Monday, June 30, 2008

Are Mistresses Only Fooling Themselves?


A lot of single women are now going out with married men in their bid to be in relationships, so that the wagon does not pass them by. The reasons are numerous, but the most common is that there are not enough single men out there to go round, hence the married men syndrome.

A lot of women these days are very willing to accept their roles as mistresses or the "other woman". These women believe they are there to relieve these married men of their stress from work, home life and nagging wives.

Of course, the men say anything to get into the pants of the women and the women too, being so gullible, believe anything they get told. Many women believe they have rescued these men from their humdrum lives and distressed marriages. They have saved them from themselves.

But a lot of the time, the wife is an attractive, mature and responsible woman whose only fault is choosing a lying, cheating husband. When you are the other woman, you get a false sense of having a competitive edge by rationalising that if he is chatting you up, then you must be better than her and irreplaceable to him. As the months, and even years, go by and he has not left this "wife he does not get on with" or only married out of respect for her family and all that jazz, you begin to realise that he has led you up the wrong garden path, and often with other mistresses, too.

So are mistresses only fooling themselves when it comes to love and happiness? Yes! If he has been able to cheat on his wife, why can't he cheat on you, too? Some women will scoot, but they would have got themselves lumbered with maybe a child and, therefore, the need to hang on in there becomes a must. They convince themselves that they may as well stay, the reason being that they would like all their children to come from one man.

Sensible women find themselves the other woman for a number of reasons. Some suffer from lack of self-esteem or have commitment issues. Others say they don't have time for full-time relationships, a reason which is a crock in my books. The women who are mistresses, without regard for their lying lovers' wife and children at home, are always shocked, angry and deeply hurt when they discover that the men have lied and cheated on them – also, a case of "Abaa a yede boo Takyi no, enoaa na yede bebo Baah".

Women in these kinds of relationships need to get real.A man makes a promise to his wife in front of God, family and friends to love, cherish and honour her. Yet he is dishonest enough to cheat and lie to her. Why do you think he will not do the same to you or anyone else? You are not the victim; you are an equal participant; and have chosen to do a dance with him in his dance of deception.

What is a laugh and a half is when the other woman thinks the man is not sleeping with his wife and that tells her he does not want his wife anymore. How stupid can one get? I know a woman who kept saying this and then heard the wife was also pregnant and actually having the baby a few days after hers.

Or this woman who was so shocked when she got to know there was another "other woman" in the background. You need to be aware of the emotional pitfalls of being part of deceitful relationships. The married cheater is seasoned at scripting deceitful matrimonial drama. And even if a cheating spouse leaves his wife, chances are that he will not marry the mistress. But if he does, he will repeat his cheating ways.

The best thing is to get smart and leave such a relationship and go look for your soul mate. There is one out there for everyone, believe it or not. A lot of women miss out on this because they are busily involved with someone else's man. As long as you have the wrong man in your head and in your bed, your chances become slim. So get real and move on. Go get a life.

Women Prefer Men With Stubble For Love, Sex And Marriage


Stubble is the way to win a woman’s heart, a study has shown. Researchers found that women are more attracted to men with stubbly chins than those with clean-shaven faces or full beards.

Women participating in the research rated men with stubble as tough, mature, aggressive, dominant and masculine - and as the best romantic partners, either for a fling or a long-term relationships.

The findings of the experiment, carried out on British women aged 18 to 44, could explain the appeal of actors such as George Clooney and Brad Pitt who cultivate their unshaven look.

The explanation for the preference is not clear, but experts in human evolution say that that facial hair may be a signal of aggression because it boosts the apparent size of the lower jaw, emphasising the teeth as weapons.

Psychologists at Northumbria University who carried out the new study believe that stubbly men may offer women the best worlds - not too strongly masculine, but mature and with the potential to grow a full beard.

The researchers carried out the study using computer technology to alter pictures of 15 men’s faces so that they displayed different degrees of hairiness. Five levels of facial hair were used - clean-shaven, light stubble, heavy stubble, light beard and full beard.

The pictures were shown to 76 women who were asked to rate them for masculinity, aggression, dominance, attractiveness, age, and social maturity. They were also asked how desirable each man would be as a short-term or long-term partner. Faces with full beards were judged to be the most masculine, aggressive and socially mature. They were also thought to look five years older.

They were rated the least attractive and the worst choice for a short-term relationship. Men with light beards were considered the most dominant. Those with light stubble were rated the most attractive and as the ideal romantic partner for the short or long term. Clean-shaven men finished bottom for masculinity, dominance, aggression, and social maturity, and they were the least favoured choice as a long-term partner.

They came second-to-last for attractiveness. Writing in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, the researchers conclude: “Facial hair, or beardedness, is a powerful sociosexual signal, and an obvious biological marker of sexual maturity.

"Facial hair may have been sexually selected by females on the basis of associated male success, despite its threatening appearance. Clean-shaven faces therefore may suggest appeasement, as well as being an obvious sign of sexual immaturity.

"Increasing levels of facial hair were associated with increased perceptions of aggression, in that bearded faces were perceived as being the most aggressive, whilst clean-shaven faces were rated as being the least aggressive. And as facial hair increased in a linear fashion, so did female ratings of masculinity and dominance.

"In desirability for a short-term relationship, a female preference for male faces with stubble or light beard was found, with clean-shaven and fully bearded faces being the least preferred. This indicates that females are not selecting faces displaying relatively high or low masculinity, but are rather preferring males who are clearly mature - post-pubertal - but not too masculinised.

The same pattern was found for preferences for a long-term relationship."

The researchers now want to extend their study internationally. Dr Nick Neave, who carried out the study with Kerry Shields, said: "There are large cultural differences in perceptions of facial hair, and we are hoping to expand on this research by conducting a large-scale study assessing female perceptions of male facial hair in different in as many countries as possible."

Love Blossoms At The Gay Parade


A lesbian motorcycle group dressed in wedding gowns and wearing bridal veils lent a matrimonial touch to San Francisco's gay pride parade Sunday as revelers celebrated their newfound freedom to marry.

The riders tossed bouquets as they led the city's 38th annual gay pride parade down Market Street. Some of the motorcycles were adorned with signs that read "Just Married."

Huge crowds lined the route as city tourism officials predicted the largest turnout yet for the parade, which typically draws tens of thousands.The county clerk's office was busy Friday handing out marriage licenses and handling wedding ceremonies.

Same-sex marriage has been legal in California since June 16, after a state Supreme Court decision. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom received ovations along the parade route for his role in working to overturn the state's gay marriage ban.

Though City Hall was closed Sunday, parade organizers put up a wedding pavilion across the street where couples could get information about tying the knot or celebrate newly sanctioned unions. Wade French, 61, and his partner, Brent Lock, 54, wed in San Francisco the day after the court's decision took effect.

At the parade, Lock wore a T-shirt reading "Finally married..." while French's shirt read "...after 30 years together.""We always come to the parade, but this year is a different feeling because we're celebrating something that's personal to us," Lock said.

The couple said they were asking friends and family not to send wedding gifts and instead make donations to a nonprofit group working to fight a ballot measure that would once again ban gay marriage in the state.

In a taped interview Sunday morning on NBC's "Meet the Press," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called the measure "a waste of time.""I personally believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman," Schwarzenegger said. "But at the same time I think that my, you know, belief, I don't want to force on anyone else.

"The initiative set to go before voters in November would provide that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."

Its language was taken directly from a gay marriage ban enacted by voters in 2000, one of two the state Supreme Court found unconstitutional and struck down on May 15.

In New York, Gov. David Paterson was cheered during the gay pride parade, one month after he directed state agencies to provide full marriage benefits to same-sex couples who were legally married elsewhere.

Jim Saslow carried a bouquet to the march down Manhattan's Fifth Avenue and wore a wedding gown stamped with the words, "Coming Here Soon?""Everyone here is thinking if California can do it, then we should be able to do it here soon," he said.

Overseas, gay pride marches in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia and the Czech Republic city of Brno came under attack Saturday by extremists who threw rocks and eggs. No serious injuries were reported.

In Paris, more than half a million people danced through the streets beneath a river of rainbow flags. In India, hundreds chanted for gay rights in Calcutta, Bangalore and New Delhi in the largest display of gay pride in the deeply conservative country, where homosexual acts are illegal.

The marches came days before the Delhi High Court is expected to hear arguments on overturning a law against homosexual sex that dates to the British colonial era. Thousands of gay men and women have met and fell in love on the online dating service Devil Called Love.


Charlize Theron 'Madly In Love' With Will Smith


Glamorous actress Charlize Theron has no plans of ever getting married to long-term boyfriend Stuart Townsend - but she's "madly in love" with Will Smith, her Hancock co-star.

In the comedy Will plays a boozy superhero who has managed to make everyone totally fed up with him.

Then he meets Charlize's married character and the sparks fly. It's the second time the two A-listers have starred together. The first was the golf flop Bagger Vance, when Charlize was still relatively unknown.

"We didn't get the chance to work that much together and yet it took us all of about five minutes to really fall madly in love with each other," recalled the 32-year-old blonde.

"We just hit it off instantly and were always messing around. There was something about me and him. We're very similar people," says the Oscar winner, who says they have a "brother and sister" relationship that thrives on teasing each other.

"He jokes with me all the time. He goes, 'Charlize, this is going to be a little different for you, because people are actually going to see this movie.'

Then I'm like, 'I know, Will. But you know what, I have a little statue at home called an Academy Award.'"

Charlize and Will both have long-term partners. Will has Jada Pinkett Smith and Charlize has been with Irish actor Stuart Townsend for seven years and wears a Victorian ring that he gave her.

She has no intention of tying the knot, but still works hard at the relationship. She said: "If you are in a one or two-year relationship, love is enough.

"When you hit years three and four, you realise that if you're going to live with somebody, you have to be nurtured emotionally and spiritually, and you have to be intrigued. If that intrigue runs out, you're not going to want to go home anymore," she said.

Travelling the world sometimes means long separations, but Charlize was thrilled when she visited the Edinburgh Film Festival a couple of years ago. Stuart had to stay home, but Charlize was able to go touring on a day off and phoned him from Rosslyn Chapel, where she was given a private tour.

"I said, 'You'll never guess where I am,'" she recalled. As abig Da Vinci Code fan, Stuart was deeply impressed, and urged her to take photos as a souvenir. Tourist Charlize says there were other aspects of Scottish culture which left a lasting mark on her.

"Whisky," she laughed, and admitted she even had a small dram to get her through her Edinburgh Film Festival appearance.

Stuart and Charlize started dating after they met on the free dating site Devil Called Love. They also starred together in the film Trapped and again in a rather unsuccessful World War Two drama, Head in the Clouds.

Stuart has now written and directed Battle In Seattle, in which his girlfriend stars alongside Woody Harrelson.

"It's funny, you live with someone for seven years and then they do something like that and you go, 'Holy s**t. I didn't know you had that in you.'"

The couple have just moved house, and settled away from the limelight with their two dogs, Tucker and Denver. And the patter of tiny feet may not be far away either.
Charlie said: "I've been thinking about becoming a mum for a couple of years now. My biological clock is ticking, but it hasn't gone off yet.

"I couldn't hope for my career to be going any better, and I have found the great love of my life in my relationship, so I think we're ready to start having kids running around the house.

"Getting pregnant doesn't excite me, but having kids does. I know I'll be a mother one day. It's just that I don't really want to look like a whale."

Only child Charlize was raised in South Africa, outside Johannesburg, where she witnessed violence first-hand. Aged 15, her mother shot her abusive father dead. She refuses to discuss the incident, but Gerda Theron was not charged after it was ruled that she'd acted in self-defence.

"Everything changed for me the day my father died. Years ago, I used to cover it all up and say he died in a car accident. It was a way of explaining his absence when I did not want to go into the reasons or the event itself.

"I have now come to terms with it and have been able to move on. "There's something to be said for coming from a country in turmoil. It made me resilient. When you come from a harsh landscape you have to get on with it. There's not a lot of whining about s**t," she added.

At 16 she left the country for good when she won a competition and travelled to Milan on a one-year modelling contract. Then she moved to New York and trained as a ballet dancer before falling into acting when a talent scout spotted her screaming at a bank teller.

She made her feature debut in 1996's 2 Days in the Valley and subsequently starred opposite Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves in the thriller The Devil's Advocate. Charlize remains fiercely close to her German-born mother and credits her for introducing her up to acting.

"We'd have to travel an hour to the nearest drive-in cinema, and we'd go and never knew what was playing. But once you got there, it was an hour's drive back, so you may as well watch whatever it was.

"I was about eight or nine and Fatal Attraction was playing and Mom didn't want to turn all the way round, so she was like, 'Well, this is as good a way for you to learn as any.'"

Next Charlize is set to follow up Hancock with the post-apocalyptic thriller The Road, co-starring Viggo Mortensen. It doesn't have Hancock's blockbuster prospects, but Charlize says she doesn't care.

"Every decision I've made has been because of the story-telling aspect or a director I wanted to work with, not how much money the movie might make or what it might do for my career," she said.

Her Oscar-winning turn in Monster is a case in point - she had to fight to play serial killer Aileen Wournos with the pockmarked skin, lank, greasy hair and bad teeth the role demanded. And when she won the Best Actress award, it looked like her defiance had paid off.

She said: "It was great to receive it for a movie that nobody supported. "There wasn't one person in this industry who wanted that film made. We were hours away from signing a straight-to video deal with Blockbuster when we found a distributor. For that reason alone, the Oscar was especially sweet."

Another sweet moment was working with Michael Caine on Cider House Rules. "I'm so grateful for him," she said. "He said he can remember vivid conversations with a grip from a certain movie, but he could never tell you how much it made or what critics thought of it. He said it's about those memories.

"You've got to go and do it for the right reasons, otherwise you'll just sit and cry at home in bed."

Barrack Obama Denies Email Relationship With Scarlett Johansson


Barrack Obama put recent reports suggesting that he was in regular touch over e-mail with actress Scarlett Johansson in perspective saying that he responded to a single email from her thanking her for her support.

"She sent one email to [my assistant] Reggie [Love], who forwarded it to me," he said. "I write saying, 'thank you Scarlett for doing what you do,' and suddenly we have this email relationship."

Obama clarified that Johansson does not have his personal e-mail address. Earlier this month Johansson told Devil Called Love that she finds it "amazing" that Barack Obama has the time to answer her adoring e-mails.

"I feel like I'm supporting someone, and having a personal dialogue with them, and it's amazing," added Johansson.

Her statements had been interpreted to suggest that she was regularly exchanging e-mails with the Presumptive Democratic Party Presidential candidate.

Johansson, 23, an ardent supporter of Obama, has campaigned tirelessly for him and appeared in his celebrity-packed Yes We Can Internet music video.

"My heart belongs to Barack," she joked with Associated Press reporter in January. "I am engaged to Barack Obama."

Johansson's twin brother Hunter works on the Obama campaign.

The Formula For Relationship Bliss


If finding the right mate is chemistry, you can't blame U.K. dating coach Adam Lyons for coming up with a scientific formula for relationship bliss.

"If you want to make someone fall in love with you, you've got to get them to invest in you," said Lyons. "What I teach is how to trigger that investment."

To that end, he figures C-R+Q+S=A. That's comfort, minus rapport, plus qualifications, plus sexual escalation, equals attraction.

The 27-year-old should know. He was voted the No. 3 ranked pick-up artist at the World Pick-Up Artist (PUA) Summit last year, and is in hot demand across North America as a leading authority on personal attraction for British-based PUA Training. In fact, his ranking falls behind only Neil Strauss, author of the bestseller The Game, and Mystery, the featured subject of which details the secret society of pick-up artists.

Lyons wasn't always lucky with women, though. Back in high school, he was voted by his peers as the most likely to never get a girlfriend. In fact, he admits he spent a decade dating mostly lonely women he found at bars and friends of friends, dragging out the troubled relationships waiting for someone better to come along.

That all changed when the former public relations and marketing rep signed up for a course a few years ago on how to meet women.

"I wanted to get the girls of my dreams, I wasn't in it to get laid like a rock star -- although that happened," he admitted.

Lyons began practicing seven hours a day, meeting lots of women right out on the street in front of his London office -- and promptly lost his job.

But, his lust to understand why he was successful attracted other men, who wanted to learn his techniques in personal attraction, followed by a flurry of print and TV journalists who helped him create credibility. That spawned a chance for a gig lecturing in the United States.

While he got the worst slot, at 9 a.m. on a Sunday, Lyons said he received a standing ovation and was mobbed by the audience: "I was over the moon and demand went through the roof."

Lyons' -- whose cold-call conquests can be seen online at YouTube -- continues to lecture and will travel to any city to conduct boot camps in which he takes a handful of guys out for sessions that include daytime seminars and nighttime clubbing. He can be reached at the 100% free dating service Devil Called Love.

But he's no longer single. Lyons partnered both personally and professionally with a female dating expert based in Dallas.

Like most of his clients, he admits he was always looking for The One.

"To be honest, this sounds so corny, but there was a phrase I always wanted to say to my wife: 'I could have had any girl in the world and I choose you.'"

Now it seems he can.

Lyons approach taps basic psychology: Offer and conditioning.

Step 1: Make women feel comfortable talking to you. "Tell funny stories, be entertaining, compliment their clothes," Lyons said. Also, try to help out: if a woman trips, help her up. If she's lost, give directions.

Be completely nice and offer to do things for them.

Step 2: After finding an easy rapport, break that rapport. "Women need to fear losing you," said Lyons. Wind a woman up, crack a joke, surround yourself with other women. Take a page from the female playbook, as they've already learned being high-maintenance is social proof that they are worth being with.

Step 3: Qualify yourself as a desirable investment not to be trifled with. Show them: "every time you refuse to invest, I'm going to show you I'm willing to walk away." Tell her you're very busy but you can meet for an ice cream or short, fun date but make sure it requires that she make the effort to spend time with you.

Step 4: Make the reward sexual. "Say: 'you're so great', kiss her on the forehead. 'You're amazing', give her a hug.The next thing you know, you're all over her, she's all over you . . . She can't believe that there is an incredible 'click' about you that she can't put her mind on. The click is her own investment, and her own input into being with you."

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Director Lean's Love Of Leading Ladies


When David Lean left London for Paris in the spring of 1955, the film-maker's finances were in a parlous state. The 47-year-old had separated from his wife, the actor Ann Todd (whom he was to divorce two years later), while the taxman was clamouring for payment of £20,000 – an astronomical amount for those days – in unpaid dues.

The details of Lean's financial problems are contained in Gene D Phillips's thorough biography, Beyond the Epic, which reveals that while he may have been among the most celebrated film-makers in British film history, in the mid-1950s, at least, Lean certainly wasn't one of the richest. The director of Brief Encounter couldn't even afford to have his teeth fixed and, at one stage, was reduced to pawning his gold cigarette case.

The British film industry wasn't exactly thriving during this period either. The Rank Organisation (Lean's main patron) was in a period of retrenchment; the extravagance and artistic ambition of the 1940s, when Rank had tried to gate-crash the American market with a series of big-budget "prestige" pictures made by the likes of Lean and Powell and Pressburger were long forgotten.

At Pinewood Studios, the emphasis was now on Norman Wisdom comedies, Doctor in the House and stiff upper-lipped war movies. Gone were the days when – as Lean enthused of the time he was filming the Dickens adaptations Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948) – he and his collaborators in the Rank stable could "make any subject we wish, with as much money as we think that subject should have spent on it... cast whichever actors we choose and have no interference with the way the film is made".

Yet, while his erstwhile colleagues floundered, Lean reinvented himself as the director of widescreen spectacles such as The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). And so the young man who once used to sit chain-smoking in the refreshment room of Victoria Station, because he didn't want to go home to Croydon after venturing into town to see the latest movie, became a film-maker feted in Hollywood and Britain alike.

It was Lean's genius that he took an international perspective at a time when other British film-makers were becoming increasingly insular. He had the vision and ruthlessness to work on an epic scale. He also had plenty of reason to escape Britain: his acrimonious divorce from Todd may have left him broke, but it gave him as compelling a reason to look further afield as his disenchantment with the British film industry.

Lean was a relentless womaniser. He was married six times and had many mistresses. His approach to marriage was certainly erratic; on the one hand, thanks to his Quaker upbringing, he took it seriously. On the other, he didn't want anything to get in the way of his career – and he couldn't escape his own nature. As his former cinematographer and producer Ronald Neame told Kevin Brownlow, the author of the definitive Lean biography, his old producer Anthony Havelock-Allan had said of Lean: "David always had to have a girl on any film he worked on."

The irony was that Lean was often thought of as a supreme technician – the former editor who knew everything about cutting, rhythm and camera lenses – who lacked the human touch. "David, a very fine director, never had very much consideration for what actors sometimes have to go through – just a relentless drive for what he wanted for the scene," said Todd, who starred in three of his films.

Lean showed similarly little compunction about ending relationships. "When David leaves you, you are rubbed out. It was like an amputation. He came with nothing... and he left with nothing," his second wife, the actor Kay Walsh, told Brownlow of the end of their marriage. There was an element of bedroom farce about his private life, too. He used the same flair that his films showed for choreography to keep mistresses and wives apart.

As was once observed by Lean's fellow director Ingmar Bergman, also married six times, the very process of film-making lends itself to erotic conspiracy: "Drama and film are incontrovertibly two professions that are immensely erotically charged."

In The Passionate Friends (1949), Lean explores such themes as sexual jealousy and adultery with far more depth than in any of his earlier films – even Brief Encounter (1945). What is surprising is the sympathy the film shows for the jealous husband (Claude Rains), who is terrified that his wife (Todd) will leave him for her former sweetheart (Trevor Howard). At times Rains' character is made to seem absurd – he's too stiff to dance and too pedantic to speak in anything other than a banker's dry discourse. Yet Lean – despite his own reputation for breaking up relationships – treats the character with sensitivity; we are always aware of his suffering.

Nevertheless, in real life, he was at it again: during the making of the film, Lean began an affair with his leading lady, who was to become his third wife. Todd's divorce from her then-husband Nigel Tangye was bitter, and her autobiography contains a comic account of Tangye (a keen aviator who was also Lean's cousin) swooping down in vengeful mood in a small plane and terrifying Lean and his crew when they were shooting his next feature, Madeleine (1950).

Whatever misery Lean inflicted on Tangye, he suffered in equal measure during his own calamitous marriage to Todd. "She treated me so horribly that I think I was far more hurt than I have ever acknowledged," he later wrote. He complained about being used as "a tool for the sex gratification of someone who doesn't really give a damn for you".

However, during the making of The Passionate Friends, Lean had shot abroad for the first time, in the lakes and mountains of the Chamonix and Haute-Savoie regions in France. And as his relationship with Todd soured, his urge to escape the UK grew. He shot Summertime with Katharine Hepburn in Venice. Then, once he began to work with flamboyant Hollywood producer Sam Spiegel, he made The Bridge on the River Kwai in Sri Lanka.

It wasn't just the taxman and his ex-wife who were driving Lean from Britain. It was the country's faltering film industry and even its actors. During production of The Bridge On The River Kwai, the director was constantly at loggerheads with his British cast members, growing so infuriated with the surly behaviour of Alec Guinness and James Donald that after one scene he yelled: "Now you can all fuck off and go home, you English actors. Thank God that I'm starting work tomorrow with an American actor [William Holden]."

While the careers of contemporaries such as Michael Powell were stuttering back home, Lean was working on a bigger canvas than ever, establishing an international reputation in the process. Maybe Todd deserves some of the credit: if they had enjoyed a stable married life, he could as easily have ended up staying in England and taking whatever chances came his way. Then again, as he freely admitted, he was "a monomaniac" who knew how to be ruthless when making a film. And however turbulent his private life, he was never going to let such matters distract him from his work, at home or abroad.

The joy of six: The leading ladies of David Lean

David Lean's first wife was his cousin, Isabel Jean, who he married in 1930. She gave him his only son, Peter, but Lean soon decided that cosy family domesticity was not for him, and just six years after the wedding, the marriage was over.

Kay Walsh, a brilliant actor who helped push Lean's career as a director, was under no pretences as to how married life would be after wedding him in 1940. "David warned me that life with him would be very difficult," she later recalled. "He had damaged so many women and didn't want to damage me. Being in love with David was a killer... how I survived I don't know." The marriage lasted nine years.

Ann Todd had emerged as a major British movie star thanks to her masochistic role as the pianist tormented by James Mason in The Seventh Veil. Sometimes called the "British Garbo", she was initially suspicious of Lean's standoffish attitude toward her on the set of The Passionate Friends, but then – as she later wrote – he swept her off her feet. The marriage, which lasted from 1949 to 1957, didn't turn out well. As Todd later said, "There are some people who shouldn't be married and David Lean was one of them."

Leila Matkar met Lean in India in the mid-1950s on a 100% free internet dating site. She left her husband and two children to be with him. They married in 1960. The marriage was Lean's longest-lasting, but ended in 1978.

Lean's fifth wife, Sandra Hotz, appears briefly in his final feature, A Passage To India. He had met her in the 1960s when she was only 20 and fell in love with her. They wed in 1981 and split in 1984.

Lean met his sixth wife, Sandra Cooke, in the food hall at Harrods. "I just wanted to congratulate David Lean and ask what he was doing next," she later recalled. They married in December 1990; Lean died four months later.

She's Got The Looks, He's Got The Millions


As unions between a multi-married Hollywood star and one of Europe's wealthiest money-makers, philanthropists and social gad-abouts go, the confirmation could not have come in a more po-faced way.

"The engagement is announced," read yesterday's personal columns of The Times, "between Arpad, son of Mr Pascal Busson, of Paris, and Mrs Florence Harcourt-Smith, of South of France, and Uma, daughter of Mr and Mrs Robert A F Thurman, of New York."

Put like that, you'd think they were two sweet young things newly embarked on life's rocky road together. But that is not quite the case. She is Uma Thurman, 38, statuesque star of Pulp Fiction and the Kill Bill movies, formerly married to actors Gary Oldman and Ethan Hawke, and ex-companion of New York hotelier André Balazs.

He is "Arki" Busson, former consort of supermodel Elle Macpherson, one-time gentleman caller to Farrah Fawcett, worth £250m through hedge-fund activities, and one of the world's most effective networkers.

So it's not surprising what they see in each other. Nor, given the circles in which they move, how they met: at a dinner party in Milan co-hosted by Gianni Versace and Tony Blair. Since then, as they edged towards "making a spousal commitment", as Hollywood Today archly put it, they have regularly popped up at fancy affairs, managing both Nelson Mandela's and Elton John's parties last week.

These gatherings are as nothing compared to the happy couple's rococo antecedents. Uma's grandfather was a German nobleman, and her mother a model who was briefly married to LSD advocate and Sixties dissident Timothy Leary. They had been introduced by Salvador Dali. She then married Robert Thurman, a New York academic and the first Westerner ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk. The Dali Lama was an occasional house guest.

Busson's family is just as remarkable – father was a French army officer and Algeria veteran, mother an English debutante. Arpad was named for Arpad Plesch, his step-grandfather, who, when his first wife died, married her daughter. A rich Hungarian financier, he was, potentially, the black sheep of the family, being "linked", as professional insinuators put it, to the Nazi-era, Zyklon-B producing firm IG Farben.

Young Arpad did his national service as a nurse, and then embarked on a life in society and finance. His firm EIM invests in other hedge funds, and he deploys his skills and contacts to make enormous sums for good causes. His charity Absolute Return for Kids (ARK) has raised nearly £100m, and spent most of it on Aids care in South Africa, orphanages in Romania and Bulgaria, and education in India and the UK.

Both Thurman and Busson have two children from previous relationships. She has a home in New York, and he in Notting Hill and the Bahamas. He has also been known to rent out Yorkshire's 45-room Mulgrave Castle for long periods. Even by the standards of the free dating service Devil Called Love, this is quite a match.

11 Hotspots For Finding Love In New York City


Have you heard? This is going to be a summer of love in New York City. As the temperatures rise, the five boroughs become a haven for hookups, make-out sessions and true romance. We rounded up 11 places to fall in love - be it forever or just for now.

1. For a fairy tale romance: The Cloisters

An oasis in upper Manhattan, the Cloisters is the palace-like setting of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's medieval architecture branch. Perched on a hill, this monastic castle will make you feel all Romeo and Juliet in the semisecret gardens - perfect for a stroll with a special someone more interested in you than in 12th-century stonework. Fort Tryon Park, (212) 923-3700, Tues.-Sun.: 9:30 a.m.-5:15 p.m. Closed Mon. (March-October)

2. For a cool place to get hot: An air-conditioned cinema to see "The Wackness"

For a trip back to New York during the summer of 1994, writer-director Jonathon Levine's "The Wackness" gets nostalgic about youthful romance. The film, which charmed audiences at the Sundance and Tribeca festivals, hits theaters Thursday. The romantically inclined will swoon over the story of a lonely teenage delinquent who devotes his summer to capturing the heart of the high school hottie Olivia Thirlby of "Juno" fame. Young love plus a jammin' '90s soundtrack equals a perfect evening for two. The Wackness: Opens Thursday at the Angelika.

3. For a reason to scream and hold someone: Reading of "Twilight" by author Stephenie Meyer

Writer Stephenie Meyer thrills teens (and even adults) with her "Twilight" romance series, about an awkward high schooler, Bella, drawn into a sweeping romance with a hunky member of the undead. To celebrate the August release of her latest book, "Breaking Down," Meyer hosts a concert/reading with singer-songwriter Justin Furstenfeld at Tine Square's Nokia Theater on Aug. 1.

4. For reenacting a romantic comedy kiss: city's bridges

Make it a double feature: Park yourself with your sweetheart on a bench in view of the 59th St. bridge by the East River, à law Woody Allen andDianne Keaton in "Manhattan." Or visit the Booklyn Bridge at dusk. This 125-year-old icon gets only more romantic with age. Look no further than Miranda and Steve locking lips beneath the graceful granite towers in the "Sex and the City movie to recognize that the Brooklyn Bridge is a breathtaking backdrop to some serious smooching, especially at night. Park with your honey on one of the benches or stroll along the weathered wooden planks while taking in the dazzling downtown skyline beneath a blanket of stars. Take the pedestrian walkway at the traffic median on Centre St. and Park Row on the Manhattan side, or Tillary St. at Adams St. on the Brooklyn side. Phone MTA Bridges and Tunnels at (212) 360-3000.

5. For a cheap date: take a cruise on the Staten Island Ferry

By day, the municipal ferries are better suited to commuters, but locals know that after dark these vessels become veritable love boats. Couples cuddle up on deck for a free 5-mile tour of New York Harbor at night. Pick up a couple of tallboys or a hot pretzel at the snack bar onboard and snuggle up for the 25-minute ride, which sails past the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and Governors Island and the Verrazano Bridge,not to mention lower Manhattan all aglow. Departs from Whitehall Terminal at 1 Whitehall St. at South St., Manhattan. Arrives at St. George Ferry Terminal at 1 Ferry Terminal Drive, Richmond Terrace, S.I.

6. For picking up hot firefighters: Bleecker Street Morton-Williams Supermarket

The supermarket at Bleecker and LaGuardia Place is a firefighter hot spot as rookies from local ladders roam the aisles (sometimes still dressed in their boots and suspenders!) to stock up on stationhouse staples. Spark up a conversation with one of New York's Bravest about grilling safety, and mention that you just happen to be barbecuing in the park this weekend, if he's got nothing better to do. ... If the Village is a hike, check out shops, Laundromats and pubs likely to draw a fireman from a stationhouse near you. Morton Williams Associated Supermarket, 130 Bleecker St., at LaGuardia Place; (212) 358-9597.

