F2F - Ch 11 Attraction and Intimacy

Chapter 11

Attraction and Intimacy

What Is Love?

"I love you, but I'm not in love with you."

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What Is Love?

• Loving is more complex than liking and, thus, more difficult to measure.
• Long-term loving is not just an intensification of initial liking.

• Psychologist Robert Sternberg views love as consisting of three components:

1. passion2. intimacy3. commitment.

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Robert Sternberg’s (1988) Conception of Kinds of Loving as Combinations of Three Basic Components of Love

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Passionate Love

• Passionate love: a state of intense longing for union with another
• Passionate lovers are absorbed in each other, feel ecstatic at attaining their partner’s love, and are disconsolate on losing it.
• Involves the same reward pathways in the brain as addictions to substances.

• Two-factor theory of emotion:
• arousal × its label = emotion
• Being aroused by a source should intensify passionate feelings, which then transfers some of the arousal to a romantic stimulus (such as roller coasters or scary movies).

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Companionate Love

• Companionate love
• is the affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply intertwined.

• Occurs after passionate love fades.
• About 2 years of marriage, spouses express affection about half as often as when they were newlyweds.
• The cooling of intense romantic love often triggers a period of disillusionment, especially among those who believe that romantic love is essential both for a marriage and for its continuation.

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Infant Attachment

• Infant attachment styles seem to lay a foundation for future relationships.
• Secure attachment
• is rooted in trust and marked by intimacy.
• Avoidant attachment
• characterized by discomfort over, or resistance to, being close to others; an insecure attachment style.
• As adults, they are less invested in relationships and are more likely to leave them and more likely to be unfaithful
• Anxious attachment
• is marked by anxiety or ambivalence, an insecure attachment style.
• As adults, they are less trusting, more fearful of their partner straying, more possessive and jealous. May repeatedly break up with the same person and often get emotional and angry when discussing conflicts.

https://co4kids.org/blog/understanding-attachment-styles

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What Enables Close Relationships?

• Close relationships are enabled by:
• Secure attachments.
• Equitability.
• Intimate self-disclosure and
• disclosure reciprocity.

https://ideas.ted.com/how-to-build-closer-relationships/

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Equity

• Society teaches us to exchange rewards through the equity principle of attraction. If each person pursued their own interests without regard for their partner, the relationship would most likely fail.
• Equity: a condition in which the outcomes people receive from a relationship are proportional to what they contribute to it.
• Equity outcomes needn’t always be equal outcomes.
• Ex: everything 50/50 (income, housework, etc.)
• Those involved in an equitable, long-term relationship are unconcerned with short-term equity.
• Perception of equity is essential to relationship satisfaction.

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Perceived inequity triggers marital distress, agreed Nancy Grote and Margaret Clark (2001) from their tracking of married couples over time. But they also report that the traffic between inequity and distress runs both ways: Marital distress exacerbates the perception of unfairness.

Perceived Inequities Trigger Marital Distress, Which Fosters the Perception of Inequities

Source: Adapted from Grote & Clark, 2001.

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Self-Disclosure

• Deep, companionate relationships enable us to be known as we truly are and to feel accepted.
• Self-disclosure
• revealing intimate aspects of oneself to others.
• Disclosure reciprocity
• We reveal more to those who have been open with us.
• But disclosure should progress at an appropriate rate.
• Self-revealing dating and married couples tend to enjoy the most satisfying and enduring relationships.

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What Leads to Friendship and Attraction?

What factors nurture liking and loving for you?

• Does absence make the heart grow fonder? Or is someone who is out of sight, out of mind?
• Does alike attract? Or opposites?
• How much do good looks matter?
• What has fostered your close relationships?

https://www.daniellebernock.com/how-to-love-well/

Proximity

• Proximity: geographical nearness; functional distance.
• Proximity powerfully predicts liking., and familiarity breeds fondness

• Those who interact frequently are far more likely to become good friends than enemies.
• In fact, those surveyed who were married or in a long-term relationship, 35% met at work or school, and the rest met by crossing paths at church or the gym, etc. (Barroso, 2020).

https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/01/28/us-education-still-separate-and-unequal

Proximity and Mere Exposure

Mere exposure

• The tendency for novel stimuli (even nonsense syllables) to be liked more or rated more positively after the rater has been repeatedly exposed to them.

• This effect violates the commonsense prediction that repeated exposure leads to boredom.
• With incessant repetition, however, liking eventually drops (hearing a song over and over).
• We even prefer ourselves the way we usually see ourselves (or what we are most exposed to), which is that we tend to prefer the way we see ourselves in the mirror!

https://conversion-uplift.co.uk/glossary-of-conversion-marketing/mere-exposure-effect/

Physical Attractiveness

• Research shows that appearance does matter.
• Kowal et al. (2022) studied 90,000 people across 93 countries and found that 99% spent at least 10 minutes each day enhancing their physical appearance, with the average person spending 4 hours per day when exercise was included!
• However, once people get to know each other through jobs or friendships, they focus more on unique qualities than attractiveness or status.
• 43% of women and 33% of men reported falling in love with someone they were not initially attracted to (Fisher and Garcia, 2013).

