Chapter 7
Hot or Not?

Adaptation, Assortative Mating, and the Beauty Market

A large, full-length mirror awaited me in the nurses’ station. As I hadn’t walked more than a few feet for months, traveling the length of the hallway to the nurses’ station was a true challenge. It took ages. Finally I turned the corner and inched closer and closer to the mirror, to take a good, hard look at the image reflecting back at me. The legs were bent and thickly covered in bandages. The back was completely bowed forward. The bandaged arms collapsed lifelessly. The entire body was twisted; it seemed foreign and detached from what I felt was me. “Me” was a good-looking eighteen-year-old. It was impossible that the image was me.

The face was the worst. The whole right side gaped open, with yellow and red pieces of flesh and skin hanging down like a melting wax candle. The right eye was pulled severely toward the ear, and the right sides of the mouth, ear, and nose were charred and distorted.

It was hard to comprehend all the details; every part and feature seemed disfigured in one way or another. I stood there and tried to take in my reflection. Was the old Dan buried somewhere in the image that stared back from the mirror? I recognized only the left eye that gazed at me from the wreckage of that body. Was this really me? I simply could not understand, believe in, or accept this deformed body as my own. During the various treatments, when my bandages were removed, I had seen parts of my body, and I knew how terrible some of the burns looked. I had also been told that the right side of my face was badly injured. But somehow, until I stood before the mirror, I hadn’t put it all together. I was torn between the desire to stare at the thing in the mirror and the compulsion to turn away and ignore this new reality. Soon enough the pain in my legs made the decision for me, and I returned to my hospital bed.

Dealing with the physical aspects of my injury was torture enough. Dealing with the terrible blow to my teenage self-image added a different type of challenge to my recovery. At that point in my life, I was trying to find my place in society and understand myself as a person and as a man. Suddenly I was condemned to three years in a hospital and demoted from what my peers (or at least my mother) might have considered attractive to something else altogether. In losing my looks, I’d lost something crucial to how we all—particularly young people—define ourselves.

Where Do I Fit In?

Over the next few years, many friends came to visit. I saw couples—healthy, beautiful, pain-free people who had been my pals and peers in school—flirt, get together, and split up; naturally, they fully immersed themselves in their romantic pursuits. Before my accident, I had known exactly where I belonged in the social hierarchy. I had dated a few of the girls in this group and generally knew who would and would not want to date me.

But now, I asked myself, where did I fit into the dating scene? Having lost my looks, I knew I had become less valuable in the dating market. Would the girls I used to go out with reject me if I asked them now? I was quite sure they would. I could even see their logic in doing so. After all, they had better options, and wouldn’t I do the same if our fortunes were reversed? If the attractive girls rejected me, would I have to marry someone who also had a disability or deformity? Must I now “settle”? Did I need to accept the idea that my dating value had dropped and that I should think differently about a romantic partner? Or maybe there was some hope. Would someone, someday, overlook my scars and love me for my brains, sense of humor, and cooking?

There was no escape from realizing that my market value for romantic partners had vastly diminished, but at the same time I felt that only one part of me, my physical appearance, was damaged. I didn’t feel that I (the real me) had changed in any meaningful way, which made it all the more difficult to accept the idea that I was suddenly less valuable.

Mind and Body

Not knowing much about extensive burns, I initially expected that once my burns were healed, I would go back to how I was before my injury. After all, I’d had a few small burns in the past, and, aside from slight scars, they’d disappeared in a few weeks without much of a trace. What I didn’t realize was that these deep and extensive burns were very different. As my burns began to heal, much of my real struggle was only starting—as was my frustration with my injury and my body.

As my wounds healed, I faced the hourly challenges of shrinking scars and the need to fight continuously against the tightening skin. I also had to contend with the Jobst pressure bandages that covered my entire body. The numerous contraptions that extended my fingers and held my neck steady, though medically useful, made me feel all the more alien. All of these foreign additions that supported and moved my body parts prevented my physical self from feeling anything like it used to. I started to actively resent my body and think of it as an enemy that betrayed me. Like the Frog Prince or the Man in the Iron Mask, I felt as if no one could discern the real me trapped inside.*

I was not the philosophical type as a teenager, but I started thinking about the separation of mind and body, a duality I experienced every day. I struggled with my feelings of imprisonment in this awful pain-racked body, until, at some point, I decided that I would prevail over it. I started stretching my healing skin as much as I could. I worked against the pain, with the feeling that my mind was taming my body into submission and achieving victory over it. I embraced the mind-body dualism that I felt so strongly and tried very hard to make sure that my mind won the battle.