7. For a trip back to the first summer of love: Sheep Meadow

Think of it as a meat market for vegans: The Sheep Meadow in Cnetral Park is the closest thing to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury. With frisbees flying overhead and guitars a-strumming all around, this massive grassy lawn is like a love-in for singles (not to mention a few dogs). Once you've found that special someone, leave the hordes on the Meadow and head to Strawberry Fields near 72nd St. for a romantic picnic à deux. Pack a gourmet picnic and pitch up on the grass in the garden's wooded "quiet zone" for an uninterrupted makeout session under the canopy of trees. Sheeps Meadow and Strawberry Fields, 71st to 74th Sts. at Central Park West.

8. For a mini-mini-moon: 79th St. Boat Basin Cafe

Okay, so 79th St. and Riverside Drive isn't Fiji, but it is a great place to instantly simulate the feeling of a romantic getaway. Smell the breeze off the water, kick off your shoes (actually you better leave them on) and throw back a margarita at the lively West 79th St. Boat Basin Cafe. The outdoor grill dishes out barbecued ribs and burgers as the sun goes down over the Hudson. Walk off your dessert with a romantic stroll downtown along HUdeson River Park. Boast Basin Cafe, W. 79th St. at the Hudeson River; call (212) 496-5542.

9. For the perfect first date: Deno's Wonder Wheel

Fancy restaurants can make first dates feel 10 times more stressful (the money, the formalities, the escargot in the teeth). Why not go back to basics, with cotton candy and a kiss on top of Coney Island's famous Ferris wheel. Its cozy metal cars are one of those rare romantic spaces where you're hidden privately away yet out there in the middle of the world all at the same time (just don't pick the cars that swing). Wait until the sun sets, and you've got the ocean breeze, the starry lights of the Coney midway below, the sound of the waves and, way off in the distance, that famous city skyline. It's open 11 a.m. to midnight all summer long; tickets are $5.

10. For a hot, sweaty singles party (art included): P.S. 1's Summer "Warm Up"

MoMA's contemporary Queens outpost hosts this ultra-hip music and dance series, set in an installation created by the annual winner of P.S. 1 and MoMA's Young Architects program (this summer, in keeping with the green trend, the setting for "Warm Up" is an "Urban Farm"). Sure it's artsy, but it's also an excuse to get sweaty and dance. The series, which brings world-renowned deejays and music ensembles to LOng Island City every Saturday, attracts all the city's pretty young things with an artistic bent. Partygoers can dance to the music, chill in the outdoor installation with a cold beer, or wander through the exhibitions at P.S. 1. Every Saturday starting July 5 through Sept. 6, 1:30 p.m.-9 p.m.

11. For foodies in love: Grand Army Plaza greenmarket

Amid the sweet smell of fresh flowers and local produce, the Farmers Market on the edge of Brooklyn's Prospect Park is a great spot for PDAs. For singles, the market could be the place to meet an unsuspecting mate with similar interests. And instead of buying your eye's delight a $10 drink, a nice fresh flower will do the trick. Saturdays, 8 a.m.-4 p.m.; NW entrance of Prospect Park.

Friends Mystified By Ruslana's Fatal Decision


Close friends of Ruslana Korshunova, the 20-year-old Kazakh model who plunged to her death from her ninth-floor Manhattan flat at the weekend, say they can't believe she committed suicide.

Korshunova appeared on the front covers of Russian Vogue and French Elle and was dubbed 'fashion's muse of the moment' by the Times newspaper in 2005.

Police in New York reported no signs of a struggle inside the model's apartment and witnesses say they saw her leap from her balcony on Saturday, just three days shy of her 21st birthday.

But Kira Titeneva, who described herself as Korshunova's "best friend" from her home town, told the New York Daily News "There's no way she would have killed herself. She loved life so much."

Ms Titeneva was also quoted in London's Daily Mail as saying: "I talked to her on Friday night and we were talking all the gossip."

Another friend told the paper that Korshunova, who would have earned around $5200 for a catwalk show, had been sending money home to her family in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan and was "one of the sweetest, nicest people you'll ever meet."

The unnamed source told the paper the model had just returned from a modelling job in Paris and seemed "on top of the world.

"There were no signs. That's what's driving me crazy. I don't see one reason why she would do that," he said.

Korshunova's last hours were spent with a former boyfriend Artem Perchenok, 24, who told the New York Post he dropped her off at her apartment just hours before her death after they had watched the Patrick Swayze film Ghost together.

Korshunova's doorman, Mahmoud Nakeeb, was also quoted in the Daily Mail as claiming the model seemed happy when she came home about 4am on Saturday.

"She came in this morning, she smiled, no sense of depression," he said.

But emotional postings on the beauty's social networking site in recent months hinted at an inner struggle.

"I'm so lost. Will I ever find myself?" London's Telegraph quoted Korshunova as writing wrote three months ago.

The paper also also quoted a post in January saying: "It hurts, as if someone took a part of me, tore it out, mercilessly stomped all over and threw it out."

The balcony the model fell from had construction netting around it which appeared to have been cut, according to the Daily Mail, which also wrote that Korshunova was shoeless and dressed in blue jeans and a purple tank top when she died.

Her agency, IMG was reeling from the tragedy and gathering information about her death and work schedule, the Daily Mail reported.

"We're shocked and our heart goes out to her family," spokesman Zach Eichman was quoted as saying.

The Cad Strikes Again


Going home has not been easy. One moment she was on the edge of becoming the chatelaine of ancient Althorp House, with its old masters, priceless antiques, endless acres and unique history as the resting place of Princess Diana.

The next she was returning to a little wooden house with a vegetable garden and a pole flying the American flag, in the dusty township of Bonny Doon, south of San Francisco, explaining to her police sergeant father why things hadn't turned out as they'd hoped.

Friends had warned television presenter Coleen Sullivan that she'd never end up a countess but just another notch on Earl Spencer's aristocratic bedpost. And so it has turned out.

'She was in love with the bastard,' shrugs a former television colleague. 'What else could she do?'
Nearly two years ago, the glamorous Coleen threw up her career - and a long-term fiance - to make her life with Charles Spencer in England after meeting him on the free relationship dating site Devil Called Love.

At around the same time, Spencer cruelly walked out on his second wife, Caroline, and their two children, including his daughter, Lara, aged just four months. Caroline - 'Pidge' to her friends - was 'devastated' - the same word that friends of Coleen have been using about her this week.

Back home in Bonny Doon, a wine-growing township with a church and two fire stations but no shop, her family are putting on a brave face. Her stepmother, Lisa Sullivan, assured one well-wisher: 'She's fine.'

But the truth is very different. Once again, the 9th Earl Spencer had raised a young woman's expectations to dazzling heights only to dash them with a callous finality.

'Charles attracts women by displaying a certain vulnerability - something of a little boy lost. It's real, not phoney,' says one of his oldest friends.

'But he gets bored with a woman the moment he realises he has total control over her. It is not a pretty characteristic, but there it is. I'm sure it goes back to his childhood when his mother ran off with another man. He loves the chase of women, and seducing them, but he can be ruthless with them.'

Lord Spencer's pursuit and capture of the glamorous brunette Coleen after she interviewed him for a documentary in the late summer of 2006, followed a pattern that will be familiar to his ex-wives, Caroline - who has two other children by her first husband, PR guru Matthew Freud - and Victoria, mother of his four older children.

It is a tale of flowers, candle-light, whispered compliments and lavish attention. And at intimate moments, gifts of jewellery under the pillow.

Coleen was a girl whom one of his friends describes as having 'a nice American sheen, a lively talker but not sophisticated like Charles'.

Even so, he appeared to be so serious about her that he accompanied her several times to see her family in America. He particularly liked her father, a former SWAT police marksman, who told him: 'Don't mess with my daughter. She knows how to use a gun - I taught her! This is not a woman who is going to let any man mess her around.'

Yesterday, the warning sounded pretty hollow - as hollow as the former police officer's claim to understand people so well after 36 years in the Force that he judged the 9th Earl Spencer to be 'a gentleman'.

Spencer's older children, living with their mother Victoria in South Africa, never came to terms with the speed with which their father had dumped his second wife, Caroline, whom they all liked, and taken up with the 35-year-old Coleen.

When Spencer, 43, took Coleen to spend their first Christmas together at his splendid mansion in the exclusive Cape Town suburb of Constantia, the plan was for the children, then aged 12 to 15, to join them.

But they refused to come to the house if Coleen was there, and he was forced to put her up in the five-star, ??350-a-night Cellars-Hohenort hotel, a brief drive from his house.

In subsequent visits, even though Coleen never had her own home in England and had become part of the everyday scene at Althorp, the children continued to have little enthusiasm for her. Yet bit by bit, Spencer worked on them and eventually began to win them over.

Like their father, Coleen had also been brought up without a mother because when her parents divorced, her father won custody. Then in July last year, Spencer took the children, Kitty, now 17, twins Eliza and Katya, 15, and Louis, 14, with him and Coleen on a week-long holiday in Mallorca. By all accounts it broke the ice.

Just three months ago, in April, Spencer finally convinced them of his commitment to Coleen, and they all agreed to sit down together and talk. Crucially, according to a family source, the children accepted that he loved her and that he wanted her to be a part of the family.

For Coleen Sullivan, the small-time television presenter, this moment of full acceptance into one of the nation's great families released a flood of relief and gratitude. However, just what it released in Earl Spencer's mind, after such a herculean effort to bring his children on-side, can only be a matter for speculation.

'One morning,' says a family friend, 'he simply woke up and decided he no longer found her attractive. And that was it. But isn't that so very Charles?' Of course, there had been clues along the way. When he hosted a shooting party of smart friends and their wives at Althorp last Christmas, Coleen went out of her way to look beautiful at dinner.

One of those present recalls that she 'really did look gorgeous and the other chaps murmured what a lucky chap Charles Spencer was, but, to our surprise, he never offered her a single compliment'.

For students of Earl Spencer and his treatment of women, this was a pivotal moment. He was, as one explains, moving from conquest and fascination, to indifference that would lead to boredom and, finally, 'shipping her out'.

This is what makes the April meeting with his children inexplicable. It certainly indicates a measure of cavalier indifference to her feelings. But isn't this how he treated the two women who did become Countess Spencer?

He is, after all, a man who never displays too much concern over upsetting women - whether they are former wives or even his sister, Diana, from whom he famously - and selfishly - withheld the sanctuary of a cottage on his estate when she was desperate for a bolt-hole after the break-up of her marriage to Prince Charles.

He claimed the pursuing paparazzi would upset his family peace. When Diana, shocked by his refusal to help, wrote to him, the loving little brother returned her letters unopened. As for the wives, theirs are both stories of grotesque betrayal. During the 1999 divorce hearing involving Victoria, held in South Africa because he was advised it would be cheaper there, he described himself (in a letter to a girlfriend) as having been 'vicious, cruel and a bully' towards Victoria.

