Question for adult men 40 and up.

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True.

I for one do not value physical beauty more than other qualities. Physical attractiveness is important, but at the end of the day, if all a woman is, is physically beautiful then you would be just as well served by poster on the wall. Because you are not going to want to engage them in conversation or go and do anything else with them. To me this would be as lonely as living alone.

The measure of beauty is different from culture to culture and from man to man. I personally have never been very attracted to blonds. I prefer darker haired women. I also am not attracted to "size 0" women. I think "supermodels" are unattractive. Nigella Lawson on the other hand is to me WOW!! !! !

She's pretty close to "model". You know, when I did a search on her (I'd never heard of Nigella Lawson) the images that came were loafs of bread. I thought, "That Broooks has an odd taste in women".

Yeah, bread would be pretty odd.

I used Nigella to illustrate my point that women do not lose their sexiness when they hit 40.

She is very pretty & she illustrates the point I was trying to maker earlier about how women in their mid 40's are still good looking. From what I have read about her and from seeing interviews, she has a brain and is not afraid to use it. She is probably about a size 12 or 14, and is definitely not super model size.

I recently heard someone comment that you don't meet your soulmate. You meet someone who becomes your soulmate. If you accept the commitment of marriage, you and your partner can grow into being "The One". After that, you have no reason to think about 'trading her in.'

I have been married for 22 years. For the first 12 of those years, until I was over 35, I worked on college campuses. Not understanding the relational difficulties that I experienced with my wife as being a result of some childhood issues that we had both experienced and also due to major differences in our thinking (I have AS and can remember details, love order while my wife is ADHD and looses things over and over and thinks the best way to order things is by making a bunch of piles around the house in plain sight), I would often allow my emotional hurts to be soothed at the thought of having relationships with college girls. College was the time that I first began pursuing relationships with girls. Several things happened that cured me of that type of thinking

First, my own daughter reached college age. If I found that a man who was 10 or more years older than her was taking an interest in her, I would feel a much greater need to check that out. Corollary, if I think about 19 year olds in any way in terms of relationships I better check my thought patterns.

Second, I learned how much my life and preferences were a result of external influences. Do people seriously think that in the media blitzed world that we live in that a man can develop any realistic 'personal' preferences for a womans looks or temperment without diliberately working at it. If so, I'd hate to think what women would have to live up to, and of course with our growing gender equality, men have to face the same problems.

Upon reevaluating the basis for attraction and relationship I determined that looks are only a small component. As has been mentioned in this thread, mental and social compatability are huge. Furthermore, those are things that can not be detected as rapidly as a womans hair color, eye color or measurements. In the long run I think you have to spend a while establishing some understanding of compatability as well as creating a working communication scheme to deal with inevitable differences.

Finally, after considering the possible influences that society might have had on my perspectives concerning what made a woman physically attractive, along with the other aspects necessary to successful relationship I arrived at the following conclusion. If I had never seen another woman (and thereby developed a preference in terms of physical attraction) before I met my wife, I might well have decided that besides being beautiful (as was my determination when I met her) she would in fact be my definition for beauty (as she has become). Hence my contention that my wife is the most beautiful woman in the world and no other (even though they be 25 years younger, thinner, have fewer wrinkles and less gray hair) can possibly be as physically beautiful as her.

Note: no one should be offended at this since my contention is that every man can believe his wife is the most beautiful in the world and be right

I also note that if a woman was reading this post trying to figure out what made men choose to bond, although I don't give specific suggestions, I actually think that accepting some basic principals and floating these could actually produce a more relationship friendly world for men and women.

I'm almost 49, and married (wife is almost 44, still quite attractive).

I like to look at younger women, but just an occasional sideways glance.

The cure for being interested is to listen to them twitter at each other, and watch them glance at their cell phone every 30 seconds. No matter how cute, they're sooo vapid it's repulsive.

I'm sure if you use a word like 'vapid' in their presence, they'll find you pretty repulsive too.

Nah, words like "vapid' are so old they're new. They might think it's another way of saying "quick".

They'll probably wonder where your accent is from...lol

I find it intriguing that all the married Aspies who checked in here see no possibility of a fling of any kind unless they go back to dating. The thought of infidelity never shows here. That an Aspie trait? I've always been monogamous, whether with my choice of 3D app or a relationship.

Certainly with my marriage of 20 years.

As far as the temptation to taste the fountain of youth, I'll pass. My ardor has cooled with the years. Yes, it's fun to look -- OMG, what they wear these days!

You'd expect more of our kind to gravitate toward youth though, wouldn't you? Given how our perspective remains so young, given our difficulty navigating the complex emotional needs of a full-grown NT woman, this would seem a welcome respite.

dp

I think that there are two main reasons why tend to be loyal and monogamous.

The first is because so many of us have had problems in the past with relationships that once we find someone that is loyal and puts up with our eccentricities that we don't want to lose them.

The second is that we tend to get into an established routine and once we get comfortable with our mate and have an established routine with them, we don't want to upset the relationship.

I was surprised and disappointed to realize how much difference looks make when it comes to something like dating. Even so, it comes third in importance, after compatibility and intelligence, and my perception of compatibility modulates my perception of attractiveness. For this thread, I tried to quantify how much difference it makes. If I think we might be compatible, it can make a woman something like two to five times as attractive compared to going only by her looks and my low baseline expectation of compatibility (near 0).

Age influences my expectation of compatibility in two ways. If someone is much younger, I expect more difference in interests (I mean broadly what we would care about, not details like what music we listen to), and I expect that less experience (on average) would mean some things are more difficult to communicate because I would have to explain more. Less experience could be compensated for by intelligence, so the younger a woman is, the smarter she would have to be before I could get seriously interested, or I would need extra evidence that we would be compatible despite the age difference.

For the sake of completeness, no, I don't think someone bright enough to be really interesting despite being young would have any romantic interest in me, and part of compatibility is mutual interest.

Edit: Can't get the quotes to work, don't know why.

Like Bazza is about to say...

dp

Last edited by dupertuis on 27 Nov 2007, 1:09 am, edited 3 times in total.

the syntax of your message looks ok.

In your profile options, do you have BB Code turned on?