As part of my campaign, I promised myself that my actions and decisions would be directed by my mind alone and not by my body. I would not let pain rule my life, and I would not allow my body to dictate my decisions. I would learn to ignore the calls from my body, and I would live in the mental world where I was still the old me. I would be in control from that moment on!

I also resolved to evade the problem of my declining value in the dating market by avoiding the issue altogether. If I was going to ignore my body on every front, I certainly wouldn’t submit to any romantic needs. With romance out of my life, I wouldn’t need to worry about my place in the dating hierarchy or about who might want me. Problem solved.

BUT A FEW months after my injury, I learned the same lesson that countless ascetics, monks, and purists have learned time and time again: getting the mind to triumph over the body is easier said than done.

My daily via dolorosa in the burn department included the dreaded bath treatment, in which the nurses would soak me in a bath with disinfectant. After a short time, they would start ripping off my bandages one by one. Having completed this process, they would scrape the dead skin away, put some ointment on my burns, and cover me up again. That was the usual routine, but on the days immediately following each of my many skin-transplant operations, they would skip the bath treatment because the water could potentially carry infections from other parts of my body to the fresh surgical wound. Instead, on those days, I would get a sponge bath in bed, which was even more painful than the regular treatment because the bandages could not be soaked, making their removal even more agonizing.

One particular day, my sponge bath routine took a different turn. After removing all the bandages, a young and very attractive nurse named Tami washed my stomach and thighs. I suddenly experienced a sensation coming from somewhere in the middle of my body that I had not felt in months. I was mortified and embarrassed to find I had an erection, but Tami laughed and told me that it was a great sign of improvement. Her positive spin helped a bit with the embarrassment, but not much.

That night, alone in my room and listening to the symphony of beeps from the various medical instruments, I reflected on the day’s events. My teenage hormones were back in action. They were oblivious to the fact that I looked quite different from the young man I once was. My hormones were also displaying a shocking lack of respect for my decision not to let my body dictate my actions. At that point, I realized that the strong separation I felt between mind and body was, in fact, inaccurate, and that I would have to learn to live in mind-body harmony.

NOW THAT I was back in the land of relative normalcy—that is, of people with both mental and physical demands—I started thinking again about my place in society. Particularly during the times when my body was functioning better and the pain was less, I would wonder about the social process that drives us toward some people and away from others. I was still in bed most of the time, so there was nothing I could actually do, but I started thinking about what my romantic future might hold. As I analyzed the situation over and over, my personal concerns soon developed into a more generalized interest in the romantic dance.

Assortative Mating and Adaptation

You don’t need to be an astute observer of human nature to realize that, in the world of birds, bees, and humans, like attracts like. To a large degree, beautiful people date other beautiful people, and “aesthetically challenged”* individuals date others like them. Social scientists have studied this birds-of-a-feather phenomenon for a long time and given it the name “assortative mating.” While we can all think of examples of bold, talented, rich, or powerful yet aesthetically challenged men coupled with beautiful women (think of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts, or almost any British rock star and his model/actress wife), assortative mating is generally a good description of the way people tend to find their romantic partners. Of course, assortative mating is not just about beauty; money, power, and even attributes such as a sense of humor can make a person more or less desirable. Still, in our society, beauty, more than any other attribute, tends to define our place in the social hierarchy and our assortative mating potential.

Assortative mating is good news for the men and women sitting on the top rung of the attractiveness ladder, but what does it mean for the majority of us on the middle or lower rungs? Do we adapt to our position in the social hierarchy? How do we learn, to paraphrase the old Stephen Stills song, to “love the ones we’re with”? This was a question that Leonard Lee, George Loewenstein, and I started discussing one day over coffee.

Without indicating which of us he had in mind, George posed the following question: “Consider what happens to someone who is physically unattractive. This person is generally restricted to date and marry people of his own attractiveness level. If, on top of that, he is an academic, he cannot compensate for his bestowed ugliness by making lots of money.” George continued with what would become the central question of our next research project: “What will become of that individual? Will he wake up every morning, look at the person sleeping next to him, and think ‘Well, that’s the best I can do’? Or will he somehow learn to adapt in some way, change, and not realize that he has settled?”


