Do looks matter?

[firecat]

I've been thinking about this "do you pick a mate based on looks" thing and feeling like there's something about the question that makes assumptions about what it means to pick someone based on looks. Perhaps they're just my assumptions. But the assumptions seem to be that if you pick based on looks, that means you are picking based on whether the person's looks makes your hormones behave like hungry puppies.

I feel that a person's "looks" make a difference in my interest, but it's not about begging hormones. It's got more to do with a gestalt impression I get of someone based on visual data in real-time[1]. I can read a lot of information that way and it can make a difference in the depth of my interest in someone. I don't privilege it over other information (how a person communicates in the long run matters more than the visual data) but it's pretty important to me, to the extent that if I have not met someone f2f, even if I have a lot of communication with them, they don't seem entirely real to me yet.

[1]I say real-time because photos don't give me nearly as much data.