Dating

to mind is Indiana Jones because of the adventurousness. I would totally date Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones. Of course you would. And he's got the physical thing. He's not afraid of getting dirty. He's swashbuckling. That's my mom, Sylvia. She's very a professional in public and kind of goofy when it's just us. We talked on the phone most weeks, sharing little updates about our lives, comparing notes on the

world around us. I happened to be on the dating market at the moment, and I've been thinking a lot lately about romantic matching. What it is that attracts people to one another? And fixes them together. I still remember when my mom was dating after my parents divorced. She met her new husband through a personal ad that was online dating, when the Internet was still made out of paper in a previous era of American history, my mom might have been the person to set me up with

a guy. But times have changed. Now we're dating online, which is seriously expanded the dating pool, and we're marrying later, which means we're treading water longer. The contemporary dat sifts through way more candidates to find her special somebody, and as we'll learn, the numbers matter more than you might think. When you looked at me little, did you have any idea of the sort of partner that I'd end up with? Like?

Did you think about that about me dating? When when I was like, I think a parent always thinks that way, Even when I took a look at the four year old, this was a curious mind. And I think when I think about your dating, I can only imagine that it would be someone who would be equally curious. I think that being a physical person, the physical strength of the person you're with actually matters. What do you mean, like like someone I can't win in an arm wrestling match. Yes,

someone who could pick you up and twirl you around. Okay, just for the record, I'm like a hundred and forty five pounds and five tents. That narrows it down. There are a lot of guys out there like that, though. Do you know what Tinder is? Do you know what the app tender? Next time we have lunch, do you want to like drive my Tinder app and you can swipe left or right and you can tell me, Oh, sure,

that would be kind of fun. We're looking for a companion for chemistry, a partner for good times and for bad, for Netflix and for chilling, someone with whom were really compatible. But what exactly is compatibility and how much of it can we expect to find in a partner. Years ago, I was talking with my best friend Jacqueline about this stuff,

and our exchange has haunted me ever since. She told me someone we both know was going through this big breakup, and Jacqueline asked him what happened, and he told her he and his girl had really tried to make it work. He said, man, we were so close to being a fit. We were, but we just couldn't do him. Not long afterwards, another friend of ours announced that he'd asked his girlfriend the big question, the one posed on bended knee. When Jacqueline asked him, ah, so how do you know she

was the one? He responded, We just fit. We match like on everything. Two couples, both feeling well matched and the exact same grade, flunked one guy out of dating and landed the other in a second ring suburb with two kids and a joint checking account. So how good is good enough? How much can we ask for? What should we settle for? I spoke to someone who studies choice and decision making to figure out exactly how people set their standards. Barry, Yeah, do you mind if I

call you Berry? Not at all. The expert with whom we are now on a first name basis is Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at the Business School at the University of California, Berkeley. He's particularly interested in how you behave when you're in environments where you have a bunch of options, like the serial aisle and the supermarkets, say

or you know, tender. Intuitively, most of us are likely to think, Hey, more options to choose from means I'll be more likely to get just what I'm looking for. But as Barry explains in his book The Paradox of Choice, that's not always the case. Most Western industrial societies believe that since freedom is good and choice is essential to freedom, that choice is good, and that the more choice people have, the more freedom they have and the better off they are.

Choice is good. But there can be too much of a good thing. And when you give people too much of a good thing, instead of being liberated by it, they get paralyzed. They can't pull the trigger. Think of your local grocery store with dozens and dozens of serials on offer. Barry says that the process of sifting through so many options can actually make us less satisfied with whatever we've put in our cards. His thinking goes likeness.

While we're comparing all the potential choices, we're making note of the best features of every option. Oh hey, this box of frosted puff whatever is is on sale. Oh but this one is organic. Ah, but this one has so much niacin. I love nias. At the end of the process, nothing can compare to the super breakfast you've collaged in your imagination by combining the best bits of each box. So even if you do end up making a pretty good selection, you just don't feel that good.

And this isn't just about cereal. This applies to big life choices too. One of the things we have to fight against is adaptation. Barry has been studying this stuff for forty five years. You have good experiences and they're wonderful, they're spectacular for a while, and then they just become your life. And as normal keeps going up, experiences that are really going to knock your socks off have to keep going up to the socks stay on, And I don't know what you can do to get somebody's socks off.

So maybe the problem is that I've dated too many great guys. It's weird to say it, but I don't think that's a ridiculous idea. I've been lucky enough to know and love some awesome dudes, and I've sometimes wondered if I had been forced to marry one of them, could we have made a go of it. I bet we could have pulled off a workable partnership. But of course, workable isn't really the standard we're going for these days, is it. We want to lose our socks, We want socklessness.

