A man meets a woman. He talks to her for a bit, they exchange a few laughs, and go their separate ways. When the man's friend asks him if he will pursue a relationship with this woman, he replies, "no, she is too fat for me."

Is this man a bad person?

A woman meets a man. They talk, exchange a few laughs, and go their separate ways. When the woman's friend asks her if she will pursue a relationship with the man, she replies "no, he isn't my type."

Is this woman a bad person?

You may be quick to say that the man is an awful terrible person for rejecting a woman because she is fat, but you may not be as quick to say the woman is a bad person for her delightfully vague reason for rejection. What if, when asked why he wasn't "her type", the woman replied, "I don't like skinny guys."

If that were the case, then both the man and the woman had equally shallow reasons for not pursuing a relationship. The man could have just as easily said "she wasn't my type" and come across less like an a-hole, but the reasoning would have still been the same. His "type" in question wasn't "fat girls".

Most people like to think that they aren't shallow, but we all know that, deep down, we are.

"No!", you say. "I love my partner even though he/she isn't the most attractive person in the world." First off, does your partner know you said that? Harsh. Second of all, of course you can still love someone that doesn't look like a model.

But it's all a big compromise that your head is making.

Most people would like to drive a Ferrari, but not everyone can afford one. Most people would like to date a model, but not everyone can pull that off.

Ferraris are awesome and sexy, but they are crazy expensive and not very good for carting kids to soccer practice. So even though you may lust after a Ferrari, a Honda may be a more sensible and realistic choice.

At our core, animals such as humans are geared toward reproduction. As such, we often do whatever it takes to reproduce (or at least "practice" reproducing, if you catch my drift). So in that sense, we should have no standards whatsoever and simply go after anything that moves. But we also kind of care about what our potential offspring would look and act like. It's survival.

So in that case, we want to bear offspring that have desirable physical characteristics. We want them to be able to survive and bear more offspring, etc.

Being shallow is nothing more than trying to choose a partner that has as many desirable characteristics as possible so that the children you have together will also be attractive, strong, and successful.

Traditional Choice of Partners

Now, if, for a man, dating a girl were just about finding someone to do the "no pants dance" with, then it would be a fairly simple endeavor: get the hottest girl who still wants to sleep with you.

While many men still might hold to this ideal, monogamy makes things more complicated. We still, at our core, want a girl who is "smoking hot", but we also want a girl who we can stand to be around for theoretically the rest of our life. So this is where the compromise sets in.

So if you're a guy, you want a girl who is hot. But you also want a girl whose company you enjoy. These two traits often come in conflict with each other, and women who are both physically attractive and have a good personality are difficult to come by.

I've come up with a relationship between attractiveness and personality, shown in Fig. 1, which can be used for either gender. I've broken it down into four applicable "zones" that describe the type of relationship that would be pursued for each.

For women, the compromise is similar but different. Women seem to be physically attracted to men that exude masculinity, but they also must consider men who will be good "providers". The rise of feminism may have changed this somewhat, but even if a woman does not need a man who is a provider, she will still want someone who will be supportive, be a good father to any potential kids, etc.

Relationship Equilibrium and Attractiveness Dissonance

All the above being said, there can still exist interesting cases when someone may not want their partner to become more attractive.

In the traditional sense, if someone enjoyed their partner's company, and a genie told them that they could make their partner significantly more attractive without changing their personality, then a logical person would say "that'd be just fine" (you know you would, don't lie).

But wait a second, it may sound good at first, but doing so may alter a sacred balance in the relationship, which I will refer to as "relationship equilibrium."

While all men do secretly want a partner who is "smoking hot", most eventually come to grips with the cold hard reality that they could not deal with it.

You see, men have image issues just like women do. Most of us know that we don't look like an Abercrombie model, so we are secretly afraid that if our partner became gorgeous overnight, then they would leave us for someone equally gorgeous.

In every relationship, there is an equilibrium, and damaging this balance could (at least in many people's eyes) damage the relationship itself.