He was labelled a serial and deceitful adulterer who had affairs with a dozen women while Victoria, whom he had met and married in 1989, was in a sanatorium for five months overcoming drink problems and anorexia.

The cruelty manifested itself in other ways. At a party, when he was reminded of his late father's remark that he should stick with Victoria through thick and thin, he jocularly told guests that Victoria 'was thin, and certainly thick'.

These days, Victoria is remarried with another child and lives happily in Cape Town. Caroline became his second Countess Spencer in 2001 and they were divorced a year ago. But the divorce is not yet absolute as they continue negotiations over her settlement.

More than anything, Caroline wants to keep, for herself and the children, the lovely canal-side house in Little Venice, North-West London, that Spencer bought for ??4.5million from Pink Floyd guitarist Dave Gilmour, through the family trust based in London and the Channel Islands.
Most people would imagine that the very least a man worth in the region of ??100million would do, having walked out on his wife and small children, is make over the family house to them.
But according to family friends, this is what he is refusing to do. 'He wants the house for himself and doesn't want her to have it,' one of them said.

'This seems to be the big sticking point in the divorce and is why the nisi hasn't yet become absolute. He's offered her money, but that too, in her view, isn't much.'

Friends who meet Earl Spencer say he displays no sense of ordeal involving any of these women. 'He's in good form,' says one. 'You'd never know he was in the middle of wrangling with an ex-wife and dumping a girlfriend.'

You have to wonder just how deep the effects of his childhood runs, as well as his conscience. This is a youngest child, the long-awaited son to continue the line of Earl Spencers, whose arrival was greeted with relief and celebration.

The child has become a man who gives all the appearance of doing precisely what he wishes and is prone to bouts of anger if he does not get his own way. And in wanting his own way, he has strayed into forbidden and dangerous areas, drawing criticism from even his most devoted friends.

On Thursday, when a memorial service to Shusha Guppy, mother of his lifelong and closest friend since Eton, Darius Guppy, was held at St James's Church, Piccadilly, Lord Spencer was not in the congregation. Of course, circumstances may have prevented him from being there, but no one was seriously surprised by his absence.

Things have not been the same between Darius and Charles since an extraordinary series of events that began in April 2006, when Guppy's pretty wife, Patricia, a delicate blonde from Sunderland who once ran an escort agency, revealed something that shocked her husband.
She told him that while he was in prison for an attempted jewellery insurance fraud back in 1993, she'd had dinner at Althorp and Spencer had tried to seduce her after his then wife, Victoria, had gone to bed.
Patricia had kept the incident to herself all these years on account of Charles's and Darius's lifelong friendship, as she didn't want to upset him. But she had heard that two other women who were at the dinner, and towards whom he also allegedly made advances, had been talking about it, and she didn't want her husband to hear from someone other than herself.

Guppy, a man of quick and inflammatory temper, shook with anger. He telephoned Spencer accusing him of betrayal, and refused to accept his vehement denials. In the end, Spencer agreed to go to Guppy's South African home.

What followed, as gasping children watched through an upstairs window, was a savage fight in which both men were smeared in blood and sweat as they grappled and thrashed around. One man could be seen kicking and punching the other on the ground.

Guppy was said to have been 'like a man possessed'. His marriage, now 19 years old, remains strong. Spencer suffered a fractured cheekbone and injuries to his ribs and nose, which he later passed off to inquiring friends as 'cricket injuries'.

Charles Spencer took a real hiding that night. It has become an episode of his life that he never mentions. Friends joke these days that they never allow their wives to go to Althorp unless they accompany them personally.

When that thrashing took place, he had only just met Coleen and it would be several months before he walked out on Caroline. Today, there is another casualty in the life of the 9th Earl Spencer. Back in the U.S., Coleen will try to revive the television career she thought she'd no longer need.

Meanwhile, the man she went out with for 11 years and was engaged to when Lord Spencer came into view, handsome, 6ft 3in Justin Allen, has long since stopped licking his own wounds, and has become a star sports presenter for Tampa Bay's 10 News.

Who will be next in finding intimate gifts under her pillow in Charles Spencer's bed? Watch this space. But as one of his old friends says: 'I doubt if Charles will ever fall completely in love with any girl. The only person he really loves is himself.'

Slave To Love


Opening the door to her mistress's bedchamber, the maid knew she was risking the wrath of Victorian society. Taking her upperclass lover by his hand, she drew him in. On her lady's bed lay a lavish ball gown.

Silently, Hannah Cullwick took off her drab calico uniform. Donning the splendid dress, she emerged transformed - only her calloused hands and hefty limbs a reminder of her below-stairs status.

Her lover, Arthur Munby, would later write in diaries which - together with explicit photographs - remained hidden for 50 years: 'I brushed out her bright hair in a lady's fashion, and placed the rose within it.

'Thus she stood before me to be looked at: smiling and slightly blushing. Feeling awkward and strange, in that unknown garb, but looking not awkward at all, but most graceful.'

Arthur added: 'Never before had I felt so strongly the need of self-control in her presence. 'Never, before or since, have I been filled with a more passionate ardour of love and reverence for that pure and innocent soul who had trusted herself so utterly to me.'

This was a forbidden and dangerous love. The pair were engaged in an illicit affair which transcended the mores of the time and crossed the class barrier. The love affair is an extraordinary tale of seething eroticism, romance and heartbreak for Arthur and Hannah, who delighted in a taboo master-slave relationship for half a century - with tragic consequences.

Behind closed doors, they engaged in cross-dressing and bizarre role-playing which would have shocked their contemporaries. She revelled in filth, he in the purity of her love. A bright and aristocratic young man, Arthur arrived in London in 1851 full of potential. He was to take up a position as a trainee barrister. As a gentleman, the glittering world of Victorian high society lay at his feet.

Hannah's place in life could not have been more different. A lowly country maid, she went into service aged eight. She came to London to live a brutal life on the bottom rung of servitude, spending 16-hour days as a maid-of-all-work in grand houses.

For his part, Arthur was battling with a strange fascination. Stifled by the rigid social hierarchy of 1850s England, he was finding himself increasingly drawn to lower-class women. He wrote in his diary: 'My interest in balls is dying out. But always to be among the sparkling froth atop of society has one sad delight in that it keeps vivid before me that gentle misplaced creature who lies grovelling among the dregs: that toiling maid of all work who might have been a drawing-room belle, and is a kitchen drudge.'

He began to seek out these forbidden women, roaming the dirty backstreets of the capital to find them. Diane Atkinson, author of Love And Dirt: The Marriage Of Arthur Munby And Hannah Cullwick, says: 'He liked his women big and strong, robust and hearty.

'He also liked them dirty and sweaty from their hard work. That was his idea of femininity.' Indeed, as his fascination turned into compulsion, he wrote of one working-class woman: 'Her make was brawny and massive, but lithe and shapely withal. The calf of her whitestocking'd leg was well seen, above her well-blacked big-nailed and enormous boots.'

In 1854, Arthur - by now a solicitor for the Ecclesiastical Commission - spotted the physical embodiment of his ideal: Hannah Cullwick. At 21, she had been sent on an errand in Mayfair, and Arthur followed her through the busy byways near Oxford Street.

Eventually, he accosted her - and it was love at first sight. He described her as the ultimate object of his desire. 'A robust hard-working peasant lass, yet endowed with a grace and beauty and obvious intelligence,' he wrote. 'Such a combination I had dreamt of and sought for, but I have never seen it, save in her.'

Their taboo relationship, revealed in a Channel 4 documentary earlier this week, seemed to excite both Hannah and Arthur in equal measure. Atkinson says: 'I think they loved the fact that they were playing with fire. There was the very real possibility that they would be discovered.

'If so, Arthur would have lost his job. He would have been completely ruined and undone. Theirs was a mad, mad love.' Hannah wrote in her own diary: 'I kissed you when you asked me. I wanted to see what your mouth was like. It was hot and warm. I knowed you was good and soft by the feel of your mouth.'

Arthur was attracted by what repelled his class, savouring the grimy details of Hannah's working life. She detailed the drudgery of her below- stairs existence to his delight.

'Lighted the fires and blacked the parlour grate,' wrote Hannah in one romantic epistle.
'Cleaned the hearth and five pairs of boots. Swept the hall. Filled the skuttles and made the fires up.'

When she visited her lover, Hannah played the role of servant, performing his intimate ablutions. She addressed Arthur by the pet name 'Massa' - a country version of 'master'.
She records of one encounter: 'Got the dinner and laid the cloth. Wash'd up after and then Massa's feet.'

For five years, both continued to hide their passion from society. While Hannah continued working as a maid, Arthur travelled around Britain, photographing working women.

He wrote of a visit to the coal-dusted women of the Lancashire pits: 'Stalwart labourers striding along the railway with spade on shoulder, or climbing up the sides of the trucks. I realised with difficulty the fact that nearly all these muscular black people in coats and trousers were young women.'

Thanking one collierwoman, Mary Harrison, Arthur gave her a gift. With barely concealed excitement, he wrote: 'The sixpence lay glittering white in the dull black palm of her extended right hand. I touched that dull black palm. It was rough and very hard.'

Back in London, his illicit meetings with Hannah continued. She wrote: 'Massa was much pleased with my hands because they were red and coarse, and I don't think he was ashamed of me but he would have been if he had seen anyone he knew.'
Atkinson attests: 'Arthur adored her hands. So much so that when she had been blacking the fire range, she would print them on to paper and send the imprint of her dirty working hands to him, as a love letter.'
Hannah certainly played to Arthur's love of dirt and the working class. Atkinson says: 'She liked to get naked and go up the chimney. She loved to climb up and be surrounded by the hot soot and she enjoyed sweeping the chimney with her bare hands.'

Hannah wrote: 'I lay on the hearth in the soot a minute or two thinking, and I wished rather that Massa could see me.' 'Massa' was also obsessed by Hannah's strength, her powerfully-built physique being the very opposite of the sylph-like creatures adorning the fashionable parlours of the time.

He often described how she could pick him up and carry him around, or hold him on her lap.

Hannah wrote: 'My arm is 14 inches round the muscle, and my hand four-and-a-half inches across the inside, for Massa measured them.'

By the 1860s, their relationship had become more experimental. Hannah began wearing a secret chain and padlock around her neck - her lover kept the key. She wrote: 'I am his slave and he is my master freely given and freely received only for love, and while I have the chains on I am sure nothing can part us and that it is the same as marriage is to other folks.'

They indulged in strange roleplaying fantasies. Arthur hired a photographer to take pictures of Hannah, emphasising her sturdy build. Arthur recorded: 'Her bare arms were ruddy like a peasant girl's and muscular. Her face too was dusty and rosy with rustic health.'

