Love Factually: 10 Proven Steps from I Wish to I Do

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR

Love Factually: 10 Proven Steps from I Wish to I Do

Finally we have a research-based guide for how to sensibly select a partner. A must read for all those of us seeking a lasting love.

—Dr. John Gottman, author of The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work

"Love Factually is a great book. It’s anchored in solid science. It brings key principles to life with gripping real-life mating stories. And importantly, it brims with practical advice in the form of concrete actions everyone can take to improve their love lives. If you plan to read one book to improve your mating life, this is the one to read."

—David M. Buss, Ph.D., author of The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

"Love Factually is a real treat: a smart, funny page-turner, full of heart and based on the best science. If you’re at any stage of the dating process, you’ll get the clear, doable steps you’ve needed all along to find and keep the right life partner. And if you’re already happily wed, you’ll be entertained by all the sage advice you can pass on to others. I was hooked from the first chapter, and I’m married and know the research inside out!"

—Dr. Linda J. Waite, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, and author of The Case for Marriage

"This book is a ray of hope in a world of cynicism. Even better, it’s hope founded on fact. In my twenty-plus years writing about and helping couples find and keep good partnerships, I’ve seen an increase in fear, a major roadblock to love. Readers of this book will learn why holding onto hope is realistic, as well as how to move through their fears, create lasting love, and feel better about themselves in the process. Love Factually is a helping, healing journey."

—Susan Page, author of If I’m So Wonderful, Why am I Still Single?

"If you are going to read any book about love, make it Love Factually. Duana Welch has written an inspiring, perceptive, truthful analysis about love, which will undoubtedly lead you to finding a better relationship, and hopefully what you are ultimately searching for."

—Jeannie Assimos, Sr. Director, eHarmony

"If you want to transform your dating life into an effective search that significantly increases your odds of meeting the right person, Love Factually is a must read. Dr. Duana Welch is like having a kind, gentle, funny, and firm love guide/guru beside you as you traverse the rocky trail of being able to fully embrace a healthy, deeply fulfilling, satisfying and enriching relationship. I recommend this book to my clients, and to men and women who are serious about investing in themselves in order to become, and attract, the person they want and deserve."

—Carrie Lynne Pietig, LPC-S, using Gottman Method Couples Therapy in private practice

"Love Factually is like having Malcolm Gladwell and Brené Brown gene-splice with Dear Abby and The Rules. The Steps here are fantastic, and it’s a great, fun read we highly recommend!"

—Ellen Fein & Sherrie Schneider, authors of The Rules, All the Rules, and Not Your Mother’s Rules

"Love Factually is a sure bestseller you won’t be able to put down until you’ve read it cover-to-cover. Duana Welch’s wise counsel, warm voice, and fact-based approach ensure that men and women alike will never again have to suffer the stomach-churning pain of yet another relationship gone wrong. Love Factually offers encouragement, hope, and well considered, proven answers for all who want to know how to find and sustain a loving and secure relationship."

—Derek Collinson, HowDoIDate.com

LOVE FACTUALLY

Copyright © 2022 by Duana Welch, PhD

All rights reserved. With the exception of writers who quote short passages in their reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced, shared, quoted, distributed, sold, or in any manner disseminated without the author’s express written permission.

Published by LoveScience Media

Eugene, Oregon, USA

www.LoveScienceMedia.com

Revised and updated edition, 2022

Print ISBN: 978-0-9863332-4-8

Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9863332-5-5

Audiobook ISBN: 978-0-9863332-6-2

Book design and production by Domini Dragoone

Cover images: Samarttiw/123rf, Devixart/Shutterstock

Love Factually lettering by Erin Tyler

Author photo by Audrey Alberthal

Disclaimer

Dr. Welch is not a therapist, but a social scientist who applies relationship research to people’s questions about their intimate lives. The opinions expressed are hers, based on her interpretation of the existing relationship research and her observations. Duana C. Welch and LoveScience Media shall be held harmless and are not liable for the results of using the advice in this book; science indicates likely odds, but even the most rigorous research cannot predict exactly what will happen in an individual person’s life. The reader is the only one who can decide whether the information in this book is a good fit for them, and so the reader is responsible for their own actions and decisions. Neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility or liability for actions and choices made by purchasers and readers of this book.

