Decoding Love: Why It Takes Twelve Frogs to Find a Prince, and Other Revelations from the Science of Attraction, by Andrew Trees

decoding-loveA smart, entertaining, and eye-opening look at the science of love.

Relationships should be so simple. You meet someone. You fall in love. If all goes well, that person falls in love with you. You live happily every after.

As Andrew Trees reveals in Decoding Love, this romantic storyline has shaped our thinking about relationships for centuries. But the fairy tale is deeply flawed. 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. Throughout, Decoding Love reveals the frequently bizarre scientific findings about human attraction from the powerful influence of smell to a mathematical theory that one must date twelve people before happening upon Mr. or Ms. Right. Everything from a genetic marker for infidelity to the way the pill can sway a woman’s choice of her partner is explored in this astonishing and thoroughly amusing account of what goes into determining why one person falls in love with another.

Page-turning, thought-provoking, and sparkling with wit, Decoding Love is an uncommon look at that most common of human pursuits: falling in love.

REVIEW:
The topic of the book – “decoding love” by drawing on the latest research in evolutionary biology – is interesting and the writing itself is very fluid. Unfortunately, by focusing so heavily on maintaining the reader’s interest, author Andrew Trees abandons the scientific rigor that one would expect (given the title and introduction) in dealing with this subject. Aside from the numerous non sequitur pop culture references, Mr Trees even writes that he decided against using footnotes so as to make the book more accessible for the average person. As such, it reads like the CliffsNotes version of an introductory social psychology textbook.

The writing itself is laden with confirmation bias, as if the author had already developed a thesis and subsequently data mined the New York Public Library for research that would support his conclusions. There is also a failure to note critiques of the research studies that he references and a suspicious absence of counterarguments throughout the book. Instead, pages upon pages are spent citing so many studies with such brevity that the impact of any given one is diluted. The reader may also find that as the book progresses, it becomes increasingly unclear what is backed by research and what is speculation on the part of Mr Trees (perhaps due to the absence of footnotes/endnotes).

The book does get better towards the end, with the final chapter (on marriage) being the clearest and most defensible. However, one can’t help but feel that the time spent reading the book was all for naught when Mr Trees concludes in the epilogue that scientists have “incomplete answers to the fundamental questions of attraction,” and that in the end “the best lives, the happiest lives, are those that approach life not as a tragedy or as a farce but as a romance.” Heartwarming and probably true? Yes. Scientific? Not so much

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