Name: Beer goggles.
Age: As old as beer itself.
Appearance: Scientifically validated.
I love you. No you don’t.
Yes, I do. I’ve loved you all these years. You’re so sexy. You’re drunk.
That doesn’t change anything. Yes it does. It means you’ve got your beer goggles on.
That’s not really a thing. Yes it is. Scientists have tested it and everything. They discovered that, when you are drunk, you become much less fussy about the sort of face that distracts you.
What does that mean? Researchers at Edge Hill University in Lancashire got 80 students drunk and asked them to perform a simple task on a computer while trying to ignore images of human faces.
And? And they found that both the drunk students and their sober counterparts found the task harder to complete when they were presented with an image of an attractive face. However, the drunk students were also distracted by the less attractive faces.
What does that prove? It proves that drunk people become much less fussy when it comes to selecting a potential mate. In short, drunk people will fancy anything. In short, beer goggles are real.
How drunk were they? Here’s the thing: not very. The researchers have said that the hornier students were only “mildly intoxicated”. It clearly doesn’t take a lot to make people lose their judgment.
Yes, but surely a dry academic study under test conditions can’t mimic the real effect of beer goggles. Aha, you’re wrong. These tests were carried out in “real-life drinking environments”. They were clicking faces on a computer in a bar, which obviously changes everything.
Didn’t we already know about beer goggles? Sure, but previous research has been limited to asking people about how attractive they found others. But this study, according to Dr Rebecca Monk, overcame these limitations by using an indirect measure of attention.
So this means that … That, yes, everyone you’ve ever met at a bar or a club would probably find you absolutely repulsive in the cold hard light of day.
That is a hard pill to swallow. It’s OK. If it is useful, you were still helping them find a moment of basic human connection that allowed them to stave off the ever-present voice telling them that the universe is empty and existence is inherently meaningless.
I guess that does help a little. Glad to be of use.
I really do love you, though. Don’t be silly, I’m not even a person. Take an aspirin and sleep it off.
Do say: “Beer goggles are real.”
Don’t say: “But then again, so is erectile dysfunction, brought on by excessive alcohol consumption, so hopefully they cancel each other out.”
