Fights about money aren't uncommon in marriage and according to at least one survey, 70% of couples argue over financial matters from time to time.

If you share a bank account with your significant other, that may add to the stress if you're not on the same page about how to manage it.

Joint bank accounts can create even more problems if the relationship doesn't work out.

Having been through a separation in the last year, I found out first hand how easy it is to get burned when you've got all your assets mixed in with your spouse's.

I've since sworn off joint accounts for good, thanks to some costly lessons I learned along the way.

If you share a checking or savings account with someone, here's what you need to know on the off chance that things go south.

Joint accounts don't offer individual protections.

When you open a joint account, whether it's with a spouse, parent or anyone else you both have an equal share in its ownership. Any assets that go into it belong to each of you, regardless of who actually deposits the money.

That also means, however, that either one of you can pull cash out or transfer it to a different account whenever you like.

My husband and I shared a joint checking account and a joint savings account. As the primary breadwinner, he was responsible for most of what went into those accounts and it was my job to make sure all the bills were paid.

When the marriage ended, he withdrew half the amount in our savings account and moved it to a different bank. Because the account had both our names on it, the bank didn't ask any questions and I didn't find out about it until after it the transaction was completed.

While that was a pretty rude awakening, the most frustrating part was that it could have been avoided by making a simple change to the terms of the account. If you request it, you can have a joint account set up so that both parties must provide their signature any time a withdrawal is made through a teller. Had I done that, I still would have agreed to split the account evenly but at least I wouldn't have been caught off-guard.

You're both on the hook if the account ends up in the negative.

Since you and the person you've opened a joint account with are both considered equal owners of the assets, it makes sense that you'd also be equally responsible for its liabilities.

If one person is making purchases or withdrawals and the account ends up in the negative, the bank is going to start piling on the overdraft fees. Even if you're no longer using the account, you still technically owe those fees as long as it's in your name.

Following our initial separation, my husband and I weren't able to close our joint checking account right away. During the transition, I opened new accounts at a different bank and began using them to pay my bills. Meanwhile, he continued to deposit just enough money into the old account to continue paying certain bills that had been set up as automatic drafts.

When he eventually closed the account, there was an automatic payment pending that was allowed to go through. That triggered more than $300 in overdraft fees and the bank was only concerned with getting the money, not who actually owed it. Fortunately, we had been banking with them for some time so they agreed to waive the fees, but that was the exception, rather than the rule.

If the bank had been less cooperative, we would have had to pay the fees or else run the risk of the account showing up on each of our ChexSystems reports. Once you get a negative mark on ChexSystems, it can be much harder to get a bank account. In that scenario, a second chance checking account might be your only option.

Debt collectors don't care whose money is in the account.

Sharing a bank account can backfire if one of you isn't keeping up with your financial obligations. For example, if your spouse runs up a big credit card bill and doesn't pay, the creditor can sue to recover what's owed. That means any bank accounts in their name can be attached, including joint accounts.

Even if you're not legally responsible for the debt, you could still lose out if your joint account is garnished following a lawsuit.

Both my husband and I each had debts in our names, but fortunately we didn't owe anything jointly other than our mortgage. It was a good thing too because one of his credit card accounts was close to being charged-off. If the creditor had decided to sue while the joint account was still open, a garnishment could have negatively affected my credit if the account had gotten pushed into overdraft.

Tip: Certain deposits, including child support payments, unemployment benefits and Social Security benefits are exempt from bank account garnishments.

Final word

Joint bank accounts do offer some advantages in terms of convenience and simplicity but there is a certain amount of risk that goes along with opening one. Evaluating the pros and cons beforehand can help you decide whether combining your accounts makes sense.

SEE ALSO: The bad money choices we make for the people we love could do a number on our own wealth

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As sprinter Oscar Pistorius, charged with murdering his girlfriend a year ago, takes the witness stand in self-defense, we're forced once again to do the impossible: separate truth from untruth.

Is he lying, as he describes shooting Reeva Steenkamp through a closed bathroom door? Or was he, as he says, legitimately frightened, and protecting her from an intruder?

To tell the truth, it's awful hard to catch a liar — or to even know if someone is telling the truth. The best estimate, based on hundreds of studies, is that people can spot a liar 54 percent of the time — a ratio that is perilously close to pure chance. But with lies being told every day — to abet financial skullduggery, everyday politics and of course everyday crime — the business of truth-telling ought to be booming.

After all, researchers say "Deception is a major aspect of social interaction; people admit to using it in 14 percent of emails, 27 percent of face-to-face interactions, and 37 percent of phone calls. 1

We're not worried about white lies, the grease of the gears of human relationships. We're worried about lies like the cascade of chicanery uttered by Bernie Madoff, the prince of Ponzi, who was convicted of a decades-long fraud that fried investors for an estimated $18 billion. We're worried about bigwigs like former president Bill Clinton, who lied when he said, "I did not have sex with that woman," and his predecessor Richard Nixon, who lamely (and laughably) proclaimed, "I am not a crook" as the Watergate scandal closed in.

And we're worried about athletes like Lance Armstrong, the erstwhile king of the Tour de France. After years of denials, he finally admitted that he, like many fellow bike racers, had been chemically enhanced.

Detection inflection

Truth is, after decades of work, the lie detection biz is floundering. "Reliable" techniques come and go. For decades, the instrument called the lie detector has been a mainstay of cop shows and station houses, but it's fallen from favor with the recognition that it can be beaten. Meanwhile, other supposed "tells" of untruth, such as avoiding eye contact or scratching certain parts of the face, are easily avoided by practiced liars.

"There is a huge literature of studies suggesting we are very poor" at lie detection, says Leanne ten Brinke, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California-Berkeley school of business. "If I show you 10 videos and five show people lying and five show them telling the truth, your accuracy will be 50 percent. Flip a coin; don't bother watching the video. It's discouraging."

Professionals don't necessarily do much better, ten Brinke and colleague Stephen Porter wrote: 2 "even trained professional lie catchers often fail in detecting high-stakes lies."

ten Brinke and Porter added that when researchers showed police officers clips of people who, like the Canadian Michael White, had pleaded for help locating a spouse who had disappeared, "the officers could have flipped a coin and performed as well." Courts later ruled that White and many of the other "pleaders" had murdered the "vanished" person.

Lying: Why so convincing?

"Deception is a very complex human behavior and in spite of years of pondering over how to spot a lie, we humans, are not very good at this task," according to Victoria Rubin, assistant professor of information and media studies at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. Her email continued, "Computer programs can bring systematic ways of looking for what might give away a lie, but there is no simple solution. There is no real consensus among researchers in the field about what these best predictors of deception might be."

One reason for the difficulty, Aldert Vrij wrote in email, is that "People are good liars because they have a lot of practice, and practice makes skill." Vrij, a professor of applied social psychology at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, added that, "People lie every day (many white lies but also more serious lies) and children are instructed to lie (white lies) by their parents from a very early age (‘pretend you like the present grandma gave you')."

Liars notice if listeners swallow their spiel, "and people can learn from accurate feedback," says Vrij.
So what do we know about deception detection? What seems to work, and when? As we survey the human quest to ferret out lies, we'll focus on psychological tests, computer analysis of text and video, and advanced interrogation techniques.

Naturally selected?

