Love In The Age Of Big Data

December 21, 2015 3:46 AM

You might expect love to be the last frontier breached by data. It is the Antarctic of the human experience, richly feeding the oceans of our emotions, yet somehow remaining elusive and unknown. Philosophers have argued over it for millennia without arriving at a satisfactory definition. Poets like Erich Fried capture its strange mix of pleasure and pain, the sense of its essential ungovernability: “It is foolish, says caution / It is impossible, says experience / It is what it is, says love.” [slhuffpo]
posted by ellieBOA (12 comments total)

One 1992 experiment found that certain indicators in how couples talked about their relationship could forecast–with 94 percent accuracy–which pairs would stay together. This was magic–a virtually foolproof way of distinguishing toxic partnerships from healthy ones even before the couples knew themselves

Would there (in theory and/or practice) exist, for any person, a potential partner they could be in a sustainable relationship in, or do some people only do toxic/dysfunctional relationships?
posted by acb at 4:14 AM on December 21, 2015

"I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do."
posted by fairmettle at 4:18 AM on December 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

After I read May’s theory that love “is now the West’s undeclared religion,” I began to see evidence of it everywhere.

That is true; its liturgical hymns are all over the radio, imploring its mercy and praising its beneficience in the way that terrified peasants placated the fickle gods. And as the Celts spoke of the “fair folk”, and the Greeks of the “Kindly Ones”, our age sings the praises of this powerful, destructive, chaotic force, in abject supplication, hoping to reap its boons and be spared its wrath.

Mind you, the same argument could apply to the other secular god of our time, the Invisible Hand Of The Market.
posted by acb at 5:04 AM on December 21, 2015 [4 favorites]

“I don’t trust that sherpa. I think he just wants to have sex with you 10 women,” John recalled saying. “I was right about that, by the way.”

The subjects of the article have a blog... and a research institute, and training sessions.
posted by sammyo at 5:25 AM on December 21, 2015

A priori, I'd imagine all the more animal like experiences like love should be much easier to model than the higher cognitive stuff that evolved later. It's possible love gets messy because all our higher cognitive stuff is basically a giant sexual display, like a peacock tail, but still.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:49 AM on December 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

Interesting article. I almost managed to read the whole thing. I don't know why there's a mention of 'Big Data' in the title. There's no big data in the research behind Gottman's formula. It's actually quite the opposite, having been generated out of personal experiences as much as anything else. A 'big data' approach would be to cross-correlate the answers from millions of relationship surveys with socioeconomic, religious and demographic data and then provide relative probabilities of 1-, 5- and 10-year success for any relationship with a given range of inputs.

For me, the most interesting part was the interview with Aron, who was easily the most informed interviewee of the entire piece, and is evidently well aware of what the most relevant data are:

Aron has studied love in many other experiments, and he’s been struck by how contextual factors influence relationships. “Unfortunately the single biggest [factor], if you look across the world, is stress,” he said. “If you’re very poor, if you’re in a crime-ridden neighborhood, it’s hard for any relationship to work out very well. That’s not one we can do much about as individuals.”
posted by kisch mokusch at 6:25 AM on December 21, 2015 [5 favorites]

A 'big data' approach would be to cross-correlate the answers from millions of relationship surveys with socioeconomic, religious and demographic data and then provide relative probabilities of 1-, 5- and 10-year success for any relationship with a given range of inputs.

Or a future surveillance dystopia, in which the government and/or Facebook/Google chooses optimal mates for people (the definition of “optimal”, of course, being left open).
posted by acb at 6:48 AM on December 21, 2015

Well, I have absolutely no authority with which to comment on this article because I have successfully avoided marriage. I mean, if George Clooney had ever returned my phone calls, things might be different .... but it was not to be ... it is what it is ....

That being said. What It Is is one of my favorite poems, so I will just leave this here for you all.

What it is by Erich Fried

It is nonsense
says reason
It is what it is
says love

It is calamity
says calculation
It is nothing but pain
says fear
It is hopeless
says insight
It is what it is
says love

It is ludicrous
says pride
It is foolish
says caution
It is impossible
says experience
It is what it is
says love

Translated from the German by Anna Kallio
posted by pjsky at 8:01 AM on December 21, 2015 [4 favorites]

Would there (in theory and/or practice) exist, for any person, a potential partner they could be in a sustainable relationship in, or do some people only do toxic/dysfunctional relationships?

If you read the article, it indicates pretty strongly to me that the capability to have functional relationships isn't so much an inherent characteristic of people as it is as skill that can be built. Of course, Gottman's seminars are kind of economically invested in that idea--can't charge people for seminars if their ability to be in relationships is immutable--but I think there's quite a bit to that. In general, my experience is that social skills in other arenas are absolutely something that people have natural differences in talent at but also that it's the sort of thing that you practice and you get better at over time. I'd be surprised to find partnered relationships different.
posted by sciatrix at 8:58 AM on December 21, 2015 [3 favorites]

There was a mention there about John Nash's equilibrium and it made me think about John and Alicia. Who got married, and then divorced, and then married again. If your relationship has the right foundation and you get stuck dealing with personal tragedy or financial crisis or serious mental health issues, you didn't split up because you had a bad relationship. I recently did what AskMe would have told me not to do, which was getting back together with my ex. Except we've been unsuccessfully trying to stay split up for years. We've been pretty much best friends again for almost a year and a half. Roughly the only thing where we've failed previously is in withdrawing when things got too hard, which was "serious mental health issues" hard, not "why don't you take out the trash" hard. Now that we know that's a problem, short-scale withdrawal ("no spoons for this tonight") feels much less wounding, and it's not lasted more than a day or two. Things are still complicated, but the "us" part of it is less fragile.

All of this seems like total common sense, but it's not really the relationship modeled by the media. I get to wondering, again and again, why A Beautiful Mind felt it necessarly to elide the years that the Nashes spent apart in favor of the simplistic trope that you make things work by sticking with your man no matter what. This seems like it's trying to create a model for how to bend without breaking. The data (even if it's not "big") feels like it's there mostly to prove that this isn't just another story we're telling ourselves about what works even though it doesn't.

Would there (in theory and/or practice) exist, for any person, a potential partner they could be in a sustainable relationship in, or do some people only do toxic/dysfunctional relationships?

I think there are absolutely people who can only do toxic and dysfunctional relationships, but I also think those people are usually pretty toxic and dysfunctional alone. Now, some people might not do relationships well because they're happier alone, and if you're happier alone then it seems silly to say that there's a potential partner with whom you could be happy. Mostly, I think some things may limit the number of people who're willing to try, but I don't think they really limit your ability to do it if both parties are already on board. Any other barrier, like poverty or disability or unmanaged mental illness, would be not so much a problem with functional relationships as a problem with functional living.
posted by Sequence at 9:30 AM on December 21, 2015 [3 favorites]

Or a future surveillance dystopia, in which the government and/or Facebook/Google chooses optimal mates for people (the definition of “optimal”, of course, being left open).

I hadn't thought about facebook. Mining their data would almost certainly reveal some chestnuts. It would be creepy as fuck but certainly count as 'big data'.
posted by kisch mokusch at 12:24 PM on December 21, 2015

Facebook can predict when you're going to break up based on the number of mutual friends

also for Valentine's day a couple of years ago, FB released a bunch of posts about love formation including bits about how they'd predict when you'd change your relationship status based on the number of online messages you were exchanging with someone else. I recall it emerging around the time of all of the OkStats! stuff from OkCupid before their founder released Datalcysm so was expecting this FPP to also be more in that vein.
posted by bl1nk at 2:26 PM on December 21, 2015 [1 favorite]