how to make anyone fall in love with you | Page 3

Shawdescribed love. And what makes people want to stay in that "excited, abnormal, and exhaustingcondition continuously until death do them part"? The question, and the quandary, of ''Precisely whatis love?" is not new. It is one that has been given serious consideration throughout the ages bycerebral heavyweights like Plato, Sigmund Freud, and Charlie Brown.In the darkened Broadway theater in 1950, the audiences of South Pacific were in total harmonywith Ezio Pinza when he pondered, "Who can explain it? Who can tell you why? Fools give you

reasons. Wise men never try." Well, recently, many wise men and women have tried, andsucceeded. Don't blame Rodgers and Hammerstein. When they were composing romantic musicals,the scientific community was as perplexed about love as Nellie and Emile de Becque singing theirbewilderment about some enchanted evening.Science "Discovers" SexLong before Sigmund Freud tackled the subject, analytical scientific minds agreed that love wasbasic to the human experience. But their rational brains also deemed that evaluating, classifying, anddefining romantic love was impossible and therefore a waste of time and money. Freud went to hisdeathbed declaring, "We really know very little about love."His dying words remained the scientific doctrine. At least until the early 1970s when apioneer-spirited band of social psychologists took up the scientists' constant cries of why? andhow? They began asking themselves—and everybody they could lure into theirlaboratories—questions about romantic love.Page 3Two women psychologists made a breakthrough by inadvertently focusing the attention of themodern press on the ancient question of "What is love?" Ellen Berscheid, PhD, with a colleague,Elaine Hatfield, managed to wangle an $84,000 federal grant to study romantic love. Berscheidconvinced the National Science Foundation to open its coffers by declaring, "We alreadyunderstand the mating habits of the stickleback fish. It is time to turn to a new species."Berscheid's study, like others before, might have gone unnoticed and unpublished, except for adozen or so pages in an obscure professional journal. Fortunately for love seekers everywhere, onemorning on Capitol Hill, former United States Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin was goingthrough his papers. Buried deep in the pile was the NSF's "frivolous" grant to two women to studyrelationships.Proxmire hit the dome! Eighty-four thousand dollars to study what? He dashed off an explosivepress release announcing that romantic love was not a science and, furthermore, he roared,"National Science Foundation, get out of the love racket. Leave that to Elizabeth Barrett Browningand Irving Berlin." Proxmire then added a personal note: "I'm also against it because I don't wantthe answer." He assumed everyone felt the same. How wrong he was!Proxmire's reaction set off an international firestorm that raged around Berscheid for the next twoyears. "Extra! Extra! Read all about it. National Science Foundation Tackles Love!" Newspapershad a field day. Cameras and microphones zeroed in on Berscheid with gusto. The quietresearcher's office was swamped with mail.Proxmire's potshot at love had backfired. Instead of putting an end to the "frivolous pursuit," hisbrouhaha generated tempestuous interest in the study of love. James Reston of the New York Timesdeclared that if Berscheid et al. could find "the answer to our pattern of romantic love, marriage,disillusion, divorce—and the children left behind—it would be the best investment of federal moneysince Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase."

Page 4It was as though Ellen Berscheid had pulled her finger out of the dike. Ever since, there has been atorrent of studies scrutinizing every aspect of love. Respected social scientists with names like Foa,Murstein, Dion, Aron, Rubin, and many others relatively unknown outside the scientific world havegiven us an as-yet-unopened gift—a gift we will unwrap now: The results of their labors, theirstudies, teach us (although that was not their purpose) how to make somebody fall in love.Granted, some of the studies don't guide us directly to that goal. To find the relevant studies, I had tocomb through hundreds of scientific probings with cumbersome titles such as "The Implications ofExchange Orientation on the Dyadic Functioning of Heterosexual Cohabitors." (Huh?) Some studieshad mice listening to classical music, then jazz and blues, to see which made them hornier.1 Otherstudies which were worthless to our goal explored sexual attraction to corpses,2 and then therewere studies on tantric motionless intercourse,3 which, I assumed, works only when a couple'shoneymoon cruise ship hits rocky seas.Happily, many studies bore tastier and more practical fruit. Especially helpful were studies by anintrepid researcher named Timothy Perper, a PhD who spent many hours observing subjects in hisfavorite laboratory, called a "singles' bar." We also benefit from brilliant examinations by RobertSternberg and his colleagues who explored theories of love. We learn from insightful earlyexplorations into the elements of infatuation by Dorothy Tennov and others. There were courageous,if relatively unknown, researchers like Carol Ronai. She actually took a job as a table dancer in atopless bar to record what facial expressions turn men on.4How More Research Was CompiledMy own firsthand research, although less daring, was no less