Luisa Dillner: Cupid calculates

Readers of the Guardian's Weekend magazine may be familiar with Luisa Dillner's popular column "Love by Numbers" on which her new book is based. Published by Profile in time for Valentine's Day next year, Love by Numbers stands out among the morass of relationship advice books because it does not actually give advice per se as it does not tell people what to do. Rather Dillner takes each question (sample reader dilemmas: "Is there any chance he'll leave her for me?", "Do open marriages work?") and uses scientific research in academic journals to find the answer. She comments: "Nobody's trying to reduce relationships to a number and to say 'Your chances of this happening are 5%,' or 'You really shouldn't do that because the evidence shows that your relationship is not going to succeed.' It's just trying to add a bit more information for people to use, or not." The book will contain a mix of brand new problems (which have never appeared in the Guardian column), and expanded answers to questions that have already run. Love by Numbers should also appeal equally to both sexes with a focus on the factual rather than the "touchy-feely" but it's not all about the science though, she adds: "It's also meant to be entertaining . . . a bit tongue-in-cheek and not take itself too seriously."

The original idea of using hard evidence gleaned from psychology journals occurred to Dillner when she was working at the BMJ (British Medical Journal), providing health information for patients based on the best available research evidence: "It made me think that something as important as relationships, that if you could provide some sort of evidence base people might use it. It can't tell people exactly what to do but what it can do is inform." The importance of not telling people what to do, as your standard agony aunt would, is paramount for Dillner. "There are so many people that give advice and they say things with such certainty and I did think 'Well, how do you know that?' . . . it struck me that some people asked questions to which there are genuine answers based on research." Interestingly, she initially conceived the idea as a book but the publishers she approached just did not get it: "Some said: 'No, you need to tell people what to do. You can't just give them the evidence, you have to be the Gillian McKeith of relationships!'"

Different perspective

Having qualified as a doctor and then practised in the West Country before joining the BMJ in 1991, Dillner had also freelanced as the author of the Guardian column "Doctor at Large" before becoming the Guardian's health editor on a part-time basis while continuing to work at the BMJ. The "Love by Numbers" column developed after a conversation with Merope Mills, editor of Weekend, revealed that she was looking for "a more weighty, slightly different relationship column . . . based around what evidence was out there."

Dillner describes many of the questions she receives as "really touching" and cites a recent one from a teenage girl "who didn't have a boyfriend saying 'Has everyone else got a boyfriend now, am I really late?' And you think what it's like when you're 17 and just how painful that feeling is." Popular themes for questions are how to meet that someone special and, of course, sex‚in particular the frequency. She laughs: "Yes, how often you have sex‚ it's very much a numbers thing!"