By: Dan Slater
NY Times, January 12, 2013

A COUPLE of evolutionary psychologists recently published a book about human sexual behavior in prehistory called “Sex at Dawn.” Upon hearing of the project, one colleague, dubious that a modern scholar could hope to know anything about that period, asked them, “So what do you do, close your eyes and dream?”

Actually, it’s a little more involved. Evolutionary psychologists who study mating behavior often begin with a hypothesis about how modern humans mate: say, that men think about sex more than women do. Then they gather evidence — from studies, statistics and surveys — to support that assumption. Finally, and here’s where the leap occurs, they construct an evolutionary theory to explain why men think about sex more than women, where that gender difference came from, what adaptive purpose it served in antiquity, and why we’re stuck with the consequences today.

Lately, however, a new cohort of scientists have been challenging the very existence of the gender differences in sexual behavior that Darwinians have spent the past 40 years trying to explain and justify on evolutionary grounds.

Of course, no fossilized record can really tell us how people behaved or thought back then, much less why they behaved or thought as they did. Nonetheless, something funny happens when social scientists claim that a behavior is rooted in our evolutionary past. Assumptions about that behavior take on the immutability of a physical trait — they come to seem as biologically rooted as opposable thumbs or ejaculation.

Using evolutionary psychology to back up these assumptions about men and women is nothing new. In “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex,” Charles Darwin gathered evidence for the notion that, through competition for mates and sustenance, natural selection had encouraged man’s “more inventive genius” while nurturing woman’s “greater tenderness.” In this way, he suggested that the gender differences he saw around him — men sought power and made money; women stayed at home — weren’t simply the way things were in Victorian England. They were the way things had always been.

A century later, a new batch of scientists began applying Darwinian doctrine to the conduct of mating, and specifically to three assumptions that endure to this day: men are less selective about whom they’ll sleep with; men like casual sex more than women; and men have more sexual partners over a lifetime.

In 1972, Robert L. Trivers, a graduate student at Harvard, addressed that first assumption in one of evolutionary psychology’s landmark studies, “Parental Investment and Sexual Selection.” He argued that women are more selective about whom they mate with because they’re biologically obliged to invest more in offspring. Given the relative paucity of ova and plenitude of sperm, as well as the unequal feeding duties that fall to women, men invest less in children. Therefore, men should be expected to be less discriminating and more aggressive in competing for females.

It was an elegant, powerful application of evolutionary theory to the mating game. The evolutionary psychologists of the 1980s and ’90s built on Mr. Trivers’s theory to explain a wide array of stereotypical gender differences in mating.

In 1993, David M. Buss and David P. Schmitt used parental investment theory to explain why men should be expected to “devote a larger proportion of their total mating effort to short-term mating.” Because men invested less time and effort in their offspring, they evolved toward promiscuity, while women evolved away from it. Promiscuity, the researchers hypothesized, would have been more damaging to the female reputation than to the male reputation. If a man mated with a promiscuous woman, he would never be able to ensure his paternity. Men, on the other hand, could potentially enhance their status by pursuing a short-term mating strategy. (Think Kennedy, Clinton, Spitzer, Letterman and so forth. My space is limited.)

One of the earliest critics of this kind of thinking was Stephen Jay Gould. He wrote in 1997 that parental investment theory “will not explain the full panoply of supposed sexual differences so dear to pop psychology.” Mr. Gould felt that the field had become overrun with “ultra-Darwinians,” and that evolutionary psychology would be a more fruitful science if it didn’t limit itself “to the blinkered view” that evolutionary explanations accounted for every difference.

BUT if evolution didn’t determine human behavior, what did? The most common explanation is the effect of cultural norms. That, for instance, society tends to view promiscuous men as normal and promiscuous women as troubled outliers, or that our “social script” requires men to approach women while the pickier women do the selecting. Over the past decade, sociocultural explanations have gained steam.