A DEMONSTRATION OF ASSORTATIVE MATING, OR AN IDEA FOR AN AWKWARD DINNER PARTY

Imagine that you have just arrived at a party. As you walk in, the host writes something on your forehead. He instructs you not to look at the mirror or ask anyone about it. You look around the room and see that the other men and women have numbers from 1 to 10 written on their foreheads. The host tells you that your goal is to pair up with the highest-numbered person who is willing to talk to you. Naturally, you walk up to a 10, but he or she gives you one look and walks away. You then look for 9s or 8s and so on, until a 4 extends a hand to you and you go together to get a drink.

This simple game describes the basic process of assortative mating. When we play this game with potential romantic partners in the real world, it is often the case that people with high numbers find others with high numbers, medium numbers match with their equivalents, and low numbers connect with their likes. Each person has a value (in the party game, the value is clearly written); the reactions we get from other people help us figure out our position in the social hierarchy and find someone who shares our general level of desirability.


One way to think about the process by which an aesthetically challenged person adapts to his or her own limited appeal is what we might call the “sour grapes strategy,” named after Aesop’s fable “The Fox and the Grapes.” While walking through a field on a hot day, a fox sees a bunch of plump, ripe grapes trained over a branch. Naturally, the grapes are just the things to sate his thirst, so he backs up and takes a running leap for them. He misses. He tries again and again, but he simply can’t reach them. Finally, he gives up and walks away, mumbling “I’m sure they were sour anyway.” The sour grapes concept derived from this tale is the idea that we tend to scorn that which we cannot have.

This fable suggests that when it comes to beauty, adaptation will work its magic on us by making the highly attractive people (grapes) less desirable (sour) to those of us who cannot attain them. But true adaptation can go farther than just changing how we look at the world. Instead of simply rejecting what we can’t have, real adaptation implies that we play psychological tricks on ourselves to make reality acceptable.

How exactly do these tricks of adaptation work? One way aesthetically challenged individuals might adapt would be to lower their aesthetic ideals from, say, a 9 or a 10 on the scale of perfection to something more comparable to themselves. Maybe they start finding large noses, baldness, or crooked teeth desirable traits. Someone who has adapted this way might react to the picture of, say, Halle Berry or Orlando Bloom by shrugging his or her shoulders and saying “Eh, I don’t like her small, symmetrical nose” or “Blech, all that dark, lustrous hair.”

Those of us who aren’t gorgeous might utilize a second approach to adaptation. We might not change our sense of beauty, but instead look for other qualities; we might search for, say, a sense of humor or kindness. In the world of “The Fox and the Grapes,” this would be equivalent to the fox reevaluating the slightly less juicy-looking berries on the ground and finding them more delicious because he just can’t get the grapes from the branch.

How might this work in the dating world? I have a middle-aged, average-looking friend who met her husband on Match.com a few years ago. “Here was someone,” she told me, “who was not much to look at. He was bald, overweight, had a lot of body hair, and was several years older than me. But I have learned that these things aren’t that important. I wanted somebody who was smart, had great values and a good sense of humor—and he had all this.” (Ever notice how “a sense of humor” is almost always code for “unattractive” when someone tries to play matchmaker?)

So now we have two ways by which we aesthetically challenged individuals adapt: either we alter our aesthetic perception so that we start to value a lack of perfection, or we reconsider the importance of attributes we find important and unimportant. To put these somewhat more crudely, consider these two possibilities: (a) Do women who attract only short, bald men start liking those attributes in a mate? Or (b) would these women still rather date tall men with lots of hair, but, realizing that this is not possible, they change their focus to nonphysical attributes such as kindness and sense of humor?

In addition to these two paths of adaptation, and despite the incredible capacity of humans to adapt to all sorts of things (see chapter 6, “On Adaptation”), we must also consider the possibility that adaptation does not work in this particular case. That would mean that aesthetically challenged individuals never really acclimate to the limitations that their looks impose on them in the social hierarchy. (If you are a male over fifty and you still think that every twentysomething woman would love to date you, you are exactly who I am talking about.) Such a failure to adapt is a path to continuous disappointment because, in its absence, less attractive individuals will repeatedly be disappointed when they fail to get the gorgeous mate they think they deserve. And if they settle and marry another aesthetically challenged person, they will always feel that they deserve better—hardly a recipe for a fine romance, let alone a happy relationship.

