Dr. Kim Mulvihill reporting
What rings your bell when it comes to romance? New research addresses the chemistry of love, and an online dating service touts natural selection.
It's a hot topic, the recent cover story on Time magazine. So what is it-- romance, flowers, pheromones? New research says it's really quite basic.
Some couples just click. Are the g-forces of love so powerful that some lovers actually merge into one? Tomkat and Brangelina, for example.
Some talk about the chemistry of love, a magnetism. That "bada bing" that brings couples together. However, new research shows the world's most powerful aphrodisiac is actually the oldest.
Neuropsychiatrist Dr. Louann Brizendine said, "We have stone-age brains, in some ways."
For a month, two psychologists in Illinois followed the love lives of a group of sexually active men and women, including all their romantic prospects from within and outside a speed dating event. At Hurrydate in San Francisco, men told us they wanted, "Someone with a good sense of humor, right, know what I mean?"
A woman said, "Someone who is a good listener."
Another said she wanted, "A nice guy."
But in the study, researchers found in reality men and women are primarily motivated by physical attraction as well as earning power. These aphrodisiacs are wired in our brains, as circuits that evolved over millions and millions of years.
Dr. Brizendine said, "Males look for signs of fertility, which are breasts and hips. Female figures with small waists, large hips indicate higher fertility."
Now this kind of natural selection, where couples meet, mate, reproduce to ensure genetic survival, well, that too has evolved.
Online, it's Darwin dating.
"A couple of years ago, three Australians were sitting in a pub complaining about dating sites over a beer and one of them came up with the idea of creating a Web site that only allowed good-looking people to subscribe."
The online dating site -- created, it says, exclusively for the "beautiful, desirable people" -- actually began as a joke.
The site's Darren Shuster said, "It became very real when people began coming to the sites in groups of hundreds and thousands every month."
"Instructions? Submit a photo. On a scale of 1 to 5, existing members vote on whether you qualify."
"It is purely on what other people think "
You're in or you're out. The rejects get an e-mail.
Shuster said, "It says Margaret Thatcher and others have been rejected, so in a sense you're in very good company.
While Darwin dating actually feels more tongue-in-cheek, it does stoke the other great aphrodisiac. The Web site makes money and it's generated money in advertising revenue.
The folks at Darwin dating say it works. They say they have lots of success stories, but for privacy reasons they had to keep the names to themselves.
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