Take the question of promiscuity. Everyone has always assumed — and early research had shown — that women desired fewer sexual partners over a lifetime than men. But in 2003, two behavioral psychologists, Michele G. Alexander and Terri D. Fisher, published the results of a study that used a “bogus pipeline” — a fake lie detector. When asked about actual sexual partners, rather than just theoretical desires, the participants who were not attached to the fake lie detector displayed typical gender differences. Men reported having had more sexual partners than women. But when participants believed that lies about their sexual history would be revealed by the fake lie detector, gender differences in reported sexual partners vanished. In fact, women reported slightly more sexual partners (a mean of 4.4) than did men (a mean of 4.0).

In 2009, another long-assumed gender difference in mating — that women are choosier than men — also came under siege. In speed dating, as in life, the social norm instructs women to sit in one place, waiting to be approached, while the men rotate tables. But in one study of speed-dating behavior, the evolutionary psychologists Eli J. Finkel and Paul W. Eastwick switched the “rotator” role. The men remained seated and the women rotated. By manipulating this component of the gender script, the researchers discovered that women became less selective — they behaved more like stereotypical men — while men were more selective and behaved more like stereotypical women. The mere act of physically approaching a potential romantic partner, they argued, engendered more favorable assessments of that person.

Recently, a third pillar appeared to fall. To back up the assumption that an enormous gap exists between men’s and women’s attitudes toward casual sex, evolutionary psychologists typically cite a classic study published in 1989. Men and women on a college campus were approached in public and propositioned with offers of casual sex by “confederates” who worked for the study. The confederate would say: “I have been noticing you around campus and I find you to be very attractive.” The confederate would then ask one of three questions: (1) “Would you go out with me tonight?” (2) “Would you come over to my apartment tonight?” or (3) “Would you go to bed with me tonight?”

Roughly equal numbers of men and women agreed to the date. But women were much less likely to agree to go to the confederate’s apartment. As for going to bed with the confederate, zero women said yes, while about 70 percent of males agreed.

Those results seemed definitive — until a few years ago, when Terri D. Conley, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, set out to re-examine what she calls “one of the largest documented sexuality gender differences,” that men have a greater interest in casual sex than women.

Ms. Conley found the methodology of the 1989 paper to be less than ideal. “No one really comes up to you in the middle of the quad and asks, ‘Will you have sex with me?’ ” she told me recently. “So there needs to be a context for it. If you ask people what they would do in a specific situation, that’s a far more accurate way of getting responses.” In her study, when men and women considered offers of casual sex from famous people, or offers from close friends whom they were told were good in bed, the gender differences in acceptance of casual-sex proposals evaporated nearly to zero.

IN light of this new research, will Darwinians consider revising their theories to reflect the possibility that our mating behavior is less hard-wired than they had believed?

Probably not. In an article responding to the new studies last year, Mr. Schmitt, a leading voice among hard-line Darwinians, ceded no ground. Addressing Ms. Conley’s finding that women were more likely to agree to casual sex with a celebrity, Mr. Schmitt argued that this resulted from “women’s (but not men’s) short-term mating psychology being specially designed to obtain good genes from physically attractive short-term partners.” He continued: “When women’s short-term-mating aim is activated (perhaps, temporarily, because of, e.g., high-fertility ovulatory status or desire for an extramarital affair, or more chronically, because of , e.g., a female-biased local sex ratio or a history of insecure parent-child attachment), they appear to express relatively focused desires for genetic traits in ‘sexy men’ that would biologically benefit women when short-term mating.”

In other words: Nothing new here, it’s all evolution.

Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist and popular author, also backs the Darwinians, whom he says still have the weight of evidence on their side. “A study which shows you can push some phenomenon around a bit at the margins,” he wrote to me in an e-mail, “is of dubious relevance to whether the phenomenon exists.”

But the fact that some gender differences can be manipulated, if not eliminated, by controlling for cultural norms suggests that the explanatory power of evolution can’t sustain itself when applied to mating behavior. This wouldn’t be the first time we’ve pushed these theories too far. How many stereotypical racial and ethnic differences, once declared evolutionarily determined under the banner of science, have been revealed instead as vestiges of power dynamics from earlier societies?

