fiddlesticks – you have convinced me start posting in this thread again.
“Why can’t you just give people a CHANCE? Why do you NEED to see a picture and decide based on that?”
He is giving people a chance. The better people. For HIM. If he is at all similar to me, the picture was more to establish a baseline than to be the deciding factor. A guy has a limited amount of dates he can physically do (and pay for, but that’s a whole other conversation). That means some girls will be rejected. A sane person will reject those that are highly, highly unlikely to ever be his wife, if he can choose from those that are far, far more likely to be his wife.
Personally, I’d feel a whole lot more insulted if I was rejected for something important to ME like not happy/kind/good/frum etc. enough, than something out of my control like my looks. How shallow are these girls? Additionally, how do they know it’s the looks? Would they feel better if it was after a date? Why?
Comparing wife-finding to friendships is undermining the premise of the shidduch system.
While physical attraction can slightly change over time if the emotional attraction is growing, it is limited in both quantity and quality of attraction. (It can make an “8” a “10” but it can’t make a “2” a “10” and you never really forget the real number. These numbers are just an approximation of an objectively subjective measurement of the amount of relative attractiveness a girl has.)
OoM – Your arguments are the closest thing I’ve heard to rational here, but they are still somewhat flawed. You are saying that it is in the guy’s benefit not to decide based on pictures, because of the bias. Problems:
A) A cost/benefit analysis is in order: the difference in how much MORE flawed the picture makes the decision vs. time/expense/energy etc. saved by avoiding many complete wastes of time.
B) It can only matter in the pre-date decisions. Maybe the other pre-date decisions are made first, or by a proxy?
C) Is it assuming that the bias of attraction is a bad thing? Most men wouldn’t get married without it.
D) I don’t think any guy makes his decision on looks alone. WIY seemed to me to be trying to make a point on an extreme example.
Celebrities are just a bad example. Their problems could come from so many places that you can’t really isolate the cause.