When you finally got first experience?

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or looking for confirmation that there's something left when looks cease to be a distinguishing factor. i'd say it's common, just not a good basis for a lasting relationship. old habits die hard, conflicting identity facets especially. someone may aspire to "be a better person" according to their own moral values, but when confronted with the reality of what it entails, they'll typically waver and eventually revert to their original selves and seek wider social validation

or maybe i'm just generalizing from personal experience. there's always that possibility

I wouldn't put "looking for confirmation" on the list of acceptable reasons. These types are the one's that forever will do just that, and it actually becomes worse when they get older and less attractive because then they need to use extraordinary means to obtain what they could more easily obtain when younger. These are the types you see in "Hollywood housewives", and that's a type I would not want to have anything to do with.

"acceptable or not" is a personal matter, no doubt. it is a believable reason though. so when looking for "the catch", it doesn't have to be anything else. it's right there already

I'm obviously just Mr wet-behind-the-ears in all this. I mean, I know there are people who go entirely by looks (and occasionally looks and cash) because they (as far as I can see) have little enough personality or character to go on - the dull-eyed slow-witted vacuous mouthbreathers who don't want anything more from conversation than celebrity chat and consumerism and the most fun they had getting f****d up, but surely it's not beyond imagination that quite a few people (here, women) who just happen to be good-looking are attracted to character, to personality, to interpersonal ease and such?

Or, maybe we have different ideas as to what constitutes 'very attractive'.

Of course, and they would typically be matched with good-looking men that have similar qualities, so this doesn't explain why they would prefer average men. Unless they have some other issues, like being ND, being hard to deal with, or having very odd interests or beliefs.

I wasn't just referring to very attractive women being seen as out of ones league, there are plenty of other things to like maybe the guy thinks she has her life organized better, is smarter, has more going for them or a combination of those. Also level of attractiveness is subjective for one so a woman regarded by 'very attractive' might not find guys those same people find also 'very attractive' to be attractive to her. Also I don't think being regarded as very good looking has that much to do with someones personality...some probably dothink conventional attractiveness and wealth are the most important things and some might see other things as more important. You cant really judge what a girl finds attractive based on how attractive you or others think she is. And one certainly doesn't need to be ND to care about other things than looks and money.

Then if you're me you'll have people tell you how good looking you are, and others tell you how un-attractive you are...another reason I am convinced it is subjective.

Then I'll believe the person more likely to be telling the truth. For instance, if my therapist (female) tells me I'm a "handsome young man", while a girl my age says I'm "gross", I'll believe the girl. Because it's my therapist's job to help me with my self-esteem, her verbal evaluation of me isn't likely to be accurate; it's skewed by her job duties. While a girl my age has no reason to blow smoke up my rear end, so her statement would be closer to the truth, even if not 100% so. Interestingly, when an escort compliments me on my looks, muscles, or "size", I have no trouble taking her statement at face value. Why? That I don't know and don't really care.

I wouldn't rely on the escort's view either, because it is also part of her job, maybe even more so. And I would definitely not trust the opinion of somebody I was in a relationship with to judge it.

I don't think it's helpful to consider 'attractive' (in the sense of appearance/aesthetics) beyond a particular peron's taste/preference, though we can discern what society/The Man presently thinks we should find attractive and somewhat consider how well individuals match that. I think approaching the matter as though there can be something like 'attractiveness' is going about it the wrong way.

Some people have found me attractive. They weren't mad, or having me on. Others - most, I would guess - haven't even registered the possibility of my being attractive or not, as is my attitude to most people. Others still have doubtless found me outright offputting. None of these perceptions negates any other, and only a few matter to me.

I can look at adverts, at the glossies, at various media and all around me and see what I am supposed (in both senses) to find attractive, and little if any of it does anything for me. So I cannot speak with any personal interest on that presumed attractiveness.

I find that very interesting.

I disagree to the idea that attractiveness is subjective. Most of physical attractiveness is biological and has nothing to do with culture. The things that are related to culture are things like sun-burn and the slim/fat dimension. The rest of it is biological.

I just have an easier time trusting escorts than I did trusting my therapist. With escorts, we're both on the same side. We both have a common enemy: the police. With the therapist, *I* felt like the enemy, a nutjob that needed to be reformed. Plus, it was after she asked me to do a drawing, then gushed compliments over it, even though it looked like crap. So I couldn't trust her opinion of my looks to be accurate, either. With an escort, she knows fully well that I wouldn't be paying her if I were good-looking. So if anything, my ugliness helps her earn an income.