Citing the speed-dating study, Mr. Pinker added, “The only reason this flawed paper was published was that it challenged an evolutionary hypothesis … in particular a sex difference — as the Larry Summers incident shows, claims about sex differences are still politically inflammatory in the academy.” Here, he was referring to the much criticized 2005 comments Mr. Summers made when he was Harvard’s president suggesting that women’s underrepresentation in science and engineering was attributable not to socialization but to “different availability of aptitude at the high end.”

Perhaps these phenomena exist. Perhaps men do, over all, pursue more short-term mating. But given new research, continued rigid reliance on evolution as an explanation seems to risk elevating a limited guide to teleological status — a way of thinking that scientists should abhor.

“Some sexual features are deeply rooted in evolutionary heritage, such as the sex response and how quickly it takes men and women to become aroused,” said Paul Eastwick, a co-author of the speed-dating study. “However, if you’re looking at features such as how men and women regulate themselves in society to achieve specific goals, I believe those features are unlikely to have evolved sex differences. I consider myself an evolutionary psychologist. But many evolutionary psychologists don’t think this way. They think these features are getting shaped and honed by natural selection all the time.” How far does Darwin go in explaining human behavior? 

By HANNAH SELINGER
NY Times Published: January 10, 2013

I MET him when I was 22 and squandering a year of my life (and liver quality) working as a waitress in my Massachusetts hometown. I was an Ivy League graduate who’d always had a plan, and suddenly I had no plan. All my life I had been regimented, disciplined and very, very good, but I didn’t want to be that girl in the front row raising my hand with the right answers anymore. So I traded in my sharpened pencils for an apron and a pair of clogs, and started serving tables five nights a week at a local pub.

It took a lot less time than anyone expected for me to shed my preppy college ways and adopt the freewheeling lifestyle of restaurant work. The guys in the kitchen labeled me “Columbia” in homage to my now distant-seeming academic career, my Massachusetts accent returned with a vengeance and I learned to negotiate the distance between a postwork six-pack of Bud Light and the crooked, mile-long drive home, as all local drunks inevitably do.

He had worked at the pub through high school, then returned when, one semester short of graduating from college, he dropped out. He was two years older than me and possessed the kind of natural good looks that made me nervous. I was surprised when he wanted to be friends and opened up his life to me on a boozy and Parliament-fueled night in his apartment, but I was not surprised that someone as good-looking as he was chose not to kiss me when the evening ended.

We carried on a knotted-up friendship for two years. We shared a bed many times but never touched. He pulled me into his world only to discard me any night a pretty young thing showed up for the taking, knowing, I think, that I had fallen in love with him and that I was only waiting for him to realize I had been there all along.

For those years, we practically lived together. Our friendship was of the riotous, fight-it-out variety, so much so that people often said we were in love. If he was in love with me, he didn’t exactly show it, spiriting off one night to sleep with my best friend behind my back, and asking my roommate to be his date to a wedding we both attended.

But I was consumed by him. I had forgotten how to breathe on my own. We circled each other constantly, picking up the messes, piecing our friendship and whatever else remained back together. He knew I loved him. I slept with his cousin to get his attention, and afterward he looked at me in the sly way of men who know they have you under their thumb, who know you can do nothing to resist.

“Good for you,” he said.

That could have been our mantra: “Good for you.”

Years later, he would confess to having loved me all along. But while I stood waiting for him to happen to me, he was always looking for the next best thing. I apparently made too good of a friend for him to justify anything more significant, which my young brain could interpret only as a criticism.

To me it felt like a matter of time. He would come around. I pushed hard against the girls he brought home. I slept on his couch and in the morning shouldered angrily past blond college students who did not understand my rage.

Who was I, anyway? A friend? A roommate? A drunken neighbor with nowhere to sleep? Did even I know who I was?

