Preferential mating

Maggie says:
Gene's right... it's totally time to bring back the discussion of how we mate (or most likely don't) through our preferences in books, movies, eating, and the like. Put on the fond memory music and stoke the conversational fires, because to facilitate our fun I'm going to link to an oldie-but-goodie: the much-loved "taquito moment" article.

Our original post (remember m-pyrical?) is here, with some of our taquito moments from '05 and '06 included in the post and comments. And since then... well, one M is married and another fled the state for a boy (cue eye-roll), so life is a lot different now.

And yet, discussions of attraction and repulsion never cease to be a good time, however hypothetical they may be.

The fascinating question that rises to the top of all of these articles is not about what we like, but actually about what we detest. The logic goes, if we can eliminate prospective mates by things they possess that we hate, will we eventually land on the person who has it all? Or does not possessing any inoffensive qualities simply give us a bland candidate, rather than one who might embody qualities we both love and love hating? And is it obnoxiously post-modern to maintain that our best matches will love our loves of books, movies, art, music, poetry, food, etc.... or is that just common sense? Is our luxury of having the time and confidence and freedom to endlessly choose actually more harmful to us in the end? Do the best of us just fall early and figure it all out later, happily rolling our eyes at their DVD collection for the next fifty years? Or can time give us the luxury of finding that person who also has sentence twelve on page 149 of our favorite book underlined, and does that give us more in the end?

Let the debate begin continue.

The Original: Picky, Picky. In the Outlet Mall of Love, Finding a Good Fit Can Mean a lot of Returns. "The Taquito Moment comes to represent a moment of clarity, the thing you fasten onto later when explaining why you could never go out with that person again."

Books: It's Not You, It's Your Books. "If you’re a person who loves Alice Munro and you’re going out with someone whose favorite book is ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ perhaps the flags of incompatibility were there prior to the big reveal."

Food: I Love You, but You Love Meat. "He had no problem searing her vegan burgers alongside his beef patties, but she found the practice unenlightened and disturbing."