You might think we humans have an advantage, since the ability to detect lies would seem essential enough to be favored by evolution. "We thought natural selection would promote this ability," ten Brink says, "and we also thought that for lie detection to be accurate and adaptive, it did not necessarily need to be conscious; you don't need alarm bells going off in your head, it could be subtle, so when you hear someone speak, you don't really trust them, don't feel like you want to lend them money or go on a second date."

To test that premise, ten Brinke and colleagues looked for implicit associations — concepts that are triggered by exposure to something in the environment. For example, if you harbor stereotypical feelings about green people, after seeing a photo of a green person, you would be more likely to understand, choose or recognize words that express your discriminatory feelings, like"bad,""nasty" or "untrustworthy."

In two studies, the conscious ability to distinguish truth from fiction was no better than chance, ten Brinke says, but "people responded faster to ‘truth' words after they saw a truthful video, and to ‘lie' words after they saw a lying video. This suggests that the unconscious mind does discriminate."

The "moral is that we might be better lie detectors than we thought, but the ability does not live in our conscious mind," ten Brinke said. The study might support a tactic of "going with your gut," but the false confessions uncovered by DNA tests show that this attitude among police investigators has put innocent people in prison. "I'm very unclear about the implication," says ten Brinke. "This does create a new interesting perspective on humans as lie detectors and opens a bunch of potential avenues. Can we look at the behavioral reaction of the receiver of a message to determine something about the veracity of the sender?"

How high are the stakes?

Many studies of lie detection are criticized because the subjects are, too often, college students who are asked to lie about trivialities. Critics question the realism of that setup, and argue that, lacking sufficient emotional stress, subjects fail to reveal the "tells" that often accompany high-stakes, real-world lies.

"The behavioral cues to deception tend to be quite subtle, especially when the lie is not high-stakes," ten Brinke told us. "When students come to the lab and tell a lie about their summer vacation, that's not high stakes. Unless it means a lot to you, you are not worried about being caught and might not leak any clues."

To deception researchers, "leak” means to unintentionally reveal a telltale sign of lying.

While researching her dissertation, ten Brinke focused on high stakes liars by studying videos of people who had issued a televised plea for help finding a loved one. Half of the 78 cases were genuine. In the other half, the pleader was later found to have murdered the disappeared person.

The pleader videos contained "pretty clear cues to deception," ten Brinke told us. "Deceivers smiled more; that's a very unlikely emotion for someone who's genuinely disturbed. They were unable to replicate genuine sadness in the face. There are muscles that are very difficult to control, so they were not able to pull off that look of sadness, particularly in the forehead."

Still, the tells were difficult to catch in real time, she adds. "My study was frame by frame, a very exhaustive, expensive analysis." Working in real time is "a very difficult task" so "videotaping is always recommended. The cognitive load [mental work] for the lie detector is incredibly high, especially if you are in conversation, and looking for an appropriate question, and examining the speech pattern and body language all at once."
The face, she says, is "an incredibly valuable cue to deception if you know what to look for; it can tell you a ton of interesting information."

Ken Lay was CEO of Enron Corporation, an energy firm that collapsed in scandal in 2001 in what was then the largest bankruptcy in American history. Lay is shown listening to a question outside of the U.S. Courthouse in Houston after the close of his bank fraud trial May 23, 2006 in Houston, Texas. After being convicted of 10 counts of fraud, conspiracy and making false statements, Lay died on July 5, 2006.

The interview

Much of the focus in criminal deception detection today concerns the interrogator, not the subject. One goal is to increase the subject's “cognitive load" (need to think fast) during interrogation. One way to do this, Vrij says, is to ask people to recall the event in reverse order. "‘You said you went for lunch with your friend. Tell me in detail what happened in the restaurant [working backward] from when you and your friend left the restaurant?'"
With cooperative witnesses, Vrij wrote us, reverse order recall often results in new information, but liars "will attempt to say again what they said when asked in normal order.

This is difficult to do and may lead to contradictions. Also, because liars focus on repetition, it is unlikely to result in new information."

Indeed, Vrij says, finding lies "Is all in the questioning. Through good interview techniques, deception may become apparent, but poor interview techniques are unlikely to elicit cues."

For example:

- Passive or general questions, like "Tell me in detail all that happened,""give liars the opportunity to report their planned lie," Vrij says.
- Leading or suggestive questions, like "Did you take the money?" can cause symptoms of nervousness among liars and innocents alike.

(Scientists interested in interrogations 3 have tried to evaluate the ability of various techniques to uncover lies. More recently, sparked by capital-case confessions that were later proven false by DNA evidence, researchers have tried to identify techniques that coerce the innocent to confess. One key offender: interrogators who falsely claim to have incriminating evidence.)

Computer vision? ***

It’s the computer age.

So what can our digital slaves add to the enigma that is deception detection? Computers may lend a hand in analyzing the highly expressive human face, which nonetheless baffles most human efforts to detect lies. Aware that slackers seeking disability benefits often lie to doctors about pain, Kang Lee, at the Institute of Child Study at the University of Toronto, asked subjects to show real or faked pain. "The question was, when humans express a genuine emotion, do they use one group of muscles, and when they express fake emotions, do they use a different group of muscles?" Lee explained. (The experimenters immersed subjects' hands in cold water, which Lee says is "very painful, but safe.")

Because pain is a universal experience, "We are very well versed in faking pain," Lee says, which makes the task tough for deception detectors. When Lee trained people to analyze the videos, their accuracy rose from chance to 56 percent. "It was very poor, and that's been found before," he says.

The old-fashioned "lie detectors" measure sweating, respiration and heart rate, which indicate heightened "arousal" caused by the state of deception — or something else. Critics say the detectors are far from foolproof. Here, Igor Matovic, member of the Slovak Parliament, demonstrates his recent lie-detector test during a press conference on February 23, 2012, in Bratislava, Slovakia.

By using machine learning, Lee, working with Marnie Bartlett of the University of California, San Diego, taught computers to detect deception with 82 percent accuracy. "That's a big leap forward, and it tells us there are signs in the facial expression that can tell us if they faking or are experiencing pain for real," Lee says.
Frame-by-frame video analysis revealed that real and faked pain have different expression. "When faking, the mouth opens with a very regular, rhythmic dynamic," Lee says, which does not appear with real pain.

That subtle distinction shows the advantages of computer vision, he says. The computer "can remember frame by frame; our cognitive system has a low capacity, we can't remember these dynamics, and the mouth is only one part, we also have to look at the eyes, the nose the cheeks and the words. That is lot of information to compute concurrently."

The words have it!

In a recent study, Lynn Van Swol, an associate professor of communications arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that lies were easier to detect by computer chat than from watching a video.
Why? "There may be just too much to analyze in a video," says Van Swol, "and that takes away from probably one of the best indications, what the person is saying, and putting it in context."

The context includes common sense and knowledge of the world. Say, while trying to decide if someone was truthful, you asked about favorite pastimes and were told, "I like to write poetry.""You might think, how many people could truthfully give that response?" says Van Swol, "rather than looking at whether his eye is twitching or he's scratching his chin." Poetry is a scarce avocation, so that answer is a possible — but hardly conclusive — tell of deception.

Trust a computer?

