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Okay, so the most interesting thought that I had about last night’s discussion is completely tangential to the questions posed above, so I’m going to try to answer a few of those first. To address Paul’s question about whether or not we should be funding “science of love” research, my answer is definitely “yes”. It seems to me that knowledge is worth pursuing if for no other reason than pursuing knowledge; we never know what’s going to come out of it and what findings we may stumble upon that hold infinite potential. Granted, that’s an answer that’s applicable to all sciences… For the “science of love” specifically, I think that there will always be a drive to understand the forces that power our society and dictate (at least to some extent) the interactions between humans. It’s an experience that seems to be somewhat universal despite being highly subjective and individualized. And with so much hate and anger and war in this world, why not expend some energy trying to understand some of the more positive forces driving human action?

The other comment that I want to address before moving on is whether or not eharmony’s practices are “Scientific.” While I do see the difficulties that arise from this groups’ unwillingness to subject their methods to peer-review, it seems unreasonable to me to declare their practices unscientific. It undermines the very real research by respected experimental psychologists and implies that they’re not contributing to the fields of personality and social psychology. In reality, while their specific techniques are not being made public, they are promoting the idea that matching people according to dimensions of personality and beliefs can be effective, and this alone will promote further examination into this phenomenon by other research groups. (And considering the state of funding for social and personality psychology research, I certainly can’t condemn researchers for turning to private institutions for employment).

Now for my tangent… Tuesday night I had a little flashback to intro psych where I remember Ben telling us about cognitive merging. “Cognitive merging” occurs when you and your significant other gradually start thinking like your partner and kind of fuse together mentally. For example, if my boyfriend likes hot wings and I don’t really care for them when we start dating, as the relationship goes on I may dislike them less and less. Eventually when you give us surveys about our likes and dislikes, interests, etc., our answers reflect those of our partners. (This stuck with me because it was a really terrifying idea to me that I would loose part of myself by getting too involved in a relationship).

So it was really interesting to me in the discussion of the break-up when Ben said one of the major factors behind breaking up is the idea that we just get bored with our partner because there’s nothing new about them. If after two or three (or seven) years we’ve come to incorporate aspects of their personality into our own and cognitively merged with them, then does that mean that we’re really getting bored with ourselves? Our brain has sucked all that it can out of our partner and is ready to move on to suck more out of the next person? It leaves me with a mental image of our brains as parasitic zombies looking to feed off the brains of others… Although if this is the case, then I guess the answer to the breaking-up = advantageous question would be yes.

Yay for love and zombie brains. (and thanks stephanie, ameilia, & alex for a really interesting topic!)