Picking Partners, Part I

I have a file titled "Picking Partners" with articles, quotes and statistics. There are too many for one blog posting so I decided to break them out into two or three. More coming soon.

Turkish proverb, "Who seeks a faultless friend remains friendless"

Love and War authority Theodor Reik said no woman is ever really surprised by a matrimonial proposal. Nor even by any sort of romanic overture. The female of the species always sets the sex stage, except in criminal behavior, for either stop or go. And she usually rehearses the proceedings in her mind.

When two stangers meet, a man and a woman, it's the woman who decides whether they will speak. Even if she doesn't speak first, she let's him know . With a glance, a smile, a gesture. -LM Boyd, Seattle Times.

Women pick men, men pick types. when a woman recalls the loves of their life, she may well realize none of her men were like any of the others. When a man looks back, though, he often sees a distinctive similaritiews in girlfriends of his past. Some others claim, most, though, just match up with someone they accidently meet and, then try to make it work.

Oscar Wilde, "Men always want to be a woman's first love; women like to be a man's last romance."

Seven out of ten women prefer the appearance of men, "clean-shaven", according to most recent surveys.

In a Stanford study, highly emotional women and highly intelligent men commonly fall for each other.

At the University of Pennsylvania they studied over 10,000 daters and found that what people said they were attracted to and what they were actually attracted to were way different. Most knew "it" almost instantly, when they saw it. Men and women, when assessing compatibility, within moments of meeting, using primarily cues of height, weight and attractiveness. The researchers were surprised that religion, education and income played very little roles in their choices.

At the University of Liverpool, researchers found that we are attracted to people that look like ourselves or like our families. Call it narcissism but when men and women viewed digitally altered human faces they were drawn to the familiar. This may explain the common phenomenon of couples looking like they could be siblings.

Barbara Ehrenreich, "Personally, I can't see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour."