Kissing Ugly Men Makes You Ugly
On gravitational pull, microbiomes, and why the man you choose becomes the woman you become. Scientifically.
By Amanda Leon · April 2026
It is just past 9:30pm, somewhere in Texas, and a man is placing a piece of medical tape over my mouth.
This is not, I should clarify, what it sounds like. The tape is approximately one inch long and rests across the seam of my closed lips. He is doing the same to himself. We just finished a low-light bedtime routine before asleep, and we have decided — or more precisely, he has decided and I have agreed — that we will both spend the night breathing exclusively through our noses, in accordance with the recommendations of journalist James Nestor, whose excellent book Breath made the case that mouth breathing is responsible for approximately half of the modern world's chronic ailments.¹
Reader, I am still mouth-taping. Four years later. The book is genuinely good. The practice in an insurance policy in making sure that I am slowly improving my sleep, my jaw alignment, and my morning energy. I do not regret learning it.
But on this particular night, lying in the dark with tape on my lips, watching the sculpted silhouette of a man whose squat form I now use in the gym, whose protein powder I now keep in the pantry, whose pre-workout supplements I now take, whose bedtime ritual I have now adopted as my own — it occurred to me, with some clarity, that I had not chosen mouth-taping in any meaningful sense. I had absorbed it. The way water absorbs the shape of whatever container holds it.
I had become, in increments so small I could not feel them happening, a woman who lived inside the daily architecture of a man named Chad.
Chad was, to be clear, a good man. The relationship is not the point. The point is biological, and the point is universal, and the point is something nobody teaches women before they begin selecting the people whose lives they will eventually wear.
"You do not choose the man. You choose the woman you will become while standing next to him."
I. Men Are Jupiter
Here is the metaphor I created that has been organizing my thinking for some time.
In our solar system, Jupiter is so massive that it bends the orbits of every planet around it. Comets headed for Earth are pulled instead into Jupiter's atmosphere, where they vaporize. Asteroids that would have rearranged the architecture of life on this planet are quietly absorbed by a gas giant that is, in essence, our gravitational bouncer.² Jupiter does not ask permission. Jupiter does not announce itself. Jupiter simply exists at a scale that bends everything around it.
Men, in the gravitational economy of romantic relationships, are Jupiter.
Not because they are more powerful. Not because they are smarter. But because the cultural, biological, and behavioral conditioning that surrounds male-female pairing has constructed a one-way gravitational system in which the woman bends, the woman absorbs, the woman adapts — and the man, by and large, continues to orbit himself.
This is not a complaint. This is biology compounded by culture, and the culture is the more dangerous of the two.
Women are, on virtually every measurable axis, more permeable than men. Our microbiomes shift faster.³ Our nervous systems entrain to others more readily.⁴ Our hormonal cycles are more responsive to environmental input.⁵ Our brains, by some measures, are more susceptible to behavioral mirroring than men's are.⁶ This is not weakness. This is a different operating system — one designed, evolutionarily, for community, attunement, and care. It also means that the man you let close to you is not just sharing your bed. He is colonizing your body, your habits, your bacterial composition, your sleep architecture, and over time, your sense of who you are.
Hypergamy — the cross-cultural, cross-historical pattern of women seeking partners of equal or greater social, economic, or genetic status — is not, as the manosphere likes to claim, evidence of female shallowness. It is the evolutionary intelligence of a creature who knows, on some pre-conscious level, that she will become the man she chooses.⁷
So she has chosen carefully. For approximately 200,000 years.
And then, in the last 60 or so, we trained her to stop.
II. The Birthday Party
Last month I attended a friend's birthday party in Bali.
In attendance was a woman I will call Camila — an absolutely stunning Brazilian, hourglass-shaped, brilliant smile, the kind of person who walks into a room and heads simply turn. She had been in a situationship with the same man for three years. They had been officially dating for three months. He still had not put a ring on it.
The man in question was, to put it as charitably as I am able: a short blonde troll. Hairy. Underwhelming. Looked like an extra from the cantina scene in Star Wars who had wandered onto the wrong set.
I usually try to keep my comments to myself. I did not, on this occasion, succeed.
