Tagged: Love

A new study from the University of Chicago shows that couples who meet via online dating sites tend to have better relationships than couples who meet for the first time in person. Here to tell us more about these findings is Ingrid Wickelgren, editor with Scientific American MIND.  She wrote the article, “Does Finding Your Spouse Online Lead to a Stronger Marriage?”

At its most transparent, Valentine’s Day is a holiday built for consumption. That may sound like a bit of a buzz kill, but there is loads of research activity connecting our romantic ideals and more base human motivations to our decisions to spend and save…mostly spend. Joining us, is Dr. Marina Adshade who teaches Economics at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver. She hit a nerve there in 2008 when she launched an undergraduate course called Economics of Sex and Love. It was an instant hit among students, and led to the launch of the Dollars and Sex blog and now, a book of the same title. It uses market research and economic analysis on matters of the heart and other anatomical bits.

Dear Prudence (or Prudie as she is known by her fans) has the answers to all manner of relationship issues, handling delicate matters with aplomb, sensitivity, and humor. Emily Yoffe, a.k.a. Prudence, writes the Dear Prudence column for Slate and joins us to offer some last minute advice on Valentine’s Day.

When we first saw Robert Ito's Pacific Standard piece on folks who've fallen in love with their robots, we were all....huh? So of course, we booked him on the show. You can listen to that interview here:

But all that talk about human-robot love got us thinking...if a robot is the love of your life, how do you show it? Here are some ideas we dug up:

1) Buy him a snazzy costume!

Remember how people used to joke about online dating? What once was an easy target for digs about desperate singles and social pariahs is now a success story for oodles of couples and dozens of highly profitable dating services.  Among the unabashed masses of online daters these days is an unlikely demographic – the animal kingdom. Reyhan Harmancy is a staffer at Buzzfeed, where she wrote about how zoos use online dating methods to profile and pair species together.