Proverbs 31:30 (NIV)
30 Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a
woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.
The fear of God is the beauty of the soul reigning in the
heart.
They say that beauty is only skin deep, but many studies
have shown that we have an inherent bias to view attractive people as better,
smarter, and more socially competent. This strong attractiveness bias impacts
everything from hiring decisions, to how highly students rate professors, to
how well students are treated by their teachers.
This bias is especially strong in our 21st century dating
scene. As an example, the comedy writer Ali Reed created a fake profile on the
dating site OK Cupid for a woman she called "AaronCarterFan." (Aaron
Carter, for the uninitiated, is the younger brother of a Backstreet Boy.) Then
she loaded her profile with despicable traits, including "enjoys kicking cups
out of homeless people's hands," and "my parents think I'm in law
school so they pay all my bills—LOL," and "you should message me if
ur rich." But for the online photo Reed used the real photo of a friend
who's a professional model.
What happened to the beautiful but decadent fake
"AaronCarterFan"? Reed said, "[She] did very well. In the first
24 hours she got 150 messages. I had the profile up for two or three weeks, and
she had close to 1000 men message her. She got probably 10 times the number of
messages that my real profile got."
[Adapted from Freaknomics blog, "What You Don't Know
About Online Dating: Full Transcript" (2-5-14)]
Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting. Hebrews 3:13
says, “You must warn each other every day, while it is still “today,” so that
none of you will be deceived by sin and hardened against God.”
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