"Camila," I said, with the kind of warmth that precedes the unsayable. "If I were him, and I looked in the mirror every morning, and I had by some miracle of God convinced a beauty like you to be with me — I would have locked that down with a ring three years ago."
She laughed. The kind of laugh that means the speaker just said the thing the listener has been thinking and could not give herself permission to say.
And it reminded me of the strange particular shape of contemporary dating — where I open Bumble and find a gallery of men whose dating profiles look like the aftermath of a Frankenstein experiment requesting, with a straight face, "intimacy without commitment." Permit me, briefly, a public service announcement: if Bumble is going to allow that as a profile option, then in the interest of fairness it should also offer the equally ludicrous option of "commitment without intimacy." Because looking at certain dating profiles — the gentleman with the dead fish, the gentleman with the visible drug habit, the gentleman whose lifestyle photo is a Las Vegas hotel bathroom mirror — what I want to write back is: Sir. Looking at you, the only profile option that makes any sense is 'Seeking Goddess to Worship.' Respectfully. From a distance.
I will be cancelled for some of this. I am not concerned. The trolls who would come for it would have to encounter, first, my badass former US Marshal SWAT papa, who has trained extensively for this exact eventuality.
But here is the actual point, beneath the wit:
Camila was about to become him. Not because she wanted to. Because the science says she would.
"You do not date a man. You try on the future version of yourself who will live inside his daily architecture."
III. The Microbiome Doesn't Lie
Here is what science actually tells us about what happens to a woman who lets a man close to her body.
First, the microbiome. The human body is, by cellular count, more bacteria than human — your microbiome contains approximately 38 trillion microorganisms that influence everything from immune function to mood to cognitive performance.⁸ Couples who live together develop measurably convergent microbiomes within months of cohabitation. Their gut bacteria, their skin bacteria, their oral bacteria — all of it begins to look more like the partner's than the partner's looks like the rest of the population.⁹ A 2014 study published in the journal Microbiome found that a single ten-second French kiss transfers approximately 80 million bacteria from one mouth to the other.¹⁰ Eighty million. From one kiss.
This is not poetic. This is colonization.
Second, seminal plasma. Decades of research have documented that semen contains a pharmacopeia of bioactive compounds — including testosterone, estrogen, prolactin, oxytocin, melatonin, serotonin, and a class of mood-regulating prostaglandins — which are absorbed through the vaginal walls and have measurable systemic effects on women's mood, hormonal balance, and bonding behavior. Gallup, Burch, and Platek's 2002 study at SUNY Albany found that women whose partners did not use condoms scored significantly lower on standardized depression measures than women whose partners did.¹¹ I am not, to be very clear, recommending unprotected sex. I am pointing out that even the most cautious sexual contact transfers chemical signals that alter your neurochemistry — and that you are, in the most literal biological sense, drinking him.
And before you reach for the reassurance of a condom: the mucosal membranes of the genitalia and the skin of the inner thighs have dramatically higher permeability than regular skin — which is precisely why transdermal medications are preferentially delivered to these sites. Lipid-soluble compounds, including several of the hormonal compounds in seminal plasma, absorb through skin contact alone, condom or not. Your grandmother's warning to be careful who touches you was not superstition. It was applied pharmacokinetics.¹¹ᵃ
Third, behavioral mirroring. Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler's three-decade longitudinal research, drawing on data from the Framingham Heart Study, demonstrated that we measurably absorb the behaviors, emotions, body weight, and even political views of the people closest to us — with romantic partners producing the strongest convergence effect of any social tie.¹² You become him. Not metaphorically. Statistically.
Fourth — and here is where it gets interesting — facial appearance. Robert Zajonc's 1987 University of Michigan study found that long-term married couples grew measurably more similar in facial features over twenty-five years of cohabitation, attributed to shared expressions creating shared wrinkle patterns and emotional convergence.¹³ The study has been challenged by more recent work using modern facial recognition technology, which suggests that couples select similar partners rather than growing alike — but Zajonc's underlying mechanism, that we mimic the faces we are exposed to most, is well-established in mirror neuron research.¹⁴
Translation: even if you do not literally start to look like him, your face begins to make his expressions. Which, if his expressions are the expressions of a short blonde troll, presents a problem.