Computers can also analyze text, looking "for a pattern of objectively-observed predictors of deception," as Rubin wrote to us. For example, if it's true that liars try to avoid the first-person pronouns "I" and "we," a computer can quickly examine text to look for an abnormally low number of first-person pronouns. The pronoun theory is debated, and Rubin agrees that any one indicator is not definitive, but rather "should contribute towards the overall decision making – is this given text truth or a lie?"

Computers, she notes, are fast, consistent and obedient. They have "a certain type of objectivity, assuming the programmer instructs the program based on scientific consensus, and not his or her personal opinions. Computer programs can be trained to look through large volumes of data, observe patterns, and make certain conclusions on which to base their further decisions."

Using this so-called "machine learning, Rubin and colleagues created software that detected 65 percent of lies, somewhat better than the 50- to 63-percent performance from people in the same study.4

What might account for the slight advantage for computers? People, Rubin wrote, "are not necessarily objective, nor systematic, nor do we know what exactly to look for to spot a lie. We quite often rely on intuition. We are subjective and have emotions; for instance, liking an idea might help us validate it. We might misinterpret cues. We multi-task as we read — we need to understand what is said and perhaps think how it's phrased, make connections to what we already know, remember what we've read in order to evaluate its veracity. Ultimately, the task is cognitively taxing and we are just human."

But being human has advantages, Rubin adds. We have "the powers of true comprehension of the situation in a life context and the ability to see the big picture, to reason and be self-aware. Say, someone is stating the opposite of what's obviously true. A human knows to interpret it as sarcasm and how to react to it and what it actually means."

Between crime, sports and politics, the need to detect deception is not fading away. And Rubin reminds us of another playground for deceit. "We communicate and get our information via computer and mobile devices. We are unsuspecting, truth-biased [tending to believe what we read, in other words], and potentially vulnerable to online predators, spammers, scammers, and opportunists with malevolent deceptive intentions."

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Why do we make sacrifices for our loved ones?

Research tells us that our commitment is what motivates our willingness to sacrifice.

Sacrifice, after all, is really about navigating a conflict of interest. We encounter these conflicts of interest when our own personal needs and goals are incompatible with those of our partner or our relationship overall (e.g., continuing to watch our favorite Netflix show vs. helping a partner prepare for a job interview).

In order to sacrifice, we have to resist the gut-level urge to act selfishly and instead focus on the long-term benefits to our relationship.

Of course, some sacrifices are easier to make than others. Taking out the trash for a spouse doesn’t take the same kind of effort as helping him or her fill out tax forms. Just because we’re motivated to address our partner’s needs does not necessarily mean we can.

Forgoing self-interest can require a great deal of mental effort, orexecutive control. Executive control is a label psychologists use for a collection of mental abilities that help people work toward achieving their goals. This includes things like resisting temptation (e.g., not eating cake if you’re on a diet), switching quickly between tasks (or multitasking), and remembering new information.

Researchers in the Netherlands were interested in learning whether executive control also enables sacrifice in relationships. In a first study, they asked 44 young adults in relationships to fill out a survey about their relationship commitment and then complete at tricky task to test their level of executive control. So, how did this task work?

Basically, they were shown words on a computer screen one at a time, written in blue, red, or white font. The words themselves were either emotional (e.g., “smile”) or non-emotional (e.g., “table”). If a word was white, they had to press one of two keys to categorize it as emotional or non-emotional. If a word was blue or red, they had to press one of two keys to categorize it as blue or red. So, white words had to be classified by meaning, and blue or red words had to be classified by color. Because this task requires keeping a lot of separate information and categories in your head, it takes a good deal of executive control. People who categorized more words correctly were considered higher in executive control.

Next came the sacrifice task. People were shown two similar pictures and were asked to find the difference between them, just like in children’s games. If they found the difference, they could win their partner a prize. The twist was that the two pictures were identical (sneaky researchers). So the participants could either persist for a long time at this frustrating challenge, or they could give up but not win a prize for their partners. Those who spent more time looking were given higher scores for sacrifice (because they pushed on through the impossible task just to benefit their partners).

In their second study, the researchers brought in couples together. Couple members also filled out commitment surveys, but this time did a different executive control activity. They were shown 45 letters on a screen, one at a time. For every letter they saw, they had to press one of two buttons indicating whether that letter was the same or different from the letter they saw two letters ago (again, a lot to keep in you head!).

Then, to measure sacrifice, one partner was randomly chosen to do a frustrating task, while the other could watch entertaining videos. The frustrating task required typing out random strings of text for as long as possible (“7seww9vYLzIvv9N2Vyg”). They were told they could stop whenever they wanted, but then their partner would have to stop watching the fun videos and take over. Because there would be obvious consequences to their partner if they stopped doing the frustrating task (i.e., the partner would have to take over), the sacrifice here was even more meaningful than in the previous study (where stopping the task only meant the partner didn’t win anything). The more text strings the participant typed out, the higher their sacrifice score.

In both studies, the researchers found that partners who had greater executive control sacrificed more. They searched longer for the difference between the identical pictures and they typed out more letter strings. Partners who reported more commitment on the surveys also sacrificed more, but executive control was more strongly related to their sacrificing behaviors.

Overall, these studies showed that commitment to a partner isn’t always enough on its own to promote sacrifice, especially when the sacrifice requires considerable time and effort. While sometimes it seems like we can effortlessly and automatically meet our partners’ needs, there are other times when we have to exert some extra mental effort to get past our own self-serving desires. So, even if it might take a little extra work to abandon your Netflix cue, the effort you put in to helping your partner could pay off big time for you both.

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Ending a relationship can be awkward, and comedy group Eva and Mel perfectly captured this by having single New Yorkers read the last text they received from an ex. Try not to cringe while hearing these embarrassing exchanges. 

Video courtesy Eva & Mel

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Millions of people take to the bars, coffee shops and internet sites of the world looking for love.

Finding that love connection isn’t always easy because your new found guy may end up having too many Star Trek figurines or your new found gal may have one too many cats.

While there are seemingly a million things that can go wrong, people do fall in love.

But is it possible that some people fall easier than others?

How They Did It

To answer this question, researchers from UCLA surveyed over 350 men and women (average age ~30) about their experiences with falling in love.

Researchers defined love for the participants as “A very powerful emotional experience that might include excitement and anxiety, tender feelings and physical attraction toward a particular person, constant thoughts of the person, and an intense desire to be around the person.”

Participants then answered a question about whether they typically fell in love quicker than their partner, participants also listed the number of people with whom they have been in love, how many times they experienced “love at first sight”, and how many of their “loves” led to a relationship.

Researchers also asked about the importance of physical attractiveness and how many times the participants mistakenly overestimated another person’s interest in having sex with them.

What They Found

Results of the study indicate that men and women reported a similar number of lifetime “loves” and similar occurrences of falling in love first. However, compared to women, men reported physical attractiveness was more important and were more likely to mistakenly overestimate sexual interest from another person.

Men also reported more occurrences of “love at first sight” and were more likely to fall in love without a partner reciprocating that feeling. Men who were more likely to overestimate females’ sexual interest fell in love more frequently, while women did not show a similar pattern.

Men who place more importance on physical attractiveness fell in love first in their relationship more often when they thought they were with a highly attractive partner. Finally, women with a higher reported sex drive also reported falling in love more frequently.

What Does This Mean?

