About The Red and Black (Athens, Ga.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 6, 2014)
28 AMPERSAND | FEB/MAR 2014 BY: LORI KEONG As a morning kick, I’ll sometimes pair the taste of a bitter cup of coffee with a sweet guilty pleasure: a glance at my daily love horoscope. Today, mine reads, “If you’re single and looking for love, there will be a happy prospect opening up after Saturday.” Well, shucks, Mr. Tarot. Let me clear my schedule. Although I usually take these love digests with a grain of salt, true astrology enthusiasts—more common than some may think—base their entire love lives around their star signs, predicting their ideal mates down to the last moon. After another incon clusive date has me thinking I’ll be spending V-Day with a bunch of single girls at Yoforia, I can’t help but wonder whether there’s an easier way to determine compatibility: what works and what’s worth holding on to. Is it all in the stars? According to University of Georgia astronomy professor Jean-Pierre Caillault and much of the scientific community, absolutely not; there is no scientific basis for astrology. “Obviously it has deep roots in the constellations,” Caillault says, but adds that constellations are made-up and that besides the sun, “there’s no possible connec tion with planets or stars [and] us.” Well, if astrology isn’t the measure of a match made in heaven, there have to be more reliable ways to test compatibility. Dating websites, for one, seem to have match- making down to a relative science. Popular sites like eHarmony.com and Match.com, for example, often pair users through an algorithm that accounts for shared interests and personality traits. Sociologist Dr. Pepper Schwartz, who has been studying gender relations since the early ‘70s, devised her formula for dating website PerfectMatch.com based on the Myers-Briggs personality test developed from studies by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung. As Schwartz discovered through her research, matters dealing with attraction and psychology are, well, complicated. In the article “How Do I Love Thee,” published in the March 2006 edition of The Atlantic, she says there is no perfect formula for compatibility, but that science can help people get close. Using personality-based categories as her framework, Schwartz’s test accounts for the fact that opposites attract and that people seek “similarity and complementarity in different amounts.” For example, a risk taker may be attract ed to someone who tends to play it safe, at the same time seeking similarities in their partner for other traits. Dr. Jennifer Gonyea, a lecturer and un dergraduate coordinator in the university’s
