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Relationships
Why Do We Make Irrational Choices in Love Relationships?
How decision-making in mate choice upends your love choices.
Posted April 25, 2024 Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
Key points
- Irrational choices in love relationships are reflected in high divorce rates.
- dPeople use a rapid decision-making cognitive style in selecting who to fall in love with.
- Rapid decision-making may be emotionally conditioned by ways parents interact emotionally with their children.
- We fail to use careful, rational thinking in choosing mates.
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky researched and explained how people think and behave in making financial decisions. They discovered that people often make irrational decisions that do not benefit them. They developed the field of behavioral economics.
Is there a corollary in how people make love decisions and choose mates? Do people make irrational choices, have cognitive illusions, and make faulty judgments that lead to poor mate choices and high divorce rates? If we do, how does it happen?
What Studies Reveal
Several studies examine how people make choices in mates. Peter M. Todd et al. studied people involved in speed dating. They scrutinized the traits in mates people chose, not what they said they wanted. When there is a time restriction of five minutes in speed dating, they discovered, there is a disconnect between wants and actual choices.
Men made decisions to date women based mostly on their physical attractiveness.
Nor did women’s decisions about who they desired to date connect with what they said they wanted in a mate. Instead, they made decisions on both physical attractiveness and a sense of potential mate’s commitment to mate and family.
Alison P. Lenton et al., in a separate study involving speed dating, learned that, when short on time, people pay more attention to visual cues, the looks of would-be mates. They pay less attention to those aspects of mates that take longer to assess—life experiences, background, educational and occupational attainment.
Cognitive Systems and Love Decisions
A study done by Lucrezia Savioni, et al. examined the roles of cognitive systems 1 and 2 in evaluating “love” decisions. The cognitive systems were elaborated by Kahneman and Tversky: System 1 is a rapid, unconscious, intuitive cognition process that operates automatically and emotionally. System 2 is a slower, rule-based cognitive system operating consciously and oriented toward the long term.
Savioni et al. discovered that System 1 decision-making predominates in love and mate decisions. People play more attention to their feelings about potential mates than to rational decision-making.
If rapid emotional decision-making predominates when choosing love interests, how do people fare?
Emotions and Cognitions
The divorce rate in the U.S. is 40-50%. It is higher for second and third marriages. Why? How does this happen? In our clinical psychodynamic psychotherapy work over 80 combined years, Homer B. Martin, M.D., and I, two psychiatrists, explored this question.
We discovered an emotional conditioning process in early childhood that leads to unconscious, rapid-onset emotional responses. Emotional conditioning is a form of learning that operates in an emotional sphere. Children are emotionally conditioned by interactions with their parents, beginning in infancy. The process, largely irrational, leads to emotional reactions to other people, in relationships. It is similar to the rapid way System 1 cognitions operate.
Dr. Martin and I were impressed that this irrational, emotional conditioning style dictates people’s automatic attraction to mates, like a form of magnetism. It robs people of thinking in a reality-based way about potential mates. Instead, it creates an automatic, knee-jerk response. This is mistaken for “love.”
John Bowlby learned that early infant attachment styles govern later mate choices and adult attachments. Our impression is that people often become unable to shift to a more rational Type-2 decision-making style when emotions are activated, as in mate selection.
What Goes Wrong?
When emotional conditioning operates, intensive observations and thinking about potential mates are not done. People don’t ask questions of potential mates. People assume things about potential mates, without examining whether they are true or are figments of their imagination.
Many love relationships do not operate in reality, Dr. Martin and I observed. In time such relationships unravel and fall apart. The unreality of so many false emotional reactions degrades love relationships. People break up or divorce since they cannot live long with fantasies about one another.
Making Improvements in Love Relationships
Improvements in love relationships lie in grasping when and how System 1 cognitive styles and emotional conditioning kick in and falsely attract us to romantic partners. Then we need to be aware how to shut down System 1 cognitions and emotional conditioning and open up our System 2 cognitive style and think instead of reacting emotionally to others. This is hard work, and it may require the help of a psychotherapist. It is a worthy goal to aim for to ensure healthy, realistic love relationships.
References
Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment, Basic Books, Inc., New York.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.
Lendon, A.P. et al. (2010). How humans cognitively manage an abundance of mate options, Sage Journals, 21(4).
Martin, H.B. and Adams, C.B.L. (2018). Living on Automatic: How Emotional Conditioning Shapes Our Lives and Relationships, Praeger, Santa Barbara, CA.
Savioni, L. et al. (2023). How to make big decisions: A cross-sectional study on the decision making process in life choices, Current Psychology, 42:15223-15236.
Todd, P.M. et al. (2007). Different cognitive processes underlie human mate choices and mate preferences, Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 104 (38): 15011-15016.
