You’re on the phone with your grandmother, and she wants to know when you’re going to produce grandchildren for her and how on earth you can be “dating” the same person for 2 years without any marriage plans. You tell her that these things take time, that people are complicated, and it’s hard to know where this is going. You feel morally superior as she clucks disapprovingly. You think, I’m a modern person, and I have science on my side.

Or do you? Well, today the BBC reports that:

People decide what kind of relationship they want within minutes of meeting, a study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships said. “It’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. We make a prediction about what kind of relationship we could have with a person and that helps determine how much effort we are willing to put into developing a relationship.” The results were the same for people who talked for three, six or ten minutes. Prof Ramirez said: “That tells you things are happening very quickly. People are making snap judgements about what kind of relationship they want with the person they just met.”

To be fair, the results above actually refer to a study on platonic relationships, from which they are extrapolating. This isn’t the first study to claim that we decide the eligibility of somebody as a romantic partner in a short period of time. Should we be surprised, given that love closely resembles mental insanity?