Decoding Love: Why It Takes Twelve Frogs to Find a Prince, and Other Revelations from the Scien ce of Attraction

by Andrew Trees

Overview

Read Andrew Trees's posts on the Penguin Blog.

A smart, entertaining, and eye-opening look at the science of love, publishing for Valentine's Day

Relationships should be so simple. You meet someone. You fall in love. You live happily every after. This "romantic story line" has shaped our thinking about relationships for centuries. But the fairy tale is deeply flawed, and researchers today are making shocking discoveries about how and why we choose the people we love.

Drawing from the latest studies in economics, brain science, game theory, evolutionary psychology, and other fields, Decoding Love takes on a topic we all think we understand-how we fall in love-and illustrates that most of our assumptions are wrong. Along the way, Andrew Trees offers surprising new insights into the nature of attraction and desire, as well as an intimate look at the strange intersection of romance and the modern world of dating.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781440685910
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/22/2009
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	292 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Andrew Trees is the author of the novel Academy X. He has taught at a number of colleges and universities and he lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Romance and Its Discontents 1

1 The Dating Mind: What I Learned About Dating from Freud Or at Least from the Subconscious 9

2 The Dating Animal: What I Learned About Dating from Darwin 33

21/2 The Dating Animal, Part II: How Dating Is What Makes Us Human or Darwin Reconsidered 69

A Brief Intermission to Consider the Question of Monogamy 86

3 The Dating Culture: What I Learned About Dating from Thorstein Veblen 94

31/2 The Dating Culture, Part II: What I Learned About Dating from Sex and the City 108

4 The Dating Game: What I Learned About Dating from Adam Smith 127

5 The Dating Dance What I Learned About Dating from Hanging Out in Bars 167

A Second Brief Intermission to Focus- Finally-On the More Traditional Subject of a Book About Attraction: Practical Advice 202

6 The End of Dating: What I Learned About Marriage 218

Epilogue 247

Acknowledgments 249

Bibliographical Essay 251

Index 257