Friendship with the opposite sex vs sexual selection.....

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Hyperlexian has pointed out some studies that show if you know someone than you find them more attractive. So do you only go for WASP's?
(I don't know if that term is well known or used outside of the US)

I don't date outside of my culture, no.

It would be interesting is someone had a professed preference for protestants.



Or maybe you mis-assessed you...
Quite possibly she doesn't think of herself as inherently better, or more worthy that her friend.
Or quite possibly she wasn't trying to make a comment on your 'rank' but thought two people she knew had similar interests/compatible personalities.

Are you not realizing how this can seem degrading to others, and why DogsWithoutHorses is having an issue with it?

I don't think Sally is very attractive, so I think she is 3/5th's of a person

No I don't think she is 3/5ths of a person, I just think her scores aren't high enough for me to interested in. Unfortunately at this point in my life, I'm not desperate enough to settle for some one I don't find visually attractive, regardless of their personalities.

YOU are failing to understand that what you need in a relationship, what it takes to be HAPPY, cannot be measured by ANY standard, and sometimes our friends sees our NEEDS more than we do. If you insist on seeing these things in black and white grades or levels of value, you could be missing out on someone who would actually be a fantastic partner for you. Your loss, really, but then I don't want to hear it when you are older and lonely and blaming it on everyone but yourself. You owe it to YOURSELF to give a broader group of people a CHANCE. You don't have to hook with them, but you SHOULD give them an honest CHANCE.

You would be surprised at how many men I've had crushes on who ended up with women one might have considered too far below their attractiveness rank. They could have had anyone, and in the end they chose the person who met their needs best, and threw out the social rank rule book. Those are the most solid couples I know, that really matched up based on intangibles none of the rest of us can see. So after a lifetime of watching what makes a successful couple, I will say that you would be a FOOL if you allowed your sense of "rank" to be defined by how you perceive the "rank" of the person you are considering dating, and when you refuse to date someone simply for falling below a set standard, you are doing just that: defining yourself by how you define them.

I understand that we all must be attracted to the person we are with, but looks fade and real love comes from someplace else. As it was noted in a post above, knowing someone makes them more attractive. If someone has features that are a huge and permanent turn off, fine, take them out of the pool, but simply because you didn't think they ranked high enough? Do that, and you'll never be truly happy.

May I be blunt? If you are thinking that way, you aren't ready for a serious relationship. You don't understand what it takes.

Smart women will throw you back into the pond.

In other words, change your thinking or you'll get nowhere. In my experience, women don't want to be with guys who think the way you do. At minimum, you'll have to learn to walk the talk about not being so superficial.

I am sorry if it seems like I am attacking you, and since I don't know you beyond the few posts I've read in this thread, I could be way off base, but I don't want you to end up unhappy in a few decades wondering why you never were able to get what you thought you deserved. You need to hear the impression you are making here, and how much the women I've known in my life reject it. I get frustrated reading the subset of men on this board who blame their issues on women when they have spent years refusing to hear about the turn offs they, themselves, project - I don't want anyone to end up being "that" guy, it seems like such an unhappy place. And what you've said here ... HUGE turn off, HUGE roadblock to building any relationship. IMHO.

It is entirely in your power to change it, to make a different choice, or I wouldn't be making this pitch.

Personally, I chose my toys based on which did the most cool stuff.

I think, though, that this could end up in Adult if we discuss selection of partners according to what "cool" stuff they're willing to do.

How she's supposed to know her friend is "lower" on your scale? That's assuming she even realizes you have this strange scale thing. All you've made clear is that she herself is acceptable. That's just a single point on your scale. The rest of it is unknown. Without belief in a universal scale, I cannot see how you could arrive at your conclusions logically.

While I see what you are saying. The fact I asked *Her* out and not her friend, or a girl who looked like her friend, is the missing clue. Once you have that, you can easily gain the rest of the information needed. The only reason she would make this mistake is if she incorrectly assumed she was the TOP choice and was still in the same bracket as her friend who would be more towards the bottom, and that I can't really blame her for, even though it's not correct, she wouldn't be aware of that.

I can respect her for not being interested in me physically, and I can certainly appreciate anyone who will tell me they don't like my personality, but to try and pawn me off on her friend who isn't as attractive as she is is just insulting to me on a very personal level, as what she is saying, in effect, is, you aren't good enough for me, but you are good enough for my friend. While at the same time I'm saying, you're friend isn't good enough for me, but you are. Thus, 3 people are left marginally less happy, rather than two people potentially being happy.

But such is the way of the world.

My sister pawned my husband off on me NOT because she thinks she is higher up on some scale than me, or because she didn't find him attractive enough, but because she thought him and I were more likely to be compatible on values, personality, and all the things that matter. I'd say it was a smart call, given that him and I are happily married, and she is now married to a man who was friends with our other sister first.

Of course, one difference is that my husband never was interested in my sister, she is too young for him, while you were actually interested in this girl, but your assumption of how she saw things is definitely unlikely to be accurate She thinks her friend is a great catch - that is how most women feel about their friends, and true friends don't introduce their female friends to guys they don't think also make decent catches. You should take it as a compliment.

I won't totally rule out that she is as you say, I do have a friend who used to flirt and reel in more guys than she could possibly date, so she would then try to match some of them up with her friends, which I didn't allow, because we were such opposite physical types that I just knew the guys couldn't be appreciating it, But you know something? In the end she couldn't hold onto a relationship, and is now twice divorced. the men she was with tended to be so ridiculously superficial, they would tell me all these wonderful things about her that I knew were not true, but they never wanted to hear the truth. Relationships can't be built on illusion.

How? It's a single point on a scale. She has no idea where she even is on that scale, except that she's above some certain minimum. There is absolutely no way to even guess where anyone else could possibly place. Perhaps from just general intuition, she could have guessed that her friend occupied a less desirable position, but there's no way to tell whether it met the minimum or not. Theoretically, it would even be possible for her friend to be higher on the scale - it stands to reason that you'd be aiming somewhere around the middle.

Most women don't think in terms of the chunky scale or whatever you want to call what you're operating by. They think more along the lines of personalities that will get along, chemistry, that sort of thing. The concept of some sort of hierarchical scale of partners based on physical attributes is generally alien to them (outside of cardboard representations, i.e. in the real world), and generally its an idea most women would be repulsed by. You've got to appreciate she'd have to assign qualities (that she considers extremely negative) to your personality, to even grasp your scale criteria. Maybe she didn't think of you that way.

Agreed.

Many men are repulsed by the chemistry crap as well (you're either attracted to someone or you're not—science of matter has nothing to do with it).

i think this is incorrect, while personality does play a role I do notice most women start off of physical looks and then hope theres personality behind them

Pheromones.

But I think the term is not entirely literal, refers to social processes as well.