Attractiveness and Voting Behavior

• Looks even influence voting.
• Princeton University students were shown photographs of the two major candidates in 95 U.S. Senate and 600 U.S. House of Representatives races since 2000. Based on looks alone, the students correctly guessed the winners of 72% of the Senate and 67% of the House races.

• Gender matters: men are more likely to vote for physically attractive female candidates, and women are more likely to vote for approachable-looking male candidates

Attraction

• Matching phenomenon: the tendency for men and women to choose partners who are a “good match” in attractiveness and other traits.
• People invest more in pursuing someone whose attractiveness roughly matches their own.
• Attractiveness Halo Effect: the presumption that physically attractive people possess other socially desirable traits (happier, sexually warmer, smarter, etc.)
• But what about in the digital world? Gulati et al. (2024) asked 2748 participants to rate facial images from a diverse set of 462 individuals.
• There were two conditions: original and attractive after applying an AI-based beauty filter.
• They found that the same individuals earned statistically significantly higher ratings of attractiveness, intelligence, trustworthiness, etc. in the attractive condition.

The Attractiveness Stereotype

• The physical attractiveness stereotype
• What is beautiful is good. What do we see in Disney movies, for example?
• Adults exhibit a similar bias when judging children, and children often learn this stereotype early.

• Adults of both sexes will avoid sitting next to a person who is facially disfigured.

• After cosmetic surgery, women are often judged as more attractive, kinder, likable, and so on.
• Even infants as young as 3 months will stare longer at faces rated as attractive.

Who is Attractive?

• Attractiveness is culturally dependent
• Cultures with scarce resources find heavier people more attractive.
• Cultures with abundant resources typically find slimness to be attractive.
• Across 27 nations, an average leg length-to-body ratio is more attractive than very short legs.
• Facial symmetry is deemed more attractive.

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The Average-ness of Attractiveness

Christoph Braun and his compatriots (Gruendl, 2005) photographed the twenty-two 2002 “Queen of Beauty” finalists, without makeup and with hair tied back, and then created a “Virtual Miss Germany” that was the blended composite of them all. When adults in a local shopping mall were shown the finalists and the Virtual Miss Germany, they easily rated Virtual Miss Germany as the most attractive of them all.

Who’s the Fairest of Them All?

Each year’s selection of “Miss Germany” provides one country’s answer.

left: Oliver Bodmer/Action Press/ZUMAPRESS; right: Dr. Martin Gruendl

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Similarity versus Complementarity

• Complementarity: the popular idea for those in a relationship to complete what is missing in the other.
• Researchers have been unable to confirm that opposites attract.
• Some complementarity may evolve as a relationship progresses, but people seem slightly more prone to like and marry those whose needs, attitudes, and personalities are similar.
• Birds of a feather, flock together

• Friends, engaged couples, and spouses are far more likely to share common attitudes, beliefs, values, and traits.
• The greater the similarity between a husband and wife, the happier they are and the less likely they are to divorce.

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Liking Those Who Like Us

• Liking is usually mutual.
• Those who are told that someone likes them usually feel reciprocal affection.

• Students like another student who says eight positive things about them better than one who says seven positive things and one negative thing (Berscheid et al., 1969).

• We are sensitive to the slightest hint of criticism. Writer Larry L. King (1986) speaks for many in noting, “I have discovered over the years that good reviews strangely fail to make the author feel as good as bad reviews make him feel bad.”

https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/pensive-couple-on-light-background-thinking-about-answer-for-question-gm1334410715-416539422

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How Do Relationships End?

• Comparing their unsatisfying relationship with the support and affection they imagine available elsewhere, many relationships end.
• Each year, Canada and the United States report one divorce for every two marriages.

Article: World Population Review on Divorce

https://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/finance-advice-after-marriage

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Individualistic vs. Collectivistic Marriages

• Individualistic cultures have more divorce than communal cultures.
• What does my heart say?
• What will other people say?
• Individualists expect more passion and personal fulfillment in a marriage, which puts greater pressure on the relationship. But they also invest fewer resources in the relationship — why?

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Divorce

• Divorce is less likely if:
• get married after the age of 20
• both grew up in stable, two-parent homes
• dated a long time before marriage
• both are well and similarly educated
• have a stable income from a good job
• live in a small town or on a farm
• did not live together or become pregnant before marriage
• religiously committed
• are of similar age, faith, and education

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The Detachment Process

• Severing bonds produce a predictable sequence: agitated preoccupation with the lost partner, deep sadness, and the beginnings of emotional detachment.

• Detaching is a process, not an event.
• The closer and longer the relationship, the more painful the breakup among dating couples.
• Among married couples, the breakup has additional costs.

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Breaking Up

• Those without better opportunities or who feel invested will seek alternatives to exiting the relationship.
• Wait for conditions to improve.
• Ignore the partner and allow the relationship to deteriorate.
• Take active steps to improve the relationship.
• Healthy marriages are not devoid of conflict, but they are marked by an ability to reconcile differences and overbalance criticism with affection.

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When a marriage is “very happy,” life as a whole usually seems “very happy.”

National Opinion Research Center Surveys of 34,706 Married Americans, 1972 to 2018

Access the text alternative for slide images.

Source: General Social Survey

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Dove's Real Beauty Campaign

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Those We Love

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