Love, in Theory

Imagine meeting someone at a friend's exhibition. You talk about the pictures, then about the peculiar confidence of people who arrange gallery lighting. They laugh. You find them easy company. Outside, waiting for the bus, you remember that you also spent an unexplained minute describing your broken washing machine. Of everything that happened, this is what gets to represent you. If you often leave a conversation thinking people didn't like you, a 2018 study offers a useful complication: people sometimes give themselves a worse review than their conversation partners do. Researchers called the difference the “liking gap.” It doesn't mean every stranger secretly adores you. It means that the impression you carry home can be more pessimistic than the other person's own account. The interesting part is how the researchers checked. They had access to something our solitary bus-stop investigations generally lack: both sides of the conversation. AI-generated...

The first date went well. Now your group chat is debating when you're allowed to admit it. Text tonight? Wait until tomorrow? Leave it two days so you don't look too interested? One experiment offers an awkward answer for the waiting committee: after an imagined first date, next-morning contact scored highest for relationship intentions, but there was no evidence that waiting longer made the sender seem more desirable relative to the recipient. That is a finding about people's ratings, not a timetable for getting a second date. Still, it raises a better question than “Is 10 a.m. too soon?” What do we think the silence is going to do for us? A perfectly ordinary text can attract a surprising number of opinions. AI-generated editorial image. Picture a Saturday morning with three friends in your group chat, two contradictory opinions, and one piece of toast going cold. The date was Friday. You are still thinking about the story they told in the restaurant door...