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With the caveat that there's an important distinction between "caring a great deal about SMV" and merely thinking sexual attraction is important.
This post is a great example, from a guy who appears to love his wife and also find her hot (sorry @zeke5123a!).
Everyone enters dating with various desiderata, and generally those work like Boolean filters at the acquaintance-to-dating stage: the ass man doesn't date any flat-butt girls, the lady who prefers brunets declines the blonds. That way, by the time you start bonding with somebody, you've presumably clarified that you do find them hot and you can focus on also enjoying their personality and connecting with them as unique (and hot!) individuals.
By contrast, "caring a great deal about sexual market value" implies approaching dating with the basic premises of market thinking: interchangeable, quantifiable and commodified products with purely instrumental value, plus a focus on pursuing rational self-interest through utilitarian consumer choice among equivalent market competitors.
Thing is, that's a very natural way to think about objects, but it is not a natural or common way for humans to think about social affiliation. Relationships aren't normally a competitive optimization game: everybody should be willing to ditch their vegetable-oil brand for a competitor offering 10% more for the same price, but most men and women would be baffled by the suggestion that they should gladly trade their best friend/ mom/ dog/ nation/ sports-team loyalty if they found an equivalent with 10% better stats. Normally, there's even a mild disgust reaction to contaminating an affective relationship with quantified consumer utility in this way.
Ontologically, a thing whose purpose is to be ranked, quantified and consumed is not a thing to be loved faithfully with all your heart, and vice-versa. Thus, although people may have a vague sense that partners should "match" in their attractiveness level, the only way I can see to care a great deal about SMV, to the extent of habitually comparing/strategizing SMV and considering marriage with SMV in mind, is if you have zero experience of women as lovable human beings beyond the strictly competitive-consumerist framing, which doesn't even seem to reflect genuine sexual desire as much as a kind of status panic.
That's vastly different from just thinking you'd like to fall in love someday with a girl who also has big tits.
Well, I'm not sure you are understanding the phrase "caring a great deal about SMV" the same way I meant it.
Let me ask you this:
Do you agree that in the absence of factors such as money or social status, people who enter long term relationships have a strong tendency to end up with their looks match, i.e. someone who is roughly at their level of physical attractiveness? For example, it's very unusual for a very attractive man to marry an average-looking woman?
I said somewhere upthread that people do have vague ideas about looks parity, but on reflection, no, it definitely hasn't been my experience that this is sufficiently granular to make it weird or unusual when a very attractive person marries someone who looks average. If you're holding constant the social scene (like undergrads in related majors at a specific college, or young professionals in related industries in a single urban area), I'd actually expect zero surprise at literally any coupling across any range of appearance percentile scores. The idea that people would match up by appearance like Ken and Barbie dolls feels like a very middle-school view of the world.
I do think that a huge proportion of perceived physical appearance is downstream of social class (nutrition, stress levels, body and facial ideals, medical procedures, health/wellness/exercise access, clothing/hair/grooming norms, social self-presentation), and people do have a strong tendency to date within their same social class and local subcommunity, so that might be a confounding factor.
That's not my experience at all. In fact, when a very attractive person ends up with someone who is mediocre, I (and most people I know) notice it and start speculating that there must be some hidden factor, such as wealth or social status. Moreover, I am pretty sure that there is a lot of scientific researching confirming that most people place a great deal of emphasis on physical attractiveness in choosing mates.
I don't know you, but I strongly suspect this is one of those situations where a person claims personal experiences which are wildly at odds with reality for purposes of bolstering their position in a debate. For example, if I were to post on Reddit that in my experience women don't like to work on cars, it's pretty much guaranteed that someone will come along claiming to be a woman who loves working on cars and all her female friends love working on cars.
But anyway, if you won't accept that most people are more or less obsessed with SMV (which basically means looks) in choosing mates, then so be it. There's really no way to have any productive discussion. Cheers.