Overall, men seem to fall in love easier than women, but why? It may be that men fall in love easier because they think being in love is important to women. Thus,men fall in love is a way to show female partners that they are committed to the relationship.

The fact that men were more likely to fall in love when they over estimated sexual interest suggests that a man may be more likely to have interest in a women once he believes she has sexual interest in him. That is, the way to a man’s heart is through his…well you know.

Of course it is also possible that men who fall in love more easily are also inclined to overestimate sexual interest as a way of validating his own feelings.

Though there may be true differences between men and women, it is also possible that this study tells us more about who falls in “lust” more easily. The researchers definition of love focuses heavily on the more passionate aspects of love such as powerful emotions, attraction, excitement, and intense desire. It is possible that a study focusing on more companionate or friendship-based love could yield a different pattern of results.

After reading about this study, it may seem obvious to you that men fall in love easier than women. But if I had asked you earlier, “who falls in love more easily, men or women?” would you have answered “men”? Maybe you would have, but what about others you know. Give it a try and then set the record straight with a little science.

Reference: Galperin, A. & Haselton, M. (2010). Predictors of how often and when people fall in love. Evolutionary Psychology, 8, 5-28.

A version of article was previously published on lovestruck.com.

If you’d like to learn more about our book, please click here (or download it here). Interested in learning more about relationships? Click here for other topics on Science of Relationships. Like us on Facebook r follow us on Twitter to get our articles delivered directly to your NewsFeed.

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DATA SOURCE: NATIONAL HEALTH AND SOCIAL LIFE SURVEY

DATA SOURCE: NATIONAL SURVEY OF FAMILY GROWTH

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During the past 50 years, women have made great strides towards equality in the workplace.

But when it comes to dating between men and women, most men still pay for the majority of expenses at the beginning of a relationship.

In a day and age when women are increasingly financially independent, why are they still not picking up the dinner tab?

Porscha Kazmierzak is one of the many women who still think that men should pay on a first date, even though she identifies as a hard-core feminist.

"If somebody offers to pay for my meal, I'm thinking this person is considerate and they are maybe going to take care of me," she says. "If I insist on paying on a first date, it's because I’m not interested."

The tradition of paying for dates is a "short cut to figure out what the other person is thinking," says Rita Seabrook, a PhD student in women's studies and psychology at the University of Michigan.

Seabrook says when a man pays for dinner, it sends clues to the other person such as, "I like you" or "I want us to be more than friends." It makes things seem comfortable and certain when dating can feel so uncomfortable and uncertain. So the tradition has stuck around. But so has its other — more subtle — message.

"Men are expected to make a lot of money," says Seabrook. "And women are expected to value men who make lots of money."

Evan Major used to think these ideas never really affected him. Then he lost his job at the same time he was dating someone new. When they went out, sometimes he would pay as much as he could. Other times, his girlfriend would cover his half. This challenged his sense of self.

"There is such a tight link between financial security and the identity of a man," he says.

But after the beginning of a relationship, men and women usually start to do things differently.

"Couples start to split somewhere in the first six months," says Dr. David Frederick, a professor of psychology at Chapman University.  

But when it comes to changing gender norms, things move slowly.

"Causing those to change, I think, is a very long process that we've seen starting over the past 50 years," says Frederick. 

But Frederick says as long as we continue to see a shift towards more gender equality in the workplace, there's no reason why we shouldn't also see the same shift at the dinner table.

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Americans have some odd notions.

Take, for instance, the dream job.

"We all want a dream job,"performance strategist Laura Garnett writes at Inc.

"Just like finding that one great love," she says, "it's a goal that virtually everyone has."

As you can tell from Garnett's comparison, the dream job is a romantic idea.

Like the pursuit of "that one great love," it's misguided, unrealistic, and self-defeating.

Let's dig into it.

The "one great love" sentiment is another way of talking about a "soul mate" or "better half."

It goes back to Ancient Greece, some 2,300 years ago.

In Plato's "Symposium," the playwright Aristophanes says:

Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the tally-half of a man, and he is always looking for his other half.

When one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself ... the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together.

Sounds familiar, right?

It was handed down through fairy tales like Cinderella, where the glass slipper fits only the prince's one true love.

Yet couples psychologists John Gottman and Peter Pearson agree that this fairy tale has been a disastrous model for relationships.

"There's a cultural attitude where if you find the right person, you shouldn't have to work" on the relationship, says Pearson, a cofounder of the Couples Institute in Menlo Park, California.

"Because at the beginning you didn't have to work; it was easy and effortless," he says. "If you find the right person, [you think] it should stay that way. It's the happily-ever-after imprint. If you're with the right person, it will take care of itself."

That same hope animates the quest for the dream job.

The script goes something like this: If you find the right gig, it will satisfy all of your needs and you won't have to work a day in your life. You'll feel so fulfilled, content, and creative that you'll have no choice but to give a TED Talk about how you arranged your life in the perfect way.

But looking for everything you need in a single person or job creates a ton of pressure, and according to "How to Find Fulfilling Work" author Roman Krznaric, it's unsustainable.

"The mythology of the soul mate ratchets up our expectations of what that relationship should be," Krznaric says, "that you should try and find all your loving needs in one person — the romantic partner and the best friend and the person you can have children with and a playful relationship with and so on."

It "inevitably fails," he says, "because we can't meet those expectations."

Similarly, Krznaric notes, if you look at the surveys asking what people want from their careers, certain themes come up again and again, like quality relationships, autonomy, creativity, status, recognition, and money.

It's hard to find all of those criteria in a single job.

Recognizing that, you could opt for a "portfolio career," where you do several jobs at the same time. For instance, you might freelance articles to magazines and run digital strategy for a brand during the week and then teach yoga and cooking classes on the weekend.

Or you could satisfy those different parts of yourself by combining career and leisure pursuits. Krznaric uses the American poet Wallace Stephens, who wrote "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," as an example.

"He was an insurance company executive by day and an avant garde poet by night," Krznaric says. "When he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, and he basically could have gotten a full position at Harvard to write poetry for the rest of his life, he turned it down and kept up his insurance company job because he didn't want to depurify his creative act as a poet."

Like Stephens, you could find your desire for financial security and status in your career, and then find your need for freedom and expression outside the formal workplace.

The approach works for Krznaric. "I do a lot of public talks, and I'm not one for seeking status and recognition, but being in a public light to some extent is reaffirming of what I do," he says. "But as a writer, I'm sitting quietly in my study as I am now, in an attic in suburban Oxford, and no one sees what I'm doing and it's a very internal process, struggling with words. These various parts of my life satisfy the different selves that I have."

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As a scientist who studies online-dating data, I’ve spent a lot of time quantifying how other people fall in love. I began to wonder whether it was possible to apply the same methods to my own relationship. I told myself it was for the sake of science: I was acting out of professional curiosity, and would understand others’ relationships better by putting myself under the mathematical microscope.

But it would be more honest to admit it was also because I missed my boyfriend. After spending three years at college with him, I had left to study for a year at Oxford; this was my equivalent of flipping through photo albums.

But what data to use? We rarely text or take pictures. But in the four years since we began dating, we’ve exchanged an average of four emails a day, which works out to more than 5,500 emails. If we had just typed out literature to each other, we would’ve recently completed Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, though we won’t finish Infinite Jest for another six years or In Search of Lost Time for another 19. When I told my boyfriend I wanted to statistically analyze our emails, we had the following conversation:

Him: I think you should ask my permission to do that.