The stories, letters, comments, and examples in this book are real. However—except for the author and the scientists, authors, and sources identified by last name—others’ names and identifying details have been changed, and their quotes and letters have been edited, to protect their privacy and dignity.

If you want to communicate with Duana, email her at Duana@LoveScienceMedia.com. As with content at her blog, your letter may be published, either on-site at LoveScienceMedia.com, and/or in a future book. If your letter is chosen, your name will be changed, your other identifying information will be removed and/or changed, and prior to publication the letter may be edited for brevity and to maintain your anonymity.

Also by Duana Welch

Love Factually for Single Parents [& Those Dating Them]

Dedication

For all who want love enough to pursue it patiently, persistently, and above all—factually.

Contents

Introduction: Not another learning experience!

Step 1 • Is Love More Than Luck?

Abandon myths that hold you back

Step 2 • Your Match in the Mirror:

Pinpoint your traits for a mate

Step 3 • Good Fences Make Great Lovers:

Love yourself into a great relationship

Step 4 • Head Games:

Master the mating mind

Step 5 • There’s Never Been a Perfume Called Desperation:

Make yourself high-status

Step 6 • Across a Crowded (Chat) Room:

Seek where you will find

Step 7 • Finally, You Meet:

Don’t suck at dating

Step 8 • Breaking Up Without Breaking Down:

Flunk wrong relationships to ace The One

Step 9 • Getting To I Do:

Triumph at Commitment 911

Step 10 • Progress, Not Perfection:

Persist, be hopeful, be brave!

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

About the Author

Introduction

Not Another Learning Experience!

Perhaps you’ve seen the bumper sticker: Oh no, not another %#*@ learning experience. And maybe, like me, you’ve lived it.

In 1997, I was closing in on a doctorate in psychology. My specialty wasn’t relationships, but memory. If you were worried about it, wanted to know what changes are and aren’t normal with age, wondered what causes memory decline, or needed to regain what you’d lost, I was your woman.

My unofficial occupation—what I spent at least as much time on as research—was finding Mr. Right. Like some of you, I knew unreservedly that I wanted one love o’ my life, and I figured it was worth investing considerable time and effort. I was working hard. But I was not working smart.

In fact, I was succeeding in my career while failing (flailing?) at love. I had an emotional sensation of groping around in a dark room, hoping I’d latch onto the right relationship and keep it. Somehow. Maybe?

One night, after a devastating breakup that Little Debbies, chocolate, and the charity of friends could not console, I was standing in a bookstore nursing a broken heart—because as a nerd, I go to bookstores when I’m feeling heartbroken—and I had The Moment: the epiphany that transformed the way I lived my love life, and led me to verifiable, objective answers to all my questions.

Questions like:

❤ Is finding love just luck? And even if I find it, can I hold onto it?

❤ Am I asking for too much—being too unrealistic in my standards? Or are my standards too low?

❤ Where are the best places to meet The One? Or is he more likely to show up if I just stop looking?

❤ How can I find out what I need to know about someone before getting too involved?

❤ Why are the guys I’m not into, into me, and the guys I’m into, aren’t? Am I doing something to attract men I don’t want, and repel men I desire?

❤ How long should I keep dating around once I’ve met someone I like?

❤ How soon is too soon for sex?

❤ How can I tell it’s time to give a relationship the heave-ho? And if I have to dump someone, what are the two simple phrases that will make breaking up not quite so hard to do?

❤ If I’m the dump-ee, how can I heal my own broken heart?

❤ How can I get a stagnating relationship to move off dead-center and toward commitment?

❤ What is the meaning of life?

Okay, the last one is beyond the scope of this book. But The Moment really did lead to answers to the other ones.

The Pain That Led To Gain

We’ll get back to The Moment, but first we’ve got to backtrack to the mistakes and pain that led me there. Like other people, when things go easily, I don’t question them too much. But when there’s a lot of pain, I start wanting to prevent more.

