Ladies - is not wanting a toned body on a partner abnormal?

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Hi Grisha, you're a cutie and definitely date-able! And the introspective look is very appealing.

I really don't think it is a deal-breaker. Most of the skinny guys I've known could get dates. Perhaps not with girls who are exclusively into muscular guys, of which there are indeed some, but they got dates anyway.

Thanks! It's nice to know that some women find the "introspective" look appealing, because of course it can't be helped - I'm afraid at first impression it may seem like I am not open to communicating.

But here at WP you already know where I'm coming from, IRL it probably makes me seem unapproachable, maybe even creepy - and having ripped abs doesn't help this.

Count me as another who is not into muscles. I dated people of various types (have been married for a gazaillion years, so this is all kind of academic now) but have always been most attracted to chunky guys. I really like romance novels but it annoys me that they never feature my type.

I'm only a bloke so I can't really vouch for female taste...to me you look OK but somewhat miserable, which I gather is something of a deal-breaker among the mainstream. Personally I wish they'd make it their work to see if they could bring a smile to a guy who was acceptable apart from the frown, and find out whether it's a sign of general negativity or whether it's just superficial, because I think they'd often be pleasantly surprised at the outcome. But I don't know if many of them are that curious. I usually find that I can't help but smile when I first get evidence that a woman is interested in me, and when I'm in a social environment I try to think happy/amusing thoughts generally so that I'll be looking a bit more positive than I otherwise would. Smiling is very powerful if you can get to control it. But as you've already noticed, not all women see it as a bad sign if you don't smile. Might be small percentage-wise, but you only need a few (at the most), and there are billions of them in total. As for muscles, most guys with wives and kids don't look particularly muscular, so I suspect the muscle thing is a minority fetish of some kind that needn't concern us.

Thanks for the feedback, TD.

I think you pretty much nailed it. Smiling is very unnatural/uncomfortable/rare for me, people have remarked upon it for as long as I can remember. Several women have told me that I would do much better if I would "just smile".

Upon reflection, the girlfriends I have had in my life (infrequent as they are) were all people who got to know me first in another context (classmates/co-workers) who were able to see what I was really like instead of rlying on the gloomy/soul-less first impression that I give off.

Sometimes I try to smile, but it comes off as sort of a forced grimace - a real smile is too subtle to fake well and I think conveys an impression of insincerity and even sarcasm.

Back to the original point, I remember hearing somewhere that "men learn to love the women they are attracted to; women learn to be attracted to the men they love"

I cannot but believe this is true: how many women are obsessed with pornography? how many men?

Very admirable/endearing trait in women.

Sigh.

PS I hope HB will forgive me for hijacking her thread, I feel bad about it...

Yes it's difficult to fake a smile, and the results are usually worse than frowning.....I think the eyes tend to give it away, and maybe the deliberate use of facial muscles looks different from the involuntary use. That's why I use the "happy thoughts" method.....it's still fake, because I'm smiling at something internal, but I'm the only one who knows that. Trouble is, I end up laughing, which can work very well, but can easily spill over into weirding people out when I can't stop and nobody knows why I'm laughing any more.



Yes most women aren't going to end up surfing for porn....steamy romance novels, films with hunky male heroes maybe, but not usually yer actual porn. Still emotional infidelity though, perhaps?


Oops......I thought it was your thread. Sorry.

Makes me wonder if acting lessons might be good therapy for Aspies...

do you consider viewing porn or reading romance to be infidelity? i don't. porn rocks my world, and romance novels etc. make me want to vomit. i do not think i am alone is that sentiment, because apparently - if i recall correctly (can't grab a statistic as i am at work), the middle-aged female demographic accounts for the fastest-increasing group in terms of pornography consumption.

Interesting - I did not know that.

Yes, for me a partner reading porn would come over as a strong form of emotional infidelity, and most of my partners would have felt awful if I'd used porn myself. Sexually, I feel that I should be enough for my partner, if we're going to do the monogamy thing at all. And I wasn't happy with my first wife's interest in romantic novels, though I balked at putting pressure on her to stop it. Strangely enough, she was also the only one to encourage me to mess with porn - she started buying me photography magazines which were always full of nude girls....at the time I'd begun to get interested in other women, and she'd noticed that, so I think she did it to try and provide a safer channel for my - er - naughty feelings, but it just made me want to screw around more.

You're not alone with your value system though. I don't know if it's a growing trend......they experimented with selling porn to women in the late 60s, but the uptake wasn't great, and the suggested explanation was that women just aren't usually wired like men. I'd like to see the statistics. It could be that the whole pornophilia thing is governed mostly by unconscious guilt, so if women have been told for millennia that they're not to even think about spicy stuff, maybe their romance films and books give them some kind of outlet for their forbidden adulterous feelings - they identify with the heroine who gets humped by a guy who is more attractive than their own partner, but they can tell themselves (and Hubby) that it's only a story they're reading.

Yes I think they would be. I was rather concerned about the potential pitfalls of "DIY smile emulation" when I was practising my irresistible grinning skills in front of a mirror (the things I do in the name of social outreach ). Every time I ended the smile, I noticed a transient signal from my eyes that looked to me for all the world like a strong sexual come-on. I'd love to know from an expert/coach what that is, and if necessary how to control it, because I suspect it could get me into a lot of trouble.....and funnily enough I know a lady with strong Aspie traits who seems to do the same thing, though I don't have the cheek to point it out to her or ask her whether she means it.

I'd really be curious about the nature of the porn they tried. There's a huge, huge market of erotica for women these days. Especially in ebook form, which makes it so much easier to buy and own. There's even a whole niche of gay erotica that's primarily bought by straight women.

i don't cheat in my head when i am viewing porn. maybe it's an empathy thing, but i don't get into a character or imagine myself with someone else. i don't read fiction at all so i don't get engrossed in any sort of story, much less erotica. and when i look at pictures, i'm not imagining myself in some sort of scenario. hard to explain. i have no idea what my husband thinks when he is looking at it alone, but we talk about it when we look together.

I'm sort of the same, though I do read and love fiction. I do get engrossed in the story, but I don't put myself in anyone's place, I just observe. My husband finds it very odd, he automatically puts himself in someone else's place.

I wouldn't consider it cheating even if I did, though; we are both free to read anything we like. Not to criticize how anyone else lives, but it wouldn't even occur to me that we shouldn't be.

Ah, that's quite a difference.....I always used to see the porn subjects as people. If the face was out of the picture, it wasn't so interesting. Mind you it was only nudity and provocative poses, I don't know a thing about anything more hardcore than that. I suppose I'd imagine I was actually there with the lady. Surely that's what the brain makes of a picture though? A picture being a representation of what you'd see if you were in a certain place at the right time? The eye focusses the image of the photo on the retina pretty much like it was the real thing, and the resulting body chemistry changes are the same, that's why it's a turn-on, isn't it?

I seem to objectify sex less as I get older. It's always been important to know who I'm having sex with, but when I was younger I wasn't much bothered once I was "performing," as if I didn't much care as long as she was female...it was very much a physical lust thing. But I got bored and floppy after a few years with the same woman.....these days I don't get bored over time, and it might be the result of making the sex a bit more personal. Can't prove the cause-and-effect though.