Applying science to love

The Weather Girls harmonize, "It's rainin' men ... It's rainin' men / every specimen / tall blonde dark and lean / rough and tough and strong and mean," in one of the last great anthems of the Disco Era. The lyrics lead me to believe that one of the girls must have experienced what I like to call The Pack Phenomenon (TPP). She probably went for months, perhaps even years, without a man in sight - not a single prospect - and trapped in a veritable dating desert.

One day, she fell in love, and the herd instinct took over. Suddenly, in the middle of her Sahara, "It's rainin' men." My TPP theory, arrived at by carefully conducted, completely unscientific research, is that men are highly evolved pack animals. They are capable of smelling female desperation from 14,000 miles away, but able to deftly perceive the scent of contentedness from a worldwide radius.

Therefore, when a woman falls in love, she becomes the irresistible target of the entire bunch. Immediately, her phone starts ringing. There's the 3 a.m. call from her ex-boyfriend, the call from the crush she's had for two years, and, invariably, calls from every guy who has ever asked for her number. From near and far, they come out of the woodwork. I know TPP happens; I have both observed and experienced it.

However, my largest question remains unanswered. How does the word get out? Smoke signals? My favorite hypothesis is that being in love causes a supersonic SOS sign (She's nOt Single) visible to former and would-be suitors. My postulation explains the phone calls, but becomes problematic when other factors are considered: campus catcalls, random run-ins with gorgeous hunks, and truck drivers' abject admiration, to name a few.

I concluded there must be something more that makes a woman in love glow like a Lite Brite in a dark closet: the Boyfriend Brilliance Effect (BBE). According to my rationale, the BBE generates luminescent confidence. This confident glow is what compels previously passive men to action; it catalyzes The Pack Phenomenon. (Disclaimer: I do not have any data regarding reversal of gender roles, but I think we can safely assume the inverse is also true). 

Attempting to bend my theories into logical analysis, I looked to the business school. Supply and demand had a lot going for it, but relationships are difficult to compare to commodities. I was sadly disappointed with probability and statistics: Apparently my perceived cause/effect is labeled an unrelated correlation. Biology explained physical attraction, but defining the element that turns a dowdy dame into a glamour girl still eluded me. Frustrated, I discarded intelligent investigation and pondered the million-dollar idea of bottling the Boyfriend Brilliance Effect - sort of a man-rain dance in pill form. Utterly impossible ... or was it?

I recognized in my hurry to analyze, I had forgotten to even consider psychology's placebo effect! In case you aren't familiar with it, the placebo effect occurs when you take a pill believing it to be effective when, in fact, it is simply a sugar pill. Research (the real, scientific kind) shows that the consequences of simply believing in a treatment are profound. It might be impossible to bottle the intangible effects of being in love, but believing that you exude a high level of glowing confidence and self-contentment - despite current relational status - could quite possibly have the same end result (TPP), no boyfriend required. So dust off your sense of self-reliant spunk and see what the universe sends your way. Let it rain!

Rebecca Miller is a senior in psychology. She can be reached for comment at miller.2791@osu.edu.