And like other people, I made the same mistakes, repeatedly. In my case, some huge problems were knowing who to date, who to trust, how fast to get involved, and when to cut and run. My standards were like a bad play on the Three Bears story; I didn’t know whether they were too low, unreasonably high, or just right, and everywhere I turned—friends, family, therapy, books, pop culture—seemed to have a different answer.

So I gave the wrong men too many chances, discounting my own experience and seeing things so much through their eyes that I forgot to use my own. Because what if I let this one go, and nobody better was out there?

I remember one man I dated who seemed to have it all. He was funny, well-educated, steady, employed, wealthy, smart, handsome, tall, interesting, and came from a famous family. He was honest and represented himself exactly as he was. At core, he was an excellent human being; I respected him mightily.

But he couldn’t tell me anything more intimate than what I might reveal to my dentist. He loved me as much as he could love, and told me as much as he could tell, but it wasn’t enough for me. I thought I was an officially horrible person for feeling that way, but that’s how I felt.

We went on a vacation together and I called my friends back home just to have someone to talk to. I spent several months debating with myself whether I should hang in there. Was it an okay standard to want emotional intimacy, I wondered? Ultimately, I left because I was less lonely alone!

I also had a habit of letting myself get too involved with men I didn’t know enough about—including one who said he was a lawyer when actually, he was a paralegal. It turned out he was $90,000 in debt, had no plan to pay it down, and wanted ownership of half my house. He didn’t seem to have any friends, but he did have a sister who dropped broad hints that I would find myself shackled to an impoverished man-child.

I began having panic attacks, including one that happened during a dream in which I heard my own voice say: You CANNOT and MUST NOT marry this man! I guess my right-brain intuitive function got tired of hinting around and finally got the conscious left hemisphere to club me over the head. Fortunately, I heeded that directive, broke up with him that very afternoon, and felt instant calm.

Another pattern I had was being high-status as soon as I lost interest in a man. Strangely, I received marriage proposals—from men I didn’t want to marry.

For example, an ex-boyfriend happened to call just as I was getting serious with someone else. We hadn’t dated one another in over half a year, and I’d avoided him so I could move on with my life. At this point, though, I was over our breakup, so his call was surprising but welcome. He told me about his new girlfriend in glowing terms, which I was fine with. So when he asked me how I was doing, I didn’t think there would be any harm in revealing how happy I was in my own love life. I kid you not, the next words out of his mouth were, Will you marry me? He was dead serious; had a date picked, repeated the offer several times, etc. My next thought was something along the lines of What The Hell, but more strongly worded. Where did this come from?!

Yet I didn’t make the connection between my behavior and the outcomes; each time, I thought there was something wrong with them.

On the flip side, I habitually tried courting men I wanted—calling them and making them meals and being available whenever and wherever, and slathering on the attention. I mean, that kind of behavior won me over, right? So it should work with them. Nope.

Instead, I lost chances with several men who could have been The Man. The worst heartbreak was Evan (not his real name—except for me and those referenced by first and last name, the innocent/guilty in this book are protected by pseudonyms and random alterations of identifying details.). He was my handsome, whip-smart literature professor boyfriend, who initially pursued me with white-hot ardor. He said he loved me, he wanted to introduce me to his mom, and he’d never met anyone so perfect for him; he dangled the idea of marriage.

But very soon in the relationship, I started calling to ask when I could see him again, and whether he’d like to spend an evening with my mom, my little boy, and me? His passion quickly cooled and his attitude morphed from discussing a future to asking whether this needs to go anywhere. I pulled the plug, but only because the relationship had already crossed to the Other Side.

Oh, it hurt. A lot.

It seemed like my friends were right: Relationships were all about luck. And I just wasn’t lucky.

Finally, The Moment

Or was that it? There in that bookstore, I wondered: Why am I stumbling around in this most important area of my life when I am so good at, if not so humble about, my job? Hasn’t some other nerd already studied this? Why don’t I know about it, if they have?