Me: I wouldn’t ask your permission to read the emails. Why should reading them using a computer be any different?

Him: You’re going to find some weird pattern and break up with me.

Me: Either that will be warranted by the data, in which case it’s a good thing, or it won’t, in which case I’m a bad statistician. Are you saying I’m a bad statistician?

This is what scientists call “obtaining consent.”

It was dark and drizzling when I walked back alone to my Oxford dorm room, curled up around my laptop, and dove into the digital record of our relationship. I was unsurprised to find that our emails became more frequent after I left for England. But I felt a jolt when I discovered that I sent my boyfriend far more emails than he sent me.

I called my boyfriend and asked him why, according to the data, I missed him more than he missed me.

I closed my program, made myself a cup of tea, called my boyfriend, and asked him why, according to the data, I missed him more than he missed me. He said that wasn’t true, he just preferred to talk on the phone rather than send me emails. I went back to the data to see if it substantiated his claim, and indeed it did: He used “call me” and “phone” more frequently in his emails.

Having avoided one potential breakup, I returned to the data and looked at how the average length of our emails changed over time. I found large spikes corresponding to the first three times we were apart for our university’s spring, summer, and winter breaks. These lengthy emails turned out to be, unsurprisingly, the sort of pour-your-soul-out messages that accompany first infatuation. The content of the emails changed over time in other ways as well. For example, we used the word “promise” more frequently early in our relationship, often to make the sort of charming but trivial pledges that build trust—“I promise not to kill you,” or “I promise never to make you go to a yacht club.” On the other hand, we began to use nicknames and endearments only later in our relationship—promises replaced by pet names.

Then I wondered if differences in our personalities would show up in our emails. I compared the words I used with the words he used; this revealed that, contrary to gender stereotypes, I am probably more aggressive. I am responsible, for example, for more than 95 percent of the profanity in our emails. He is much more likely to use the phrase “I am not sure,” and is also responsible for 60 percent of the incidences of “sorry.” I have a penchant for bleaker topics, and am more likely to mention “pain,” “cancer,” and “suicide.” I am also more likely to make sweeping generalizations about men, as evidenced by my more frequent use of “boys” and “male.”

We each bring up our interests: He, the quadrilinguist, mentions Greek, Latin, and Italian. I use words related to statistics. Our language is distinctive in other ways. He, the New Englander, is much more likely to use the word “dandy” (as in Yankee Doodle); I, who when comfortable with someone begin talking like a frat boy, am much more likely to use the word “bro.”

To avoid getting dumped, I will stop sharing details of our emails and will instead share two larger lessons I learned about love. The first is that statistics can be unexpectedly, painfully powerful. I had long known the joy of slicing out truth with a statistical scalpel, but here the heart I’d cut into was my own. Whydoes my boyfriend apologize more than I do? Why have our emails gotten shorter? What if I still want promises, not just pet names? Another statistician of love, the founder of the dating site OkCupid, once said that analyzing people’s relationships made him “very grim” because he had to “embrace the darkness.” I always found this a bit melodramatic, but perhaps he simply empathized better than I did with the lovers who went under his knife.

I was originally planning to make an app to allow anyone to analyze their own relationship, but it isn’t clear to me I’d be offering something worth having. There are far more unpleasant things you could find. What if your partner’s emails are less affectionate on days when they have meetings with that attractive co-worker? What if you no longer send them flirtatious emails, or only tell them they’re attractive after 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, when you tend to be drinking? What if you discussed Plato and Proust with your ex, and with your current partner you only talk about what’s for dinner? (I did not perform a comparative analysis across my relationships because I figured my exes dislike me enough already.)

You might argue that if these things are true, it is better to be aware of them. But I am not sure that love is best looked at so clear-eyed. Relationships are weird: pas de deux that in the moment are endearing seem bizarre when coldly quantified; full of truths that might be softer if only dimly perceived. If you never thought of your partner as unaffectionate until you learned they say “I love you” 20 percent less frequently than you do, what benefit have you gained?

The second lesson I learned is about the limits of statistics. My relationship is not fully captured by my emails: What I remember are the moments themselves, not their digital shadows. The entire email record of my relationship can itself be attached to an email. It is but a hundredth of a hundredth of a hard drive, a pinch of electron fairy dust that cannot contain four years of tears and touches. And my emails are not fully captured by my algorithms, which would react the same way if I took every carefully crafted message and scrambled the words into random order. Writing this piece alone, what I want is my boyfriend; what I have are some line graphs. If I lose this much when I study a single relationship on which I’m an expert, God knows what I’m losing when I apply the same approach to tens of thousands of people I’ve never met.

So those are the twin and opposite warnings I’d pass on to those who would reduce love to a line graph: You don’t know what you’re missing, and you don’t know what you’ll find. Perhaps the moments that count most can’t—or shouldn’t—be counted.

SEE ALSO: Snapchat is paying college grads almost $500,000 to work there

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Men and women cheat. It's something we hope we never do or have done to us, but it can happen to anyone.

Licensed psychotherapist and relationship expert, Rachel A. Sussman, explores what a couple can do to help prevent infidelity in a marriage.

Produced by Sam Rega. Camera by Devan Joseph. 

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In 1993, Danny Resnic was having anal sex during a casual hookup in Miami Beach when his partner’s latex condom broke. Resnic had been using condoms ever since the man he describes as “my best friend and love of my life” died from AIDS in 1984. “I have always been looking for a monogamous relationship and was never really happy with casual sex,” he says, but in the gay subculture of Miami Beach, where he’d moved from California in 1991, casual sex was the norm. When Resnic slept with men he didn’t know, he insisted on condoms.

After several weeks of worrying about the broken condom, Resnic got tested for HIV. The test came back positive.

The odds of contracting HIV from a single act of unprotected anal sex are extremely low—experts put the risk below 1 in 100. “I couldn’t believe it,” Resnic says today. “‘Cause I was really vigilant. I lost all my friends during the AIDS crisis, and I used condoms religiously. And then when one broke, I thought, ‘How could that happen?’ ”

Resnic became obsessed with answering that question: He read everything he could find about condoms at his local public library in Miami. He learned how latex condoms are made (by dipping phallic molds into vats of liquid latex, which is peeled off after it dries), and how they are regulated (the Food and Drug Administration considers condoms medical devices and dictates how they are manufactured and labeled).

He discovered that three publicly traded companies—the makers of LifeStyles, Durex, and Trojan—controlled almost the entire market. And he figured out that, since the introduction of the rolled latex condom in the 1920s, not much about condoms had changed.

“Like Eating With Saran Wrap on Your Tongue”

But to call polyisoprene “revolutionary”—a term that Durex’s new polyisoprene condom also uses in its marketing materials—is funny and sad. More than 30 years after the AIDS crisis began—more than 30 years after the advent of the safe-sex movement—a synthetic latex condom counts as revolutionary?

If you believe Danny Resnic, hard at work on his Origami condom, polyisoprene is a symptom of Americans’ failure of imagination when it comes to condoms. “When I first told people I was developing a new condom, they went, ‘Well, what could be different about a condom?’ ” he said. “They couldn’t imagine anything different, because there’s never been anything different.” Resnic thinks men have become desensitized by latex condoms. “They’ve come to accept that level of sensation as the maximum.” If they use condoms at all.

