The Mathematics of Love: Patterns, Proofs, and the Search for the Ultimate Equation (Ted Books)

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My goal is to be like the guy who invented Velcro. Nobody remembers his name, but everybody uses Velcro. I think the same thing will be true here. This information is eventually going to become something everybody learns in elementary school, and knows about. How to form and maintain relationships with other people, starting with kids' friendships. It's so fundamental. We're such social creatures, to understand how to have relationships, how to have friendships, how to love right, how to make relationships last is so basic to our health, longevity, our very survival as a species. How to be a good father, a good mother. The principles are all there waiting to be uncovered. Like Luenhook looking through his microscope and discovering a hidden world no one saw but him, researchers now are uncovering the amazing world of emotion. Discovering very simple principles that are easy to apply. And eventually everybody will know them. It is 1819 and Stephen Fairhurst wants only to forget the horrors of Waterloo and remember the great and secret love he lost. But, despite his friendship with the clever Lucy Durward, he cannot tell her about the darkness in his past. The strange allure of Emma Darwin’s debut novel, The Mathematics of Love, reflects its enigmatic title. If there’s anything numerical about our affections, it’s higher math than most of us can compute, like the formulas behind snowflakes or hurricanes, and a similar sort of complexity makes this story just as fascinating. . . If you’re in a book club torn between lovers of 19th century and modern fiction, The Mathematics of Love may be just the thing to square the circle. The bilingual dexterity of this novel is one of its several triumphs as Darwin alternates between the murky moral chaos of the 1970s and the rigid formality of the genteel class in the early 19th century. Anna and Fairhurst, living in the same space though separated by time and unimaginable social changes, are equally haunting characters, the parallels between their lives tantalizing and evocative... [T]he two stories that Darwin tells here add up to something hauntingly beautiful.” - Washington Post Book World

El capítulo 1: ¿qué probabilidades tengo de encontrar pareja? nos presenta la ecuación de Drake adaptada a encontrar pareja en vez de extraterrestres, nos cuenta cómo al estimar tendemos a compensar lo que sobrevaloramos con lo que infravaloramos para llegar a algo que suele tener sentido, al estilo de los problemas de Fermi. At that point we know, from Loren Rowling's work, that people start secreting adrenalin, and then they get into a state of diffuse physiological arousal (or DPA) , so their heart is beating faster, it's contracting harder, the arteries start getting constricted, blood is drawn away from the periphery into the trunk, the blood supply shuts down to the gut and the kidney, and all kinds of other things are happening — people are sweating, and things are happening in the brain that create a tunnel vision, one in which they perceive everything as a threat and they react as if they have been put in great danger by this conversation. But we are far from being done. There's so much we don't understand. Like sex. We have no clue about how sex works in relationships, how it fits into everyday interaction, what good sex really is like, what great sex really is, what everyday sex is, how it all works or fails. We have no descriptive data. A lot of that is because we are such a prudish, low-touch culture. The New York Times recently reported, in an article about Kinsey, that 100 million dollars of awarded research funds had been reversed by the religious right in the USA because they think that federal dollars shouldn't be doing this kind of research. Even when it has health benefits, like understanding how AIDS spreads. This has got to stop. We need to know about sex so we can advise couples, and so we can understand. We just have Masters and Johnson's great breakthroughs, but they only really studied masturbation, not sexual relations. So there is still a great frontier out there. In his sublime definition of love, playwright Tom Stoppard painted the grand achievement of our emotional lives as “knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face.” But only in fairy tales and Hollywood movies does the mask slip off to reveal a perfect other. So how do we learn to discern between a love that is imperfect, as all meaningful real relationships are, and one that is insufficient, the price of which is repeated disappointment and inevitable heartbreak? Making this distinction is one of the greatest and most difficult arts of the human experience — and, it turns out, it can be greatly enhanced with a little bit of science. What all of this translates into is actually strikingly similar to Lewis Carroll’s advice on resolving conflict in correspondence. “If your friend makes a severe remark, either leave it unnoticed, or make your reply distinctly less severe,” Carroll counseled, adding “and if he makes a friendly remark, tending towards ‘making up’ the little difference that has arisen between you, let your reply be distinctly more friendly.” Carroll was a man of great psychological prescience in many ways, and this particular insight is paralleled by Gottman and Murray’s findings, which Fry summarizes elegantly:Similar to Ian McEwan's Atonement in its compelling, literary blend of war history and romantic relationships... Darwin will be an author to watch.” - Library Journal

Then we are also finding that if we intervene early, and do preventative intervention, our effects are much bigger, and we have an impact not only on the couple, and changing their longitudinal course, in a dramatic way, in not a very long time, but we can also have an impact on the emotional development of their children. We're following those children — we're now studying children whose parents went only to a two-day workshop, and their babies are now turning three years old, and we'll know at the end of this year whether this emotional developmental change continues and the children are in a dramatically different trajectory than kids whose parents didn't take the workshop. I was expecting to see her deliver these nuggets of math wisdom in her witty and humorous style in the book (as she does in her videos) and boy did she deliver! The story also bored me whenever the author wrote about Anna (unless the author chose to disgust me instead). I only found Stephen's story to be more interesting and I liked him better than Anna. I look at relationships. What's different about what I do, compared with most psychologists, is that for me the relationship is the unit, rather than the person. What I focus on is a very ephemeral thing, which is what happens between people when they interact. It's not either person, it's something that happens when they're together. It is like a structure that they're building by the way they interact. And I think of it that way, almost like a fleeting architectural fluid form that people are creating as they talk to each other, as they smile, as they move. Fry examines what psychologists studying longtime couples have found about the key to successful relationships:A novel rapturous with the joys of history… Anna's story is told in a wonderfully convincing, brittle, adolescent voice… [the author] gives her treatment of history in this novel a poetic force and philosophical gloss with an ongoing and absorbing meditation on photographic processes.” - The Australian The roller coaster of romance is hard to quantify; defining how lovers might feel from a set of simple equations is impossible. But that doesn’t mean that mathematics isn’t a crucial tool for understanding love. The comparison of popularity on social media to sex partners and using that sort of analysis to statistically trace the spread of STD was interesting and logical.

