It was during this week, in the lead-up to today's supernaturally inclined date of Friday the 13th, that I learned the similarity between believing in Bigfoot and believing in The One.
This somewhat unsettling information was delivered to me not by the Weekly World News, but by Ian McGregor, a York University psychology researcher. With assistance from his grad student Chelsea Ferriday, Dr.
In his lab, Dr. McGregor has his guests perform activities and answer questions that are meant to put them in an anxious mood. He then asks them to rate their level of confidence that they've found, as he puts it, "their soul mate or the person they are meant to be with."
When they were rattled, subjects consistently rated their current relationship higher on the magic scale, using their partner as a balm to ease anxiety about other matters.
"If you're feeling uncertain about a particular domain in your life - economics or academics or family, for instance - you'll find another domain to find certainty," Dr. McGregor explained. "Relationships can become an attractive domain for irrational conviction."
Similarly uncertain subjects, Dr. McGregor told me, also calm themselves by exaggerating beliefs in supernatural phenomena, like heaven and hell. And yeah, Bigfoot.
Perhaps because I have a thing for hippie values fighting to survive in this skeptical, secular century, I've dated more than one woman who referred to following her "energy" or felt that "the universe" brought things and people into her life. While some guys might take these as signs to run away, I find myself attracted to people who possess a good balance between the practical and the insane. (I'm a Libra, after all.)
Perhaps tellingly, when I put out a call to friends about how Lady Luck had serendipitously guided their relationships, I received a good number of responses from women but only one from another guy. "I'm pretty sure every time I've slept with someone, a good amount of luck was involved," he wrote.
Jen Kirsch, a Toronto-based writer who opines in print on love, responded more earnestly, describing how she met her current boyfriend.
Ms. Kirsch had recently released herself from an off-and-on relationship and was out for a Chinese dinner on Christmas Eve with a friend when a message from the universe appeared. "My fortune cookie said, 'When one door closes, another opens.' Those were the exact words," she told me. Although she'd been a recluse since the break-up, her hermetic resolve softened and her friend convinced her to go home, change and come out to a bar.
"When we got there, my friend got very drunk and disappeared," Ms. Kirsch recalled. "Alone, I caught eyes with a guy, ended up spending the entire night talking to him, and [we]note>// exchanged numbers. I've spent almost every day with him since."
She'd even forgotten all about the fortune, she told me, until a month later when she was going through photos on her cell phone and saw the snap she'd taken of it.
"That was one smart cookie!" she said. "It seemed like it had been a sign."
The story reminded me of how I'd met one of my first long-term partners - she prank called me in my college dorm. I'd felt the same way at the time - that somehow destiny was involved.
In hindsight, it seems somewhat silly, but according to Dr. McGregor, a certain amount of silliness can be a good thing. He actually called it an "optimal margin of illusion," which will also be the title of my first album.
"People have a lot of illusions to protect them from anxiety," Dr. McGregor told me. "But sometimes, positive illusions can actually come true. Sometimes people eventually develop better relationships because of them." In other words, if your belief in astrology makes you optimistic about your current love interest, that superstitious optimism might be the thing that turns the two of you into a scientific fact.
For those who place themselves firmly on the skeptical side when it comes to the universal energy flow's influence on love, Dr. McGregor pointed out that this doesn't mean you're immune to illusion.
"People can delude themselves about how great their partner is and how great they are," he said, adding that these people who put too much faith in the awesomeness of their own will can become equally out of touch with reality. (I'm sure you know who I'm talking about).
He went even further: "The personal confidence illusions can spin into narcissism, where the person is living in their own mind, leaving a wake of rubble behind them as they flex their grandiose muscles."
So basically, if you don't believe in Bigfoot, you probably believe you are Bigfoot. We are all destined for delusion, and in our own way we are all lunatics when it comes to love. At least we will be until 2012, when the world ends.
Micah Toub is the author of Growing Up Jung: Coming of Age as the Son of Two Shrinks .