Why do women find confidence attractive?

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I'm miserably single, if that's what you're asking.

Oh, uh... weird. I thought I saw mention of it somewhere, but hey, I'm not keeping track.

My last relationship was several years ago. I'm still very unaccustomed to...existing...alone.

I personally tend to prefer a confident man, but that's because I'm a confident person myself. I think pairing a confident/outgoing person with an unconfident/shy person can cause a whole host of problems. My first boyfriend was more a shy type, and I found that I often had to hold myself back or had difficulty enjoying social events because he was so uncomfortable all the time. Plus I'm a person who loves socializing with a large range of different people, and meeting new people, (although being AS I also enjoy long periods of solitude), and having a shy person around who is uncomfortable with new people can be a real hindrance and stress; especially when you constantly have to worry about them and keep them entertained/occupied, meaning you can't just enjoy yourself stress free.

I think generally shy people are a better match for shy people, and confident people with confident people, except for some exceptions.

women might be younger when they lose it - i have no idea about that so i can't speculate. seeing as how some younger women seem to like older men (and some older men want the younger women) that stands to reason.

i don't see how there can be more single women than men, any more than the reverse could be true, unless there are that many more women than men in existence or if there are a lot of men paired up with each other?

for example, in a closed group of 100 people (50 of each gender), if 25 men are married, then 25 women have to also be married or those men could not have spouses. no leftovers or imbalances are really possible.

Last edited by hyperlexian on 03 May 2011, 8:29 am, edited 1 time in total.

You mean you prefer an extrovert. Some introverts tend to be quite confident ... just not socially "confident".

I have to come back to this again though.

In my own experience you have to look at - when the world has repeatedly hit you on something - what it is and how you can find a way out of it. Things like martial arts, knowing you to handle yourself, pursuing education (as it sounds like you're doing great with), and generally anything that elevates you will get you there. If you just think in terms of say weights for self defense, unfortunately that's only attributes - not fighting knowledge - and my own experience with that was yes, I felt a little more imposing but I felt like it was all puff, plus I was tired all the time, apparently carrying more muscle drains your resources and you need to get a lot of cardio in otherwise you essentiall just get fat and sluggish with it.

I wouldn't rule out anything you're doing. If for example you're pursuing education or martial arts, have been enjoying the process, are maybe a few years in to one or both, are getting somewhere but still feel the same way about yourself - give it time. It takes a while for changes in your mannerisms off of new capabilities to catch up. Odds are, by the time you're say exceptionally good at something like martial arts you're internal orientation to the world around you will in fact be much difference as the psychic 'stuff' that you're soaking in will be generally much more positive. That said, being that you've been through a lot as I have (as it sounds), it means that our confidence or self-esteem will trail our achievements by a bit but that's not to say that these things won't work, its just to say that if you hit a spell a couple years in where you start wondering if it will ever make you feel better about yourself - keep doing it, if for nothing else just to keep your mind occupied. When you do that you'll later find that you were at an internal plateau and that quitting would have been the worst thing you could have done.

When I think of the 'quiet confidence' hyperlexian mentioned, ie. when some people just walk into the room and people sense it, I think of one of my cousins who was a wrestler at one of the most touted highschools when it came to wrestling programs. When he was 16 and 140lb he could bench 285 and off of his experience with dedication to what he was doing as well as how people looked at him for it, him and his brother both, could afford to be great guys, be even a bit on the quiet side but have people clustered around them. Transplant either one of them somewhere that no one knows them - people see that confidence and history in so many ways from their body language and it radiates. I think its really the same for us if we dedicate ourselves long enough to self-improvement measures that have real world tie ins like this (martial arts, athletics, big achievements in the business world) because it starts actively replacing what we were told about ourselves or what we were told is all that we'd ever be with much more positive stuff and the longer we're at it the more our achievements will ooze out of our poors rather than our hard times. It seems like if we really dedicate ourselves to the process and use that daily process as well like an antidepressant, good things will catch up to us regardless of how far in arrears we've been.

Right, I was going to mention that extroversion/introversion =/= confidence/lack thereof. Someone who doesn't speak a lot is presumed to be unconfident or shy (among other things, I've noticed).

It could be that they genuinely aren't interested in social interaction, or feel the particular people around them have nothing interesting or intelligent to say.

There are so many factors to attraction, if we're actively searching for evolutionary or "natural" reasons for something-
a man having "confidence" often connotatively implies some type of imposing physicality (I think),
but in the modern world, it is brains, not brawn, that are arguably a more reliable predictor if we're talking about future ability to provide.
Whether this change is reflected in modern women's preferences in men, I haven't the faintest. (I don't form sexual attraction, but if I did, it would be an astrophysicist who'd be dropping my panties like nobody's business, not a Hulk-wannabe.)

Also important is that women likely prefer different types of men for different types of relationships-
wasn't there a study concluding during ovulation women prefer men with more overtly masculine features (possible indicators of greater testosterone/virility?) and a more intelligent/nurturing men at other times?

This is all if we're going with the presumption that women's primary drives are still strictly or mostly conception-childbirth-childrearing oriented, and not totally subverted by modern imperatives, which is a big "if".

It's funny that, ironically (and hypocritically), I tend to mistake quiet / shy people as arrogant. The average NT might think the same way on first impressions and hence shun introverts for extroverts:(

Right! It all depends. I think women in particular are though to be stuck up if they don't talk to people. (Personal experience.)
My mother always said "still waters run deep"- she was talking about men, but I think she's usually right, in general.

If you were a woman bogged down with raising children in a clearing in the middle of the jungle, where there were no laws and lions, hyenas and other men around, wouldn't you want a man who you knew was confident enough to come through for you and the children? Or would you want a timid man who let others take resources for his family and constantly needed to be tended to like the children did?

The wives and children of those men died out. We are all the descendants of men who were sufficiently confident with respect to the context of their society.