negatives.

Social psychology has an idea that relationships are based on rational choice and cost-benefit analyses. To quote Wikipedia:

If one partner's costs begin to outweigh his or her benefits, that person may leave the relationship, especially if there are good alternatives available.

For more on the Social Exchange Theory, take a look at these articles at Boundless and Psych-it.

This theory may be true near the end of the relationship, but (seems to me) at the beginning the choice is relatively irrational.  It happens that how and what we decide to buy has been the topic of intense study by those selling for some time now. Just google "Studying people’s buying habits." There's more about buying decisions at Buying decision process and Rational choice theory on Wikipedia. And, when we choose someone, aren't we really "buying" what they have to offer?

Again, I personally think romantic choices are irrational, because that's how I make them (then rue the day). There's an interesting article about irrational choices from Daniel McFadden's paper "The New Science of Pleasure," published by the Atlantic. In his paper he says:

...The popular psychological theory of "hyperbolic discounting" says people don't properly evaluate rewards over time. The theory seeks to explain why many groups -- nappers, procrastinators, Congress -- take rewards now and pain later, over and over again. But neurology suggests that it hardly makes sense to speak of "the brain," in the singular, because it's two very different parts of the brain that process choices for now and later. The choice to delay gratification is mostly processed in the frontal system. But studies show that the choice to do something immediately gratifying is processed in a different system, the limbic system, which is more viscerally connected to our behavior, our "reward pathways," and our feelings of pain and pleasure.

How do you choose?

-- Marge