Barry is quick to point out there's very little empirical evidence on this, but still I can't, for the life of me, see why having two cereals to choose from and the grocery is any different from having two hundred romantic partners to choose from on a dating site. It seems to me that all the problems that having all these options present in the retail domain, they present, perhaps even to a greater degree, in the romantic domain, because

the stakes are so much higher. Barry told me about a pretty interesting study on dating choice as it played out in the world of speed dating. If you're unfamiliar, speed dating started in the late nineties, and it goes like this. An organizer gather there's a bunch of people in a room to set them up on tiny dates

only a few minutes long. A bell rings to indicate when you're supposed to move on to your next day, to the next, and at the end of the night, you submit a little sheet of paper to the organizers to indicate who you'd like to see again. If they also pick you, then you're set up for a real date at normal speed. What's interesting is how the number and range of potential daters in the room can affect

the number of matches. A two thousand eleven article and a publication called Biology letter Is reported findings from a study of eighty four speed dating groups. Researchers discovered that the daters who had a wider variety of people to choose from picked fewer people than want to see again, and when they had a lot of really varied choices, they were more likely to pick no one at all.

And arguably this is because with everybody you see, you know, the scarce person is pretty nice, but that other person was funnier, and that other person was a little bit better looking, and that other person seemed to be a better listener, and so every attractive feature of everybody reduces the attractiveness of everybody else. Confession time I tried speed dating. Once I liked a guy with a pink dress shirt

who did not indicate liking me back. If you're listening now, pink shirt guy, this is the glamorous podcasting life you could have been a part of. One of the most fascinating recent revelations about love and dating comes from the work of Dr Helen Fisher, a researcher, a tier and a public figure who spent much of her career studying how we make romantic choices. Here's the study I read that blew my mind. Dr Fisher recruited a bunch of people who were passionately in love and put each of

them into an fMRI machine. While inside, each participant was shown a picture of the person I loved and pictures of somebody else as a control image. The machine tracked brain activity throughout the session, and at the end of her research, Helen was confident that she'd identified exactly which parts of the human brain are involved in romantic love. I've actually seen these regions modeled in three D, even hopped in an fMRI machine myself to have my own

brain scanned. And let me tell you, love is not pretty. It's a curving set of nabby, mangled, sort of claw like things clenched deep inside the darkness of our skulls. Nobody gets out of love alive. I mean, we're trying to win life's greatest prize, which is a mating partner. Helen talks with her hands. She is inexhaustibly excited about what she does. I had thought that the hardest thing I would do with my career would be to figure out the brain circuitry of romantic love and attachment. But

as it turns out, it's actually not. The question was why do you fall for him or her? Why are you drawn to a particular person? And there's all kinds of cultural reasons. I mean, we tend to fall in love with somebody from the same socio economic background, same general level of intelligence, same general level of good look, same religious and social values, same reproductive goals, same economic goals,

your child. It certainly plays a role. Timing is important, Proximity is important, and I would say at my age, lighting can help you, know. So I began to think to myself, well, maybe basic biology can pull you naturally towards one person rather than another. There's four basic brain systems that each one of them is linked with a constellation of personality race, the dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, and estrogen system. I'm gonna slow a role here because this part is important.

Those four substances Helen mentioned dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, and estrogen, They're in all of our bodies and they act on systems in our brain, affecting the way we feel, learn, think, and act. Helen started studying the available research about how a person's temperament is to some extent shaped by these

four brain systems. People who are testosterone dominant, for example, may be more prone to skepticism, People who are serotonin dominant tend to be more religious, estrogen people may be more verbal, and dopamine dominant people are more novelty seeking. Helen wanted to know are there dating patterns that emerge between these four types? How are they attracted to one another? First, she said about designing questionnaire that could allow her to

categorize daters into their biological types. I collected all the data from hormone studies and neurotransmitter studies and medical and biological studies to make the questionnaire, and then I went on to do two brain scanning studies to prove that this questionnaire actually measures what it does. She also linked up with match dot com and chemistry dot com, big online dating sites, which gave her access to a huge

number of active daters. The users agreed to take her temperament questionnaire, and then they set about matching and dating each other, and she took note of who linked up with whom. More than fourteen million people in forty countries have taken Helen's questionnaire, I recently joined their ranks, answering her fifty six questions. On one of those agreed disagree skills, I find unpredictable situations accelerating. Yes, taking care of my possessions is a high priority for me. I dropped my

phone every time I stand up. That's a strong disagree. I think consistent routines keep life orderly and relaxing. No, not so much. My answers classify me as driven by the estrogen system. According to Helen, people like me verbal social, inclined towards monogamy, conflict diverse, like to date test uster our own people, logical, confident skeptics. Oh come on, really,

that's just oh hell, that is totally true. However, the seratonin camp planners who value tradition prefer to date within their own ranks, as do the novelty and adventure seeking dopamine folks, who presumably take their candle at dinners on the wing of a plane toasting Chardonnay cup with red bull. Yeah. Okay. Going back to Barry Schwartz, our choice expert, he says there are two distinct approaches that people might use to guide their choosing. There are some people who, whenever they

have a choice to make, they want the best. We call people like this maximizers. There are other people who are not so concerned about the best. We call these people satisficers, and it's a term that was coined by a psychologist named Herb Simon half a century ago. The thing about being a satisfy sir is you don't have to examine every option. You examine options until you find one that meets your standards. Then you stop looking and you are satisfied with what you've gotten. Maximizers want to

make sure to score the best possible option. This is a friend who will tour a thousand apartments before signing a lease. Satisficers, meanwhile, have a specific standard in mind. They wanted two bedroom and the hardward floor is a closet big enough to record a podcast in, and as soon as she finds a place that meets those requirements, she's ready to move in. Satisficers aren't necessarily less choosy.