In one titillating chimney-sweep image, she is naked to the waist and smeared with coal dust, with Arthur's chain around her neck. Yet she appears strangely vulnerable, despite her physical strength.

She remarked of the image: 'Just what I wanted. I don't care how black it comes out, and the rougher looking the better.' She delighted in blacking herself up with soot and lead for her lover, writing: 'The blacker I get with work, the more ardent I feel towards you.'

One photograph would perhaps have shocked Victorian society most: it shows the servant-girl dressed as a lady. Another shows her cross- dressing, her hair cropped to look like a man.
Hannah even liked to lick her master's boots. Arthur writes: 'Hannah insists on being allowed to clean my boots always, for boot cleaning being the lowest work of all was ever a sign of her being mine.

She wrote: 'We had a long kiss. I licked his boots of my own accord.' Later, she told 'Massa' that she could tell where he had been by how his boots tasted.

Atkinson believes it was Hannah who held Arthur in her thrall, despite acting as his slave. 'She was in the driving seat,' she says. 'She was the boss, really.'

Finally, after 18 years apart, Hannah moved in with Arthur - as his new servant, giving their relationship the veneer of respectability. At first, they enjoyed domestic bliss. But soon reality intruded on their fragile alliance, with disastrous consequences.

Arthur wanted to live with Hannah openly, as a real couple. He attempted to educate his beloved servant girl, aiming to turn her into a lady, just like in the play Pygmalion. He wrote: 'Someday I may perhaps be able to do justice to her devotedness and to my own scheme of training her.'
His misguided plan shattered their love, finally exposing the gulf between them.
Hannah hated the idea of giving up life as a maid and wrote: 'I'd rather do the work myself but for fear anyone should think me set up or proud. 'No, I've long resolved that for freedom and true lowliness there's nothing like being a maid of all work - no one can think you set up or proud in that.'

Without telling Hannah, Arthur bought a wedding licence. His lover resisted, writing: 'I care very, very little for the licence of being married. It seems to have so little to do with our love.'
Arthur was determined, describing Hannah's 'loving face and bare strong arms glowing red with the work, an obvious servant and yet an obvious wife.'

Eventually, worn down by his pleas, Hannah agreed to the marriage. At 9am on January 14, 1873, they stood before the altar of St James Church in Clerkenwell, central London. In front of just four guests, Hannah for the first time called Arthur by his real name - standing beside him as an equal at last, as he placed a ring on her finger.

Hannah said: 'I am united heart and soul as well as married at church to the truest, best, and handsomest man in my eyes that ever was born.' She left the church not to a grand reception, however, but to return to her housework.

Her refusal to be a lady would tear the couple apart. It seems that Hannah was simply unable to adapt to a life 'upstairs', despite Arthur's desire to make her respectable. He bought her fine lace gloves, but she demanded that he continued to pay her a wage and kept their relationship secret.
Indeed, Hannah seems to have felt humiliated by the whole exercise, her new status undermining her very existence. Poignantly, she wrote to her new husband: 'I hope you'll never take me out again as a lady. It makes me miserable. I feel so useless and idle.'

The strain eventually became too much, and Hannah suffered a nervous breakdown, exacerbated by drink. Tragically, just four years after making her his wife, Arthur exiled Hannah from his home on the advice of doctors.

She was sent to Shropshire, where she became a servant again, and wrote a stream of painful letters to Arthur. She told him: 'I have felt my love for you as much as ever this last six months, although I have given you up and have no desire to see you.'

Arthur would visit, and she would once again play servant to him. In 1892, on their 19th wedding anniversary, Hannah still insisted on licking Arthur's boots. Bereft and appalled, he wrote of his consequent shame: 'But it is my fault of other years, hard to be amended now, that this sweet soul has been brought so low in her own eyes. That wasn't what I meant by those strange trials.'

The last picture of Hannah, aged 69, was taken in 1902. It shows an old and broken woman, dressed in the clothes of a servant. Although they had entered the 20th century, Arthur hid the picture from visitors behind a black velvet curtain, lest they discover his forbidden bride.

Hannah died childless and alone in Shropshire on July 9, 1909, the victim of her illicit romance. Just six months later, Arthur followed her to the grave. It was the end of a doomed relationship that lasted over half a century and defied society's strictures, but tragically destroyed those within its embrace.

The French Lieutenant Author’s Secret Woman


A secret cache of love letters reveals how John Fowles, author of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, re-enacted his epic story of forbidden passion with a young student.

More than 20 years after he wrote the novel, Fowles embarked on a passionate affair with Elena van Lieshout, a 21-year-old Oxford undergraduate who modelled herself on Sarah Woodruff, the flighty heroine of his most famous work.

Though Elena never stood amid the wind and waves at the end of a stone pier like Meryl Streep in the famous image from the 1981 film version, she and Fowles visited the spot on the cliffside above Lyme Regis where in the book Woodruff tells her admirer of her disastrous affair with a French army officer.

The letters reveal that despite being old enough to be her grandfather, the author and undergraduate shared a bed. The romance was never fully consummated because Fowles, who was 64, had suffered a stroke, but the relationship was sexual.

In one letter Fowles, who also wrote The Collector, a novel about a man who collects butterflies and then takes a girl captive, apologises for going too far.

The 120 letters and postcards, including some unpublished love poems, were sent by Fowles, who died in 2005, over a two-year period. “Dearest Leni,” he would write, quoting the songwriter Cole Porter. “In the words of that all-time cliché, you’re under my skin.”

The letters have been consigned anonymously to Sotheby’s where they are expected to sell for at least £30,000 at auction in London next month. Van Lieshout was 21 when she was first invited to Belmont House, Fowles’s home near Lyme Regis, Dorset, in July 1990. The writer’s wife Elizabeth had died of cancer a few months before and he was becoming increasingly reclusive.

A student at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, with ambitions to be a concert pianist, actress or novelist, van Lieshout had been visiting the area since her teens, taking long lonely walks in the manner of Woodruff who wanders along the sea as scandalised villagers gossip about her longing for her French lover to return. Van Lieshout had taken a summer job as a waitress. Hearing of the death of Fowles’s wife, she put a note expressing her condolences through his door. He invited her to afternoon tea.

Fowles had long had the capacity to inhabit a “fantasy world” inspired by his own writing, according to his biographer Eileen Warburton, and in the student he seems to have found someone with a similar capacity.

Despite the 43-year age gap, the two began an intense friendship, with her moving into Belmont House for the summer. A month after their meeting, they stood at the place where Fowles pictured Woodruff telling Charles Smithson, her admirer, of her ruinous affair with the French lieutenant.

Van Lieshout, the relatively unworldly student, played the role of the woman with a supposedly dark past. She spoke, Fowles recollected, “in little spurts of confession . . . not quite unconsciously repeating the role of Sarah in The FLW . . . the outwardly demure but inwardly self-consumed woman, obsessed by her own freedom”.

Later Fowles wrote to her: “I was one eighth of the way into thinking you were just an ordinary girl, one of those Oxford would-be bluestockings, really rather silly; but now I’m back at square one, late as always, there’s this odd creature at the door, across the cobbles, nervous — demure, and I think, oh Christ, I nearly forgot and walk towards you, into something so much more than just sex, just friendship, just curiosity.”

The real and fictional women seemed strikingly similar to him: to van Lieshout he wrote how “sometimes you seem running and screaming from some great horror in life”. He frequently drew attention to the outwardly “demure” appearance that she shared with Woodruff.

Fowles initially explained the extraordinary setup to her parents as a friendship and criticised the prudish reaction of the locals: “She has brought a happiness into being I thought had gone forever when my wife died last March. Everyone in Lyme — and no doubt elsewhere — always jumps to the most disgraceful conclusions when you say things like that, but we know what has happened is strangely different.” However, by the time of her return to Oxford, he told them of his wish that they should marry.

Fowles poured out his feelings in his letters and candidly expressed his horror at the fact that he was physically unable to consummate the relationship fully. He quoted to van Lieshout a passage he had written in his diary: “It seems barbaric at times; that I’ve lost all sexual potency yet not sexual feeling. That I want Elena, and she can’t want me.”

Warburton, the author of John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds, believes “Elena for Fowles was the embodiment of the fey, come-hither female characters of his novels”. In an unpublished sonnet sent to van Lieshout, Fowles presented himself like the French Lieutenant’s Woman. Woodruff is described in the novel as “like a living memorial to the drowned” when she looks out to sea for the lover who has abandoned her.

Fowles in the poem puts himself on the same part of the coast, Seatown Beach: You know the book I carry in my heart, How she was me, now I am her. I love Your sea, yet I am lost without her land.

Peter Selley, director of Sotheby’s books department, who is handling the sale, described the relationship between Fowles and van Lieshout as “an archetypal mentor and admirer kind of relationship which we’ve seen dramatised countless times in literature and history”.

Ronnie Payne, a lifelong friend of Fowles, described van Lieshout, who later joined the police force in her native Wales, as a “bright and sparky” young woman “who had fallen under the spell of the great novelist”.

She eventually balked at the seriousness of the relationship. On her return to Oxford, to do her finals, Fowles said “all life lies in a little room on the river in Oxford”.

He wrote in December 1991: “I sense that you would like to drop it, the being half-engaged, whatever you want to call it. Fine, you are held to nothing . . . but we made a show of putting on shackles much too early.”

They remained in touch until 1998, around the time Fowles married Sarah Smith, an advertising executive and friend of his first wife. In the last interview he gave before his death at the age of 79, he commented on the parallels in his life and fiction: “You are every character you write.”

Van Lieshout, who has Dutch and Welsh parents, went to the funeral but friends of Fowles say they have now lost touch with her. The University of Austin, Texas, which holds the majority of Fowles’s archive, said it would like to acquire the letters. Thomas Staley, director of the university’s manuscript centre, said: “John could be tough but there was a helplessness about him as well.”

I Think I Love You, In A Nanosecond


Erika Kokkinos felt like a monkey in a zoo.

Technically, she was "dating." At each of 12 tables at an art gallery in Northwestern University's student union, Kokkinos was meeting an eligible college bachelor, some of them quite attractive.

But the radio/television/film major had trouble disregarding the tripod-mounted cameras and cucumber-sized microphones. Barely an hour before, she had produced a saliva sample-not exactly a sexy exercise-so researchers could analyze her hormone levels. The whole evening of romantic possibility had been set up as a science experiment.

Kokkinos had arrived at last November's event straight from work, rushing to fix her makeup so she didn't look tired, and wearing nice jeans and a top that was tight, but not revealing. The primping was less to impress the guys than to make her feel desirable. Five months after a breakup and weeks from graduation, Kokkinos was single and content.

