First Posted: 1/21/2014

The following facts are excerpts from my upcoming book, “101 Facts of Love: The Science, Law and History of Love, Sex and Relationships.”

1. Men from the Forbes 400 list have much younger wives when remarrying — 22 years younger — than the general U.S. population.

The stereotype that wealthy men marry younger women is true… at least when wealthy men remarry. For example, people like Donald Trump and other similar celebrities confirm this backed-by-research statistic.

2. Until 1967, it was legal for states to ban interracial marriages.

A few years after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, in the midst of the Civil Rights era, the Supreme Court of the United States finally struck down a Virginia state statute that prohibited interracial marriages.

3. A Google search for the word “dating” yields more than 452,000,000 results.

Lots of people are looking for love.

4. The length of the erect penis is only about 1 1/4 inches in gorillas and 1 1/2 inches in orangutans but 5 inches in humans, even though males of the two apes have much bigger bodies.

This confirms that the male endowment is comparatively larger than his closest evolutionary relatives. One theory is that the male penis evolved to its current size to match the size of the women’s vaginal cavity.

5. Sigmund Freud’s theory of “sexual symbolism” has been confirmed by empirical research. In one experiment, subjects designated elongated, pointed, or penetrating objects as male, and hollow, rounded, or enclosing objects as female.

After Freud put forth his sexual symbolism theory, it was confirmed decades later: people tend to subconsciously associate pointed objects — whether cigars, flag poles, or missiles — as phallic and male, whereas people associate hollow objects — bowls, crevasses, or holes — as vaginal and female.

6. In 2010, the online dating industry made $2 billion dollars in the United States.

Online dating sites typically charge between $20 and $60 dollars a month. If the member does not find a date, the only winner is the dating site, a profitable business.

7. One study has found that long-distance relationships can lead to couples becoming closer and developing stronger bonds than normal relationships.

The old adage, “Distance makes the heart grow fonder,” has an ounce of truth in it.

8. As of 2004, seven states — Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Virginia — still punished specific sexual activities between consenting adults of the same sex as a felony.

“Sodomy laws” have been on the books in the United States and elsewhere for centuries. These laws seek to regulate what consenting adults do in private.

9. In Western societies, approximately 40 to 50 percent of women express some level of body dissatisfaction.

Alost half of all women in Western societies are not happy with their appearance. This is, I surmise, the outcome of unrealistic standards that are the product of media and marketers.

10. Among those reporting on anal sex in a clinic study, condom use by heterosexual women was much rarer (7 percent) than condom use by homosexual (71 percent) or bisexual (53 percent) men.

Apparently, when people do it in the naughty place, women use condoms a lot less than homosexual men.