Living and Loving

February is love month.  We’ve been hearing this since we have been old enough to hear anything at all.  The consumer products juggernaut that fills all our communications with advertisements, sometimes now flowing like torrents from “influencers,” takes up the “love” theme at the beginning of the year and continues relentlessly until St. Patrick’s Day.

Even those pushing products that seem far removed from romance jump onto the love-promotion freight train.  Nothing says “love” quite like a new furnace or set of house gutters.

For all its importance in our lives (because without it, after all, most of us wouldn’t even be here) designing to encourage people to fall in love isn’t much researched.  Maybe this is an area where environmental psychologists are still focused on collecting field data.

For most of us, vision is our dominant sense, it is the main channel through which we collect information about the world around us and is the most direct route to our emotional core.

Scientists have studied—vigorously in most cases—how what other people look like influences how good a potential partner someone we see is likely to be.  We can be put off by things such as dramatic facial asymmetry, for example, or anything else that might indicate that a potential partner is not all they might be, genes-wise.

Researchers have learned that potential partners viewed in front of red surfaces, say a wall painted red, are viewed as more attractive than when seen in front of other colours.  Attractiveness seems like a pre-requisite for any positive next steps (and people can have surprisingly different and interesting interpretations of the word “attractive” and “positive,” but that’s best left for another article), so adding a red backdrop to all sorts of places, from bars to bedrooms, seems like it could often be time well spent.

The identified link between red and perceived attractiveness isn’t really surprising when you consider that people feel that others they see in spaces featuring warm colours are indeed warmer people than anyone in a cool-colour dominant space (although people seem and feel more powerful in cool colour dominant spaces than ones with lots of warm colours).  This research encourages the use of warm colours in spaces where you would entertain others, whether that’s a snug or a boudoir.

Many a movie romantic scene, and we all know they’re always replications of real-life experiences, feature candle light.

Even though the cliché of “romantic candlelight” seems so overdone as to nauseating, in this case those powerful drivers of our society, the cliché-developers, are onto something that science can stand behind.  Our socializing with others is more pleasant and more relaxed when we are in relatively warm and dim light, which is exactly what candlelight is.  Need to do your taxes or brain surgery?  Turn up the lights and screw in the cool light bulbs to concentrate and do hard mental work.  It’s unlikely that’ll be top-of-mind with many on Valentine’s Day, however.