492 Chapter 14 The Major Motives of Life: Food, Love, Sex, and work
pets...you name it. Matchmaking services admin-
ister lengthy questionnaires and personality inven-
tories, claiming to use scientific principles to pair
up potential soul mates (Sprecher et al., 2008).
A review of the research on Internet dating
found that these sites often don’t deliver the love
of your life (or even the love of your month), and
they don’t do better than old-fashioned methods
of meeting people in generating long-term rela-
tionships: Online dating profiles, the researchers
explained, reduce “three-dimensional people to
two-dimensional displays of information,” which
are often not enough to let participants evaluate
true compatibility (Finkel et al., 2012). Besides,
many people think they know exactly what they
“must have” in a partner, and then they meet
someone who has few of those qualities but a
whole bunch of others that suddenly become
“essential.” Yet one underlying premise of most
Internet matching sites is basically correct: Like
attracts like.
Watch the Video In the Real World: Speed
Dating at MyPsychLabThe Attachment Theory of Love. Once you
find someone to love, how do you love? According
to Phillip Shaver and Cindy Hazan (1993), adults,
just like babies, can be secure, anxious, or avoidant
in their attachments (see Chapter 3). Securely at-
tached lovers are rarely jealous or worried about
being abandoned. They are more compassionate
and helpful than insecurely attached people and
are quicker to understand and forgive their part-
ners if the partner does something thoughtless or
annoying (Mikulincer et al., 2005; Mikulincer &
Shaver, 2007).
Avoidant people manage their anxiety and
insecurity by distrusting and avoiding intimate
attachments. Anxious lovers, however, are always
agitated about their relationships; they want toeither morphine or endorphins, the animals show
much less distress than usual when separated from
their mothers; the chemicals seem to be a biologi-
cal replacement for mom (Panksepp et al., 1980).
These findings suggest that endorphin-stimulated
euphoria may be a child’s initial motive for seek-
ing affection and cuddling—that, in effect, a child
attached to a parent is a child addicted to love.
The addictive quality of adult passionate love,
including the physical and emotional distress that
new lovers feel when they are apart, may involve
the same biochemistry (Diamond, 2004).
Using fMRI, neuroscientists have found other
neurological similarities between infant–mother
love and adult romantic love. Certain parts of
the brain are activated when people look at im-
ages of their sweethearts, and these are the same
areas that are activated when mothers see images
of their own children as opposed to pictures of
other children. In contrast, other brain parts are
activated when people look at pictures of friends
or furniture (Bartels & Zeki, 2004).
Clearly, then, the bonds of attachment are
biologically based. Yet, as we saw with oxytocin, it
is important to avoid oversimplifying, by conclud-
ing that “love is all in our hormones” or “love oc-
curs in this corner of the brain but not that one.”
Human love affairs involve many other factors
that affect whom we choose, how we get along
with that person, and whether we stay with a part-
ner over the years.The Psychology of Love LO 14.5
Many romantics believe that only one true love
awaits them. Considering the presence of 7 billion
people on the planet, the odds of finding said per-
son are a bit daunting. What if you’re in Omaha
or Winnipeg and your true love is in Dubrovnik
or Kankakee? You could wander for years and
never cross paths.
Fortunately, evolution has made it possible to
form deep and lasting attachments without travel-
ing the world. The first major predictor of whom
we love is proximity: We tend to choose our friends
and lovers from the set of people who live, study,
or work near us. The second major predictor is
similarity—in looks, attitudes, beliefs, values, per-
sonality, and interests (Berscheid & Reis, 1998).
Although it is commonly believed that opposites
attract, we tend to choose friends and loved ones
who are most like us.
The Internet has made it possible for people
to seek their “ideal match” on all kinds of dimen-
sions: political attitudes, religion or secularism,
sexual orientation, disabilities, preferences for par-
ticular sexual activities, preferences for particularInternet services capitalize on the fact that like attracts
like. How well do these services work?