Now, of course, not every relationship features two people who are equally attractive. Most don't. But usually the less attractive person will have some redeeming quality or qualities that upgrade their attractiveness potential. A guy can be short, bald, and have a "face made for radio", but if he is a multi-millionaire then he very well could bring in a woman far above his attractiveness level.

This is not to say that all women are gold-diggers, many times men who gain high levels of status are simply brimming with confidence, which, I've learned, all women find attractive. This is sometimes played with in the TV series Modern Family, when Sofia Vergara's character justifies that her relationship with Al Bundy is "not because of his money." I'm still a tad skeptical.

In any case, it is these redeeming qualities that provide an equilibrium. So, as an example, a man with a good job marries a woman who is a step above him in terms of attractiveness, but a step or two below him in terms of job salary. The man can feel comfortable about keeping his woman because he has a good job that gives him extra "attractiveness points", and the woman can feel good about keeping her man because she figures he probably can't do better than her, even with his salary.

In this example, let's say that the man starts working out and takes better care of his face and skin. At some point, he reaches a level of attractiveness that is on par with his spouse, and still has a good job. His wife may start to get worried, because all of the sudden he is desired by other women on looks alone, with his job being icing on the cake. He has created what I will call "attractiveness dissonance", where, with all of his qualities combined, he can "afford" (with his "attractiveness points") a woman who is either more attractive than his current wife, or more successful.

On the flip side, if his wife went from attractive to *extremely* attractive, then he may start to get worried because all of the sudden she can "afford" a man who is both attractive and successful.

This example is, of course, oversimplified, as there are a plethora of factors that go into two people's attraction to each other, but the point I am trying to make is that we strive as humans to be with a spouse who is more or less on our same level of combined attractiveness, and we tend to get uncomfortable if we feel there is "attractiveness dissonance", even if our fears are all in our head.

The Five-Dimensional Attractiveness Model

The graph shown in Fig. 1 represents a two-dimensional model for attraction, with the degrees of freedom being "attractiveness" (which I will refer to as "looks" from now on), and "personality."

Both these terms are vague and leave many stones unturned when it comes to two people's attraction toward each other in a monogamous relationship, so I would like to take an opportunity to add a few more degrees of freedom.

Here are my five categories:

1. Looks: the purely physical attraction between two people
2. Personality: the purely emotional attraction between two people
3. Status: includes wealth, both in monetary and non-monetary forms.
4. Value Harmony: Measure of how well two people agree on major life values/decisions, i.e. having kids, religion, location of living, etc.
5. Convenience Factor: Sometimes, people get together because they met each other at the right time in their lives and even though they weren't exactly perfect together, they decided to go for it. And hey, this actually works for a lot of people. This can include things like "our families are friends" (which is the white-people version of an arranged marriage).

Now, if you rank each of these categories on a scale of 1-10 and then combine them, then you have your "total attractiveness coefficient".

How you combine them can be tricky. The simplest ways would be to just add or multiply them, but the graphical approach shown in Fig.1 implies an RSS (root-square-sum) of each value. For those of you who aren't very math-savvy, that basically means that you square each term, add them together, and then take the square root, as shown below.

However you combine the terms, it is important to note that every individual will have a different threshold at the lower end of one or more categories that will constitute a "deal breaker", or perhaps a threshold at the higher end of one or more of the categories that will constitute them ignoring faults in the other qualities.

Simple examples include that an intense emotional connection can lead a person to ignore the fact that their partner doesn't make a lot of money or isn't very good-looking, or that someone who is incredibly attractive can lead their partner to ignore that they have little to no emotional connection. On the flip side, someone who is incredibly ugly can lead a potential partner to ignore any of their other redeeming qualities.

Conclusion

Attraction between two people is a complex game, but when you break it down, we aren't really as sophisticated with our tastes as we would like to believe.

In my mind, it is okay to be "shallow" in the conventional sense, because we are more or less wired to judge based on appearances, and wanting attractive children isn't such a bad thing.

That being said, there are of course many other reasons to be with someone, so you must take them all into consideration when choosing a partner.

 

References:

I've got to give credit to The Ladder Theory for being an inspiration to many of these ideas.