Automatic romance between opposite sex (or two gay) characters

In My Humble Opinion
21

An arranged marriage is, effectively, a case where two random people are forced to stay together for a long period of time. Surveys of people in arranged marriages give similar satisfaction ratings and higher (on average) romance ratings.

This isn’t quite the same as the usual Hollywood situation where there’s no particular social expectation that the couple behave like a couple - they’re free to just remain as two strangers - but it would say that the core of a close connection is, simply, familiarity.

22

Mrs. L v1.0 was from India. Her sister married while I was visiting—I think she defended her doctoral dissertation a few months after her (arranged) marriage. The parents felt they needed to marry her off, but she was content being single.

I can’t speak to all cases but I would challenge the “two random people” characterization. Her parents didn’t pick for her…she met half a dozen men at least. In each case she (and the man) had the choice to continue or not. So they do have some choice. Toward the end, her parents said, “Hey, we can’t keep doing this forever,” so there was some pressure to pick.

v1.0 told me that affairs aren’t that uncommon. I found this, which seems to corroborate that.

I have a theory about it. When you live in a poor country, your family is your wealth. You might be ill but someone else is bringing in money so life goes on. In that sense, the family has an interest in whom you marry.

In fact, I recall that when v1.0’s sister agreed, a series of gifts were exchanged between them. I remember the parents of the bride-to-be were supposed to give the groom-to-be a wristwatch. I remember that they look these gift horses in the mouth. “How nice does that wristwatch need to be? We don’t want to offend them…how nice was the last gift they gave her?” In a way, I thought it was good that they check out each other’s finances, sort of.

To keep feeding the economic engine, the marriage needs to produce children. Once that has been accomplished, it’s all good.

No, they don’t love each other when they marry. If you were in such a marriage, maybe you’d make a deal with your spouse: let’s look the other way when the other cheats. Don’t be obvious—don’t be indiscreet—and I won’t make you look bad, either.

She said that they have a break during the day, like the siesta of Latin America. They like to take an extended break (wink wink) during the day.

23

There is something called the mere-exposure effect, where repeated exposure to a stimulus leads to an increase in preference for said stimulus. It definitely applies to ideas. It has at least been hypothesized that this is part of human mate selection, with people becoming more attractive simply by being around them more.

I’ve definitely noticed how I am more likely to (often subconsciously) excuse bad behavior in people I know than people I don’t. And here’s one article that mentions a bit of research:

I wish I could find more, but I’m not finding the right search terms. I keep just getting general stuff about the mere-exposure effect, and not specifically involving our reactions to people.

24

At the risk of fighting the hypothetical, in a movie or TV series, the man and woman are almost always of a reasonable degree of attractiveness, unless someone has been writing TV scripts about two super-ugly people stranded alone together.

Anyhow, though, I would guess that in 99% of instances, if you put a man and woman together on a stranded island and the woman is of childbearing age, then even if she is ugly, they will eventually be having babies. You know how, when people are starving, even cockroaches and spiders can become appetizing-looking to them after Day 40 of no food? I would guess that a similar thing would happen to two people alone for a year or longer.

Another factor, as author Madeleine Brent once pointed out, is that two people who are in a situation of danger tend to bond emotionally together (quote: “Between two who have walked through the valley of danger together, there is a bond that might have otherwise have taken a thousand days to forge.”) In your TV shows, that’s what the man and woman are typically in - stranded, or in some situation of that sort. So they are likelier to bone, too.

25

I think we can see it a lot with younger people who are forced to be together. Summer camp, teen job, college. Teenagers are naturally more horny and may have a bit less impulse control. I bet if you took 20 random 19-21 year-olds and put them on an island, the majority would be paired off pretty quickly with a few outliers to either side.

26

And this is related to the thing I’m actually curious about. Obviously the whole thing in media is skewed - they’re both invariably good looking and, regardless, it’s also predetermined by the writer.

But, one could actually do an experiment in the guise of some “Mars Habitat Study” or something of that ilk.

So, Velomont’s socio-science experiment:

  1. find some soon to close, two storey Journey’s End or Days Inn type of motel and recruit single volunteers;
  2. allocate a ten-room section to each pair of opposite sex volunteers, paired up by some random selection methodology. I would suggest that, for purposes of this exercise, there is some minimum level of attractiveness (eg everyone is, by some definition, a 6 or better) in order to avoid pairings like Kate Upton and the Elephant Man. Also have an age range, say from 30 to 60, and keep the pairings within 10 years of age range of each other.
  3. issue each participant a fall-detection type pendant
  4. have a bunch of daily task requirements sufficient to keep them working together for about 50 or 60 hours each week, with regularly scheduled breaks and access to the hotel pool and fitness facility.
  5. run the experiment for about two months and see what happens.

I don’t think that there would be anything unethical about it and it would be really interesting to see what sort of results there would be.

27

I would like to see the results of that experiment too, but in order for it to work, you’d have to fool them into thinking the whole study was about something else. Because if you tell them, “The purpose of this study is to see if you will be attracted to each other,” then that will instantly sabotage any romance ideas that might have otherwise naturally arisen on their own. People rebel against following “preset plans.”

28

In most of these plots however it isn’t that the two people who initially detested eachother end up together solely because they were trapped. The idea is usually that they were in actuality soul mates all along, and that the close confinement and having to depend on one another allowed them to appreciate the other’s hidden qualities. Take for example Beauty and the Beast. If Belle had been confined in the castle with Gaston for months, I don’t think that they would have been a couple at the end.

29

Yes, absolutely. You’d have to concoct some other experiment at the superficial, participant-interface level if you will, with an explanation that the experimenters were studying variations in human performance. Though each group would be doing the same tests, each group would be told that the other groups were doing different tasks under differing conditions (eg one group could be told that the other groups are doing various mixes of cognitive, psychomotor, or affective domain tasks with different mixes of participants).

I think it actually would be quite interesting. The resulting data could be quite useful for such things as long term space exploration and things of that nature.

30

You’re describing Spring Break all across the Caribbean, Central American beach resorts, and Florida.

The results are unequivocal: young strangers in strange surroundings hook up almost instantly.

:wink:

31

It’s just confirmation bias. Of course storybook romances don’t happy that often but they do happen and that’s what you see in movies–not the dull, everyday relationships.

32

Also in familiar surroundings; they hook up almost instantly at home, too.

33

Quite right. But the OP’s set-up was all about being in forced proximity in unfamiliar / dangerous / exotic surroundings.