By Francesca Serritella
Bust out the citronella candles, it’s mosquito season! Here’s a Classic Column about feeling favored by the summer pest and what these bloodsuckers might have to teach us about attraction. Tell me, do mosquitos like you, or love you?
Mosquitos love me.
I’ve always believed I get an inordinate number of mosquito bites, but I never said it out loud. Everyone feels this way. Brandish a bottle of OFF! at any summer barbeque, and five people will proclaim that mosquitos love them with equal parts self-pity and pride. It’s almost a humble-brag, as if mosquitos are real aesthetes, the blood-sucking playboys of the insect world.
The subtext is: “There’s just something about my exposed skin that attracts all species, whatta hassle!”
Then I recently came across an article explaining mosquitos actually do have a “type:” they’re most attracted to humans with the blood type O.
My blood type.
I wasn’t imagining it, it wasn’t some messed up version of vanity, it was science!
Mosquitos don’t consciously know they’re looking for O blood or even why they prefer it, they’ve simply evolved to blindly seek out what’s good for them.
It got me thinking, how much of finding what we need is pure animal attraction? And why are we so quick to dismiss our instincts as unsophisticated or undiscerning?
There’s not enough animal attraction in dating these days. Now we have apps using data analytics and algorithms to help us find partners. Technology is helping us meet, but is it helping us mate?
How many of us have swiped right on someone with all the right stats and pictures, only to find you two have zero chemistry in person?
Smartphones are no match for pheromones.
In the old days, like pre-Tinder 2012, we had to meet out in the wild, at local watering holes, places where we could get within sniffing distance of one another and let the limbic brain do its work.
This is essentially how I’ve met every man I ended up in a serious relationship with. It was never a calculated, well-thought-out assessment of the man in front of me, it was just an immediate, inexplicable attraction, like getting hit by a two-by-four, if the two-by-four were made of warm feelings instead of wood.
My attraction couldn’t have been solely based on looks, because while they were all Studly Do-Rights to me, they looked completely different from one another.
I thought the fact that my exes have nothing superficial in common proved that I was sensitive and deep. But maybe I’m no more evolved than the humble mosquito, subliminally picking up on advantageous genetic matches.
Even if we didn’t procreate, hey, it was fun while it lasted.
Likewise, I think I’m more attractive in person than online. I don’t photograph that well, I hunch to cuddle up to friends, and I don’t know what to do with my nose. But when I go out, I tend to meet men easily. I’d developed my own theories as to why:
I’m smiley and approachable. Some people have “resting bitch face,” I must have “resting slut face.”
My looks fall in that sweet spot between sort-of-pretty but not scary-pretty. Maybe it’s the curly hair. Sleek, bombshell blowouts make a woman too intimidating. I know, because when I get a great blowout, I get delusions of grandeur. I start thinking things like, “Should I date a professional athlete?” and “How does one meet Jake Gyllenhaal?” My crazy, natural curls communicate something more accessible to men, like, “I might have lost my keys.”
Or could it be my sparkling personality?
Nah. It just as likely my blood type, or some other genetic quality completely out of my control.
Bruised ego aside, wouldn’t that be kind of freeing? The notion that there’s nothing we need to do or change about ourselves to attract our ideal mate—not losing five pounds, or choosing the right outfit, or coming up with the perfect opening line. Instead, something buried deep in our DNA will guide us to the person we need.
It’s almost romantic.
So I say we need to take a lesson from the mosquito, a bug of taste, and return to letting animal attraction lead the way.
In the meantime, can somebody please pass the calamine?
Copyright © Francesca Serritella