A night of so-called speed dating seemed a lark, a way to find out who might come out of the woodwork at a university with a barren dating scene. She'd been intrigued by the experiments after taking a psychology class as a sophomore with NU Professor Eli Finkel, who was both the night's lead researcher and its emcee.

Kokkinos arrived at Eric Acinich's table. Though each considered the other among the best-looking participants in the room, the date did not begin smoothly. After introductions, she said the first thing that popped into her head: She'd dated another Eric for a year and a half, and everyone thought they were brother and sister.

She regretted saying it immediately. Brushing off the awkwardness, Acinich, a recent transfer from the University of California-Santa Barbara, told her he'd grown up in Southern California. So did the previous Eric, she said, laughing. "Wow, should we just stop now? Or is this, is this like, really awkward?" Acinich joked.

The exchange might have torpedoed the date, but it broke the ice. For the next three minutes, they laughed, learned about each other and shared some very personal thoughts -like a normal, promising first date, on fast-forward. The pair had chemistry. They clicked "yes" on the 100% free internet dating website Devil Called Love that night, and the next day, they matched.

What happened between Kokkinos and Acinich isn't unique-new romantic bonds form every day, everywhere. Most North Americans will fall in love at least once during their lifetime. Yet the moment these two met-unlike most others among human history's billions of romantic relationships-was digitally captured in sight and sound.

The video would be one perspective in a Rashomon of romantic data: Finkel and his graduate student/collaborator Paul Eastwick collected extensive, pre-event questionnaires from every participant (199 during nine sessions), along with revealing post-date surveys over three months and e-mail exchanges between those who matched.

"This is going to sound immodest," Finkel said of the mountain of information. "I don't think there is a data set that's even close."

The Northwestern speed-dating experiments, and similar studies by teams from Wilmington, N.C., to Berlin, have helped revive a surprisingly dormant area of science, upending assumptions and discovering new truths about the psychology behind what happens when boy meets girl-and how a spark of attraction leads to true romance. Eventually, they may unlock a few of the mysteries of love.

"It's ground-breaking," says Stony Brook University professor Arthur Aron, author of several classic relationship studies. The speed-dating research "makes it possible to study something that hasn't been ethically or practically possible to study before."

For thousands of years, thinkers from Plato to Erich Fromm have analyzed love, and everyone from William Shakespeare to Elvis Presley has chronicled the ecstasy of falling into it. But compared with many scientific subjects-the bonds between atoms, for instance-researchers know precious little about how romance works.

The modern study of the psychology underlying attraction began during the 1960s, when a generation of researchers set out to show that love could be examined as hard science. Some fixed up opposite-sex strangers in the laboratory; others showed subjects personal advertisements and asked them how attractive they found such potential mates.

One study randomly paired college freshmen with dates to a "computer dance," telling attendees a software program had matched them up. A few teams followed mid-college couples or newlyweds for decades. Just before Finkel, 33, and Eastwick, 29, were born, the new field seemed to be hitting its stride, forming scientific conclusions about, for example, how much looks affect desirability (answer: a lot).

In 1975, however, Wisconsin Sen. William Proxmire bequeathed the first "Golden Fleece" award to Elaine Walster (now Hatfield) and Ellen Berscheid, two prominent relationships scholars. Their non-achievement: "fleecing" taxpayers by accepting an $84,000 National Science Foundation grant for "frivolous" research.

"I believe that 200 million Americans want to leave some things in life a mystery, and right on top of the things we don't want to know is why a man falls in love with a woman," Proxmire said in one press release.

Although scientists rallied to the cause, a reader call-in poll conducted by the Chicago Daily News found that the public supported Proxmire by a margin of 87.5 percent to 12.5 percent. The professors were deluged with hate mail. Government funding dried up, and many shied away from such studies, with stalwarts like Hatfield turning to private funding sources. Stony Brook's Aron still excises the word "love" from government grant proposals.

Other professors sought fertile ground by studying stable, established relationships. There, too, funding has played a role: Researchers must justify experiments by identifying potential applications. The fact is, research into falling in love isn't likely to help sustain marriages or combat spousal abuse. But studies of married couples very well might.

In January 2004, when Eastwick enrolled in Finkel's graduate seminar on close relationships, Finkel had conducted little attraction research up to that point. Eastwick and Finkel had each arrived at Northwestern the previous fall, but hadn't talked much.

During the first few class meetings, Eastwick began asking questions Finkel could not answer, wondering aloud how dynamics like trust and forgiveness applied when partners first met. Finkel responded with, "We don't know," or referenced largely abandoned lines of research. Even basic questions, such as what men and women want in mates, remained unsettled.

Another student suggested that observing speed dates might provide insights, and Eastwick half-jokingly suggested a class outing. Finkel thought the idea had merit.

So just before Valentine's Day that year, Finkel took his class to a speed-dating event at Cherry Red, a now-defunct club in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood. Then 28, he wasn't much older than the seminar's half-dozen students. The rookie professor had long hair (since trimmed) and earrings (since removed), and casually dropped the word "dude" into sentences.

Finkel hopped from table to table, four minutes at a time, searching for Miss Right, and thinking about how speed dating applied to his research. He and Eastwick sprinted through a round-robin of dates, with some class members observing from the bar. Later, they would choose "yes" (as in "I'm interested in seeing this person again") or "no" (as in "I'm not") for each date.

Eastwick recalls meeting a succession of female lawyers and talking with them about music and growing up outside Boston. Telling the women that he studied romance was often a killer opening line. Finkel tried a similar approach. Though only a handful of the women bought his love professor routine, a match made that evening would result in a torrid, monthlong affair.

The duo came away amazed at how much information they could cull from four minutes of banter. By the end of each date, they had a solid sense of their romantic compatibility, or lack thereof, with each woman. Most conversations delved deeper than the "What do you do?" one might expect from brief interactions, and exhibited a range of emotions, from excitement to concern. They saw potential for a new research paradigm-speed dating as laboratory experiment. "We walked out of there thinking: 'Hey, we should really study this,' " Eastwick says.

As they started designing speed-dating events and related experiments, Finkel and Eastwick became subject to a parallel phenomenon: male bonding. They often met for beers, coming together over shared research interests and a love of guitar. The professor immersed himself in the grad student's bold pursuit of the field's deep questions, and Eastwick found a home in Finkel's nascent lab for much of his research.

Both saw an opportunity to fill a gaping hole in relationship research: the period between the initial spark of attraction and couplehood. Speed dating allowed them to ethically set people up with a series of random partners, and then record the first moments of dates that-though not exactly natural-would likely be real enough.

"It's easy to do a study in the lab where you have people meet each other or read about someone or hear about someone and ask how attractive they are," says Aron. "And it's possible, after people have fallen in love, to find out what's gone on. But it's very hard to do a study in the lab where you make people fall in love."

By tracking speed daters for months, Finkel and Eastwick hoped to learn how total strangers become twosomes.

"That's like a blank canvas," says Finkel. "What is this magical period between the opening few minutes of meeting and 'Now we're in a relationship'? Nobody knew."

It's a bright afternoon in early April, and Finkel is hunched over his office desk, watching Eric and Erika meeting again for the first time on a monitor. Eastwick sits a few feet away from him, between a table filled with stacks of journal articles and a guitar resting against a shelf.

They have watched about 25 of the 1,158 videos shot during the November 2007 sessions and Eric and Erika's date is among the best. The researchers are explaining why their meeting proceeded so well, and why most others don't.

There's one obvious reason: both Acinich and Kokkinos are good-looking, a trait that most studies associate with attraction. He's got an athletic build and a kind face, she has a big smile and wavy, sandy-blond hair.

For the most part, their discussion isn't unique, and a transcript might mask their obvious chemistry. Yet just moments after they've met, the two start playing off each other: He's slightly shy and takes himself seriously, but offers self-deprecating one-liners about, for example, his participating in the speed-dating event.

She's an extrovert (she appears in 476 photos on Facebook) with an ability to laugh at most anything. "This is standard stuff that's in almost all the dates: where you're from, what's your major. But these people do it better," Finkel says.

"There's this witty banter that might be the most essential predictor of romantic attraction," he continues. "If you're good at it, that's good. If I'm good at it that's good. But if we're both good at it, that's explosive. I think we've got some explosiveness here."

During the running commentary, Finkel often transitions from contemplation to fast-talking fervor, displaying the charisma that's led to his status as a quasi-sex symbol among Northwestern coeds. He's a recipient of faculty awards from two campus sororities, and course evaluations by his female students occasionally laud attributes other than his teaching. (The recently married Finkel says no student has ever put him in a compromising situation.)

Finkel and Eastwick describe the videos the way a play-by-play man and color commentator might call a baseball game. They analyze who's being dominant or submissive, and whether daters are mimicking each other's hand motions (a sign of affiliation). In one date, a junior male interested in environmental activism and a senior female passionate about global health have a tough time connecting. He keeps telling her how "great" what she's doing is, but she doesn't reciprocate.

"You can tell it's not really there, but it's not obvious why," Finkel says a third of the way through. "They've found something they have in common, it seems like he thinks what she does is fascinating, he's interested in similar sorts of things. They're both sort of do-gooders, they want to make a difference in the world. By all rights, they should be really sparking by now."

He and Eastwick trade on-the-fly theories on what went wrong.

"I think she's not attracted to him, in part because he's younger," Finkel offers.

"He started the date badly," Eastwick replies.

"Yeah," Finkel says, "but he's been very enthusiastic."

"He has been very enthusiastic," Eastwick agrees. "It's not infectious."

"I think she's the limiting factor," says Finkel. "I think if she were giving him more to work with, they'd have a spark."

They un-pause the recording. By the end of the date, the woman is giving the man career advice. Unlike Kokkinos and Acinich, there's no connection.

In one exchange between the latter, Erika says she applied for Teach for America.

Erika: "So, I find out about that tomorrow."

Eric: "Are you worried . . . are you worried about that?"

Erika: "I'm pretty worried, yeah."

"It's an emotionally astute response, right?" Finkel says as he watches. "I applied to Teach for America, I hear tomorrow. He picks up that there's going to be some anxiety about that. She cares. He's shrewd."

Erika [obviously concerned]: "It's a pretty competitive program, it's just so weird to know that, like, tomorrow I'll know if I have a job or not."

"She's really disclosing," Finkel says. "They're having an emotionally significant conversation -insofar as you could have an emotionally significant conversation with somebody you've known for two minutes and 50 seconds."

The Saturday after the event, Kokkinos and Acinich met for lunch, then spent seven hours together. For months, they were almost inseparable, talking on the phone daily and trading text messages, sharing time at bars, restaurants and a show at Second City. They joked about the semiweekly surveys they had to fill out for Finkel and Eastwick, and about what they'd disclosed to the researchers after every milestone, including their first kiss.

