Understanding bonds, your own included

The preferences people state before an encounter predict very poorly the people they then choose. The result is solid, and it unsettles the identikit portraits.

The best-established factor in attraction is neither charm nor affinity: it is the probability of crossing paths. A result from 1950 that seventy-five years have not refuted.

Four labels circulate everywhere, drawn from a theory that stopped using them long ago. What the research actually says is more interesting, and far less definitive.

A study covering more than ten thousand couples compared the predictive value of everything research thought it knew. Its conclusions are disappointing, and instructive.

The longer a relationship lasts, the more we believe we can guess what the other is thinking. Confidence in that reading increases; its accuracy does not.

Satisfaction is not enough to explain why people stay. A model published in 1980 adds two factors, and accounts for situations common sense judges irrational.

They are reputed to be doomed. The available work does not confirm it, and the critical moment is not the one people think.

The result has been constant in the literature for fifty years, and it is regularly misreported. What it says exactly deserves spelling out.

Almost all research on couples rests on a handful of questionnaires. Knowing what they ask changes the way the results drawn from them should be read.

Say everything or say nothing, leave space or close the distance: the recommendations cancel each other out. This is not a flaw in the field, it is its nature.