Must-Read: What FaceMate Means

What does it mean?

As the old saying goes, “opposites attract.” (Remember when Paula Abdul would spend her days dancing around, singing about this, with MC ScatCat in the background, doing whatever it is that cartoon cats do? Does anyone remember that Paula Abdul was actually once a singer and not just a cracked-out judge?) But is that really true? No doubt if you’ve been in the dating world for long enough, you know that this isn’t really the case. Just try to get through a dinner or night of drinking with someone who has nothing in common with you. It is the worst. Well, a new dating website is trying to profit off the whole concept that opposites, actually, don’t attract. But instead, similar folks do.

AskMen.com has the lowdown on the new dating site called FaceMate, which scans a person’s photos in order to try to find someone of similar look to them. Check out their write-up. It’s compelling:

As wacky as this idea sounds, there?s actually research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to support that we are attracted to people who look like us. In 2010, psychologist R. Chris Fraley had subjects evaluate a stranger?s attractiveness in random photos. When the photos were digitally morphed to partially mesh the subject?s face with the stranger?s face, the subjects noted higher levels of attraction.

The whole thing makes some kind of sense in an anthropological sense — you try to save the people that look most like you because those are signifiers that they could actually be related to you, and so much of our instincts are based on trying to preserve our own lineage in some capacity. But the whole thing still is kind of freaky.

So, then. What do you guys think? Is this FaceMate thing something worth checking out? Or should it be condemned because, my goodness, is it ever so creepy? Let us know in the comments.