None of this requires penetration. None of this requires intercourse. The microbiome transfer happens in the kiss. The hormonal signaling happens in the proximity. The behavioral mirroring happens before either of you have removed a single article of clothing. You are absorbing him from the moment you let him near.
And the absorption begins even before you touch. Research published in PLOS ONE found that stress chemosignals in sweat — volatile molecules released during anxiety — transmit emotional states to other people without any physical contact and below the threshold of conscious detection. Exposure to stress-induced sweat activated brain regions responsible for emotional processing in receivers who could not consciously smell anything.¹⁶ᵃ A subsequent study found that smelling stress sweat altered social judgments, increased vigilance, and triggered empathy responses in observers regardless of sex or conscious awareness.¹⁶ᵇ Translation: if he is chronically anxious, stressed, or radiating low-grade despair — your nervous system is already receiving that broadcast. You need only to be in the room.
This is why — and the science backs this up — your grandmother was correct. Be careful who you let close to you. The cells were paying attention even when you were not.
IV. Men Don't Change. Women Do.
There is a saying I have been thinking about for years.
The great tragedy of heterosexual relationships is the moment a woman realizes that men do not change — and the moment a man realizes that women do not stay the same.
Both of these are biologically true. Men's hormonal architecture, once stabilized in adulthood, is comparatively static. Their personality structures, their emotional baselines, their habits of mind — these tend to ossify by the late twenties and remain remarkably consistent thereafter.¹⁵ Women, by contrast, undergo continuous neurological remodeling throughout the reproductive years. Pregnancy alone produces measurable, persistent changes to gray matter density.¹⁶ Each major hormonal transition — menstruation, pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, menopause — fundamentally rewires the brain. Women are, neurologically, in a state of more or less perpetual becoming.
Which means: when you choose a man, you are not choosing him as he is. You are choosing the gravitational field you will spend the next several decades becoming inside of.
The Chad I dated was a gym-and-protein-powder man, mouth-taping, biohacking, deeply committed to optimization. I became, while orbiting him, a more athletic, more disciplined, more cardiovascularly impressive version of myself. I do not resent this. The mouth tape is, again, genuinely effective.
But I have also met women who chose differently. Women whose Jupiters were anxious, dependent, depressed, addicted, perpetually circling their own dissatisfaction without ever quite committing to changing it. Within five years, I watched these women become less beautiful. Not in some intangible metaphorical sense — physically less beautiful. The worry lines carving deeper into foreheads once smooth. The happy, relaxed glow of well-hydrated, unstressed skin replaced by the dull complexion of chronic cortisol. The bright eyes gone slightly flat. Their voices got quieter. Their wardrobes got duller. Their ambitions got smaller. The gravitational field they had elected to live inside had reorganized them around its own center of mass — and the center of mass was small, and it showed on their faces.
This is not a moral failing. This is physics.
Pick a man whose gravitational field you would not be ashamed to become. Or — and this is the part the patriarchy does not want you to consider — pick none at all. Some women are better off as their own sun, with no Jupiter in the orbit at all, generating their own light.
"Pick a man whose gravitational field you would not be ashamed to become. Or pick none at all and be your own sun."
V. The Patriarchy's Most Successful Ad Campaign
Now we arrive at the part where I get cancelled.
The cultural project of the last sixty years has been to convince women that selectivity is shallow, that hypergamy is regressive, that the woman who declines to date the short blonde troll is somehow betraying the feminist project. We have been told, by some of the more well-meaning corners of progressive culture, that the truly enlightened woman dates for personality, dates for kindness, dates without judgment, dates without standards because standards are themselves a form of oppression.
This is, with respect, the most successful self-harming brainwashing campaign the patriarchy has ever run.
Because the same culture that tells women to lower their standards also tells men to inflate theirs. The dating apps are populated by men with a 4 in social capital who are confidently swiping left on women with an 8, while writing in their bios that they are looking for someone "low maintenance, drama-free, and adventurous." I have read those bios. I am old enough to know that what they actually mean is: someone who will absorb me at no cost to herself, a blank canvas on which I can project all of my desires.
