The Look of Love is a song by ABC taken from their brilliant album The Lexicon of Love. It was released on 7 May 1982, three days before my 14th birthday. It reached No. 4 in the UK charts and No. 18 in the US charts. The song was written by the lead singer, Martin Fry, after he was dumped by his girlfriend (who can be heard saying “goodbye” on the song). The lyrics deal with the disillusionment associated with finding and feeling love.
In dealing with the sometimes-painful pursuit of romantic love, the song is a reminder that human beings are a goal-oriented species. Some of the “big ticket” goals we are driven by are good for us, up to a point. We probably have something akin to an innate desire to reach for ever more money and status for example, because their absence is a source of misery. But we can become addicted to more money and status in ways that are harmful. In Happy Ever After, I put this down to the power of the social narrative to reach for ever more regardless of how much we already have.
A lot has been written about how a lack of goals and motivation can be harmful to us, but much less has been written about how being too goal-oriented can be harmful too. Constantly setting goals and striving for ever more can cause anxiety and serious mental health problems. We need to reframe our goals in ways that bring about the most happiness, not only for ourselves but also for those that we care about. Income and success are all worth striving for, but only up until the point at which the feedback from our experiences tells us that we have enough.
We certainly have strong desires to find and feel love. We are willing to pay quite a lot of money to have the experience of love and, by and large, this is money well spent in terms of how it makes us feel. But we can sometimes get carried away with the idea of falling in love. There is of course a very powerful social narrative to be in a relationship, which is often seen as synonymous with being in love. So much so, in fact, that single people – mostly single women – are often pitied for not yet having found the love of their life.
This narrative flies in the face of some of the evidence, which suggests that single women fare pretty well compared to single men, and to women in relationships. We have no randomised controlled trials of course and so we must be very careful about making causal inferences but it’s at least interesting to note that, on average, women appear to gain the least from being in a relationship. But they also feel the greatest pressure to be in one – and largely because they can then go on to do something else where the happiness benefits are also far from clearcut; namely, to have children.
One thing is for sure – we are not especially good at predicting how changes in our lives will impact on our happiness. When we think of love, children, money, status etc. we imagine paying attention to only the positive aspects of that change and expect that we will do so for much longer than turns out to be the case. When it comes to love, we imagine seeing only the good qualities in our prospective partner and for our romantic feelings to be frozen in time. In contrast to our imagined worlds, in the real world everyone is also a pain in the arse and romance fades quite quickly.
To properly understand the look of love, we need to consider how it will look next week, next year and for the next ten years, as well as how it will look tomorrow. This is no easy task on our own but we can lean on the advice and experiences of other people. In one study, the rating of a prospective male date by other women was a much more accurate guide to the success of the date than the predictions of the woman actually going on the date. I’ve long thought that dating apps should have Tripadvisor-type ratings, but there are many problems with that of course.
It can sometimes be difficult for us to find people whose advice we can truly trust, not least because even our closest friends will find it hard to free themselves of their own judgements about what kind of person we should fall in love with. AI tools might be more helpful here. One of the most promising uses of AI is as our trusted personal assistant, providing guidance that is genuinely in our best interests. Perhaps AI will provide, in the words of ABC, “a solution to the one thing, the one thing we can’t find”.