You, your parents, and the hotness of who you marry

The article seems to be missing the confounding factor that physical attractiveness is also fairly well correlated with other markers of success such as wealth.<p>Some of the reasons for that are fairly obvious e.g. if you&#x27;re healthy, your brain works better.<p>But beyond that, this sort of selection isn&#x27;t just occuring in dating. You&#x27;re more likely to get a job, have a solid friendship group, be received better by strangers, etc, if you&#x27;re more attractive.<p>It&#x27;s a feedback loop, particularly for women.<p>I&#x27;m sure you can find a few outliers, like say pre-hair-transplant Elon or whatever. They&#x27;re still not actually _ugly_ for the most part though.

I wrote my graduate thesis on something similar. One of my findings was that &quot;hotness&quot; was less important in male choice than female choice. More specifically, I found that men didn&#x27;t care as much about the hotness of their potential mates than did women care about their own hotness influencing the quality of their potential mates.<p>In short, hotness&#x27;s strongest correlation was in women&#x27;s pickiness; the more attractive the woman, the pickier she is. This remained true regardless of other factors that we would predict to matter (e.g., age, income...).<p>Men&#x27;s attractiveness did not influence their pickiness.

Evolutionary psychology strikes out again.<p>Eva Illouz would point out that interest in &quot;hotness&quot; is culturally determined. For instance:<p>There is a proliferation of images of &quot;hot&quot; people; a person in 1722 did not see as many &quot;hot&quot; people as today. &quot;hot&quot; people appear in advertising, storytelling, pornography, etc.<p>Illouz thinks it is a bad idea that you&#x27;d select a mate based on a temporary feeling of being overwhelmed by attraction for them.

I wonder if there’s a simpler explanation: that it’s easier to be dispassionate and deprioritise attractiveness for other people?<p>If I was advising a friend, my head would rule: I’d tell them that while attractiveness is nice to have, they should prioritise other aspects (values, temperament, etc.) in choosing someone to be happy with in the long term. I have no vested interest in how attractive my friend’s partner is - only in their happiness.<p>But when making a choice for myself, heart (or raging hormones?) plays a much bigger role, and attractiveness is prioritised much higher, especially at first. And I do (obviously) have a vested interest in optimising for the attractiveness of my partner, all else being equal.

I think physical attractiveness has always ranked on people&#x27;s choice in a mate but I think there is a recent phenomenon with the younger generation to only consider physical attractiveness.<p>Regardless of this recent phenomenon I think younger people generally have always prioritized feelings when choosing a mate. So it may not have strictly been physical attractivenes as measured today but more the holistic cultural attractiveness of the time period.<p>I do think that parents can make a wiser choice because their feelings have been tempered with time and thus are not as influenced by feelings and this quality of attractiveness. They can take a more detached and logical approach of the qualities that would make a good long-term mate. Of which feelings are a part of it but of all the things that come together for successful bonding personal feelings are among the most malleable things there are.<p>A person who gives you the butterflies in your stomach and makes you feel attractive this week may not be the same person next week or in 5 years. Because attractiveness is also culturally based it is something that can be learned and relearned. Since this is completely within your own self it is your own power to control and relearn and adapt.<p>There are many more things that go into the relationship you have no power to control. Such as is the person good and honorable. Because despite what we may want time and time again it&#x27;s shown people rarely can change their core value system. So if a person is not an honest and honorable person in tiny details it is unlikely that they will ever become that for anyone else. We can only look through recent times and throughout all history where we find people curiously attracted to hotness of abusive people. They continually make the cry but they love me and they&#x27;ll change for me but how often does that really happen.<p>These are the qualities that young people are blinded to because of the emotion and the feeling or that hotness as listed here is their primary quality they&#x27;re looking at. All it takes is someone to look around when a culture has decided what makes something hot or physically attractive you will quickly see the men adapt to that and peacock around as that thing whatever it is. If it&#x27;s having no job and being a grunge bum but wearing nice clothes that you scammed off someone that&#x27;s what you&#x27;ll see a whole lot of. If it&#x27;s wealth and security of lifestyle you will see men move toward that. It is only the nature of things.

Nobody stays hot forever. If you married the hottie when young, and you both grew up into average looking older folks, you recognize the long-term futility of looksism, that in fact truly nice people, regardless of looks, are much better long-term prospects.<p>But tell that to a young person...

This is very easy to explain. When you are younger, there are abundant &quot;hot&quot; people in your age group. As you age, that number approaches zero. If you prioritize hotness at an older age, you will be very lonely. Get old and the mystery solves itself.

My parents seemed to care a lot more about hotness and class...I was happy just to meet anybody intelligent...

Curious as to the age of the author. I think this might be impacting their observations.