If I were trying to lie to support a position, surely I wouldn't have independently pointed out my own comment about appearance parity earlier in this thread, would I? I closed my eyes and did a thought experiment running through circles of single and dating people I know now or have known in the past, trying to figure out if, as you say, it would feel weird or remarkable for the best-looking ones not to hook up with the other best looking ones, absent other factors. Then I did the same for married couples I know, trying to de-age them and figure out if they would similarly have have been notably close looks-matches in their presumed social circles during dating.
And what I found was exactly what I said: once people are pairing up within a common class and cultural scene, my experiences just don't validate a SMV-style careful, granular dating hierarchy from the hottest to the least hot.
I was surprised, too, because, as I said, I also have a vague sense of homophily or type similarity in couplings, which should contradict this. However, I was also finding that a huge amount of the similarity seemed to be imposed at the level of the social scene itself, so there simply isn't as wide a diversity in appearance among people who already share the common class background, common geographic locale, common set of career or academic interests, etc., that would cause them to meet in the first place. For instance, most people of a certain social class in entertainment, media, finance or law who live in Hollywood, CA, are highly likely to share similar exercise routines and body/grooming expectations, plastic surgery backgrounds, shop for clothing at similar stores, etc., and thus look pretty similar to each other. Most extroverted young-professional types in the partying scene of a Northeastern metro, ditto. Most back-office coders in NYC or engineering majors at a Midwestern state university, ditto. You don't really see DC lobbyist/nonprofit folks who look like they could be shopping at a Dollar General in rural Missouri. So when I think about married professionals I know, there is a vague similarity in range of looks (although nothing like so granular as "all 8s with 8s" or even "hot person with mid person would be shocking"), but also I can't find any instances of other similar local professionals who diverge from that range of looks by being dramatically hotter or less hot than their peers.
Thus, as I said, I'd question whether some of any more dramatic looks-matching you're imagining may be flowing from the tendency for people to socialize with others of the same class, community and professional backgrounds. Once that's in place, it's just a somewhat tighter band, within which people seem to couple fairly freely. I'm unsure how we'd adjudicate that: anecdata? Group photos? The social science in this area is going to be shitty online surveys, which would not be helpful. Do you have many examples of real-life shocked discourse about real-life mid/hot couplings, by people who actually know the couples in question (not just teen boys on 4chan and bots on Twitter)?
You don't have to engage with it, but I'd just point out that OP was on why some people might find SMV frameworks uninteresting or false to the realities of human family formation. So this statement of yours is a bit like saying it's impossible to productively discuss atheism with anyone who hasn't first accepted Jesus Christ.
I disagree with your analogy. A better analogy would be to say it's impossible to discuss atheism with someone who insists that they personally met Jesus Christ and witnessed miracles being performed.
Well, it appears that the SMV side is the one making a strong positive claim for the social universality of a complex, negative-entropy and psychologically implausible coordination phenomenon, so I'd think the burden of extraordinary evidence for an extraordinary claim should fall on their side.
Again, if you have lots of examples of IRL people expressing shock when an IRL acquaintances marries someone otherwise fully compatible who's a bit more or less attractive than them, that would be a start. But so far your evidence is seemingly "I am personally upset when a hot man marries a mid woman, regardless of what else they have in common."
I have no idea what you mean by "negative-entropy," but certainly no coordination is necessary such a thing as objective attractiveness to exist.
This is a wild misstatement of my position. For any lurkers who are reading this, here's what I actually said:
Since I think you are misrepresenting your personal experiences, I'm not surprised that you would misrepresent me like that. In any event, I do not engage with people who strawman me. This exchange is concluded. Feel free to have the last word -- I will not read or respond.
Accusing people of misrepresenting their own personal experiences while complaining that you think you are being misrepresented, followed by a huffy dismissal, is too antagonistic, and it seems you are only engaging to "win" an argument and score points.
More charity and courtesy, please.
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