Writing Heterosexual Characters/Romance

I'll look at the cites in my textbook when I get home. In the meantime you could google around though.

 

Why do I feel like this topic is none too genuine?

 

Kay, David buss 1989, males studied in 37 countries preferred youthful female characteristics that signify reproductive capacity. Norman li 2002 for females. Lippa 2007. Ugh I'm tired, can give full cites later. 12 hours of school tomorrow uggggh

 

I'm not trying to get into the middle of this argument, but I do want to point out that just because the correlation is statistically significant doesn't mean that the r^2 has to be high. I wouldn't be surprised that those correlations are statistically significant, but I would be shocked if the r^2 is higher than .4. (R^2 signifies what portion of the recorded differences among the population can be attributed to the tested variable.) If the r^2 is .4, that means only 40% of the differences among men's selection of mates can be attributed to whether the mate is youthful. If that is the case, factors other than youthfulness would still represent a majority of what goes into the mate selection process.

 

OK, so men - on average - like hot chicks. Women - on average - like rich men. Check. Oh, wait a minute, how randomised was the study? The OKCupid study was almost certainly self-selected by OKCupid members - so that reduces it to single persons looking to hook up (or, worse, people in a relationship but looking for a bit on the side), totally eliminating people in a relationship. And if you're writing about a couple in a relationship, it's those in a relationship you want to know about.

I don't know whether the studies you cited were properly randomised; but even if a properly-randomised study supported the findings above, are you writing an average story about an average guy and an average gal? Because, if you do, it'll probably get the average response from a publisher - rejection.

 

While that's true, I don't think anyone was saying otherwise - just that the data suggested looks for men and wealth for women were important factors when choosing a mate.

Curious as to where you got the 0.4 figure - it seems a bit precise for just being pulled out of the air.

Also, I'm having a hard time telling if this thread is mocking that batshit 'men are dominant red tortoises from Mars' stuff in the other thread or the original 'how do I write a homosexual romance' question. If it's the latter, that's not really cool. The guy didn't have any experience, wanted to get it right and so asked about it. That's what this forum's for.

 

I don't think it's so much mocking the OP in that thread - they got a lot of helpful (hopefully), detailed, patient answers. I assumed it was more making fun of the direction that thread ended up veering towards, ie the insistence that writing gay characters will be intrinsically different from writing straight characters.

 

Umm... Okay. Moved to Lounge 'cause you guys are just having a laugh here.

If someone wants to seriously discuss how to depict attraction and romantic feelings in their characters, feel free to start a thread about it, but this started out as as some kind of satire/mockery, so it doesn't feel like it really belongs to Character Development.

If you guys want to have a laugh, fine, but please keep it light. It can actually come off quite mean to new members, so I'd encourage a little more sensitivity here.

 

I honestly wouldn't be shocked if the OK Cupid numbers turned out to be at least partially supported by real research. But obviously that wouldn't be useful for writing a character, because we're not writing averages or amalgams.

In terms of why I wouldn't be that shocked, I'd say there's a strong social pressure in both directions. Women are paid less than men, and women are usually the ones most responsible for the welfare of any children. So the group less likely to have the resources to do a job is the group in charge of the job. Wanting to find a man who has the resources to help out seems like a natural response. It's the less pay and most responsible parts that don't seem 'natural' to me, if we're looking at this from a nature/nurture perspective. So, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if women as a group have responded to social pressure by adapting their expectations in a mate - but this doesn't mean women as a group are genetically programmed to do this.

In terms of wanting a more attractive mate? Well, both genders apparently wanted more attractive partners, and that certainly isn't surprising, either. We're attracted to attractive people, pretty much by definition. Women not being as susceptible to physical attraction may tie in to the societal pressures and the resulting need to find a rich man.

Again, though, we need to write individuals, not amalgams. My WIP actually involves a woman who's being courted by a very wealthy man, and she's happy to have a fling with him but resists his attempts to turn it into something more because he's so wealthy. She doesn't want to be in an unequal relationship like that, doesn't want the power imbalance, etc. I'm pretty sure they'll work it out by the end of the book (they'd damn well better, or I've wasted a few months of writing!) but she's making me work for it.

 

That .4 figure was random based on an upper limit on the potential r^2 of a single variable in determining complicated social/biological issues. I'm not sure what you mean by it seems too precise. Are you implying something?

I doubt that youthfulness even had a r^2 of .4. My point was that it's very rare for a single variable to have a high r^2 in complicated social/biological issues such as selecting a mate.