Which one of the three approaches illustrated in the figure below do you think best describes how aesthetically challenged individuals deal with their constraints?


The three possible ways to deal with our own physical limitations

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My money was on the ability to reprioritize what we look for in a mate, but the process of finding out was interesting in its own right.

Hot or Not?

To learn more about how people adapt to their own less-than-perfect looks, Leonard, George, and I approached two ingenious young men, James Hong and Jim Young, and asked for permission to run a study using their Web site, HOT or NOT.* Upon entering the site, you’re greeted with the photo of a man or woman of almost any age (eighteen years of age or older only). Above the photo floats a box with a scale from 1 (NOT) to 10 (HOT). Once you’ve rated the picture, a new photo of a different person appears as well as the average rating of the person you just rated.

Not only can you rate pictures of other people, but you can also post your own picture on the site to be judged by others.* Leonard, George, and I particularly appreciated this feature because it told us how attractive the people doing the rating were. (Last time I checked, my official rating on HOT or NOT was 6.4. Must be a bad picture.) With this data we could, for example, see how a person who is rated as unattractive by users of HOT or NOT (let’s say a 2) rates the hotness of others, compared with someone who is rated as very attractive (let’s say a 9).

Why would this feature help us? We figured that if people who are aesthetically challenged have not adapted, their view of the attractiveness of others would be the same as those of highly attractive people. For example, if adaptation did not take place, a person who is a 2 and a person who is an 8 would both see 9s as 9s and 4s as 4s. On the other hand, if people who are aesthetically challenged have adapted by changing their perspective about the attractiveness of others, their view of hotness would differ from those of highly attractive people. For example, if adaptation had taken place, a person who is a 2 could see a 9 as a 6 and a 4 as a 7, while a person who is an 8 would see a 9 as a 9 and a 4 as a 4. The best news for us was that we could measure it! In short, by examining how one’s own attractiveness influences the hotness rating that one gives others, we thought we might discover something about the extent of adaptation. Intrigued by our project, James and Jim provided us with the ratings and dating information of 16,550 HOT or NOT members during a ten-day period. All members of the sample were heterosexual, and the majority (75 percent) were male.*

The first analysis revealed that almost everyone has a common sense of what is beautiful and what isn’t. We all find people like Halle Berry and Orlando Bloom “hot,” regardless of how we ourselves look; uneven features and buckteeth do not become the new standard of beauty for the aesthetically challenged.

The general agreement on the standard of beauty weighed against the sour grapes theory, but it left two possibilities open. The first was that people adapt by learning to place greater importance on other attributes, and the second was that there is no adaptation to our own aesthetic level.


The three possible ways to deal with our own physical limitations (following the first HOT or NOT study)

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Next, we set about testing the possibility that aesthetically challenged individuals are simply unaware of the limitations placed on us by our lack of beauty (or at least, that this is how we behave online). To do this, we used a second interesting feature of HOT or NOT called “Meet Me.” Assuming you are a man who sees a picture of a woman you’d like to meet, you can click the Meet Me button above the woman’s picture. She will then receive a notification saying that you are interested in meeting, accompanied by a bit of information about you. The key is that when using the Meet Me feature, you would not be reacting to the other person only on the basis of aesthetic judgment; you would also gauge whether the invitee would be likely to accept your invitation. (Though an anonymous rejection is much less painful than being turned down face-to-face, it still stings.)

To better understand the usefulness of the Meet Me feature, imagine that you are a somewhat bald, overweight, hairy fellow, albeit with a great sense of humor. As we learned from the ratings of hotness, the way you view the attractiveness of others is uninfluenced by what you see in your mirror. But how would your unfortunate belly and your low level of hotness influence your decisions about whom to pursue? If you were just as likely to try to pursue gorgeous women, it would mean that you are truly unaware of (or at least uninfluenced by) your own physical shortcomings. On the other hand, if you aim a bit lower and try to meet someone closer to your range—despite the fact that you think Halle Berry or Orlando Bloom is a 10—this would mean that you are influenced by your own unattractiveness.

Our data showed that the less hot individuals in our sample were, in fact, very aware of their own level of (un)attractiveness. Though this awareness did not influence how they perceived or judged the attractiveness of others (as shown by their hotness ratings), it did affect the choices they made about whom they asked to meet.