Female selectivity is not shallow. It is the evolutionary mechanism by which our species has, for two hundred thousand years, ensured that women bear the genetic load of partners who are at least minimally worth bearing. The moment we trained women to override that mechanism — to believe that her gut sense about a man was bigotry, that her hesitation was prejudice, that her standards were oppressive — we did not liberate women. We disabled the operating system that protected her body from absorbing partners her cells were trying to warn her about.
Hypergamy is not vanity. It is the immune system of mate selection. And women have been told to suppress it under the banner of being nice.
Be nice. Be kind. Yes. Always when appropriate.
But also: choose the gravitational field you would be willing to live inside for the next twenty years. Because you will live inside of it. The cells have already begun to converge.
VI. What This Actually Means
If you are inside a relationship: take inventory. What habits have you absorbed? What ambitions have you lowered? What version of yourself were you before he entered the orbit, and is the current version a woman you would want to be twenty years from now?
If you are choosing now: stop dating his potential. In the great words of my friend Mellissa, "I want my man fully potentched." Date the actual man, in the actual moment. The man he is at thirty-two is, statistically, the man he will be at fifty-two. Women change. Men do not. Plan accordingly.
If you are out: do not rush to fill the orbit. Spend time as your own gravitational center. Let your microbiome reset to your own bacterial signature. Let your nervous system recalibrate to your own rhythm. Let the version of you that existed before the last orbit re-emerge — and then decide, with clear eyes and your own intact field, who, if anyone, gets to enter next.
And to Camila, my Brazilian acquaintance, who may never read this and knows exactly which troll I am referring to:
My darling. He is not the gravitational center you deserve.
You are.
Love always,
— Amanda
P.S. If you’re curious about the upcoming polo book or want to join on upcoming polo adventures, I’d love to invite you to subscribe to my Youtube channel.
Sources & Citations
1. Nestor, James. Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. Riverhead Books, 2020.
2. Horner, J., & Jones, B.W. (2008). Jupiter — friend or foe? I: the asteroids. International Journal of Astrobiology, 7(3-4), 251–261.
3. Song, S.J., Lauber, C., Costello, E.K., et al. (2013). Cohabiting family members share microbiota with one another and with their dogs. eLife, 2, e00458.
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11. Gallup, G.G., Burch, R.L., & Platek, S.M. (2002). Does semen have antidepressant properties? Archives of Sexual Behavior, 31(3), 289–293. SUNY Albany.
11a. Wikipedia, Absorption (skin); Lien et al. (1986), Progress in Drug Research. Genital and mucosal skin demonstrates significantly higher permeability to lipid-soluble compounds than general body skin — the pharmacokinetic basis for transdermal drug delivery to these sites. Lipid-soluble hormonal compounds in seminal plasma can be absorbed through skin contact in regions of higher permeability.
12. Christakis, N.A., & Fowler, J.H. (2009). Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. Little, Brown and Company.
13. Zajonc, R.B., Adelmann, P.K., Murphy, S.T., & Niedenthal, P.M. (1987). Convergence in the physical appearance of spouses. Motivation and Emotion, 11(4), 335–346.
14. Tea-makorn, P.P., & Kosinski, M. (2020). Spouses' faces are similar but do not become more similar with time. Scientific Reports, 10, 17001.
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16. Hoekzema, E., Barba-Müller, E., Pozzobon, C., et al. (2017). Pregnancy leads to long-lasting changes in human brain structure. Nature Neuroscience, 20(2), 287–296.
16a. Prehn-Kristensen, A., Wiesner, C., Bergmann, T.O., et al. (2009). Induction of empathy by the smell of anxiety. PLOS ONE, 4(6), e5987. Stress chemosignals in sweat activate emotional processing regions in receivers below conscious olfactory detection.
16b. Moshkin, M.P., et al. (2013). Chemosignals of stress influence social judgments. PLOS ONE, 8(10), e77143. Stress sweat altered social perception and triggered vigilance responses in observers who could not consciously detect the odor.
