The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
The next time you're at a party with the love of your life, don't spend a lot of time trying to identify other couples in love Ñ chances are, you aren't very good at it. Golfers may be able to identify a sweet swing, and runners admire a lengthy stride in others, but a new study has found that when it comes to identifying couples in love, no one is worse than Ñ well, couples in love. "Love is truly blind," said Frank J. Bernieri, professor and chair of the Department of Psychology at Oregon State University and one of the authors of the study. "People in the study who had the longest relationships, were immersed in reading romance novels and spent lots of time watching romantic movies just loved this research. They all were quite confident of their ability to identify others in love." "And without exception," he added, "they were, by far, the least accurate in their assessment." In another study, a team of clinical psychologists at McGill University in Montreal filmed 25 couples and used a battery of common assessment tools to determine the depth of couples' affection for one another. All of the couples had been together for at least three weeks; many for several months. On film, the couples were seen interacting casually. A series of volunteers were asked to assess the depths of the filmed couples' feelings for each other. "The range of accuracy was really extraordinary," Bernieri said. "Those who were best at it were about twice as good as those who did the worst. Imagine observing 10 couples and trying to identify the five who love each other the most, and the five who loved each other the least. If you were in love at the time of the study, you would only get three or four out of 10 couples Ñ so you'd be wrong twice as much as you'd be right." "But if you weren't in love, you'd get it right six or seven times out of 10," he added. "That, in my book, is a huge difference." Bernieri said what likely happens is that couples in love tend to project some of their own theories and attitudes about love onto others. Or they may identify certain behaviors by other couples Ñ snuggling, a hand on the knee, intense eye contact Ñ and attribute them to true, long-lasting compassionate love instead of, say, infatuation or lust.
