"NICE car," I said as I entered the taxi. The ride was perfect - rims, air conditioning, that nice leathery, clean car smell. I was more taken aback than anything else. Earlier that morning I had been assaulted by fumes from the taxi I hailed from Half-Way-Tree to work, so this was a welcome reprieve. I started to imagine the journey from work to home - started to imagine riding in this car to Negril, to the beach .

"So what about the driver?" he asked, and I looked at him for the first time and almost choked on the laugh. "That was going to be my next sentence, the driver not too bad looking actually," I lied.
Truth be told, horrendous wasn't word enough to describe God's creature sitting in the plush comfort of this car. But I could overlook that.

The money theory.

It is often felt that no matter how horrible the man looks, as long as he drives a 'big' car and can afford a luxurious lifestyle he can get any woman - even one with very striking features. On the flip side, if the man looks like a Fabio and rides a bicycle or drives a Lada, he will have great difficulty getting a beautiful woman.

There are two theories floating around, debating whether women are actually in it for the money. One theory is that ugly men have developed two kinds of strategies to date beautiful women - scouting for beauty, which involves looking for undiscovered, up-and-coming beautiful women who may not yet know their worth; and impressing the beauty, which involves impressing a beautiful woman who has no boyfriend. In this case all she wants is an honest, trustworthy, fun man who can bring stability into her life.
Clinical psychologist, Dr Tammy Haynes-Robinson from the Medical Associates Hospital, tried to explain the conundrum.
She says from her personal observation, women in Jamaica tend to look better than the men they date.

This, she says may be due to a variety of reasons including:
1. Her motivation and what she wants. One of the motivations could be money, assets - whatever the man has to offer her.

2. The interest lies more with the qualities he possesses than the way that he looks.

3. She feels less threatened. If he is good looking other women will be after him.

4. The man will worship her and put her on a platform.
"Some women like to be treated like a princess and this is what a lot of these men would do," she added.

Or, as Dr Satoshi Kanazawa says, this dating practise may just be one of the pitfalls of evolution, meaning that there are more attractive women to handsome men in the world, forcing many to settle for less attractive men.

The evolution theory

According to a 2005 study by the London School of Economics, led by Dr Kanazawa and published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, attractive women are in higher supply than handsome men because beautiful parents are more likely to have daughters than sons.

And as time passes, the gap widens.
The researchers showed that beautiful people are 36 per cent more likely to have a daughter than a son as their first-born child. Contrary, less attractive people have more sons - more less attractive sons that is.

Dr Kanazawa based his conclusions on data from 3,000 Americans taking part in an investigation called the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. When Dr Kanazawa looked at the sex of the volunteers' first-born children, he found attractive parents were far more likely to have had girls.

"Because physical attractiveness is heritable, and because physically attractive parents have more daughters and less attractive parents have more sons, over time, the average level of physical attractiveness among women increases relative to men, so that women are, on average, more attractive than men," he said. This suggests that this dating trend may be simply a result of an oversupply of unattractive men, forcing women to regard other things than looks, when choosing a partner.

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