Tom's Views

Dear   [BB],

My best advice to   find a good man   is:  Be yourself.   I know that sounds cliché. But being yourself is cliché, for good reason.  This rule is so fundamental to successful relations that it’s no wonder so many people say it so often and try to practice integrity so much; though many fail at self honesty to be sure. If you pretend  to be someone different than who you actually are to win a man (or woman for that matter), then you cannot truly win them, even if it appears that you have.  The Golden Rule of Successful Relationships: Fool unto others as you would have others fool unto you. 

If they fall in love with the facade you create through pretending, then in order to keep them in love with you, you have to   keep pretending.  Talk about a lover’s cross! It’s kind of like lying. Tell a small lie, and then you have to tell tens more to keep the lie appearing like the truth, not to mention all the brain power needed to figure out how to keep from being discovered.  Lying and pretending get real old, real fast; especially when the continued survival of your relationship depends on you continuing to lie and pretend.  You may think that you must fake and deceive a little to find true love.  But love cannot be true if born from makeup (either physical or mental). True love lasts.  But a love will not last when its imminent demise is promised by any lies that are necessary to keep it going. 

So, in your fight against fate to find a good man, being yourself is your most effective weapon. Not only will your sincerity attract more men that are truly compatible with you, but it will also discourage those who are not.  Yes, a man may reject the real you.  That’s true.  But if he does not find the natural you irresistible, then don’t betray yourself by pretending to be different than the person you are. This only wastes time by delaying his inevitable dissolution with you.  No relation is worth that constant wonder and fear that it will end at some unknown time; at least, not in the long run.

Let’s face it. There are equally valid positive and negative ways to interpret all states of being. No matter what you say or do, some with find reason to like it, and others will do likewise to hate it. So, just be yourself, because at least that way, for better or for worse, you’ll be less stressed, less anxious, and most importantly, you’ll be true. Shakespeare understood this well when he wrote: This above all; to thine own self be true.

Being comfortable with showing our true selves to the world is, I’ve found, one of life’s biggest, most daunting challenges. But once you achieve it, it is perhaps the most rewarding victory. Not sure most of us will ever reach a point where we can be totally free with our expressions. That extreme would probably not be too good for society at large. We all have skeletons (deep, dark secrets) and facets of our personalities that are best left unexpressed. But many of us go too far, and either express too little of ourselves, or express falsely – pretend to have different personality traits than we actually do. And this is where much of the wasted time and broken hearts originate in relationships, as apparently, you have learned.

Good luck, and take care.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Makeup, True Beauty, Love, And Honesty
• To Best Attract Women, Be Yourself!

There are usually exceptions to most every rule. But as a general rule, women with body mass indexes (BMI) of 15 to 20 attract me the most often and most intensely. These are my goddesses. It’s automatic. It’s chemical. It’s electricity. It’s reflexive. It’s often   love at first sight.  It’s an involuntary reaction to the thin that I cannot change. Nor do I desire to change it. My attraction to thin women is part of who I am, and has always been.

So while this aspect of me may make me appear gravely imperfect in some others’ eyes, I still cannot settle for bigger BMIs. Larger bodies simply do not turn me on. I hold nothing against the bigger ladies. It’s just that I’m powerless to respond romantically to them; even if they have characters of gold. Unfortunately though, a   character of gold   cannot take the place of deficient physical attraction. No matter how nice a bigger lady treats me, no matter how honest and loving she is, she’ll be unable to create romantic allure in my heart without a naturally thin body to compliment her sweet personality. While I could be great friends with a big sweetie, experience shows that we’d probably never be great lovers who are actually in love with one another.

Now I’ve said nothing about how women should or should not manage their weight, and certainly would not expect a woman to “get thin” just so she could date me. In fact, I’d prefer that she be naturally thin, and not have to struggle to maintain her thinness. In fact, if some ladies prefer to sport curves, then more power to them. I just happen to prefer the thin side of a healthy BMI, which is 15 to 20. Many guys feel differently, yes. But personally, my heart beats loudest and fastest for the tall and quite thin and fair ladies.

If you think I’m shallow for this hard-wired preference, then let’s hear what you find attractive. I guarantee that no matter what you come up with, I’ll be able to make a solid case for you being shallow for that preference as well. Any single preference can be made to seem shallow with sufficient debating skills. So liking tall, thin women is on the whole, no more or less shallow than appreciating someone smart, rich, curvy, innocent, sophisticated, or whatever. We all have sacred preferences and things we value supremely in a mate that others might find shallow. Nonetheless, one of my core values just happens to be a BMI of 15 to 20 in a woman.