They might have a lot of boxes to check, but generally it's the maximizers who find themselves spending a lot of time and energy on their deliberations. Intuitively. Most people think you should make the little decisions as a satisficer, like, hey, this works, I'll take it, and the big decisions as a maximizer. I'm going to spend the time and energy on this to find the very best. But Barry says

they're wrong. You know, by the time you find your romantic partner, you'll be in your mid fifties, and uh, that's not the right way to go through life. In addition to which, since we're talking about Roman Tick relationships, there's a huge mistake I think that people make, which is that the challenge when you're seeking a romantic partner is one of discovery find the right person. And I don't think it's really about discovery. I think it's about creation.

You find a compatible person and then you build a great relationship. It's worth noting here, and Barry agrees that we don't have to partner at all. Life has some other pretty great prizes. But Barry has a point. If we do want to find a companion, it'd be nice to find that person while we've got a lot of time left to pack around together. I know that you're married for fifty two years as of three days ago. Hey, I'm late with the happy anniversary. So how did Barry

meet his wife? mRNA? There's some hyper rational decision matrix. Well, so she's probably going to be mad at me for revealing all this stuff. But we became best friends in eighth grade and I was romantically interested in her from the get go, and she was not romantically interested in me, and it took a lot of persistence on my part to get her to change her mind. When you were doing that, are you using methods of satisficers or maximizers?

I watched fifteen years old. Give me a break. I don't know what the hell I was doing as to where I ought to be looking for my partner. Barry is not impressed by the app I happen to be using. You are way way too good to be needing to use Tinder. Let me say, I'll take it. I'm gonna put that you don't have to do if it's cool with you want my endorsements, Barry? Can I put that on my Tinder account? I'm doing it for all if

you think it will help. I don't know. I think it's funny, I asked Talent Fisher, our expert on love and brain systems, who we should point out still does work for match dot com. If there are any best practices for online dating. The brain is not well built to go through a hundred different choices. There's a sweet spot in the brain between five and nine, and after that you just end up choosing nobody. So if you're on a dating site after you've met nine people, stop

and get to know at least one person. Better think of reasons to say yes, no, no, okay, all knows? So far, so far we've had one yes and like six or seven knows. Remember how at the beginning I asked my mom if she wanted to drive my tender account. Well, here she is behind the wheel. Ah, he doesn't look adventurous enough. And can you tell that from his expression or from what he's wearing or what he's in an office? We're in an office, I know, but I know we're adventurous.

Mm hmm. This is not a guy who I would have paused on. But I think you should sit right because, okay, it's a match. Do you know what that means? Mom? That his dad is swiping from his tender accounted? He he's sliped right on me too. I admit that watching my parents divorce has probably made me a little gun shy. They're both kind, sensitive people, and it hurt to see them so damn sad, which made it seem all the

more important to choose my own match carefully. But I don't want to set a standard for compatibility so high that it's impossible to meet, or worse, makes me an ungenerous partner always disappointed with her guy. So Barry's idea that compatibility isn't only something you find, it's something you create is compelling. How good is good enough? Isn't a question to retire after you swipe right, or even after you like it and put a ring on it. How

good can this get? Can be asked every day when deciding who makes the pre dawn pot of coffee, how the bills are paid, how the compliments are paid, when to relent, when to insist on a difficult conversation instead of turning off the light to fall asleep alone in the same bed. I bet there are many potential relationships that any two people could build together. Their decisions in the first morning they spend together reverberate through the afternoon.

The decisions of their youth shape the partnership of later years. Choice is not a lever we pull once, It's a wheel that's always turning. Okay, here is my revised tender profile. Tessa thirty nine design features five ten musician and writer half Puerto Rican Water. I like science and milk, chocolate and kindness, and I'm looking for a charismatic, smart, trustworthy dude who's mostly but not completely grown up. I am officially endorsed by Dr Barry Schwartz. Okay, so Deeply Human

kicks off of the bang big ideas about love. It's not just who you pick but what you make together. So if you're expecting to fall hard for someone, you might have to help dig the hole. So happy shoveling. In our next episode, the topic on deck is pain. We'll be delving into why we hurt, why some of us can't stop, and how pain might shape some of the most important parts of our lives. Deeply Human is a BBC World Service and American Public Media co production

with iHeartMedia. Until next time, Curiously, Yours, Dessa,