The three possible ways to deal with our own physical limitations (following the first HOT or NOT study and the Meet Me study)

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Adaptation and the Art of the Speed Date

The data from HOT or NOT eliminated two of our three hypotheses for the process of adaptation to one’s own physical attractiveness. One alternative remained: like my middle-aged friend, people do adapt by putting less emphasis on their partner’s looks and learn to love other attributes.

However, eliminating two of the alternatives is not equivalent to providing support for the remaining theory. We needed evidence showing that people learn to appreciate compensatory attractions (“Darling, you are so smart / funny / kind / attentive / horoscopically compatible / ____________________ [fill in the blank]”). Unfortunately, the data from HOT or NOT couldn’t help us with this, since it allowed us to measure only one thing (photographic hotness). Searching for another setup that would let us measure that ineffable je ne sais quoi, we turned to the world of speed dating.

Before I tell you about our version of speed dating, allow me to offer the uninitiated a short primer in this contemporary dating ritual (if you are a social science hobbyist, I highly recommend the experience).

In case you haven’t noticed, speed dating is everywhere: from posh bars at five-star hotels to vacant classrooms in local elementary schools; from late-afternoon gatherings for the after-work crowd to brunch events for weekend warriors. It makes the quest for everlasting love feel like bargain shopping in a Turkish bazaar. Yet, for all its detractors, speed dating is safer and less potentially humiliating than clubbing, blind dating, being set up by your friends, and other less structured dating arrangements.

The generic speed-dating process is like something designed by a time-and-motion expert of the early twentieth century. A small number of people, generally between the ages of twenty and fifty (in heterosexual events, half of each gender) go to a room set up with two-person tables. Each person registers with the organizers and receives an identification number and a scoring sheet. Half the prospective daters—usually the women—stay at the tables. At the ring of a bell that sounds every four to eight minutes, the men move to the next table in merry-go-round fashion.

While at the table, the daters can talk about anything. Not surprisingly, many initially sheepishly express their amazement at the whole speed-dating process, then make small talk in an effort to fish for useful information without being too blatant. When the bell rings and as the pairings shift, they make decisions: if Bob wants to date Nina, he writes “yes” next to Nina’s number on his scoring sheet, and if Nina wants to date Bob, she writes “yes” next to Bob’s number on her scoring sheet.

At the end of the event, the organizers collect the scoring sheets and look for mutual matches. If Bob gave both Lonnie and Nina a “yes” and Lonnie gave Bob a “no” but Nina gave Bob a “yes,” only Nina and Bob would be given each other’s contact information so that they can talk more and maybe even go on a conventional date.

Our version of speed dating was designed to include a few special features. First, before the start of the event, we surveyed each of the participants. We asked them to rate the importance of different criteria—physical attractiveness, intelligence, sense of humor, kindness, confidence, and extroversion—when considering a potential date. We also changed a bit of the speed-dating process itself. At the end of each “date,” participants did not move immediately to the next one. Instead, we asked them to pause and record their ratings for the person they’d just met, using the same attributes (physical attractiveness, intelligence, sense of humor, kindness, confidence, and extroversion). We also asked them to tell us if they wanted to see this person again.

These measures gave us three types of data. The pre-speed-dating survey told us which attributes each person was generally looking for in a romantic partner. From the postdate responses, we discovered how they rated each person they had met on these attributes. We also knew whether they wanted to meet each person for a real date in the near future.

So, on to our main question: Would the aesthetically challenged individuals place as high a premium on looks as the beautiful people did, showing that they did not adapt? Or would they place more importance on other attributes such as sense of humor, showing that they adapted by changing what they were looking for in a partner?

First, we examined participants’ responses regarding their general preferences—the ones they provided before the event started. In terms of what they were looking for in a romantic partner, those who were more attractive cared more about attractiveness, while the less attractive people cared more about other characteristics (intelligence, sense of humor, and kindness). This finding was our first evidence that aesthetically challenged people reprioritize their requirements in dating. Next, we examined how each speed dater evaluated each of their partners during the event itself and how this evaluation translated to a desire to meet for a real date. Here, too, we saw the same pattern: the aesthetically challenged people were much more interested in going on another date with those they thought had a sense of humor or some other nonphysical characteristic, while the attractive people were much more likely to want to go on a date with someone they evaluated as good-looking.

