#WTF: Kevin's Kephalonomancy is Kontagious

The Matching Hypothesis: Half-baked Implications for Proverbial Ugly Ducklings and Nerdy Girls.

<editorsnote> Nerds, meet Kevin. I found him on craigslist, kinda like how I found that half eaten bag of pretzels, and last Friday's booty call. Casual encounters, FTW! He's hilarious, and smart ... and little elves dance in his footprints as he walks. For the record, I've made two of those facts up. </editorsnote>

#TalkNerdyToMeLover's Kevin Herman

I’m pretty sure I angered H’Ttp-U’rl, baleful god of the internet, by warping his time and space with textual clusters so unnecessarily long and dense with syntactic buttfuckery and semi-fictional lexicon for the past few weeks, but...eh, here we go again.

There were a few topics floating around that I considered rambling on about, but given how pretty much all my posts have basically thus far been slipshod psychology lectures thinly veiled by boner jokes and one attempt to get you very drunk...well, not really gonna break the mold with this one.

I talked a lot in the ‘Geek Chic et Moi’ compendium about ‘Similarity’ and its statistical importance to the survival of a relationship - mostly in terms of attitudes (or in the case of my li’l nerds, interests as well) - but it actually goes a little deeper...or I guess shallower, really, than that. Lo, “The Matching Hypothesis”.

To reiterate: yes, birds of a feather seem to flock together in terms of intangibles like attitudes - but study after study after study since 1966 have noted a similar trend in the physical realm as well. Yeah, we all know and/or have seen a short, dog-faced 4 walking hand in hand with a statuesque 8 --- but by and large, self-perceived 7’s are subconsciously predisposed to shacking up with other 7’s, 5’s with 5’s, and *sigh* 10’s with 10’s (give or take a “point” in either direction). And in those major point disparities, there’s usually a good chance someone’s income is making up the difference. The good news - statistically, an immaculate personality can *also* help tip the scales; but unfortunately still not as much as hawtz will for chicas or “resources” will for dudes.

Evolutionarily and just like...generally, it makes sense: You date too far *up* - you’ll develop an actually justified jealousy and paranoia that your partner could (and may) easily do way way better than you that leads to stress and subsequent resentment; you date too far *down* - you may start to feel like you settled, begin harboring resentment as such, and then feel even shittier and stressed when no matter how often or strongly you demonstrate your love, you can’t get your boo to drop the annoying jealous, paranoid, ungrateful little shit act.

Excess stress kills both people and relationships. Evolutionarily that stress came from the thought that either *she* would secretly bone a dude with a bigger club and have you raise his offspring, or that *he’d* decide to shower a much hotter Neanderthal babe’s kids with his resources. It was literally an issue of genetic fitness and survival. Now it’s mostly just steady access to poon, comfort, and companionship that’s at stake.

This isn’t to say we don’t find ourselves consistently attracted to 8’s, 9’s, and 10’s no matter where we fall on the spectrum; I find Olivia Wilde and Yvonne Strahovski to be some of the most attractive women, like, *ever* - but distinguishing between “being attracted to” and “wanting a relationship with” is crucial. According to theory, despite the Destroyer-of-Worlds-class boner these women give me, some part of my brain just KNOWS they are not suitable mates because - shit, even suspending the fucking retardedness of the idea and imagining that one (or both :D) decided to call me theirs (for more than one torrid, amazing night) - I’d live in a state of perpetual crippling anxiety that they’d eventually realize the huge mistake they’d made; knowing this, my brain says “fuck *that* noise,” pre-emptively killing any motivation to even *want* to make that happen.

I mean, it’s a bad example since famous people have delusional (and often unattractive) fans constantly proposing to them from their azalea bushes right before the cops arrive, but the point is that in a non-celebrity scenario, when faced with someone we find stupefyingly attractive, our mind seems to do some quick and dirty math regarding the short AND long-term odds based on our self-perceived attractiveness, fostering or inhibiting the motivation to pursue accordingly.

On its own the hypothesis is pretty nifty, but a question I kept putting to my professors that none really had an answer for was thus: how does a *sudden, drastic shift* in one’s physical attractiveness affect their dating patterns?

Like, let’s say you have a “She’s All That”-esque scenario where dorky, largely ignored girl whose consequent self-perception puts her at a 4 suddenly shoots up to an 8 in the eyes of others. While I’m sure the newfound attention would *eventually* push her self-perception up to an 8ish, realistically there’s gotta be a transition period where she still feels drawn towards other 4’s who now - while finding her incredibly beautiful - won’t feel as viscerally drawn to her. At the same time, she’s receiving attention from the hypothetical Freddie Prinze Jr’s (just...go with it) but it registers as...I mean, almost *alien* to her; and despite her objectively thinking “yes, he is really fucking hot,” and *knows* she should want to date him, her ‘motivator’ hasn’t overcome the mental safeguard against doing so yet. It’s like some lonely, fucked state of quantifiable-attractiveness limbo.

It’s just something I was wondering because, hell, I feel like it happens more often in real life than one might think, and doesn’t even require the ugly-duckling/beautiful-swan transformation. I know plenty o’ young beautiful yet nerdy women who just kind of sat idly on the romantic sidelines until that weird time either late or post-high school when the guys suddenly realized “oh, shit, yeah we totally *do* like smart chicks now,” at which point those girls (much to their confusion) spontaneously found themselves super in demand, seemed sort of overwhelmed by the attention, and were kind of unsure how to react to it.

For many it was a turbulent transition; thrust as it were, fresh-faced and well behind the learning curve into the middle of a battle between the sexes that had been raging amongst their peers since long before they arrived, with hardened veterans - calloused by experience and versed in social nuance - already filling the ranks on both sides.  Some hit the ground running and performed admirably while learning - with curiosity, responsibility, and strength in equal measure; a few simply hid and removed themselves from the equation entirely; and others...lost both themselves and sight of who they were, abandoning caution and foresight, giving themselves over totally to the conflict and becoming an unrecognizable mess devoid of dignity in the process.

It’s a hell of a thing. It ain’t easy being nerdy.

#nerdsunite

For more of Kevin’s politically incorrect verbal incontinence, follow him on Twitter or check out his like, completely legitimate astrological operation at Fiehard.