Decoding Love: Why It Takes Twelve Frogs to Find a Prince, and Other Revelations from the Scien ce of Attraction

by Andrew S. Trees

Book Overview

Read Andrew Trees's posts on the Penguin Blog.

A smart, entertaining, and eye-opening look at the science of love, publishing for Valentine's Day

Relationships should be so simple. You meet someone. You fall in love. You live happily every after. This "romantic story line" has shaped our thinking about relationships for centuries. But the fairy tale is deeply flawed, and researchers today are making shocking discoveries...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1583333746
• ISBN13: 9781583333747
• Release Date: January 2010
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Length: 274 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.2"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Excellent Book

This book is very interesting and informative. I started to read a few pages of it when I first got it and have not been able to put it down. I have read numerous books like this and Decoding Love is by far the best.

When you're done crying, get intellectual...

I bought this book another written along the same vein (Why He's Dating Her (Instead of You) - Why He Didn't Commit, Why He Left, and Why You're Still Hooked - 10 Ways to Be...) after my boyfriend ended our relationship to be with another woman. After I got over the initial sadness, I wanted to better understand why we make the relationship choices we do and what part of the "dance" I was getting wrong. I LOVED this book! Talk about approaching the act of dating and getting to know each other from a perspective never explored before! As a left-brain, I appreciated the science behind the theories and I appreciated how the author posed explanations of female/male reactions to each other I hadn't even considered. This book allowed me to take a whole new look at the choices and reactions I was putting out there and gave me hope there are better ways to attract a life-long partner.

A MUST READ for my clients!!

I am a Marriage and Family Therapist, and not only do I think this is the best book on dating/attraction I have ever personally read, I am enthusiastically recommending it to several of my clients. Unbelievable.

Utterly fascinating.

This book really hit home for me. It is simply an extraordinary book. It's sort of like Desmond Morris meets Freakonomics meets a dating book. Anyone who likes reading about dating and relationships will find this book fascinating. Another great book I read is Sexy and Confident: How To Be The Dreamgirl Men Want, Have a Better Life and Improve Your Self-Esteem. It's more of a dating book, but also addresses some of the same subjects.

Great Compilation

Love is a many-splendored thing. It's also how we, as a species, manage to reproduce and survive. This book looks at love from the latter perspective. In that vein, it discusses love (and sex) through some very non-romantic lenses - psychology, evolutionary and otherwise; economics; game theory; physiology; non-verbal communication ... Trees really does cover all the bases here. This topic is a particular interest of mine and I've picked up bits and pieces from all over the place. This is the first book I've come across, though, that really puts it all in one place. If you're familiar with this stuff, it's all there - David Buss, The Red Queen, bonobos, The Paradox of Choice, oxytocin, vasopressin, Helen Fisher, waist-to-hip ratios, Frans de Waal ... you name it. At the same time, though, you'll probably also learn a thing or two. If you're not familiar, however, you'll learn quite a lot. For example, do you know why humans have larger testicles than gorillas, but smaller ones than chimpanzees? How many years do you think being single take off your life? Why are there so few genes on the Y chromosome? To be able to attract a female, how much extra money does a man have to make per inch under 6' he is? What kind of smelly male T-shirts are women attracted to? In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you'll become something of an expert, as Trees covers just about everything. He also does so in a very lucid, engaging style - something that can't be said for all the experts. I can't really imagine a better introduction. The only problems I had with the book were in the last few chapters. One of these is ostensibly a list of do's and don'ts. Most of these were prefaced in the rest of the book, but some of them were simply a grab bag of things he wanted to introduce and hadn't had a chance to do so yet. These were mostly of the form "A study said that x, so you'll definitely want to do x." No discussion, no debate, no counter-arguments, no nuances. Some readers might even see this as a problem for the rest of the book too. Another thing that was a lacking was a happy ending. Believe me, a lot of this stuff is incredibly depressing. And it's not that Trees didn't have a chance to. His last chapter talks about marriage, which had a number of good things to be said for it. In particular, I was struck how happily married couples tend to idealize their partners. What a great way to end such a depressing book. I think Trees recognized this idea's potential, but he really didn't play it up as much as he could.