One night, he and I finally crossed that boundary he had so carefully maintained between us. It was in January, a few years after we met, and I had moved to Boston to go to graduate school. I remember a cold night and the unexpectedness of our coming together and the quiet of the house and the light from a neighboring streetlamp filtering into the bedroom. I remember how fast my heart was beating and how I could not seem to catch my breath.

There he was, in my bed like old times, but it wasn’t platonic anymore, and suddenly there were a million questions we needed to ask. It was perfect and crazy and it changed us, and I thought that the roller coaster had finally ended, that we could settle down together at last. He confessed that he had loved me the whole time but had been afraid of the intimacy shared between people who know each other so well.

When the first light crept in, demanding our attention of this most recent entanglement, he kissed me, and left. Later, he called to say that he loved me, and that it was a mistake.

We talked for what felt like forever, circling the same question: what are we?

He wanted nothing, and I wanted the world. I lay in bed with my phone cradled to my ear, taking the news as one might receive a diagnosis of cancer. I stayed there all weekend, unable to move, paralyzed by the knowledge that now it was over. Even our friendship was too damaged to repair. This is what happens, I learned, when “Happily Ever After” does not happen.

I moved to New York City that spring. He met another girl he loved, one that probably knew him a little less well. They married two years ago, but I wasn’t invited. When I saw him after the fact, he told me not to take it personally, but we both knew that with another twist of fate, it could have been us up there at the altar.

I couldn’t help but take it personally; it’s always personal.

From time to time I would see him at parties and be reminded of what was missing, the hole he left behind. Even less frequently, he would call on a cold winter evening with a set of stock apologies, possibly ignited by a fight he was having with someone else. He knew he had hurt me and he knew how deeply.

“One of the worst things I ever did in my life was make that phone call,” he told me once, even after he had married, but there was no time to excavate such deep and abiding wounds.

When he and his wife had a baby last year, I knew he was gone forever, in the way that you feel the trajectory of life changing even when you want it most to stay the same.

THEN a month ago, my phone rang. It was him, a voice still familiar and all too lost in the shape of my daily life.

Why call now? I wondered, though I already knew.

His wife was leaving him, he said. He needed to talk.

I found myself back home for a weekend, walking a hurricane-ravaged beach with no shoes next to this man I had loved so much, listening to him talk about the dissolution of a marriage.

He wanted advice and would listen to anything, and it would have been easy to send him toward the certain precipice of divorce, given our history. But instead I stayed silent and watched the uneven motion of the waves, gray matter shaken from the storm.

We followed the crescent of sand for miles before he took my hand. Soon we were back at my mother’s house, in the guest suite downstairs, in love again, though only for a moment. I had to close my eyes to kiss him because otherwise I could not convince myself, after all those years, that this was really happening.

I couldn’t fall asleep in his arms, for what would take place when morning came and the sun broke through the blinds? What would happen, I’m sure we were both asking ourselves, when the days continued on — him here, or me there — with a wife and baby still in the wings? What good could come from any of this now, really, the gestures futile, the pain so deeply embedded that I am prone to always making the same mistakes?

“I’m messed up,” he said, hoping, I think, that I would come back and save him the way I always had before, put him first, choose him over me, allow his immediacy to overshadow my own.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, you are.”

I put on a sweater. I went outside with him for a parting cigarette and kissed him goodbye in the forgiving October air. We had met in October, too, and at once it seemed like a very long time ago and only a whisper, like all time, really.

At 32, I finally did what I could not all those years ago: I let him go.

My self-summary
I am a writer and poet, one, bear with me here, of the “major” writers of the late 20th century, though just typing that felt desperate. I received a B.A. in English at Humboldt State University, then went on to attend the esteemed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, thus launching my career. I also like to drink.

What I’m doing with my life
Working on some short stories but honestly not that into it, which may be why I’m entertaining the prospect of dating again.

