When you’re looking to meet your match, it can’t hurt to pursue a bunch of angles, from online dating to blind setups. But would you sniff strangers’ shirts to find the right partner for you?
“Pheromone parties,” in which strangers submit T-shirts they’ve slept in for three nights in Ziploc bags, are already happening in New York and Los Angeles. Dating hopefuls take a whiff of each bag (a pink or blue index card with a number that corresponds to its owner rests inside) in the hopes of smelling their ideal match.
Judith Prays, a web developer, said she came up with the idea for pheromone parties after she failed to find a match online. Prays said she’d date men for a month or so before things soured until she started seeing a man who wasn’t what she was looking for and wound up in a two-year relationship.
What she remembered was his smell.
“Even when he smelled objectively bad, I thought he smelled really good,” the 25-year-old said. “And so I thought, OK, maybe I should be dating based on smell?”
The first party she threw, in New York, led to a half-dozen hookups and one relationship.
Pairing up based on smell isn’t that crazy an idea: Scientific studies have found that women prefer the smells of men who are least like them genetically (to ensure strong offspring, biologists think), and men tend to find a woman’s body odor most pleasant when she’s ovulating.
However, Prays says she knows that, when it comes down to it, the parties are just fun: “The most successful thing about it is, it opens up conversation,” she says.
Nothing wrong with that!
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