Finding the right person

Some psychiatrists, such as Thomas Lewis from the University of California, hypothesize that romantic love is rooted in experiences of physical closeness in childhood—for example, how we felt in our mother’s arms. These feelings of comfort and affection are written on our brain, and as adults, our constant inclination is to find them again. According to this theory, we love whom we love not so much because of the future we hope to build, but rather because of the past we hope to live again. The person who “feels right” has a certain look, smell, sound, or touch that activates very deep memories. Evolutionary psychologists explain, however, that survival skills are inherent in our choice of a mate. According to this hypothesis, we are attracted to people who look healthy—for example, a woman with a 70 percent waist-to-hip ratio is attractive because she can likely bear children successfully. A man with rugged features probably has a strong immune system and therefore is more likely to give his partner healthy children. On the other hand, perhaps our choice of a mate is a simple matter of following our noses. Claus Wedekind, a professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland conducted an interesting experiment with sweaty T-shirts. He asked 49 women to smell T-shirts previously worn by a variety of unidentified men. He then asked the women to rate which T-shirts smelled the best and which the worst. He found that women preferred the smell of a T-shirt worn by a man who was the most genetically different from her. This genetic difference means that it is likely that the man’s immune system possesses something hers does not. By choosing him as the father of her children, she increases the chance that her children will be healthy.