If we take the findings from the HOT or NOT, the Meet Me, and the speed-dating experiments, the data suggest that while our own level of attractiveness does not change our aesthetic tastes, it does have a large effect on our priorities. Simply put, less attractive people learn to view nonphysical attributes as more important.


The three possible ways to deal with our own physical limitations (after the first HOT or NOT study, the Meet Me study, and the speed-dating study)

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Of course, this leads to the question of whether aesthetically challenged individuals are “deeper” because they care less about beauty and more about other characteristics. Frankly, that is a debate I’d rather avoid. After all, if the teenage frog becomes an adult prince, he might become just as eager to use beauty as his main criterion for dating as the other princes are. Regardless of our value judgments about the real importance of beauty, it is clear that the process of reprioritization helps us adapt. In the end, we all have to make peace with who we are and what we have to offer, and ultimately, adapting and adjusting well are key to being happier.

THE HIS AND HERS PERSPECTIVE

No investigation into the dating world would be complete without some examination of gender differences. The results I’ve described so far were combined across males and females, and you probably suspect that men and women differ in their responses to attractiveness. Right?

Right. As it turns out, most of the gender differences in our HOT or NOT study fell into line with common stereotypes about dating and gender. Take, for instance, the commonly held belief that men are less selective in dating than women. It turns out that this is not just a stereotype: men were 240 percent more likely to send Meet Me invitations to potential females than vice versa.

The data also confirmed the casual observation that men care more about the hotness of women than the other way around, which also relates to the finding that men are less concerned with their own level of attractiveness. On top of that, men were also more hopeful than women—they looked very carefully at the hotness of the women they were “checking out,” and they were more likely to aim for women who were “out of their league,” meaning several numerals higher on the HOT or NOT scale. Incidentally, the male tendency to ask many women on dates, and to aim higher (which some may see as negative), can euphemistically be called “men’s open-mindedness in dating.”

Against All Assortative Mating Odds

We all have some wonderful features and some undesirable flaws. We usually learn to live with them from a young age and end up being generally pleased with our place in society and in the social hierarchy. The difference for someone like me was that I grew up with a certain set of beliefs about myself, and suddenly I had to face a new reality without the opportunity to adjust slowly over a long period of time. I suspect that this instant change made my romantic challenges more apparent, and it also made me look at the dating market in a slightly colder and more distant way.

For years after my injury, I agonized over the effects that my injury would have on my romantic future. I was certain that my scars would dramatically change my position in the assortative mating hierarchy, but I couldn’t help feeling that this was wrong in some ways. On one hand, I realized that the dating market operates in many ways much like other markets and that my market value had plummeted overnight. At the same time, I could not shake the deep feeling that I hadn’t really changed that much and that my value reduction was unfounded.

In one attempt to understand my feelings about this, I asked myself how I would respond if I had been perfectly healthy and someone who had suffered an injury similar to mine asked me out on a date. Would I care? Would I be less likely to date that person because of her injury? I must admit that I didn’t like my answer to this question, and it made me wonder what I could possibly expect from women. I came to the conclusion that I would have to settle, and this deeply depressed me. I hated the idea that women who had been willing to date me before my injury would no longer see me as a potential romantic partner. And I dreaded the thought of settling, both on my account and for the settlee. It just didn’t seem like a recipe for happiness.

ALL THESE ISSUES were resolved while I was in graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. One fine day, the chair of the psychology department appointed me to the colloquium committee. I can’t really remember anything I did during the committee’s meetings other than create the logo for the announcements, but I do remember sitting across the table from one of the most amazing people I have ever met: Sumi. By any stretch of assortative mating imaginable, she should have had nothing to do with me. We started spending more and more time together. We became friends. She appreciated my sense of humor and, in what I can only call a magical transition, at some point somehow agreed to look at me as a potential romantic partner.

Fifteen years and two children later, and with the help of the HOT or NOT data, I now realize how lucky I am that women pay less attention to physical appearance than men do (thank you, my fair readers). I also came to believe that, as unsentimental as it sounds, Stephen Stills’s song has a lot of truth to it. Far from advocating infidelity, “Love the One You’re With” suggests that we have the ability to discover and love the characteristics of our partner. Instead of merely settling for someone with scars, a few extra pounds, buckteeth, or bad hair, we really do end up changing our perspectives, and in the process increasing our love of the person who is behind the mask of their face and body. Another victory for the human ability to adapt!