To analyze videos of daters like Kokkinos and Acinich, Finkel and Eastwick have turned seat-of-the-pants observations into a set of coding rules ("Is desire increasing or decreasing over the course of a date?") for their research team to track. They won't know the outcomes for months, but findings from their 2005 speed-dating events have already stirred the scientific community.

The results that surprised other psychologists mostly examined mating preferences-what men want in a woman and vice versa. According to a theory called the matching hypothesis, people are looking for someone similar to themselves on measures such as height and physical attractiveness.

Other researchers view mating more like a marketplace, with everyone looking for the richest, smartest, best-looking person that likes them back. The sexes seem to desire different traits: Men say they value physical attraction most, and women prize earning potential.

Evolutionary psychologists, a group that draws on Darwinian ideas to describe human behavior, have used these responses to help crystallize theories of mating: A better-looking woman may be more fertile, and a wealthy man may provide more resources for child-rearing. It's a politically incorrect analysis, though one supported by data. Yet it's based largely on laboratory research, not how people act with real-life partners.

When Finkel and Eastwick tested speed daters, pre-event surveys yielded the expected results: men said they would focus on physical attractiveness, women on earning prospects. But during the dates, those sex differences disappeared, contradicting previous research. Eastwick was so surprised at the numbers, he called Finkel several times in rapid succession-late at night -to tell him what they'd discovered.

Speed-dating men and women valued physical attractiveness equally, and they prioritized personality and earning potential similarly. In other words, males and females prized the same things in a mate. What daters wrote on paper bore little relevance to what they thought of living, breathing people.

"We seem to have no introspective accuracy into what it is that we like," Finkel says. "If you tell me you're a guy who really cares about a woman who's intelligent and funny, and I really care that she's sexy and trustworthy, we should prefer different women. But we don't."

Experiments by other teams replicate the findings, which were first published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in February. When Finkel and Eastwick looked at daters' selectivity-how many "yeses" they marked -they discovered more results that didn't jibe with prior research.

Two ideas delineate bonds between strangers: unique reciprocity (If I like you, will you like me back?) and generalized reciprocity (If I like a lot of people, will a lot of people like me back?). Most research on the topic examines platonic interactions at events like parties. It confirms conventional wisdom-if I want to be friends with you, you'll respond in kind, and if I'm a life-of-the-party type who likes everyone, most will like me back.

Finkel's speed-dating sessions didn't quite follow those rules. One-on-one, unique reciprocity held. But the suitors interested in the most partners were often rejected. The average dater didn't prefer partners playing hard to get-she was more likely to "yes" men who played hard to get for everyone except her. The behavior signaled that the need to feel "special" in a relationship might play a role within moments of meeting.

"People can smell the desperation," says Peter Todd, an Indiana University psychologist who observed the phenomenon during speed-dating studies in Berlin.

"It almost seems like magic," says Eastwick. The findings inspired them to record the speed dates, partly to search for the mechanism behind that intuition. They think selective people may warm up to their partners slowly over the course of a date, or land on unique areas of conversational common ground.

The most startling findings, though, are months away from publication. Eastwick and Finkel partnered with NU Professor Jennifer Richeson to analyze how race influences dating. If Americans were married via random matching, nearly half of all couples would be mixed. But the actual number is more like 3 percent. Factors like segregation, class differences and racism probably account for the disparity.

Eastwick led an analysis of racial preferences among speed daters, testing whether political orientation affected their choices. Based on survey data, Eastwick and Richeson predicted that white liberals would be more likely than white conservatives to "yes" a member of a racial minority.

Indeed, the data confirmed that hypothesis. But liberals actually preferred minorities over members of their own race. Laboratory experiments, in which subjects conversed with a white or black confederate-a student working for the researchers-yielded the same results.

Why would white liberals prefer black partners? One working theory is that liberals feel anxiety, and misattribute their arousal to romantic desire. It's a mistake highlighted by several experiments, including one in which subjects meeting a woman on an anxiety-provoking, shaky bridge were more attracted to her than those who met her on a stable structure. For liberal daters, the anxiety might stem from the desire to make a good impression on a member of a minority, or because of a conflict between progressive beliefs and unconscious negative feelings toward minorities.

Other researchers are using speed dating to pursue a variety of aims. Todd's Berlin experiments study how people make decisions with limited information. He's found that daters do a poor job of assessing whether a partner is interested, and that people adjust their standards for answering "yes" based on success in prior dates. At Columbia University, economist Raymond Fisman and psychologist Sheena Iyengar have shown that the size of a racial minority population in a speed dater's home town predicts his preference for dating minorities-familiarity, unfortunately, seems to decrease tolerance.

University of North Carolina- Wilmington professor Shanhong Luo learned about speed dating from an episode of "Sex and the City," then began running studies on how similarity affects daters, guided by a scientific how-to manual Finkel and Eastwick published.

Like any research method, though, speed dating is far from perfect. No experimental romance has blossomed into a long-term relationship, limiting the scope of Finkel's analysis. Acinich and Kokkinos, one of the recent study's most promising couples, didn't last. There was no thunderous breakup argument. They just faded out, from seeing each other every day, to a few times a week, to not at all.

The pair offer a number of factors: poor communication on both sides; a month-long holiday break for Kokkinos; Acinich's aversion to committing to a soon-to-be graduate; and, for Kokkinos, the kindling of a relationship with a "write-in" (a non-speed dater who begins dating a study participant).

The researchers haven't fully analyzed the most recent session data, but in the 2005 study, about one-third of the daters went out at least once with someone after the event, and just three couples lasted a month. While that figure may seem low, they have little basis for comparison.

They've scoured the literature for estimates of how many people someone might need to meet before making a match. The best they found was a study in which 14 percent of people introduced via an experiment met a second time. To put random strangers together and produce several year-long relationships, much less a marriage, they'd likely have to recruit thousands of subjects.

Some researchers see deeper problems in the speed-dating methods. Relationship psychology matriarch Berscheid supports their work, but believes the duo are moving too fast. Before they start making conclusions about how we love, she says, they must study the speed daters themselves.

"What we need is some empirical research into how these people who feel the need to resort to speed dating are different from people who don't," Berscheid says.

Journal reviewers have suggested that speed daters are more extroverted, or less successful, or more promiscuous, than the average college students forming the subject pool of most experiments. Though the Northwestern team has not conducted a systematic study, they've run some numbers on personality traits of their first sample, and they seem no different from the general population.

Critics have yet to produce data showing anything to the contrary, but several claim speed dating is too artificial to provide a valid study of real-world romance.

"It doesn't facilitate the goal of finding a meaningful relationship," says Iyengar, who likens the dates to job interviews. "I wouldn't use that paradigm if I wanted to understand romance and relationships. I'd use parties or social gatherings in which people have meaningful interactions."

Eastwick argues it's more reliable than asking people questions in a lab, and notes the lack of research into how methods of meeting-through church versus at work, for instance-influence interactions.

"It's got enough validity that you can tell whether or not somebody is worth a second look. I certainly wouldn't want to base a marriage decision on it, but it's got to be better than looking at a profile [in the laboratory]," he says.

His opinions are bolstered by research into people's ability to make accurate decisions from "thin slices" of information. In one study, untrained viewers' judgments of 30-second, silent video clips of teachers predicted the evaluations of students who'd sat through an entire course. Others demonstrated similar effects among phone operators and management consultants. Malcolm Gladwell's 2005 book "Blink," which highlighted Iyengar's research, describes such findings in detail.

"In social interactions, we learn a lot about others more quickly than we think we do. And not only do we learn a lot, but it also tends to be somewhat valid," says University of Connecticut professor David Kenny.

It's an open question how thin-slicing applies to romance. Researchers such as Arizona State University's Jason Weeden, co-author of two studies using speed-dating data, remain wary of generalizing the results to the long-term mating game.

Finkel's findings, Weeden says, demonstrate how differently speed daters act from those seeking serious relationships. For example, women usually tell researchers they'd prefer a wealthier man in a long-term relationship, and numerous surveys show higher marriage and lower divorce rates for rich men.

But when asked about short-term sexual partners, women rank physical attractiveness higher than wealth. Following Weeden's logic, that female speed daters cared more about looks, just shows they were thinking short-term.

"If you ask college kids to say what they'd like in a marriage partner later in life, they access their long-term psychology," says Weeden. "When they're on spring break in Cancun, they access their short-term psychology-the nice-and-compatible stuff goes out the window and, for both men and women, it's mostly about finding the most attractive partners."

Even if they think they're looking for a longer-term match, Weeden believes a bar-like setting with many available singles could trigger short-term thinking.

"I think it gets dangerous when we try to say that there's only one kind of initial attraction, and speed dating reveals its essential truth," Weeden said.

Eastwick and Finkel maintain their subjects' behavior is quite different from those looking for a one-night stand. The speed daters wrote in pre-event questionnaires that they were interested in casual or long-term relationships, not quick hookups, and the conversations in the videos also discount the idea.

"You can imagine an environment where everybody is really drunk and they're getting touchy. But you can see that's not what this is," Eastwick says. They've also replicated the mating-preference findings in unpublished studies using other methods.

Still, Finkel concedes it's possible that initial romantic attraction has little to do with whether a relationship prospers or sours. The outside environment, from financial troubles to appealing alternative mates, can also wreak havoc on a couple, no matter how compatible the pair seems.

"It is as yet unknown whether what people can learn about themselves on a speed date is valuable information for baby-making down the road," he says.

To Finkel, that's the biggest question in his corner of psychology, and a chief motivator for his research.

"Our generation is going to live until 100, and we're vowing 'til death do us part at the age of 30," Finkel says. "If it's true that the basis on which we're making our marital decisions is flawed, somebody's got to know that. We have to discover that."

Already, speed-dating researchers, along with those employing other modern techniques like brain imaging, have helped kick-start the field toward answers. Finkel and Eastwick might spend years poring over their current data, inspecting surveys from the speed-dating experiments to learn how relationships develop, or don't, or analyzing speed daters' saliva to understand the biology behind lust and infatuation.

Their long-term goals are more ambitious: They hope to secure funding for a megastudy to track tens of thousands of speed daters, following couples for decades, through dating, courtship, marriage and divorce.

With sufficient research, Finkel believes, scholars might make dating less hellish for millions of people, or develop models to predict relationship success based on speed-dating compatibility.

It will, of course, be decades before their conclusions lead toward a grand theory of dating, much less comprehensive personal or policy recommendations. Yet Finkel still dreams far into the future-20 years, perhaps-to a time when he and Eastwick and the rest of the field might understand how romantic attraction works even 5 percent better.

It may not seem like much, but in a culture where as many as half of marriages end in divorce, even a tiny bit of new knowledge could have profound implications in how we search for love.
"That would be totally valuable," Finkel says. "People would be desperate to know it."