Height

Looks like I need to find an asian woman to date. Anthropometry of Love: Height and Gender Asymmetries in Interethnic Marriages.

Both in the UK and in the US, we observe puzzling gender asymmetries in the propensity to outmarry: Black men are substantially more likely to have white spouses than Black women, but the opposite is true for Chinese: Chinese men are half less likely to be married to a White person than Chinese women. We argue that differences in height distributions, combined with a simple preference for a taller husband, can explain a large proportion of these ethnic-spefi…c gender asymmetries. Blacks are taller than Asians, and we argue that this signifi…cantly affects their marriage prospects with whites. We provide empirical support for this hypothesis using data from the Health Survey for England and the Millenium Cohort Study, which contains valuable and unique information on heights of married couples.

Love at First Sight

Penelope hits another one down the middle. This post "Love at first sight" reminds me of missed anniversaries.

We are genetically predisposed to fall in love with someone not like us—it keeps the gene pool safe. So when you want someone to fall in love with the idea of working with you, focus on personality characteristics you offer them that they don’t already have.

I guess opposites attract? Sometimes.

Asker or Guesser?

I think in many ways I am more of a "Guesser" than an "Asker", particularly when it comes to relationships.

This terminology comes from a brilliant web posting by Andrea Donderi that's achieved minor cult status online. We are raised, the theory runs, in one of two cultures. In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything – a favour, a pay rise– fully realising the answer may be no. In Guess culture, by contrast, you avoid "putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes… A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't have to make the request directly; you'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept."

Neither's "wrong", but when an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleasantness results. An Asker won't think it's rude to request two weeks in your spare room, but a Guess culture person will hear it as presumptuous and resent the agony involved in saying no. Your boss, asking for a project to be finished early, may be an overdemanding boor – or just an Asker, who's assuming you might decline. If you're a Guesser, you'll hear it as an expectation. This is a spectrum, not a dichotomy, and it explains cross-cultural awkwardnesses, too: Brits and Americans get discombobulated doing business in Japan, because it's a Guess culture, yet experience Russians as rude, because they're diehard Askers.

Height

A solution to a problem I've discussed before.

Relationship Scholar Dies

The academic community lost an important researcher, Caryl Rusbult. From her obit in Science News:

Caryl Rusbult was the queen of close relationships. For more than 30 years, and for the past six years at Vrije University in Amsterdam, she studied how some men and women form lasting, supportive marriages. Rusbult’s work led her to conclude that close partners are interpersonal artists, sculpting one another’s strengths and weaknesses so as to bring out the best in each other. She called this the Michelangelo Phenomenon, a reference to the great Renaissance sculptor who said that he used a chisel to release ideal figures from blocks of stone in which they slumbered.
......
And the discussion would have been lively. Shortly after meeting one another in the early 1980s, Reis and Rusbult got into a fierce debate at a psychology conference about what people really want in close relationships. Reis championed emotional intimacy. Rusbult insisted that partners want to coordinate their behavior so they can achieve goals that each holds dear.

“Ten years and much research later, I was convinced that she was right,” Reis says.
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Real-life dating and married couples provided her team with glimpses of the Michelangelo Phenomenon in action. Time and again, romantic pairings succeeded if each partner detected the other’s self-reported dreams and aspirations and found ways to guide him or her toward those goals. This process hinged on identifying and working with a partner’s personal flaws, just as a sculptor incorporates irregularities in a block of stone into a masterpiece.

Dating Markets

I've always said the sex ratio is an important aspect of any dating market. Here is an article from the New York Times on the ramifications of the shift to more females in college. It is clearly a better time to be in college than when I was there. Alex Taborrak discusses it here, and here he provides a good example of how small differences with large opportunity costs can dramatically alter the "power" in a relationship.

Casual observation here on campus suggests males would be wise to lock up their significant other with a ring now, because they won't be able to do better after school is out.  

Dating

xkcd with a funny comic.