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As a scientist who studies online-dating data, I’ve spent a lot of time quantifying how other people fall in love. I began to wonder whether it was possible to apply the same methods to my own relationship. I told myself it was for the sake of science: I was acting out of professional curiosity, and would understand others’ relationships better by putting myself under the mathematical microscope.

But it would be more honest to admit it was also because I missed my boyfriend. After spending three years at college with him, I had left to study for a year at Oxford; this was my equivalent of flipping through photo albums.

But what data to use? We rarely text or take pictures. But in the four years since we began dating, we’ve exchanged an average of four emails a day, which works out to more than 5,500 emails. If we had just typed out literature to each other, we would’ve recently completed Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, though we won’t finish Infinite Jest for another six years or In Search of Lost Time for another 19. When I told my boyfriend I wanted to statistically analyze our emails, we had the following conversation:

Him: I think you should ask my permission to do that.

Me: I wouldn’t ask your permission to read the emails. Why should reading them using a computer be any different?

Him: You’re going to find some weird pattern and break up with me.

Me: Either that will be warranted by the data, in which case it’s a good thing, or it won’t, in which case I’m a bad statistician. Are you saying I’m a bad statistician?

This is what scientists call “obtaining consent.”

It was dark and drizzling when I walked back alone to my Oxford dorm room, curled up around my laptop, and dove into the digital record of our relationship. I was unsurprised to find that our emails became more frequent after I left for England. But I felt a jolt when I discovered that I sent my boyfriend far more emails than he sent me.

I called my boyfriend and asked him why, according to the data, I missed him more than he missed me.

I closed my program, made myself a cup of tea, called my boyfriend, and asked him why, according to the data, I missed him more than he missed me. He said that wasn’t true, he just preferred to talk on the phone rather than send me emails. I went back to the data to see if it substantiated his claim, and indeed it did: He used “call me” and “phone” more frequently in his emails.

Having avoided one potential breakup, I returned to the data and looked at how the average length of our emails changed over time. I found large spikes corresponding to the first three times we were apart for our university’s spring, summer, and winter breaks. These lengthy emails turned out to be, unsurprisingly, the sort of pour-your-soul-out messages that accompany first infatuation. The content of the emails changed over time in other ways as well. For example, we used the word “promise” more frequently early in our relationship, often to make the sort of charming but trivial pledges that build trust—“I promise not to kill you,” or “I promise never to make you go to a yacht club.” On the other hand, we began to use nicknames and endearments only later in our relationship—promises replaced by pet names.

Then I wondered if differences in our personalities would show up in our emails. I compared the words I used with the words he used; this revealed that, contrary to gender stereotypes, I am probably more aggressive. I am responsible, for example, for more than 95 percent of the profanity in our emails. He is much more likely to use the phrase “I am not sure,” and is also responsible for 60 percent of the incidences of “sorry.” I have a penchant for bleaker topics, and am more likely to mention “pain,” “cancer,” and “suicide.” I am also more likely to make sweeping generalizations about men, as evidenced by my more frequent use of “boys” and “male.”

We each bring up our interests: He, the quadrilinguist, mentions Greek, Latin, and Italian. I use words related to statistics. Our language is distinctive in other ways. He, the New Englander, is much more likely to use the word “dandy” (as in Yankee Doodle); I, who when comfortable with someone begin talking like a frat boy, am much more likely to use the word “bro.”

To avoid getting dumped, I will stop sharing details of our emails and will instead share two larger lessons I learned about love. The first is that statistics can be unexpectedly, painfully powerful. I had long known the joy of slicing out truth with a statistical scalpel, but here the heart I’d cut into was my own. Whydoes my boyfriend apologize more than I do? Why have our emails gotten shorter? What if I still want promises, not just pet names? Another statistician of love, the founder of the dating site OkCupid, once said that analyzing people’s relationships made him “very grim” because he had to “embrace the darkness.” I always found this a bit melodramatic, but perhaps he simply empathized better than I did with the lovers who went under his knife.

I was originally planning to make an app to allow anyone to analyze their own relationship, but it isn’t clear to me I’d be offering something worth having. There are far more unpleasant things you could find. What if your partner’s emails are less affectionate on days when they have meetings with that attractive co-worker? What if you no longer send them flirtatious emails, or only tell them they’re attractive after 10 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, when you tend to be drinking? What if you discussed Plato and Proust with your ex, and with your current partner you only talk about what’s for dinner? (I did not perform a comparative analysis across my relationships because I figured my exes dislike me enough already.)

You might argue that if these things are true, it is better to be aware of them. But I am not sure that love is best looked at so clear-eyed. Relationships are weird: pas de deux that in the moment are endearing seem bizarre when coldly quantified; full of truths that might be softer if only dimly perceived. If you never thought of your partner as unaffectionate until you learned they say “I love you” 20 percent less frequently than you do, what benefit have you gained?

The second lesson I learned is about the limits of statistics. My relationship is not fully captured by my emails: What I remember are the moments themselves, not their digital shadows. The entire email record of my relationship can itself be attached to an email. It is but a hundredth of a hundredth of a hard drive, a pinch of electron fairy dust that cannot contain four years of tears and touches. And my emails are not fully captured by my algorithms, which would react the same way if I took every carefully crafted message and scrambled the words into random order. Writing this piece alone, what I want is my boyfriend; what I have are some line graphs. If I lose this much when I study a single relationship on which I’m an expert, God knows what I’m losing when I apply the same approach to tens of thousands of people I’ve never met.

So those are the twin and opposite warnings I’d pass on to those who would reduce love to a line graph: You don’t know what you’re missing, and you don’t know what you’ll find. Perhaps the moments that count most can’t—or shouldn’t—be counted.

SEE ALSO: Snapchat is paying college grads almost $500,000 to work there

Join the conversation about this story »

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A reader submitted the following question:

"Just how common is cheating? What percentage of people admit that they have done it before?"

This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer because it depends upon how you define “cheating.” Specifically, are you talking only about sexual infidelity, or are you also asking about emotional infidelity? 

When researchers use different definitions, they obtain wildly different results. For instance, in a 2010 review of 31 different studies of infidelity published in the journal Personality & Individual Differences, researchers found that rates of infidelity ranged anywhere from 1.2% to 85.5% of respondents [1]!

Typically, studies that define infidelity narrowly (i.e., only in sexual terms) report lower rates, whereas those that adopt broader definitions (i.e., sexual and emotional infidelity) report much higher rates. Indeed, that 85.5% figure comes from a study that used a very broad definition of cheating that even included flirting with someone other than your partner.

Rates of infidelity also vary across certain demographic characteristics and relationship types. For instance, research finds that cheating tends to be more frequent among men than it is among women (although this gender difference has narrowed considerably in recent years). Likewise, infidelity tends to be more common among couples who are dating compared to those who are married.

I should also mention that rates of infidelity vary depending upon whether the question is framed specifically in terms of one's current relationship or in terms of whether one has ever done it (obviously, the latter tends to yield higher numbers).

With that said, here are a few statistics you might be interested in.

First, let's look at the percentage of married people who say they have ever had sex outside of their current relationship. Looking across the studies included in the 2010 review paper, that number pretty reliably falls between 1 in 4 and 1 in 5, at least among samples collected in the United States (rates of infidelity can vary substantially across countries).

