“People have a fundamental motivation to improve the self and add to who they are as a person,” Dr. Lewandowski says. “If your partner is helping you become a better person, you become happier and more satisfied in the relationship.”

“Knowing something about the way you communicate attraction says something about challenges you might have had in your past dating life,” Hall said. “Hopefully, this awareness can help people avoid those mistakes and succeed in courtship.”

The five styles of flirting named: physical, traditional, polite, sincere and playful (all detailed in the article).

Internet daters are not losers: Contrary to the stereotype, there’s little evidence that internet dating is the last resort of social misfits or weirdos. In fact, quite the reverse. Internet daters are more likely to be sociable, have high self-esteem and be low in dating anxiety (Kim et al., 2009; Valkenburg, 2007). These studies found no evidence that people use online dating because they can’t hack it face-to-face. It’s just one more way to meet new people.

Nobody likes unpleasant surprises, but when Allison Brooke Eastman’s fiancé found out four months ago just how high her student loan debt was, he had a particularly strong reaction: he broke off the engagement within three days…

Diane Johnson looks dating and marriage in a NYRB review.

It used to be that on a date, the boy would pay for a Pepsi and the movie; that was it. Lori Gottlieb, in Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, estimates the cost to today’s woman of four months of dating, counting therapy afterward when it doesn’t work out, to be $3,600: online dating service, clothes, including expensive underwear, haircut, hair color, cosmetics, bikini wax, entertaining him, and gifts. Things have changed.

Move over, Match.com. This is the next generation of online dating. Unlike traditional dating sites where members spend hours on computers writing autobiographies and scrutinizing photographs, a raft of newfangled dating tools are striving to better bridge the gap between online and real-world romance.

Brooding Russians: Less distressed than Americans (ScienceDaily)

Bad Breath Troubles? (WebMD)

The Big Lies People Tell In Online Dating (OKCupid)

The researchers found that volunteers who found it easy to associate their partner with bad things and difficult to associate the partner with good things were more likely to separate over the next year.

(Image courtesy of Durham University)

A pair of studies looks at the look of love:

First: Attitudes Towards Sexual Relationships Can Be Judged From Photos Of Your Face

And in another:

Volunteers looked at faces with exaggerated or reduced male or female features; the faces had been morphed to look either more or less masculine or feminine. As the faces flashed on a computer screen, the volunteer was supposed to hit a key as quickly as possible to indicate whether the face was looking at them or away from them. Both women and men could do that more quickly when the face had exaggerated sexual characteristics.

I think it’s just a ploy, I received the same email too and my matches don’t seem to have changed. Probably just a way to draw people back in that haven’t been signing in as often.