Bonded by Evolution

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Measuring Desirability

Here is a story about how I learned my place.

It is 1999, and I’m at Cornell University in upstate New York. The school is big enough to foster considerable anonymity, and the dazzling cold makes it easy to disappear under the requisite winter hat, scarf, and parka. On one such freezing morning in early November, a woman approaches me in the middle of the sidewalk. This is not a common occurrence. Did I drop something? Will I be asked to make a donation? Surely she has mistaken me for someone else? She exudes a social confidence that feels like a foreign language.

I quickly discover that she knows who I am; we went to the same high school. After fumbling awkwardly through the first few minutes of conversation, it finally occurs to me to blurt out that I have a car, since the easiest way to travel back to our hometown outside of Boston is a six-hour car trip. We exchange email addresses.

Anna is younger than me, but she possesses an uncommon level of sophistication. She is tall and striking; when she enters a room, the center of gravity shifts in her direction. She is fluent in Russian, she is a fan of classic films, and she writes poetry. She is friends with interesting people. On the 1–10 EvoScript scale of mate value, Anna is a 9.

I, on the other hand, would be considered a 6. I’m not bad-looking, but at this particular moment in my life I don’t exercise much, so my physique can charitably be described as “doughy-adjacent.” More problematic is that I have very little social cachet: I wake up early, dutifully attend all my classes, study hard, and spend any remaining free time with a small group of close friends. I’m a little too proud of the fact that I rarely go to parties, and when I do, I’ll glom onto the one or two people I already know. I have not yet learned the fine art of mingling.

A drive home together over the holiday break gives Anna and me a chance to get to know each other. The conversation is easy; I initially award the credit to her charming lack of inhibition, but maybe I’m playing a role, too—I do seem to be making her laugh. We talk about exes and the Beatles and my pet gecko named Ringo. We make plans to hang out in person over the break. Cue butterflies.

And we do hang out. A lot. Whereas most month-long breaks reach a plateau of dreary sameness, this one is jam-packed. I go with her to buy her first guitar, and I teach her how to play. We get high and watch Yellow Submarine. She shares with me some poetry she has written, and I set it to music. Critically, whatever tiny crushes and flings she had mentioned previously all seem to be evaporating. It feels like I can’t lose.

Or can I? On the one hand, we are spending a massive amount of time together. Not many women have ever wanted to spend this much time with me without being at least somewhat into me. She emails regularly, and she returns every voicemail that I leave for her. On the other hand, when it’s just the two of us? She’s not giving me any signals. If anything, she seems to know exactly how not to give off signals. She never touches my arm accidentally. She never catches my eye for too long. We watch My Fair Lady; she stays on her side of the couch. Wistfully, I stay on mine.

By January, it’s becoming obvious that if something doesn’t happen soon, we will retreat to our disconnected social circles. This is my biggest fear, because I have tremendous doubts about my ability to hack it in her universe. As I mentioned, she is friends with interesting people. And many of these interesting people are also men who are accomplished, charming, and hot. Men who are worldly like her and who thrive in her social milieu.

As we arrive back at school, we make plans to watch one of the remaining movies on her bucket list for me: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I am initially delighted to see the three-and-a-half hour running time as we head up to her room.

Except now, the signals are crystal clear, and they are decidedly inauspicious. If I move in her direction, she moves away. She receives phone calls from other people, and she takes them. I retreat to a corner of her twin bed; wow, this movie is long. When it is over, I say good night and head home.

Later that same night, after I leave, she goes to hang out with some other friends. Within a couple of days, she has a new crush in her life that she is hooking up with. I won’t lie: He’s pretty damn good-looking.

Learning your place in the dating pool can be a brutal process. You come to understand your intrinsic mate value—whether you are an appealing 8 or a lackluster 3—through repeated rejection. Are you rejected by only the most desirable people, or by pretty much everyone? Your answer to this question feels like an indication of your rank: your position in the hierarchy of desirability. This feeling shapes the romantic risks that you take, the situations you walk into, and the speed with which you count yourself out. After all, rejection hurts. If you continually aim too high with your attentions and affections, you’ll receive an extra dose of ridicule and mockery. Find your rank and stay put, or fry like Icarus.

According to this logic, I was a fool for thinking I had a shot with Anna. Put simply, Anna was more attractive than me and more socially skilled than me. Even though she enjoyed spending time with me, she could attract someone with a lot more value than what I had to offer. I never spent much time with the good-looking guy she fell for that January, but nevertheless, I was competing with him—and I lost. For anyone of any gender who has had the experience of being rejected for someone else, the EvoScript is the voice that says: “This is your core essence. You’re just not desirable enough. Get used to it.”

In some cases, that voice offers an even more sweeping indictment. In this story, it might tell me that I was a willing participant in my own swindling. It whispers that I was a useful tool in the short term to alleviate Anna’s boredom, and I should have known better than to walk right into the friendzone. Aggrieved men online might point to stories like mine to gin up misogyny: Anna was just another attractive, popular woman who gets everything she wants in life and delights in making sure that beta males like me know my place.

This interpretation—that Anna is a winner and I am a loser in the marketplace of mating—distorts the specifics of this story, and more important, it distorts the abstract, generalizable lesson about how romantic attachments form and what sustains them. To understand why, we need to scrutinize—and disassemble—the mate value concept.

We All Have a Value

It is a basic fact in evolutionary biology that animals differ in something called reproductive success. Put simply, only some individuals of a given species produce offspring who survive to reproduce themselves. Critically, members of early human (and protohuman) groups who made prudent mate choices—perhaps by identifying mates who had high reproductive potential—sent their own genes forward into future generations and became our ancestors. The ones who made poor choices did not.

Animals are not clairvoyant; they cannot directly peer into the future and know which potential mates are destined to be reproductive champions. So they try to size it up as best they can, usually by assessing whether potential mates possess traits that have historically been decent signals of reproductive success. This set of trait judgments is what evolutionary psychologists mean by the term mate value.

The EvoScript proclaims that mate value lingers among humans living today: Even if you don’t have any intention of reproducing anytime soon (or ever), you have nevertheless inherited the instinct to assess others’ mate value, and you have a mate value yourself. My friend’s “how not to be a dating loser” list from the introduction is a fine illustration of the mate value concept. The more you possess these desirable traits—like attractiveness, or confidence, or a good sense of humor—the more mate value you have. Possessing the trait doesn’t need to be binary, of course; the sexier you are, the better. These traits could have different origins, too: Some traits may derive from your genetics; others might be acquired through hard work and persistence. Some, like status, could accrue with time; others, like youth itself, slowly fade. Critically, your mate value is an amalgamation of all these appealing traits at a given moment in time—your worth on the open market.

Traits do not need to be universally desirable across all contexts to be a part of someone’s mate value. As an avid 8-bit Nintendo player in the early nineties, I fully understood that this skill added nothing to my mate value while attending junior high. In gamer communities today, it could well be an asset. In other words, cultures can shape whether a specific modern skill or trait is linked to broader attributes—someone’s status, social skills, or value to the local group—which would have been a reliable signal of reproductive success in ancestral times.