Second, let's look at how many college students have ever committed sexual infidelity. Again, the studies reported in this review paper pretty consistently put that number between 1 in 2 and 1 in 3.

Of course, keep in mind that, if anything, these numbers probably underestimate the true prevalence of cheating because not everyone who has done it is willing to admit to it, even on anonymous surveys.

In short, cheating is a very common activity; however, the prevalence of infidelity varies dramatically depending upon how you ask the question and to whom.   

For more information on cheating, including some of the reasons people do it and the outcomes associated with it, see here.

Want to learn more about Sex and Psychology? Click here for previous articles or follow the blog on Facebook (facebook.com/psychologyofsex), Twitter (@JustinLehmiller), or Reddit (reddit.com/r/psychologyofsex) to receive updates. 

[1] Luo, A., Cartun, M. A., & Snider, A. G. (2010). Assessing extradyadic behavior: A review, a new measure, and two new models. Personality and Individual Differences, 49, 155-163.

SEE ALSO: Here’s when people are most likely to cheat on their partner

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NOW WATCH: Research reveals why women cheat, and it's not what you think

A New York judge has ruled that a woman is allowed to serve her ex divorce papers via Facebook message. 

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Matthew Cooper made the ruling after a nurse named Ellanora Baidoo was unable to track down her husband for three weeks in order to serve him with the divorce papers. 

“I think it’s new law, and it’s necessary,” Baidoo’s lawyer, Andrew Spinnell, told the New York Daily News.

Spinnell notes that “We tried everything, including hiring a private detective," and were ultimately unable to track Victor Sena Blood-Dzraku, the man in question, down.

Blood-Dzraku doesn't have a job, a driver's license, or billing address, however the couple have communicated regularly on social media.  

Baidoo's lawyer sent the first Facebook message out to Blood-Dzraku last week and, “So far, he hasn’t responded."

He will continue to send Blood-Dzraku one message per week for three weeks or until Blood-Dzraku responds and acknowledges receipt, the court filing says.

It's unknown whether this decision will be used as a precedent in future cases, however as CNET notes, "this isn't the first time a US judge has granted someone permission to serve legal documentation on Facebook." A man was allowed to serve child support payment documentation via the social platform last year, and some foreign countries allow for divorce filings over text message.

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Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher has a pretty perfect description of what it's like to be in love with someone:

Simply put, she says, that person becomes the center of the world. You have an intense craving to be with that person, not just sexually, but emotionally. You can list the things you don't like about them, but all that gets pushed aside and you focus only on what you do like about them.

"It's an obsession," Fisher said in TED Talk called "Why we love, why we cheat."

What's going on biologically, though, is far less romantic, and it explains why we sometimes cheat on those we love.

Romantic love is essentially just elevated activity of the reward hormone dopamine in the brain.

In the TED talk Fisher explains an experiment where she and a team of scientists scanned the brains of people who were in love. The team showed the smitten person a neutral photo and then a photo of their beloved. They recorded which regions of the brain were active while the person gazed at the photo of their partner.

The researchers found that one of the most important brain regions that became active when each person looked at a photo of their partner is the reward system — the same brain area that lights up when a person takes cocaine or has an orgasm.

That means that "romantic love is not an emotion, it's a drive," Fisher said. "And in fact, I think it's more powerful than the sex drive."

Many other studies have found the same thing: love operates as a motivation and reward system in the brain. So, if love is rewarding, what drives us to cheat on people we fall in love with?

The problem is that romantic love isn't the only brain system that is activated when we fall for someone. There are actually three brain systems related to love, Fisher explained.

There's the sex drive, which is like an "intolerable neural itch," to get us out searching for a range of partners to help pass on our genes. There's romantic love, which helps us focus our mating energy on one person. And then there's attachment, the calm and security we feel with a long-term partner so we can raise children with them as a team.

However, those three brain systems, sex drive, romantic love, and attachment, aren't always connected to each other.

So it's possible to feel deep attachment to a long-term partner at the same time you feel intense romantic love toward someone else and even also feel sexual attraction toward another person, Fisher said.

"In short, we're capable of loving more than one person at a time," Fisher said.

And that's why, Fisher says, some people may cheat on their partner.

It's why someone can lay in bed at night thinking about deep feelings of attachment to one person and swing to thoughts of romantic love for another person.

"It's as if there's a committee meeting going on inside your head as you try to decide what to do," Fisher said. "I don't think honestly that we're an animal that was built to be happy — we're an animal that was built to reproduce. I think the happiness we find, we make."

This all sounds like a cynical take on love, but Fisher says that, despite all these straightforward and unavoidable biological processes, there's still mystery and "magic to it."

Watch the TED Talk here:

SEE ALSO: Here’s the model that can predict if a relationship will last

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NOW WATCH: Scientists Discovered The 2 Personality Traits For Lasting Relationships

It’s been clear for some time now that narcissists are attractive to women. At first blush, their extreme self-confidence can be almost magnetically alluring.

But surely after women have been dating for a while, they come to realize that their enticing surfaces are masks for bad behavior, including infidelity. And certainly when their focus shifts to looking for a prospective husband, they’ll run as far as they can from narcissists, right?

Actually, no. In a rather dispiriting study, researchers V. Tamara Montrose and Carrie Haslam of Hartpury College in England, report that narcissistic traits retain their appeal even among veterans of the dating scene, as well as those who are specifically searching for a spouse.

“The narcissistic male does not make a good partner, but even experienced females do not realize this,” they write in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

To the researchers' surprise, they found that women "wishing to get married were more attracted to the narcissistic male personality than those not desiring marriage."

Their study featured 146 British women between the ages of 18 and 28. Seventy-six percent said they were looking to get married, while 24 percent did not. The women reported how many men they had been involved with romantically in past years: 52 percent said they had zero to five previous partners, while 7.5 percent reported having 21 or more.

They were then presented with 20 statements related to narcissism and attraction, and asked to rate their agreement or disagreement with each on a one-to-five scale. These included “Confidence in a male is more alluring than modesty;” “Male vanity is an attractive attribute;” and “I am attracted to men who take pleasure in being the center of attention.”

To the researchers’ surprise, they found that women “wishing to get married were more attracted to the narcissistic male personality than those not desiring marriage.” Specifically, marriage-minded females responded much more positively to such assertions as “I am drawn to a man who displays authority” and “A man who uses manipulation to influence his success at work is attractive.”

“This finding is problematic from a female perspective,” they write, “as the narcissistic male is primarily short-term mating goal oriented.” (In other words, he’ll break your heart.) Unfortunately, they add, many of the qualities that make such a man poor mate material “are not immediately evident.”

The researchers found no significant differences among women who reported having more or fewer romantic partners. The only real distinction: Those at the top of the scale, with 21 or more past partners, were significantly more attracted to narcissistic males than those who had zero to 10.

The results suggest male narcissists are seen as high-status figures with “the ability to acquire resources, and that they are entertaining and self-assured. These traits are attractive to females in relationship contexts,” the researchers write.

Haslam and Montrose conclude that women “need to take into account future relationship desires and past mating experiences” when deciding who might be good relationship material. Many do, of course.

But this study suggests pathological self-regard exerts a pull that stirs primal passions—one that retains its potency longer than many might predict.