I was and am in the social sciences. And those sciences—psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc.—well, they’re like other sciences because they apply the same methods, but they use those methods to study social things. Might they have reality-based information about finding and keeping love?

Because let’s face it, my own biased brain, my friends’ biased brains, and others’ biased brains were…biased. The human brain is not logical. It creates beliefs and then seeks to confirm them, instead of doing the rational thing of collecting data and then analyzing it; that’s just how it works.¹ So all of us, no matter how smart we are, or how well-educated, or how well-intentioned, wind up believing stuff that isn’t true. Then, we act on it and mess up our lives.

Science is the only route to objectivity. Was anything objective known about love? And if so, would it help me?

Yes. And yes.

Why This Book?

The book you are reading presents all the information I needed in 1997, and 1998, and…well, every year up until I researched what’s in this book and began applying it first to my own life, and then with clients. It is the guide I needed and didn’t have. Although I have enjoyed numerous other relationship books, they tend to focus on opinion-based advice, or to present science on its own without showing how to use the information.

None of them combine research with practice to give you the full story—from before you meet until you fully commit. And even though I spent over a decade as the author of LoveScience, a relationship blog that gives advice from a social science perspective, it’s too scattered for the whole point-by-point picture.²

There might’ve been a time when I would have feared being turned off by a scientific approach to love. But just as understanding digestion hasn’t put me off eating, knowing factual information about human mating and relating hasn’t ruined romance for me. On the contrary—knowing how love works has paved my and my clients’ paths to happiness, and has drastically reduced our pain.

This book is the one I yearned for, giving practical advice in a step-by-step, easy-to-use way that is firmly rooted in science without being a science book. This is a love book that uses science. It represents my best efforts to do something I haven’t found elsewhere: give you verified tools you need to find and keep the love of your life.

What’s New In This Edition?

Science does not sit still! Relationship scientists are constantly asking new questions, learning new stuff, and testing to see whether the stuff they found out before still holds true.

I’m always learning, too. Since this book’s first edition in 2015, I’ve continued reviewing the science and working with clients all over the world, and you’re getting the benefit of that in this new edition.

The good news? Everything in the first edition still holds true. The newer science only serves to underscore that!

But there’s more. Just as science is constantly on the move, dating is changing. New issues have arisen or intensified—and this edition addresses those.

For example, in 2015, dating apps were new, Zoom didn’t exist, and phone calls were still a thing (gasp!). Meeting potential mates in person was still the most common way to start a relationship; today, depending on your age and sexual orientation, technology is becoming the norm.³ Public health became a giant concern: A global pandemic occurred, and the data indicate we will have others. Politics have become more polarized, with fewer people willing to date outside of their views.

None of this has changed human nature or the solid science that has revealed it over the decades. But all of this has changed dating.

This updated book addresses those issues and questions like:

❤ What can you do to vet potential partners for long-term potential, when most apps don’t give you more to go on than photos and a few catchphrases?

❤ What’s the most up-to-date info on finding love online or on-app—from which app or site to choose, to what belongs in your profile, to when to exchange numbers?

❤ What can you do if someone ghosts you, or ices you, or whatever new term comes up for general misbehavior and cold-hearted ugliness?

❤ Technology has shifted dating more and more toward appearance, and less and less toward the stuff that really makes people happy. How can you stand out if you’re not in the top of the top when it comes to looks?

❤ Is texting preventing relationships that could have succeeded? And if so, what can you do instead?

❤ Are your political views hindering your search? Or can they be helpful?

❤ And much as I hope this one quickly becomes irrelevant: How can you leverage the pandemic or any other public risk to find love even more easily?

All this and more awaits!

Who Are You?

Believe it or not, you’ve been on my mind since 1998, the first time someone asked me to write this book. Some people believe women are the only ones who read about relationship advice, but I’ve seen otherwise: A third of my readers and clients are men. Many are LGBTQ+. Most relationship science focuses on heterosexual and cisgender people—but where research exists to point out distinctions among the experience of LGBTQ+ people, it’s included. Regardless of your gender or orientation, you are welcome here. As we’ll see in this book, pretty much everyone wants, needs, and deserves lasting love.

