Attraction At Tucker Essay

Who we desire is driven by powerful evolutionary forces, but while most of us are drawn to looks first (whether or not we admit it), human attraction is far more complex than it appears at first sight.

Throughout her 20s, management consultant and author Nita Tucker dated doctors—usually tall ones. She was drawn by their status and her mother's insistence that a physician would be a great catch. "If someone said he was a doctor, I was turned on," she says. "I went out with enough to staff a major hospital."

Then Tucker moved to Seattle, where the SuperSonics had just won the NBA championship and were the town's biggest celebrities. To Tucker, a basketball player seemed an even better catch than a doctor. Plus, he'd be taller.

One night at a bar, Tucker noticed some guys from the team, including one who had just been dubbed "Most Eligible Bachelor" by a local paper. Tucker smiled and tried to catch his eye. "But I didn't smile quite high enough, because the guy next to him came over instead." That man, Tony, invited Tucker to join the group. She spent the rest of the evening flirting with the players and ignoring him.

Tony, it turned out, was the team's vice president, and he invited Tucker to a game the next day. "I said, 'Of course!' because I wanted to be with the players," she says. "They were funny and cute. Tony was a boring

The fact that human female ovulation is largely concealed. Other female primates signal fertility in clearly detectable ways, such as a chimp's pink genital swelling. A male human is given no such guidance. "This dramatically changed the ground rules of mating for humans," Buss says. "Human males have to detect fertility from physical cues that happen to correlate with it." Since female to zero around age 50, the theory goes, cues correlated with youth and fertility peaks in the mid-20s and declines health have evolved into a universal standard of female