I’m really good at
I hate to kick a dead horse here, but I’m really good at writing. I also make a pretty neat beef stew, since I tend to take 6 hour naps. It just gets done. My first collection of short stories Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? was shortlisted for the National Book Award and sort of revitalized the short fiction form. John Updike selected on of my stories for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Century; Robert Altman made a sprawling film out of my stories; writing professors all across the country solemnly mention me as a kind of blue-collar American Camus; so, I’m not saying I’m really good at writing, just noting some examples of how others seem to feel this way.

The first thing people usually notice about me
I look the way a depressed person looks, if one were not trying to look that way.

Favorite books, movies, shows, music, and food
The Trial; The Sun Also Rises; For Whom The Bell Tolls; The Stranger; Dear Mr. Capote; Kramer vs. Kramer; Terms of Endearment; Taxi Driver; Annie Hall; Love Connection; Empty Nest; Mr. Belvedere; My Two Dads; Miles Davis; Charles Mingus; Bill Evans; Pasta all kinds.

The six things I could never do without
Hendrick’s gin; tonic; lime; ice cubes; a tumbler; my typewriter.

I spend a lot of time thinking about
The triangular yet cyclical relationship between the author, the character of a story, and the reader; how empathy may just be narcissism projected onto others; how nostalgia is desperate memory; the hair-thin line between cliché and truth; showing vs. telling; my kidneys, liver, and spleen; realism, location, and class; linguistic economy; how to say something by not saying it; codependence, alcoholism, and intimacy; rent; whether or not something is a run on sentence and does it matter.

On a typical Friday night I am
I enjoy turning off all the lights in the house a few hours after dusk, walking over to the window, a drink in hand, and just looking out at the vessels of leafless branches bruised into purple gloom, as if beaten by day. I see a man walking his dog, the diagonal leash sloped downward towards its neck like some slanted guillotine; I see this and think what is wrong with me? As you can tell, I need to be dating again. The bottom of my glass portrays multiple ever receding foci, all working in collusion together as the room fucking spins. The once frozen lobster ravioli is now paste in my boiling pot, as I’ve forgotten about dinner.

The most private thing I am willing to admit
I’ve been cruel to others for material.

I’m looking for
Just something, or rather someone, to get me away from this writing desk. A jovial date; a flash of tits; some female chatter. We could ride a roller coaster, have way too many corn dogs, and I would hope to die of a heart attack. Anything.

You should message me if
You should message me if you’d like to take a chance on a morbidly depressed yet emotionally available writer near the end of his noteworthy, and in some circles, brilliant career who just wants to tap into this supposed carnal hedonism of art and literature, which I will admit is a heavy handed euphemism for copulation, which despite all subtleties herein I must now betray and just say will you please be quick, please?

Q: I’ve been online dating for about three years after my divorce. My story is typical: I’ve met a lot of fine women, but nothing has stuck. After a few dates, or a few months at most, I can’t seem to transition into a longer-term relationship given that there are thousands of other singles still waiting in the pool that might be a better match. Currently I’m at the three-month mark with a new woman, whom I really like. My question is: When do I turn my profile off? Going a step further, when do I quit this online dating thing for good and just stick to meeting people in the real world? It’s how I found my first wife, and I didn’t have this dilemma when falling in love with her.

A: Pardon the transactional nature of the analogy I’m about to offer, but bear with me because I believe it’s both true and helpful. This is a simple matter of supply and demand. Back when you were first dating your wife, you did not perceive an endless supply of single women waiting in the wings. In fact, there was probably no one waiting in the wings, though you knew that if you tried hard enough, you might be able to rabble up a few. And of those few, perhaps one of them would be as fetching as your future wife, and then who knows what kinds of neuroses and habits she’d have that were worse than your future wife’? So, long story short, you stuck with your future wife not only because she was smart and sexy and funny but because she seemed rare. Even if you eventually divorced, the fact is that for quite a long time she seemed to you the kind of woman who comes around once in a lifetime. And that’s a big part of the reason you fell in love and let yourself stay in love.