It'd be interesting to find out how my past therapist would react to my current status. That despite her (failed) efforts to improve my self-esteem and thus help me with dating later in life, I'm sexing escorts.

^ Is it true there are escorts out there who provide 'girlfriend experience' and not just sex?

Yes and yes! In fact, those are the kind I see exclusively. Why else would I be singing praises about them on WP?

I still think that's an unhelpful way of looking at it. Trying to force it into an objective/subjective either/or is only going to skew the matter and lead down some daft paths and lines of thought that don't really bear fruit.

I think what we find attractive certainly has a biological aspect, but I think we're better served starting out with who (and then why and how) people find attractive. Suppose we asked a huge number of people for photos of who, excluding public figures, they found attractive. We would see extraordinary variety, such that the term 'attractive' may become essentially meaningless outside of an expression of personal taste and approval. If we then enquired further about why and how they found these people attractive, about the experience of being attracted to them, I think we'd see a fair bit of repetition. In part because that's how attraction works and in part because of the limits of everyday language.

This repetition may clue us into certain constants, but these constants will be in the experience of attraction itself rather than the many individuals deemed 'attractive'.

Here are the first three results on my Google images search for 'attractive woman':







I don't find any of them attractive. They each have a certain bland easy-on-the-eye look (which is itself worth a tangent I won't indulge in here), to be sure, but they seem utterly devoid of character, of anything that might draw me in. That is, that might attract me. I'm a heterosexual male. I like having a romantic partner. I like sex, and my libido is fine and dandy. I feel no inclination or desire whatsoever to get up close and personal with any of these women. If any of these were photos on a dating profile, I'd skip right by. If these women approached me, I'd probably turn them down (depending on how desperate I was feeling, and if they turned out to be interesting after all) - there's nothing that really puts me off, but there's nothing that draws me in, either.

I think what we as individuals find attractive is so because of a variety of factors and experiences, all in interplay, influencing each other back and forth. People are attractive because we deem them so - without someone being attracted, there is no attractive. There is perhaps something sort of 'objective' like pleasantness of form - the golden ratio and whatnot - but I wouldn't equate that with attractiveness.

But again, I think searching for an 'objective' guarantee of someone's being 'attractive' is to misplace and misunderstand where and what attraction is. We can kind of get there by essentially begging the question, by defining and answer into existence, but I don't think that really counts.

We can see what society deems 'attractive' at any given time and, as we are social creatures, this will have an influence on us. Which is to say that, where certain qualities are held up as attractive (and so by implication, a lack of or 'opposite' of those qualities is not attractive, or even unattractive), we may then see people who match those qualities and deem them 'attractive', even if we ourselves don't feel an attraction toward them, and we may yet feel an attraction to people who are, by that implication, not attractive or actually unattractive.

What I mean by subjective is different people can find different things physically attractive, that doesn't mean it's not biological at all.

i find the first one attractive. my first thought is "yeah, i would have sex with her", but then i notice the metric ton of makeup on her face. in reality i wouldn't even want to approach her, let alone have sex with her or, god forbid, a relationship. the second one, i like her boobs, and that's about it. and on second thought they look fake anyway, and probably don't look good unclothed. the third one is downright boring. there's just nothing interesting about her at all. if you ask me "are they attractive?", i'll say "yes, clearly". if you ask me, "do you find them attractive / would you be interested in them?", i'll say "no", period

point being: beauty is far from being a linear scale, let alone an objective linear scale. and beauty is only one of the many facets of attractiveness. which itself is only one facet of real-life individual instances of attraction

the only opinion that matters about your attractiveness is the opinion of people you are attracted to. and if you realistically think "no one i'm attracted to will ever be attracted to me, for reasons beyond my control" (like, say, you would need a job, and you can't have one), then that's not the end of the road either. because when you overcome tunnel vision and realize that you have (or could at least develop) certain qualities, you also realize that there are certain people who would be attracted to you for those qualities. someone being (potentially) attracted to you is an attractive quality in itself. so if you can picture who would be attracted to you, you have a larger pool of people-you-find-attractive to choose from