The Happy Brain by Dean Burnett

Author:Dean Burnett [Dean Burnett]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781783351312
Publisher: Guardian Faber Publishing
Published: 2018-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

Relationship advice

OK, so maybe it’s not wrong exactly. Everything I’d uncovered about how the human brain processes intimacy and romance was technically correct, insofar as the available evidence suggests. It’s just that this neat and tidy explanation of how love and sex work in the brain is clearly woefully inadequate, because it doesn’t explain any of the pitfalls and complications of sex or love, like the stigma experienced by people with atypical sexual desires, or the fact that loving relationships can and do break down, causing immense psychological upset. This is when I finally accepted that I was out of my depth, and decided to speak to an agony aunt. Well, what else was I supposed to do?

My go-to agony aunt is Dr Petra Boynton, who provides relationship advice for the readers of numerous publications, including the Daily Telegraph. The Guardian once described her as ‘Britain’s first scientific evidence-based agony aunt’, as she’s also an experienced social psychologist specialising in human sexuality and relationships, as well as being author of The Research Companion60, a practical guide to psychological research. Luckily for me, she agreed to give her incredibly informed perspective about how we humans think about sex and love in the real world.

First, I asked her why people who fall in love don’t always live ‘happily ever after’, like we’re so often led to believe they will. Dr Boynton, in the friendly but world-weary tone of one who knows an incredible amount about something but spends a lot of time working with people who stubbornly refuse to admit how little they know, immediately pointed out that the answer to this problem is contained within my question; the fact that it’s what we’re led to believe should happen. It’s not a biological construct so much as a cultural one, underscored by the fact that other cultures don’t adhere to this view.

‘Some cultures have more formalised, arranged marriages, where the expectation is that you get married, then get to know each other. Over time you would hopefully become good friends, and you might find you fall in love or you might not; you might still have great affection, but your priorities may be around having children, and so on. In such cultures the idea of staying together long term is quite different, it’s all about maintenance of happiness, and communication, and wellbeing, and input from wider family and so on.’

To those of us in the Western world, raised on a diet of fairy tales, romcoms and will-they-won’t-they TV show arcs, the idea that you’d get married before you fall in love, before you even meet – why, that seems ludicrous! And yet, stats suggest that over 50 per cent of all recorded marriages are arranged in some way61 (largely because they’re common in India and, until recently, China, two countries that account for a third of humanity).

So if arranged marriages are a fact of life for a large part of the world’s population, it seems obvious that the Western ideal of finding

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