The world is different now. Beyond our physical comings and goings lies a virtual field populated by increasing numbers of accomplished, well-traveled, cultured, strong, spiritual people. On a daily basis, online dating and other social networks reveal the beauty and complexity of human beings, to the extent that no one seems all that rare or precious anymore. Or, conversely, almost everyone does. Here is your choice: You can cling to your faith in the gleaming specialness of everyone and continue to shop, believing that one day the miracle of technology will deliver to you a nearly perfect woman. Or you can dive into the uniqueness of one woman like you did with your wife. Basically, you can go wide or you can go deep. You’ve been going wide for several years now, so my advice is to turn off your profile, quit online dating for six months, and explore this new woman with abandon. Pretend there aren’t a million like her. Because even though there are a million like her, the longer you know her the more you’ll forget that. And that’s what falling in love is: forgetting that your beloved is one of billions. Believing and investing in his or her uniqueness the way you do your own.

By EVE FAIRBANKS
NY Times: September 6, 2012

THIS summer, during a conference in Berlin, a fellow attendee told me about the kind of summer love that arises in his profession.

He was a military officer who had been posted in Europe, and not infrequently a soldier would come back from a furlough in Croatia confessing he had fallen in love with a stripper. Not in lust, in love, the soldier would insist, and he wanted to marry her.

A fellow officer had developed a question to test the depth of a young man’s passion, though the officers still rolled their eyes at the idea that enduring love could be born in a pole-dancing joint in Dubrovnik.

“Do you know her parents’ names?” he would ask his love-struck charge. “If not, you can’t marry her.”

I laughed. Not because the soldier’s feelings were ridiculous, but because they were so recognizable.

I’ve always fallen in love on vacation. Who hasn’t? There’s a distinctive intensity to vacation romances. The object of our affection rises from the crowd like fireworks, simultaneously illuminating the unfamiliar landscape of our travels and obliterating its interest.

Why do we fall so hard on vacation? I have my theories.

The first is that the vacation, as a setting, imbues a crush with a heightened sense of meaning. Although conventional wisdom says we have flings on vacation because they won’t have to mean anything, this couldn’t be more wrong. We have flings on vacation because they seem to mean everything.

You know the feeling, when away, that the new and magical environment you are in is trying to send you a message about how to live? A week in Paris reiterates the power of great food; a month in Joshua Tree National Park admonishes you to wedge time out of your work flow for the contemplative and the holy.

We’re primed, on vacation, to recognize such messages in what we see, hear and eat, and in the people we meet. These strangers often seem to carry important information about what is valuable in life, and this makes them incredibly alluring.

I remember my first summer love as such a prophet. He was a dancer at an arts camp I was sent to. I was 12, the shortest girl in my class, with pimply skin and Coke-bottle glasses, profoundly uncomfortable in my body.

The camp was in northern Michigan, and many days it rained. That made me desperately anxious because it imperiled the fragile hairdo I’d devised to tame my natural curls: bangs blow-dried around a huge roller and sprayed so they sat in a stiff, perfect, artificial hoop on my forehead as long as I didn’t move fast or encounter moisture.

I first saw him from the bleachers of a performance hall, practicing his part of a duet alone on an empty stage. He was tall and lithe, with a shock of Baryshnikov hair and dark circles under his eyes that made him look deep. Moving fluidly with and around the partner who wasn’t there, his body looked so at ease, so natural, so like a single unit, not like the pastiche of “good” and “bad” features that I inhabited.

He was living on a higher plane, one in which the body wasn’t the obstacle to pleasure but the vehicle to obtaining it, a plane to which I newly aspired. In the context of the middle-school boys I knew back home, in their flannel shirts and cargo shorts, the image of his body in a leotard was a revelation.

When we’re away, we allow ourselves to be drawn to people who are thrillingly different from us, even inappropriate. A half-dozen summers after the dancer, I fell for a German Lutheran pastor in Brussels. I’m Jewish, but even more significantly, I was 13 years younger than him, not even 20. We were both in Brussels temporarily; I had an undemanding internship at the United States Embassy, and he had an equally forgiving stint at a theological institute.