SEE ALSO: Both men and women are bad at knowing who they want to date

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NOW WATCH: Scientists Discovered The 2 Personality Traits For Lasting Relationships

In most relationships, the curiosity of past partners and relationships often creeps into our mind. Besides wondering how you should phrase the question, we often wonder if it's even worth the trouble of discussing at all.

Dr. Bat Sheva Marcus, the sexual dysfunction specialist and clinical director of The Medical Center For Female Sexuality, reveals the best way to discuss this sensitive subject with your partner. 

Produced by Sam Rega. Camera by Jason Gaines.

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A 2014 poll of over 2,000 US adults from the National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) and Harris Interactive found that 64% of people in relationships have combined finances.

It also found that of these respondents, a third had lied to their spouse or partner about money, while another third said their partners had lied to them.

An alarming 76% of those who had experienced these deceptions said it affected the relationship, from loss of trust, to arguments and even divorce.

Combining money and deception in cases of "financial infidelity" doesn't lead to good things — but it clearly isn't uncommon.

Some of the most damaging lies are:

1. Lying about how much money you make.

"Oh, I'm not sure if I'm getting a bonus this year."

Refusing to share is just as dishonest as giving an inaccurate figure.

"If you marry someone, regardless of whether you put all your money into one account or separate accounts, you need to know how much is in the total bucket," explains Valerie Rind, author of "Gold Diggers and Deadbeat Dads: True Stories of Friends, Family, and Financial Ruin.""How do you do your budget if you have no idea what end of the spectrum your spouse is at?"

The bigger problem:"If the person doesn't want to tell you, that's a red flag right there," Rind explains. "You have to be having those kinds of conversations if you're going to be married to someone."

2. Lying about how you earn money.

"This extra cash? The company just started counting any hours after 6 p.m. as overtime."

Are you earning money through a salary? Second job? Occasional freelance work? Investments? Off-track betting?

Ok, you might not be tiptoeing into the ring of earning money from illicit, illegal, or irresponsible choices, but lying about where the money comes from has two problems no matter what form the lie takes:

• First of all, it leaves your partner or spouse unable to to correctly estimate how much money there should be, and unable to notice any missing cash. For that reason, it's closely tied to lying about how much money you're making and can be just as damaging — if you're dishonest about how you're earning money, it's easier to lie about how much you have.
• Second, it can make a real mess of your taxes. Especially if you're signing your name to a joint return, you'll want to know for what, exactly, you're legally responsible.

The bigger problem: It's possible this kind of lie can cover up something much bigger. "If someone is doing something illicit and dealing drugs, you'd want to know," Rind cautions. "If they're gambling, it can be a serious addiction."

3. Lying about your debt.

"I have a few student loans, but it's nothing to worry about."

Money you put toward debt is money that can't be used elsewhere, for you or your partner. Lies about debt can range from whether you have any, to how much, to how long you have to pay, to whether you're making the payments regularly.

"If you're tying your horse to someone else's wagon, you need to know not only what's coming in, but what's going out," says Rind. "If someone has a payoff plan, how long is that going to take? You're going to need a separate line in the budget for payments, and is that for two years or ten years?"

The bigger problem: A person's debt can give some insight into how they handle money. "You want to know how a person got into debt in the first place," cautions Rind. "Was it overspending? Was it a phase where they weren't used to managing their own money? Or is it part of an ongoing problem? You need to know how somebody runs their finances because that totally affects the whole picture."

4. Lying about the things you buy.

"This old thing?"

The poll from NEFE and Harris Interactive found that 17% of respondents had hid a purchase from a spouse. Compared to lying about your income or your debt, it may seem pretty harmless, but according to Rind, this is a gateway lie: Once you tell it, you're on the path to trouble.

"If you know you're going to be criticized, it's easier not to tell the other person — that seems to be the logic," says Rind.

The problem tomorrow:"That can backfire when you wear the new clothing or whatever you've purchased and the spouse says, 'Oh is that new?' and it leads to another lie and becomes a whole pattern," she continues. "That's the problem with lies: You tell one and it kind of ends up leading to another, and that's the real insidious problem."

5. Lying about loaning money to friends and family.

"Yeah, the conversation went ok. I told her we just couldn't afford to help them out right now."

Beyond the fact that you can't stand the idea of lending money to your partner's sister and they feel similarly about your cousins, the problem with lying about loaning money without your partner's go-ahead is pretty basic.

The bigger problem:"This one is tied in with lying about what you buy: People don't want to be criticized, they don't want their partners to say, 'Why did you do that? We're never going to see that money again!'" Rind explains.

"But that's your spending money," she continues. "It affects the budget."

6. Lying about having bank accounts your spouse didn't or doesn't know about.

"No, this is from an account that I closed years ago."

Having private, solo bank accounts is one thing. Having secret bank accounts is another.

In the NEFE survey, 5% of respondents admitted to hiding an account from their partner, and 7% said they had been the one ignorant of a partner's account.

The bigger problem: More problematic than the account's existence, Rind says, is the reason you have it in the first place.

"Are you foreseeing a problem if you have to have a secret account?" she asks. "Do you have it in the back of your mind that your relationship isn't going to work out, so you need exit funds? Are you afraid your spouse is going to want to spend that money?" 

SEE ALSO: My wife and I never discussed money before getting married — and ended up with $52,000 of debt

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At age 34, after 20 years strutting her 5-foot-11 body down the catwalk, Gisele Bündchen walked her final runway show Wednesday night during São Paulo Fashion Week in her native Brazil.

There to cheer Bündchen on was her husband of six years and father of her two children, NFL quarterback Tom Brady.

Just look how proud he is!

After the show, Brady expressed amazement with his wife to his nearly 3.2 million Facebook fans:

Congratulations Love of my Life. You inspire me every day to be a better person. I am so proud of you and everything you have accomplished on the runway. I have never met someone with more of a will to succeed and determination to overcome any obstacle in the way. You never cease to amaze me. Nobody loves life more than you and your beauty runs much deeper than what the eye can see. I can't wait to see what's next. I love you. ‪#‎GOAT‪#‎thebestisyettocome‬.

The public response was overwhelmingly positive.

After becoming the world's highest-paid model, raking in $47 million last year alone, Bündchen announced Tuesday that the show would be her last:

I am grateful that at 14, I was given the opportunity to start this journey. Today after 20 years in the industry, it is a privilege to be doing my last fashion show by choice and yet still be working in other facets of the business. #firstrunway #14yearsold 🙏🙏🙏

After her final runway show, Bündchen posted:

Speechless... Thank you, thank you, thank you! #forevergrateful ❤️🙏❤️

But Bündchen and Brady's support goes both ways.

The supermodel was right by her man's side as he won this year's Super Bowl.

SEE ALSO: 9 glorious photos of Tom Brady's supermodel wife and kids cheering him on at the Super Bowl

MORE: Gisele Bündchen — the world's highest-paid model — retires from the runway

MORE: How Gisele Bündchen went from awkward teenager to the world's highest-paid model

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Whether it's a friend, business partner or a spouse, relationships are difficult to maintain year after year. Barbara Corcoran of ABC's "Shark Tank" tells us that it takes a little more than sexual attraction in marriages and a little more than contracts in business partnerships to keep a relationship intact.

Produced by Sam Rega. Camera by Devan Joseph. 

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