She Blinded Me With Science!
I don’t know about you, but I’m a sucker for studies.
Studies, as in “studies show.” Studies, as in science.
Studies, as in “something cool I read about, and hope that someone else has verified.”
The bad thing about studies is that, unless you have some sense of how to judge the research, they can be all-too comforting. Give me an hour–heck, with Google on my side, give me a quarter of a second–and I can find a study that claims to prove just about anything I want to believe.
Taken with a healthy grain of salt, though–wait! Can I find a study that says I shouldn’t worry so much about eating salt? That was a tough one: .33 seconds to find this piece from a few days ago– So, taken with a healthy grain of salt, “studies” provide me with conversation topics, endless entertainment, and plenty to think about.
The study that caught my attention this morning showed up on one of my favorite news sites, Science Daily. I’d started by clicking on one of the recent headlines: “Married With Children the Key to Happiness?” (Answer: maybe, but two other studies in the “related stories” column found that children “take a toll on marital bliss.”) The quirky, memorable headline, though, was the one about whether having a happy spouse or partner could make you happier, too.
“Research Says,” the story goes, “Your Happiness Makes Your Partner Happy – But Only If You Are Married.”
If you’re a sucker for studies, you can click over and read the actual piece. It’s short, and, as usual, it’s a bit less dramatic than the headline suggests. Still, it’s got me thinking–not at all scientifically–about one of the novels I taught for the first time this quarter, here at DePaul: Laura Kinsale’s Prince of Midnight.
As the novel ends, our hero and heroine, S.T. Maitland and Leigh Strachan, are trying to figure out what love means, or at least what their love means, and why S.T. should stay with Leigh, despite the flaws that he thinks forbid him to marry her.
“What can I give you in return?” he demands of her. “Give me your joy,” she responds. “Give me all your mad notions and your crazy heroics and your impossible romantical follies. And I’ll be your anchor. I’ll be your balance. I’ll be your family. I won’t let you fall.”
Studies have shown that this is one of the most moving betrothal scenes in all of romance. OK, maybe no one’s studied that. But the notion that one test of a couple is how they deal with differential happiness, spreading the wealth, rings deeply true to me.
Freud said that everything he knew about psychology, poets had figured out first. If only he’d read romance novels–or Science Daily–too!
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