The Stupid Things You Do When Dating (and How to Fix Them)

Our emotions and hormones are powerful forces that can make us do things that may feel right but are not actually in our best interest. On a regular basis you may think you're attracted to someone when you're not, make yourself uglier when you're trying to look good, and generally cause yourself grief while dating despite your best intentions. Here's a look at how you cause these problems and what you can do to fix them.

You Confuse Heightened Emotions for Physical Attraction

When you feel love, attraction, fear, sadness, or any other emotion, your brain likes to come up with an explanation to make sense of the feeling. The problem is, that explanation is often wrong because you try to match the feeling to the closest explanation possible. If you're standing on the edge of a mountain and afraid you could fall and die, a beautiful man or woman standing beside you could cause you to mistake that anxiety for sexual attraction. This misattribution happens frequently in various stressful situations.

David McRaney, of the blog You Are Not So Smart, points to a study by psychologists Art Aron and Donald Dutton that put men in a room and scared them into believing they'd receive a mild or painful shock. While they fearfully waiting to be electrocuted, they'd meet an attractive subject and be asked afterwards to fill out a questionnaire rating their anxiety and attraction to the subject. Here's what happened:

The men who expected a terrible, painful future rated their anxiety and their attraction to the ladies as significantly higher than those expecting mild tingles. When it came to those narratives explaining the pictures, once again the more anxious the men, the more sexual imagery they produced.

Aron and Dutton showed when you feel aroused, you naturally look for context, an explanation as to why you feel so alive. This search for meaning happens automatically and unconsciously, and whatever answer you come up with is rarely questioned because you don't realize you are asking.

In the real world, you're constantly waiting to be shocked, but you do occasionally feel anxiety, excitement, and other heart-pounding emotions. You run the same risk as the test subjects of attributing your state of arousal to the most convenient explanation. This can cause you to feel attraction to someone you wouldn't otherwise find compelling, which can be problematic whether or not you're in a relationship already.

The easiest way to combat this problem is to consider why you're feeling aroused rather than automatically accepting the conclusion that pops into your head. We make a lot of mistakes because we assume what we think and feel is accurate without questioning, so challenge these assumptions to avoid stupid mistakes.