My response was in regards to:

saying it can be statistically significant AND it can be true that most people don't select a mate based on maximizing youthfulness. For writing, it can be an important factor if one wants it to be. But it doesn't have to be, nor does the research (ostensibly) suggest otherwise. The process is extremely complicated, and one shouldn't feel obligated to have youthfulness as a main factor even if they want to be realistic.

 

Ben414, it seems like you have some pretty specialized knowledge on research methods that not all of us have. What is r^2?

 

I thought you might have read something about how much influence factors tend to have in this kind of sociological context, or possibly even in attraction specifically. I find people tend to give figures when they've got some data and just say something like 'it's probably not very high' when they're talking generally.

It's a measure of how closely the data matches to a regression line. It's pretty essential knowledge for understanding how to interpret the stats in any study.

Coefficient of Determination

Warning: link contains maths.

ETA: This link is better, since the whole point here is that we're dealing with more than one variable:

Coefficient of Multiple Correlation

Contains more maths.

 

<-- not good with maths. better at reading abstracts and conclusions. assaults to my intelligence may begin.

 

Math is the enemy, abstracts are our friends. Conclusions are our best friends!

 

Okay, I understand where you were coming from.

I can try to explain r^2 as best I can:

When you're trying to determine if a variable causes a change in another variable, you would perform a statistical test to determine if there is a correlation--if when you see a change in the first variable, do we see a change in the second variable? So for this example, you would look at their study of people choosing mates and you would record those two variables (who they chose and the youthfulness of who they chose) for each person in the study.

With this information, they would make a model that would predict what person they chose based solely on the youthfulness of the potential mate. This is where r^2 comes in. R^2 looks at how closely that predictive model fits the actual data. Let's say that predictive model lines up perfectly with the actual data. The r^2 would be 1 because 100% of the differences among the mate chosen can be attributed to the youthfulness of the mate--since our predictive model only considers the youthfulness and is able to 100% accurately determine the chosen mate. This means that 1 - r^2 is equal to the differences among the mates chosen that cannot be attributed to the youthfulness of the mate.

Unfortunately, real life generally cannot be broken down into one variable to predict complex social/biological issues. There are many variables that go into the decision making process. Although I haven't looked at the study, that's why I am sure that they recorded multiple variables to see how they are correlated with mate selection-- such as hair color, body type, religion, career, etc.

By incorporating multiple variables that may or may not have an effect on mate selection, they can try to isolate the youthfulness variable and avoid confounding variables. A confounding variable would be one that correlates with both of youthfulness and mate selection. An example would be the correlation between me praying to Lord Lemex and my headache feeling better. Let's say every time I pray to Lord Lemex, I also consume Tylenol. If I did a test, I would see a strong correlation between me praying to Lord Lemex and my headache feeling better, but the Tylenol is the actual reason my headache feels better. Incorporating multiple variables helps avoid those confounding variables and isolate the effect of the variable that you want to test.

Finally, I don't know if you're feeling this or not, but I want to make it clear I'm not trying to be antagonistic toward you. I haven't closely read all of this thread, so I'm not sure how much of this is still joking around.

 

Ah, but what if you conclude that you should always think the opposite of any conclusion?

EDIT: Please read this question in a wise rabbi's voice.

 

Am I missing some much needed context? Why is this worthy of shame? From what I can tell, it's just a tongue in cheek dig at the idea that writing a homosexual romance is significantly different to writing a heterosexual one (kind of in the same vein as people who are baffled by the idea of writing a female character). It seemed all jovial up to this point.

 

The correlation coefficient.

(Very) basically when R^2 = 1, the variable explains all the result.
When R^2 = 0 it explains nothing.

R^2 = 0.4 is meh for most things (in my limited experience).

 

Cities. I need cities.

 

This is one of my favourite examples, he wrote, replying to his own post. It's the ol' "correlation does not equal causation" chestnut.

Read: http://scienceblogs.com/commonknowledge/2009/04/01/mexican-lemons-prevent-highway/

 

*reads first few replies*
Oh thank god you're not serious. These days, it's hard to tell. Tumblr has screwed everything up.

 

I was joking and serious, like die antwoord.

 

That's the point. It's a joke on the other thread. And I don't see how making fun of people, jovial or otherwise, is effective or necessary.

 

It's much more effective to scold people. A good scolding always makes a difference.

 

I'm sure the OP got the point in the original four pages of scolding. An entire thread dedicated to mocking him seems like overkill to me.