Who is to say that a particular preference is shallow, except those who, for whatever reason, do not meet it?  Those preferenes that make us fall in love at first sight should be embraced and sought after; not shunned.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Am I A Bigot For Wanting A Tall Thin Woman?
• Thoughts on “The Fat Ideal”
• What Is Ideal Body Weight?
• Why Believe In Love At First Sight?

References

• Body Mass Index (BMI)   definition on Wikipedia
• Ideal Body Weight   definition

I received the piece below from [Emmy] in a comment for another blog post.  But this was so well expressed that I though it deserved main post status here on my blog.  This mirrors my feelings about America’s overuse of   makeup and cosmetics   to increase chances of finding true love.  She details how makeup not only creates false beauty standards, and how its use might not be honest.  But she further explains how the women who wear copious amounts of it hurt the feelings of those who wish not to fuss with cosmetics.   Is a person who wears makeup really any further ahead of one who does not?  [Emmy] has a definite opinion about that.  Enjoy. 

——

Dear Tom,

I agree with you that having   makeup   and the latest fashion only gets you so far in a relationship.  You could be totally ugly under all that stuff.  On the contrary, you could be as beautiful as the model on the run way, but have a nasty, unattractive streak in you.  As the saying goes “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.   I believe this with all my heart.  Having the best cosmetics and the latest styles will only get you as far as a few dates if you’re lucky.  But when you reach the second date and beyond, the reality of how you really look to the other person intrudes, and they may not like the unvarnished you. 

Well I know all too well about how the cosmetic industry works.  You can’t turn on the TV and not notice the cosmetic commercials for makeup and clothing flashing before your eyes.  You have to wonder.  What are they trying to say to the average Joe, that you’re ugly unless you wear our products?  Many people could argue this.  In fact I’ve always felt uncomfortable watching these commercials because they emphasize that I’m not good enough as a person unless I wear these products.  I also don’t feel comfortable around people who fuss about how they look.  What the heck I don’t even worry about this kind of stuff.  Sure, I like to look nice but not at the expense of my wallet.  I guess being on a limited income teaches you not to be too greedy with the luxuries of the cosmetic and fashion industry.

I don’t think of myself as a beautiful person, even though I hear it quite often from people on the street, close friends and my boyfriend.  I have always assumed that by using these products, you would attract more dates as well as make yourself feel more beautiful.  By wearing this stuff you prove to society that you’re imperfect and that the products will make you flawless.  I feel like a plain Jane on the street because I don’t fuss over my hair, clothes, or put on makeup.  I know that makeup would probably hide some of my complexion issues that affect me on a daily basis.  I would be deceiving others in what I truly look like.  Sure there’s more to someone than just their looks but I don’t believe that by using makeup and wearing flashy clothes enhances your chances on getting a great relationship from a man. 

I don’t have to do anything to get noticed by men.  I just wear my casual clothing and go about my business.  It’s not like I got any more noticed by wearing flashy clothes or makeup.  In fact there are quite a number of women who hide their facial imperfections with foundation and other cosmetic products.  When my boyfriend and I first met each other, I was curious what drew him to me, it’s not like I had the flashiest clothes or wore makeup.  In fact I just wore casual clothing, ranging from t-shirts, sweat shirts, to jeans and sneakers.  In fact this is how I feel most comfortable when presenting myself to others. 

I’m already hard on myself for not being as beautiful as the girl on the street but no matter how much advice I get from friends and loved ones it doesn’t change my mind.  I want to look like everyone else.  I’m not happy with my looks, some people just laugh at me because they think that I’m gorgeous.  A lot of men probably wouldn’t mind dating me, because they like what they see.  No matter how much fashion or cosmetics I might use, I will never see myself the way that others see me.  In fact, I feel just as plain and ugly with all of the glamorous products, as without them. 

Does a person actually feel more beautiful by wearing all of this crap?  I don’t think so.  They probably just do it because everyone else is doing it, and they don’t want to look awkward.  Their opinion of themselves is probably still there, and they believe that by wearing this stuff, it will boost up their confidence.  It might make you seem more confident to others, but at the end of the day, you are you.  You can lose weight, and change your hair etc all you want but you can’t change others opinions about how they feel about you. 

True beauty comes from within not only yourself but whoever is viewing you.  This is a constant struggle for me because I’m always telling other women how unattractive I am.  Don’t think that makeup and clothes can make others fall in love with you because that’s all in your mind.  The makeup must come off eventually.  So why not reveal your true and honest self to others to begin with?  At least if you show your true self early on, you’re not sending wrong signals about yourself or misleading anyone about how you really look underneath all that goop. 

