I was killing time in my Los Angeles hotel room last week by scanning through the cable television channels and I happened upon a show concerning the science of human attraction in young adults. Despite my expectation that the program would probably be little more than an infomercial, I found my interest piqued by a segment about the effects of hormones. Hormonal development in the male creates changes in both his appearance, his voice, and his scent. The female responds, sometimes unconsciously, to all these sensory stimuli. Similarly, the program showed experiments measuring how physical changes arising from female hormonal development, overlaid with the fluctuations arising from the menstrual cycle, affects the male's perceptions of the female's desirability. Unfortunately, the program then tossed away all credibility with some poorly reasoned conjectures about Darwinian determinism. Nevertheless, the program's basic thesis seemed to be sound. There is a strong biochemical aspect to human attraction.
The program made me think about my nephew who is graduating from high school in another month. He is several years away from being physically mature and will appear to be a boy among men when he starts college in the fall. This will probably limit his dating opportunities for quite some time – no real problem unless discouragement mires him in "beta male" habits of reluctance and passivity.
I was a similar beardless youth when I started college a month shy of my eighteenth birthday. I didn't reach my full height until senior year. My dating was relatively sparse except as a pinch-hitter to fill out a double date. Therefore, my dating had more to do with public service than romance. I was the pick when a buddy needed someone moderately tall to escort his girlfriend's roommate. I remember meeting a pleasant giantess that played the upright bass in the university orchestra.
After college my hormones continued their tardy behavior. I didn't need to shave daily until I was about twenty-five. It was at this time that I began to receive a few glimmers of female attention. According to the television program's explanation, I must have begun broadcasting the right visual and chemical stimuli. During the next few years, I became aware that somehow, without any action on my part, I had been given a ticket to the great market of adulthood. With ticket in hand, I strode into the marketplace, so to speak, and WHOOSH! was soon married.
The day after I watched this television program on human attraction, I saw an evening news segment about a precocious young man who entered college at fourteen. He is completing his engineering bachelor's work now at eighteen and will start graduate school in the fall. Academically he is doing all right, but I suspect that he is so far out of sync with respect to typical physical maturity at college that he may have difficulties interacting with women for years to come. Life is more complicated than engineering studies.
