Drift Reality

A few weeks back I wrote about what I perceived to be a modern crisis in relationships. I suppose the piece could be construed as fatalistic and since then I have been mulling over a framework that can be used as a tool to facilitate relationships.

The idea for a framework first entered my mind when reading a reference to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs framework in Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick and thinking that perhaps Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs could be applied to needs in relationships. The basic gist of the Maslow Scale is that we have different levels of needs and as we satisfy one level we are then able to ascend to focus on the next level.

So, if we have food, shelter, etc. we are then able to focus on securing the sustainability of these resources. If we have sustainability of resources (safety), then we are able to focus on friendship and love.

Actually the whole idea of a ‘hierarchy’ falls apart when applied to relationships because the dynamism that exists between two individuals is fundamentally different than the dynamism between an individual and his environment – which is what Maslow’s scale is really about.

At any rate, I have come up with what I feel to be a holistic framework for relationships that can measure the overall stability and likelihood of success in a given relationship.

Physical Attraction

Physical attraction is the catalyst that brings people together in a relationship. There needs to be some element of physical attraction in a relationship although I have noticed that there may be a gender skew in the overall importance of this attribute.

Not only is the importance of physical attraction intuitively obvious, but it has also been reinforced by several notable psychological theories most notably the matching hypothesis (Goffman, 1952) – granted, most of the validation for these theories focuses on early interactions between individuals. In other words, physical attraction is probably disproportionately influential earlier in the relationship. As relationships progress, it probably loses a great deal of its importance between two people in isolation.

That being said I think physical attraction is multi-dimensional – it doesn’t only act in isolation between two people, it actually becomes a social dynamic as well.

Looks - not always what gets the girl… 

From a male perspective I know that it is an accomplishment to be dating a beautiful girl. You may not even be attracted to her but there is something empowering about having everyone in the room stare at your girlfriend when you walk into a place. For some individuals, it becomes almost like a material accomplishment (hence the phrase, “trophy” wife), which is a good segue into the next attribute.

Material Assets

“This guy was totally unattractive but he drove a lamborghini so I found that sexy.”

I literally heard someone say this recently and I think it is defines the importance of material assets to a T.

For many people (again there is a big gender skew here), material assets becomes the great equalizer to physical attractiveness. Or, in more simplistic terms, money makes guys sexier.

Kevin McGraw, a Professor at Arizona State University performed a notable study in 2002 to validate the importance of material assets to women by performing content analysis on the classified ads in newspapers around the US.

His findings revealed that in major US cities, material assets were disproportionately important: “females placed more emphasis on the resource-accruing ability of prospective mates in densely populated cities and cities having greater resource demands (higher cost of living).”

The Great Equalizer

So in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, material assets were far more important to women than in places like Kansas City. On a side note, Washington, DC ranked highest in terms of the importance of physical attraction, which should come as a bit of a surprise to anyone who lives in the District.

Material assets are not the most important attribute in relationships but they certainly play a fundamental role.

Family

By “family,” I am referring to a somewhat broad spectrum of characteristics including race, ethnicity and socioeconomic background. I think all of these are implied when people talk about the relative importance of “family” in relationships.

In some cultures (Persian culture for example), the importance of family is even further emphasized. For instance, when I was talking with my Aunt about a few years back about a Persian girl I had been dating, the first question she asked was, “What is her family’s name?” Thus began a background investigation so comprehensive it would put the CIA employee background process to shame that ultimately resulted in a full report on what city her family was from in Iran, what the predominant professions in the family were, and a general estimate for their socioeconomic status.

Based on these findings it was deemed acceptable for me to continue dating the girl. Phew.

Anyway, the importance of family is probably downgraded in heterogeneous countries with individualistic slants, like the US. According to a longitudinal study of American marriages (Field & Weishaus, 1984), personal characteristics were actually more significant to the success of marriages than socioeconomic factors, bringing me to the next pillar of my framework.

Personal Characteristics

It seems funny to think about the personal component to relationships as being on par with things like money, attractiveness, etc. because it seems to intuitively be the most important factor. What’s more, personal similarities actually play a pivotal role in the sustainability and overall satisfaction in long-term marriages.

That being said, there could be two people that have many things in common, enjoy one another’s company, and would probably make one another happy over the course of a lifetime if not for the fact that one person is not attracted to the other. It seems like a great human tragedy that two people could be perfectly happy with one another over the course of a lifetime if they found a way to bridge the initial gap caused by insufficient levels of attraction based on other variables.

Je ne sais quoi

Ultimately, you could take two people and they could be physically attracted to one another, have shared family values and even enjoy the same activities and for one reason or another – just not work.

Not to say that you could reverse all those things and find a situation that works. You will never meet two people that are not attracted to one another, have nothing in common and don’t share similar values who will work as a couple. Never.

That being said, there is an extra little something that seems to always enter the equation that is completely undefined. In some ways, the inexplicable components of love may prevail over what we can understand about it and in the eleventh hour it is always the je ne sais quoi that will cause us to run to another’s doorstep in a monsoon to please a case for love.

In 1999, a group from the State University of New York at Buffalo performed a study (later cited by Marcus Buckingham in The One thing You Need to Know) in which they asked a number of couples to rate their significant other on a list of qualities and then rate themselves on those same qualities). They then asked the couples to rate how rewarding they found their relationships.

The pattern that emerged was that in the happiest couples, the husband rated the wife more positively than she self-rated herself on every quality. The group concluded that, “intimates in satisfying marriages perceive more virtue in their partners than their friends or their partners themselves perceive.”

In other words, the happiest couples were those in which one partner had an almost deluded positive impression of the other. I think it is the incalculable je ne sais croi that can inhabit one person and compel them to see something in another that no one else can see, which is why in some ways this category may almost outweigh all other categories of importance in relationships.

Now that I have successfully contradicted the initial point of writing this essay I can sign-off.

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