“Your husband is cute,” I told a friend recently. (People usually like to hear that their long-term spouses are attractive.) “Oh,” she said, “I don’t care about that. I’ve never cared about how people look and I would hope that he doesn’t care how I look either.”
I’m often told that looks are unimportant, that in choosing a partner you should disregard appearance and focus on their more profound and meaningful qualities: personality, character, intellect. Like most advice, this is an appropriate admonition for some. If you find yourself picking based on looks alone, if you’re often seduced into relationships with attractive but empty-headed, flighty or even cruel people because you are defenceless against a pretty face, then clearly, you should reprioritise. Likewise, if you’re overly concerned about what the world considers beautiful, if you expect your partner to conform to some external beauty standard, then you might need to reconsider. But the idea that physical attraction can be overridden or ignored in the choice of a partner seems wrongheaded to me.
There might even be a secret wisdom in your intuitive response to someone else’s physical presence. I’m increasingly convinced that some important assessments that our minds make are not accessible to conscious awareness. Evolutionary psychologist Rob Kurzban’s excellent (but misnamed) book, Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, provides many examples of such processes. I suspect these include not only instantaneous responses—the so-called Type A thinking that prompts me to leap back in shock when I spot the coils of a snake beside a walking trail—but more complex, multifaceted calculations. Perhaps the lack of physical attraction to someone is a signal that shouldn’t be ignored, a sign that you are not compatible at some molecular level, that your offspring would be weaker and less likely to survive.