LOVE FOR SALE
I can’t be bought but can be stolen with a glance, I’m worthless to one but priceless to two.. what am I?
Today we are going to talk about love.
We cannot buy love, but what if we could? I mean, what if I had a machine that could make you fall in love with someone for the rest of your life? What should I charge for the use of that machine? Well, we should, first of all, be clear about what I mean when I say "love." I’m not talking about the love you have for your BFFs or your love for your family or your love for learning. I’m also not talking about Lust, an immediate attraction we have towards other people mediated by hormones like testosterone and oestrogen. I’m talking about what happens later when you begin to associate an immediate reward with one other person - what we call passionate love.
It’s what we see in new couples, where they wanna be with each other and are almost obsessed with each other. Well, psychologists have a great term for that kind of love. They call it Limerence.
Whenever we’re in this state, we do impractical, illogical, silly and sometimes stupid things, change our plans or priority for this person and even though we’re gonna miss our class or a meeting, just because we want to see them that badly. We are exhibiting limerent behaviour.
Okay, that sounds great. But what if I want to sell love, I’m gonna have to find a way to measure it and it turns out to be quite a difficult task. We do have a tool called the Passionate Love Survey. It was developed by psychologists and it’s been found to be quite reliable when it comes to analyzing other behaviours we associate with passionate love. For instance, they found, using the survey, that men and women both experience the same amounts of passionate love when they’re in a relationship. They’ve also found that men tend to fall in the love faster and sooner than women, who appear to be more cautious.
But we’re here to talk about money.
Interestingly, a UK study once looked at people who heard that someone else loved them. They heard the phrase "I love you" for the first time and the study looked at the amount of happiness those people felt and compared it to the number of happiness gamblers feel when they win large sums of money. Their conclusion is that hearing that someone loves you for the first time is equivalent to the happiness level of receiving exactly 163,424 pounds or 267,000 dollars.
But when you go beyond passionate love to a committed long-term love, there are all kinds of practical benefits that marriage brings. It’s been estimated that tax breaks and health care costs all together mean that being married is equivalent to receiving an extra 100000 dollars a year.
Now we have a lot of ways of visualizing the effect having money has on a person. For instance, we know that in the wealthiest countries people report feeling respect more often. They also report eating tastier food, for instance. But here’s what’s really awesome. Take a look at the graph of wealth against Love.
It doesn’t matter. Love is democratic, no matter who you are or how much money you have, people all over the world are feeling it.
It should be noted that having more money does not necessarily equate to being happier. This is what’s known as a hedonistic treadmill.
Getting more money helps with happiness, but only up to a certain point. In the US that point is about 75k dollars a year. At that point, more money has diminishing returns.
Another thing that correlates to having more money, more wealth, is living longer, having a larger life expectancy. But you know what else correlates to living longer? LOVE. But not just passionate love, the kind that followed it- committed, long-term love. People who form life-long pair bonds with another person live, on average, 15% longer. So being non-hard-sciency about it, all other things being equal and assuming that you’re not already super rich, finding a pair bond, finding a relationship that lasts for life is equivalent of making about an extra 30 to 40 thousand dollars a year.
Now like I said, that’s not hard science, but you know what is? Vasopressin and Oxytocin, are the chemicals that are exuded in people’s brains, even when they look at photos of people that whom they formed committed, long-term relationships. These chemicals are incredible. They’ve also seen elevated levels of them in dogs that have been pets for a long time. And also the couples who receive high levels of these chemicals resolve conflicts faster. And, people who struggle to produce these chemicals in their brain have a similar struggle when it comes to forming long-term relationships.
You can raise your levels of oxytocin or vasopressin inside your brain by simply looking into someone else’s eyes. That’s amazing. So in a way, looking into the eyes of somebody that you like is the administration of a psychoactive drug that’s addictive and long-term consequences are living longer.
So if you looking to be rich, live longer, happier, one way is to just find the right one for you. And don’t worry there’s a lid for every pot so don’t give up, keep looking, keep trying.
Thank you for reading
