The attraction factor

You don’t have preconceived ideas about the kind of person who you will be attracted to, do you? Sure, you don’t want them to be an absinthe drinking, body-stocking wearing fan of One Direction, but generally you are open to whatever a person has to offer. Most of us would like to think that we have a degree of noble open-mindedness when it comes to other people and what attracts us to them, but a new study has shown that there are some attraction factors operating at an unconscious level.

Research has found, for instance, that physically attractive women are more likely to form exclusive relationships than to form a purely sexual relationship. This is probably because attractive women use their greater power in the partner marketplace to control outcomes in relationships. In the same way, women with greater physical attractiveness tend to have fewer sexual partners while the reverse is true for men: attractive men tend to have more sexual partners.

This is all gets back to the evolutionary nature of male and female biology. For a woman, it is more evolutionarily successful to have a dedicated partner who will help protect and provide for her children. For a male, however, it is more evolutionarily successful to spread his genetic material as wide as he can. That is why men and women unconsciously spend their “attraction capital” in contradictory ways.

What about that instant when you first meet someone though? What is that attracts you to them? Are you really open to anybody without having any prejudged filters in place? According to this research we all have a predetermined idea of what we want in a person, and guess what? We want ourselves. Yes, none of this openness to whatever may be out there, or finding an opposite to complete you; according to this research the single greatest thing that causes one person to be attractive to another is similarity. In that moment you meet someone, you look for clues that indicate to you whether they are similar to you in things like education level, religion and attractiveness.

Alas, it seems when it comes to the attraction factor humans are less of a “noble savage” and more of a “practical savage”. Maybe we could just save a lot of time and carry with us an “Are you like me?” questionnaire…or, wait a minute, online dating is providing that option already.