Two hundred years of the Maine mating game.

February/March 2020

By Sofia Voltin

“It is perhaps the most difficult thing in the world to convince ourselves that we are or can be loved in return.”— Henry Poor (Bangor) in a letter to his fiancé, Mary Pierce, 1839.

Is Maine too frigid to be hot? A recent survey by Big 7 Travel ranks us as the country’s 46th sexiest state. At least we weren’t 50th—sorry, Nebraska. Slate magazine suggests the same: “According to research on embodied cognition, humans are primed to conflate temperature with emotional perception of relationships.” What does that say to a state that has, at best, a short spring? The unfair caricature of us is that we’re cold, reticent, laconic, shut off. But here’s our secret. We’re all naked under our snowsuits.

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