So I picture you as someone single or at some stage of dating or cohabiting, regardless of your other identities. By the end of this book, you’ll know a whole lot more about yourself and successful dating and relating.

You might be a longtime reader of my Love Factually book series. Or someone who just now heard of it. You might be a former college student of mine. Or a friend. Or a student who has become my friend. You might be a current or future client. Or a family member.

Whoever you are, I am passionate about helping you solve just one problem: for you to find and keep a love that makes your whole life better.

What’s In This Book? 10 proven steps to get you from I Wish to I Do:

In this book, we’re going to answer the thorny questions that keep people single and hurting—and find solutions to the common problems of preparing for love, finding the right partner for you, falling in love with them and having them fall in love with you, and making a joyful, total commitment.

Do you have ambivalence about love, or shame about seeking it? Are unexamined thought patterns blocking your success? In Step 1, we’ll examine why so many people are afraid they won’t find love—and then again, why they’re afraid they will. If you have hesitations, we’ll figure out where they’re coming from, and why we have to begin by acknowledging your uncertainty and the dating myths that are holding you back.

Step 2 is all about your standards. Are you too picky—or not picky enough? And how can you tell? How can you create more opportunity for real love, and stop dead-end relationships before they begin? And what two standards should be at the top of your list? Believe it or not, you can quickly use factual information to answer all this and more. Possibly the most important work I do with my clients, Step 2 is not to be missed.

Turns out, some things everyone told you are true: You can’t love another person more than you love yourself. And in a world that can seem shallow, it’s important to not only find the right person—but to be the right person. Does character count? You bet. And as you’ll see, odds are you can count on yours. Step 3 lays the groundwork for loving yourself more and setting boundaries on who you’ll let into your life.

Enough with being irresistible to partners we don’t want, and all-too-resistible to those we yearn for. How can you leverage the mating mind to attract the most desirable partner? What signals can you give to attract the gender you want, and which signals act as man- or woman-repellent? Steps 4 & 5 may be cringey at times, but they’re scientifically proven. They take you inside the games people play—what I call the human mating ritual—and show why there is and always has been a battle of the sexes. You’ll learn specifically how and why to shake a tail feather so the gender you desire picks you—all while bolstering your status and self-worth.

By Steps 6 & 7, you’re ready to meet Mr. or Ms. Right. But where? Research offers at least four proven places. Have you tried them all? How does technology fit into this, and how can you use it to your advantage? And once you’ve met a Mr. or Ms. Possible, what are seven ways to leave them wanting more? Thorniest of all, most of us have secrets, things it’s hard to tell or admit. But if they will impact the relationship, eventually we’ve got to come out with it. When’s the best time, and what’s the best way to deal with these monsters under the bed?

Step 8, breaking up, is infamously hard to do. But you can’t say Yes to the right one if you’re stuck with the wrong one—or can you? What are five ways you can tell you’re with Mr. or Ms. Almost-But-Not-Quite—and what can you do if you’re still unsure after that? Can you still be friends? And when moving on is called for, what’s the one phrase (okay, two) you can use to set yourself free—as quickly as possible for you, and as painlessly as possible for them?

Men and women sometimes have different views on the decision to commit, and Step 9 not only tells why, but how to respond. What if you’ve found The One, and he’s not proposing? Should you move in to test the waters? Is marriage just a piece of paper—or an altogether different thing than cohabitation? If you’re already living together, how can you find out whether your partner ever wants to get to I Do? Ultimatums are ugly, but should you issue one? This step is commitment 911.

Finally, in Step 10, we discuss the three most important dating strategies of all: Persistence, persistence, and persistence. By the time you reach this stage, you know everything you need to for finding and keeping The One. But you’ll make mistakes anyway, and maybe get tired or lose heart. How can you aim for progress, not perfection—and heal your own broken heart to love again if you’re still reeling from a breakup?

Turns out, science knows a lot about moving from I Wish to I Do. And although I’d like to spare you the bumper-sticker reality, reading