The Way to a Happy Love Life: Sniffing T-Shirts
No, really, the way to a happy love life is sniffing the t-shirt of your intended date.
The thing is that we are programmed to find attractive those who have an immune system complimentary to our own. And the evidence of such is contained in the pheromones that we throw out in our sweat, meaning that sniffing a t-shirt which has been worn for three days can give us some guidance (ie, whether we like the smell or not) as to whether we would find the person attractive. This is also a reason why those pheromone scents in a bottle don’t in fact work: the opposite sex is looking for subtle scents compatible with their own, rather than a generalised blast of general human hormones.
It’s also, slightly oddly, why women who have similar natural such body smells tend to choose the same perfume. It is to maximise, to exaggerate, the pre-existing odours, rather than to cover them.
In his original study Dr Wedekind recruited female volunteers to sniff men’s three-day-old T-shirts and rate them for attractiveness. He then analysed the men’s and women’s DNA, looking in particular at the genes that build a part of the immune system known as the major histocompatability complex (MHC). Dr Wedekind knew, from studies on mice, that besides fending off infection, the MHC has a role in sexual attractiveness. It changes odours in ways the mice can detect (with mice, the odours are in the urine), and that detection is translated into preferences for particular mates. What is true for mice is often true for men, so he had a punt on the idea that the MHC might affect the smell of human sweat, as well.
It did. Women preferred T-shirts from men whose MHC was most different from their own. What was more, women with similar MHCs favoured the use of similar commercial perfumes. This suggests that the role of such perfumes may be to flag up the underlying body scent rather than mask it, as a more traditional view of the aesthetics of body odour might suggest.
That makes evolutionary sense. The children of couples with a wide range of MHC genes, and thus of immune responses, will be better protected from disease. As the previous article suggests, that could be particularly important in a collaborative, group-living species such as humanity. Moreover, comparing MHCs could be a proxy for comparing kinship, and thus help to prevent inbreeding.
OK, so much for the science. (It should be noted that this doesn’t work for women on the pill. Pregnant women prefer the smell of people with very similar MHC, like family members. Hmm, I think we might actually have explained the modern rise in divorce here, for a large number of women when out dating and looking for a mate will indeed be on the pill and will only come off it some years later, take a whiff and call the lawyers. You think?) But what next?
Well, clearly, the next thing to do is figure out how to make money out of it. Which has been done by a dating agency. They test (similar to a regular DNA test) your MHC and then set you up with those who have a very different set. Sadly, it costs $1,995 a time which really isn’t the sort of fee we really want to have to pay in order to get a date.
Sadly, the simpler, cheaper option also seems unlikely to work. I’m not really sure what the reaction on Facebook would be if before agreeing to meet in meatspace one demanded (or offered to send) a three day worn t-shirt. Not a good one I’d think. So perhaps this is a scientific finding to file in the “interesting but not immediately useful” bin?
January 14th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
This is great! But no need to spend $2000. Simply trust your nose (and other senses). I made the terrible mistake of marrying a man whose smell I detested, from day one. I tried ignoring it, concentrating on other qualities. As time went on, it was clear the smell was bad to me both on and off the pill, pregnant and not. I tried to ignore it, tried (subtly) suggesting products for him, even though I despise colognes/perfumes. It didn’t help that I also didn’t like the sound of him, especially the way he breathed. Okay, the moral of the story: don’t marry someone you’re not attracted to (I was trying, in my young idealistic way, to ‘prove’ that looks don’t matter….).
My partner now of nearly 4 years blows me away with his scents, sounds, everything. I never before experienced total sensory satisfaction. We often tell each other that our atoms are in love, that something at a very basic level in us is drawn together. It really has much less to do with who he is than the way my senses respond to him. And I think that’s the secret to a happy love life, even if there are incompatibilities on the bigger issues.
January 18th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
It’s great to see that we have at least anecdotal evidence that the idea is correct: but it does rather beg the question of what you were doing marrying him in the first place?
Youthful idealism is really all rather well, but perhaps not going to the extent of marrying someone you don’t like the smell (or the sound) of.
Those last two sentences really rather make the larger point though, don’t they?
January 31st, 2008 at 7:34 pm
I tend to get a little extreme with my position that “surface†things don’t matter much: looks, gender,…I know, you’ll disagree with my classifying gender as a surface thing. Maybe as far as our day-to-day comings and goings are concerned, it is surface, but in personal lives, it’s more than surface. Same thing with looks. What I mean is, maybe looks, gender, smell, sound, etc. are fine on any level when it comes to working with others, meeting others, passing them on the street – it all boils down to having the ability to really see the inside of a person, not so much the outside. My ability to do this is quite good.
But when it comes to personal relationships, I’ve learned that there needs to be some personal preferences, beyond what is “inside†a person (brain, compassion, and such), because romantic attraction is, alas, important. But it does seem unfair, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t it be nice if the “beast,†so to speak, could be judged the same as the “beauty� Of course most of us fall somewhere in the middle of these extremes. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if we felt romantic attraction toward what’s on the inside, not the outside? Why are we made to be so superficial?
February 11th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
[...] The Blog, Jan 14: [...]
February 16th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
“But wouldn’t it be wonderful if we felt romantic attraction toward what’s on the inside, not the outside? Why are we made to be so superficial?”
I think actually that all of us already do that. OK, my preference in looks is for redheads and freckles: and I rather prefer women to be actually shaped like women, you know, with proper hips and everything.
So as and when I was indeed single those would be the looks I was on the look out for. But as and when I met women who met those tastes, there was still the further pocess of finding out what the inside was like before anything else happened. You know, was there a real person inside that package, one that had similar interests etc etc?