We took afternoons off to roam the city’s jewel-colored Art Nouveau bars, he puffing on Gauloises, me sipping the beer I still wasn’t allowed to drink at home. I thought he had a poetic soul. Indeed, he loved poetry, sending me reams of Hölderlin over e-mail during the days we were apart. At night, we lay in bed and prepped him for his sermons by reading the Psalms aloud.

The idea prospers that vacation flings are an escape from our real selves. But maybe what’s really happening is that they draw out selves that are real but suppressed. When we’re young, we stifle many possible selves to channel our energy into one, but the others can probably never be fully smothered. They merely wait for a trigger to revive. That can be a new place, a new person or, most powerfully, both.

I had decided before I left for Brussels to be a diplomat instead of a writer, but the freedom and the bars and the romantic northern European weather — cool, with a mottled layer of clouds rolling fast and low over the ground so that one second it was overcast and the next bright — were bringing out the poet in me. As was my pastor, who encouraged me to respond to his Hölderlin with my own words.

At summer’s end, he asked if he could come back with me to the United States. I didn’t want the affair to be over, but the thought also horrified me: this man out of Molière roaming my college campus, his Bible in one hand and his Gauloises in the other! I worried most about what my friends would make of his profuse smoking, although this was also one of my favorite things about him. It was a vice that went charmingly with all that conspicuous virtue.

The ultimate truism in our understanding of vacation romance is that it’s exciting because we don’t see our new lover’s flaws. Again, I think the opposite is the truth: on vacation we stop judging and allow ourselves to relish another person’s quirky imperfections.

When I consider what most attracted me to the pastor and the dancer, I think of what slightly marred their beauty: the pastor’s cigarettes and indecision, the dark circles under the dancer’s eyes that suggested he, too, was vulnerable to exhaustion.

Once, vacationing in Stinson Beach, Calif., north of San Francisco, I developed a crush on a waiter at the oyster restaurant where I ate most meals. The weather was bad and there were few people in town, so it was often just the two of us in the dining room.

He was incredibly elegant, with crisp black shirts and fashionable horn-rimmed glasses; his manner was perfect, warm and dignified; and he was an intellectual, confessing a love of Shakespeare.

He also had crooked teeth. I wondered why such a refined man was waiting tables and hadn’t fixed his teeth. The picture didn’t quite square, and its crookedness only intrigued and delighted me more.

THE makers of Persian rugs know that an imperfection makes a beautiful carpet more winsome. We are drawn to the cracks in a wall, the cake with a slight droop, because these are what make something — or someone — individual. We indulge our natural attraction to imperfection more freely on vacation.

Remember how your favorite part of touring Kenya was the bus that was so packed you had to share your seat with chickens, or, in Sicily, the angry baker who denied he had cannoli even though you could see them in the display case?

My favorite part of a Moscow trip was using an old Soviet-designed oven in my apartment; the temperature could not be adjusted because the plastic dials had long ago melted off. We tried to bake a pie anyway with apples we had collected from a village, and it was impossible, but I knew then it would make a great memory, and it did.

At home, though, in our ordinary lives, imperfections are liabilities. We repaint, we replace. We tolerate flaws in our partners but rarely cherish them. Partly this is the inevitable shift to a longer-term calculus. Those crooked teeth: will my children have them?

But I also think our aversion to imperfection is amplified by today’s Match.com dating philosophy, in which compatibility is king, smokers are excludable by checking a box, no weird tics and take care of your body, please.

On vacation, we fall in love less by logic than by instinct. The question then becomes: Should we be trying to love in regular life more like we love when we travel? Should we be dating strippers and oyster-bar waiters? Probably more often than we do, but not all the time.

The final thing that distinguishes vacation love, what makes it so great, is what transfigured my experience with the Moscow oven: the knowledge that it’s already halfway to becoming a memory.