The strange allure of Emma Darwin’s debut novel, The Mathematics of Love, reflects its enigmatic title. If there’s anything numerical about our affections, it’s higher math than most of us can compute, like the formulas behind snowflakes or hurricanes, and a similar sort of complexity makes this story just as fascinating. . . If you’re in a book club torn between lovers of 19th century and modern fiction, The Mathematics of Love may be just the thing to square the circle. The bilingual dexterity of this novel is one of its several triumphs as Darwin alternates between the murky moral chaos of the 1970s and the rigid formality of the genteel class in the early 19th century. Anna and Fairhurst, living in the same space though separated by time and unimaginable social changes, are equally haunting characters, the parallels between their lives tantalizing and evocative... [T]he two stories that Darwin tells here add up to something hauntingly beautiful.” - Washington Post Book World Imagine that the husband does something that is a little bit positive: He could agree with her last point, or inject a little humor into their conversation. This action will have a small positive impact on the wife and make her more likely to respond with something positive, too… [But] if the husband is a little bit negative — like interrupting her while she is speaking — he will have a fixed and negative impact on his partner. It’s worth noting that the magnitude of this negative influence is bigger than the equivalent positive jump if he’s just a tiny bit positive. Gottman and his team deliberately built in this asymmetry after observing it in couples in their study. Gottman, trained as a mathematician, has been influenced by the field of psycho-physiology, which is concerned with "the study of the body and the face and voice and emotion in relationships, and just try to understand the naturalistic development of relationships. How do people respond emotionally to one another?" He's made his own contribution to this field of emotion with his concept of "met-emotion," or "how people feel about feelings, what their history is with specific emotions like pride, respect or disrespect, love, fear, anger, sadness". One thing we know from Peggy Sanday's work on male domination of women and women's power, in her classic study of 186 hunting-gathering cultures is that when men are involved in the care of babies, not just children but babies, that culture doesn't make war. I think that's what we're seeing now. We're seeing the possibility of an end to war, where fathers are going to be saying, "not my kid. My kid's not going to that war. I am not going to let that happen. My kid isn't dying for that cause, no way. I am going to change the values of this country. If I have to, I'm getting out of here, I'm getting out of this country with my kid alive, I refuse to have my kid go to that war and die for nothing." When fathers are involved in the care of babies everything changes. That's what I think we're going to see, so I'm very excited, very optimistic. I want to write a book called "We fathers will now end war." Just a dream, maybe, but, as John Lennon said, I'm not the only one. A scientific approach to helping this happen is really very powerful, because the right information makes a big change.

That was what really fascinated me: observing people and trying to see what you could learn from a much more objective analysis. I've been influenced tremendously by my friend Paul Ekman's work Looking at Faces, which started with Charles Darwin's and Sylvan Tomkin's work, looking at the universality of how emotions get expressed, by Harry Harlow and John Bowlby's work in how normal dependency is in relationships. These views presented a new alternative to behaviorism and also to psychoanalysis.The Mathematics of Love is a daring debut novel that forces the reader to confront both the horrors of history and the destructiveness of misplaced passion. But its overriding theme is deliverance, as the two main characters face their troubled pasts and are freed from the ghosts that have haunted them… Emma Darwin's prose is golden and convincing. This book is an addictive, engaging foray into historical fiction that leaves the reader believing in the art of perspective and the redemptive power of love.” - Daily Express And here is the crucial finding — T- is the point known as a negativity threshold, at which the husband’s negative effect becomes so great that it renders the wife unwilling to diffuse the situation with positivity and she instead responds with more negativity. This is how the negativity spirals are set off. But the most revelatory part is what this suggests about the myth of compromise. The Mathematics of Love by Dr Hannah Fry of University College London, claims that finding the one isn't chemically-driven, biologically-motivated or even astrologically-determined. No it's a numbers game Daily Telegraph

Similar to Ian McEwan's Atonement in its compelling, literary blend of war history and romantic relationships... Darwin will be an author to watch.” - Library Journal Two barrels accounted for two rabbits and I sent the dogs to retrieve them. Following at my leisure, I was surprised to see them swerve away from their task towards the hedge. Then Titus raised his head and set to barking. A bravura and compelling feat of storytelling, enlivened by convincing detail and voices, as well as by serious reflection on the nature of memory, history and reportage.” - Publishing NewsShe said something very beautiful for the introduction "My great hope is that a little bit of insight into the mathematics of love might just inspire you to have a little bit more love for mathematics."

We find that there are differences between men and women and the way you to study these differences is independent of sexual orientation. You have to study gay and Lesbian couples who are committed to each other as well as heterosexual couples who are committed to each other, and try and match things as much as you can, like how long they've been together, and the quality of their relationship. And we've done that, and we find that there are two gender differences that really hold up.

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So there are all these small but reliable differences, and I think they have big implications for what you do in relationships. Now it's women who matter here, because we find that 80 percent of the time women are the ones in our culture who raise issues, and they raise them harshly in an unhappy relationship and more gently in a happy relationship. I've been working on a couple of puzzles right now. One is trying to understand couple violence, and how violence occurs between two people who supposedly love each other, and have a contract to nurture and protect one another, and to support one another's dreams in a real and meaningful way. Violence occurs so frequently in relationships in this country. Estimates by Leonard are that 36 percent of newlyweds in the United States have had a violent fight before they get married. How does violence happen in an ordinary relationship? And is all violence the same? At what point can you do something about it; is there a point of no return, where you can't do anything about it? And it must be very ordinary, and so there must be a pattern to it that's understandable.

As any mathematically minded person will tell you, it’s a fine balance between having the patience to wait for the right person and the foresight to cash in before all the good ones are taken.Every relationship will have conflict, but most psychologists now agree that the way couples argue can differ substantially, and can work as a useful predictor of longer-term happiness within a couple. Once again, like Head Start, it looks like families are changing in a major way, in terms of social class, from the bottom up. And the government is thinking that when these scientifically based programs will teach social skills to lower-income couples, couples on welfare, that they'll learn and they'll be better. They'll learn from what the middle class is doing. But I think the major learning's going to come the other way because many of the couples we have worked with who have been through a history of slavery, forcible breakups of families by slaveholders, bad schooling, racism, poverty, unequal employment opportunities, bad parenting, criminals as their only successful role models, incarceration, drug addiction, and alcoholism, and violence, and some of these couples are still together. Many of these people who have triumphed despite it all are amazingly articulate when my wife talks to them, and helps them to reveal their highly articulate wisdom. We are seeing a new kind of commitment on the part of men, and on the part of women supporting the men, and who are staying with them in spite of incarceration and addiction. It's breathtaking, because it's a real existential change. It is 1819 and Stephen Fairhurst wants only to forget the horrors of Waterloo and remember the great and secret love he lost. But, despite his friendship with the clever Lucy Durward, he cannot tell her about the darkness in his past.