And men and women are somewhat different, not a lot, but enough, which is another fascinating puzzle, because we find that if the woman is driving the husband's heart rate, that predicts the dissolution of the relationship — and not the other way around. Now why should that be? Why should it be that DPA, the general physiological arousal of men is a worse indicator of the fate of a heterosexual relationship than that of the woman? Unless she's been abused, physically or sexually, when the arousal of both of them is a really good indicator. El capítulo 2, ¿hasta qué punto es importante la belleza?, nos habla de simetría y de que por lo general los rostros más simétricos suelen ser más apreciados. Nos cuenta el viejo truco del efecto señuelo y nos recomienda que para incrementar nuestras posibilidades de ligue vayamos acompañados de alguien parecido a nosotros pero ligeramente menos atractivo.Darwin, an impressive first-time novelist, is meticulous...characterisation is achieved with exceedingly fine needlework, tracing deep links between strangers who inhabit the same space at different times: their isolation and sexual vulnerability are both poignant. Darwin is patient with them both.” Sydney Morning Herald Over a decade ago I began working with James Murray, an amazingly gifted applied mathematician, who in many ways is the father of a new field called mathematical biology. All that theorizing about chaos actually led to new mathematical developments that could model very complex phenomena in biology with very few parameters because the equations were nonlinear. So James and I and his students collaborated and after 4 year of meeting once a week, we were able to get equations for marital interaction as well as physiology and perception, that allowed us to understand our predictions, of what was going to happen to a relationship over time. Using these parameters, we are not only be able to predict, but now understand what people are doing when they affect one another. We are working with lower-income couples to see whether we can do something about when that baby arrives. So far we've found that with middle-class couples, in just two days of the couple's life, ten hours, we can change the drop in relationship satisfaction that happens to two-thirds of couples and not only change the relationship so there's no increasing hostility over time so relationship satisfaction doesn't go down, and we can have a major effect on postpartum depression. We can also really affect that baby's emotional and cognitive development in quite a profound way, with a very brief intervention. And the baby didn't take the workshop. The question is can we do it when there are many other problems present, like addiction, incarceration, violence, racism, and poverty. Can we also have that kind of effect? That's what we're going to see in the next nine years, whether we can change families. We are now engaged with the nonprofit policy group Mathematica in the largest randomized clinical trial ever done with couples anywhere in the world. There will be 10,000 couples in this study. A bravura and compelling feat of storytelling, enlivened by convincing detail and voices, as well as by serious reflection on the nature of memory, history and reportage.” - Publishing News All of which are really great conditions for running away from a predator, or fighting aggressively to protect the tribe. And survival. So when you have less blood in the periphery you create what Malcolm Gladwell calls a bloodless armor that lets you strike without really bleeding too much, or run away without hurting yourself too much. But in the context of a discussion with somebody you love clearly this DPA is not very functional. And we found in fact that physiological arousal is one of the best predictors of what happens to that relationship. That's why it predicts.

There is no topic that attracts more attention-more energy and time and devotion- than love. Love, like most things in life, is full of patterns. And mathematics is ultimately the study of patterns. Fry presents the elegant formulae the researchers developed for explaining these patterns of human behavior. (Although the symbols stand for “wife” and “husband,” Fry notes that Murray’s models don’t factor in any stereotypes and are thus equally applicable to relationships across all orientations and gender identities.) It tells you that if you are destined to date ten people in your lifetime, you have the highest probability of finding The One when you reject your first four lovers (where you’d find them 39.87 percent of the time). If you are destined to date twenty people, you should reject the first eight (where Mister or Miz Right would be waiting for you 38.42 percent of the time). And, if you are destined to date an infinite number of partners, you should reject the first 37 percent, giving you just over a one in three chance of success. Yes, there's enormous predictability. But there's nothing random or hard to understand about it. The principles are very simple. And they're easy to learn, and it makes a difference if you have the right ways to think about this, compared to the wrong ways of thinking about it. There's a lot of stuff that makes sort of logical sense, that seems like it would be right, and turns out to be a complete myth about relationships. We're at the point where we're starting to understand how to have an impact on a societal level, not just on individual cases, but really to change families in our whole culture. This stunning novel delves deep into the pain and passion of love hard lost and won. By turns heart rending and heart mending… A beautiful and rare find.” - Good Book GuideIt included verbal abuse. Emotional abuse. Physical abuse. Sexual abuse. It had romantic encounters so thoroughly portrayed that I blushed as I tried to skim past them. Complete smut.