The science of dating

What can be more important than understanding the basis of one-night stands?

If we are to be honest, understanding special relativity has minimal impact on the average person's daily life. Understanding the driving forces behind human physical attraction, now that has value in today's ultra competitive dating world.

Recent work by Canadian researcher Lisa DeBruine has shed light on the fact that facial resemblance to oneself has major impact on the attractiveness of possible mates. Using computer images manipulated to have facial features more and less similar to the viewer's, researchers were able to show that dissimilar individuals were considerably more attractive for short-term relationships -- aka the one-night stand.

Biologically speaking, this makes sense. In a relationship based solely on physical attraction, individuals should favor people whose genes are different from their own. This would decrease the likelihood of inbreeding and produce offspring with increased diversity. When confronted with the possibility of a long-term relationship, participants favored neither similar nor dissimilar individuals, although they said similar individuals looked more trustworthy.

Ponder that for a little while and you begin to see that human relationships are much more complicated than you probably realize.

Some of the people are out there are looking for someone different than themselves. Others are looking for someone they can trust, and thus someone more similar to themselves. Still others couldn't care less what you look like because they're going for the long term.

So what should you do? I suppose that if one has their heart set on engaging in one-night stands on regular basis, one should find individuals who are nothing alike to increase their chances of success. If you are not feeling quite so proactive, I suggest sitting back and relaxing. It's great that science can shed light onto some of our more primitive desires, but let's not get carried away.

Science can only do so much to help out the Romeos and Juliets of the world. Sure, drugs can be utilized when certain personal functions are lost, and finding insights into the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases is great. But to be honest, it is unlikely science will ever be able to understand the complexity of dating. A magical love potion will never exist.

Don't get discouraged. If science could solve all of our problems, life would be a dull, muted world filled with jaded individuals who would be content knowing they would never have to worry about anything.

You may never understand why the girl you just met didn't appreciate your comment about how those other girls who just walked by were "fine," or how the cute guy with blonde hair that comes by your office every day never asks what you are doing on Saturday night, but that's OK. Even if the laws governing attraction are never ascertained, as long as humans live on Earth, the rules of the birds and the bees will remain in effect.