Men and women alike, appreciate someone who is honest. Right?  So why don’t we all just be honest, and share our true natural selves with others?  If they don’t like us for who we truly are, than who needs them?  We just have to find someone who can accept us for the real us and not the false us.  People like honesty and they like to surround themselves with these types of people.  Let the cosmetics and fashion industry do what they will.  But we need not enslave ourselves to their products.  In the long run I don’t think we’re any better if we wear makeup. People will always judge us, yes.  But we just have to believe that we’re still worth it, even without the cosmetics.  Few people get truly happier by using makeup.

Emmy

Related Posts

• Against Makeup
• Does Makeup Really Work?
• To Find A Good Man, Be Yourself
• True Beauty, Not Makeup, Wins True Love

Many   makeup   and cosmetics commercials dishonestly convey an exceedingly unrealistic and dangerous ideal of how people are supposed to look to society.  Makeup distorts the notion of what   true beauty   actually is, and results in frequent mistaking a false, short-duration love for lasting and thus, true love.  The way makeup and clothing manufacturers pedal their wears really irks me. They seem to be saying that one is not whole or worthy of being loved unless s/he wears their junk on their faces, or garments on their bodies. Why do they do it, and have so many people buy in? Perhaps due to the same reason that the ANT, needs the chocolate covering to appear appetizing, right? Perhaps makeup enables a person to exaggerate their good looks, just as a chocolate coating makes an ant delicious to eat.

I do not believe in keeping things a mystery by hiding behind a face of makeup until it is too late to turn back. That’s a classic bait-and-switch ploy. Generally, I’m romantically unimpressed by a lady’s skill with makeup; I’d rather know what she looks like without the shimmer and glamour of cosmetics so that I can learn straight away if I’m capable of falling in love with the real her.

Many spend so much time faking their beauty that they never learn how to show off their true beauty comfortably. Here, the ant tastes better, minus the chocolate. Rouges, powders, oils, buffers, foundations, mascara, and any other cosmetics may cover true age, hide blemishes, and accentuate one’s desirable features while downplaying the less interesting ones. But makeup cannot very long obscure the truly (or not) loveable parts of a lady; that whole part of her that once revealed, includes blemishes and all. It’s this whole part revealed that makes men and women (at least, those of substance) fall in love if they’re going to.

Such disguises confuse the issue however, by creating fake beauty and dysfunction in relationships. They trick our innocent bystander into swallowing the ant without knowing the true nature of the morsel beforehand. The chocolate hides the “anty” nature of the ant until it’s too late, just as makeup hides a woman’s true beauty until a man becomes too emotionally involved with her to pull away.

What these makeup lovers may not realize is that any love lust they create in another with their visual slights of hand, lasts only as long as the makeup stays in place. Eventually the cosmetics come off though, revealing the true beauty or lack there of. I’m turned if I find that makeup has been used to hoodwink me, because hiding one’s true appearance shows the change artist to be dishonest.

Ideally, men and women would meet wearing absolutely nothing – no clothes, no makeup, no cosmetics, and thus, no pretense. We’d see nothing but them in their unabashed entirety. This would simplify figuring out whom we might or might not love, because we’d see everyone’s true beauty, right up front. Since true beauty lasts, while the fake beauty that comes from makeup does not, we could more remaining attracted to a potential lover much longer than the false love lust that makeup use often generates. Why? The visual impressions that encourage love at first sight would not as likely vanish; not like they do when the skillful application of makeup inspires the love, but then comes off. Love then, would last longer than the first sighting, and in fact, become love at many sightings, an indefinite number in fact.

Since love that lasts looks a lot more like true love than the short-lived attractions for which makeup is often responsible, it hard to ignore the notion that true beauty, not makeup, wins true love. Find love without makeup, and chances are that the love you find will last, and thus, be more true.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Against Makeup
• Does Makeup Really Work?
• Find True Love For Lasting Happiness
• Finding True Love Gives Lasting Pleasure
• Love At First Sight Usually Fades At Second
• Why Resist Love At First Sight?

When judging a person, people say often that a person’s mental attractiveness should trump or overshadow his physical attractiveness  in anyone’s mind who is considering him as a possible lover.  Their reasons for this mental-over-physical ideology are varied and go something like the following:

• Beauty (physical attractiveness) fades over time but personality (mental attractiveness) is more permanent and so, is thus preferred.
• People drawn to bodies (physical attractiveness) care nothing about what’s in the mind (mental attractiveness).
• A man who is physically unattractive will probably have a much more attractive mind (mental attractiveness); so we should ignore his outsides (physical attractiveness) and focus on his insides (mental attractiveness).
• A person’s mind (personality) (mental attractiveness) is more under his control than is the state of his body (physical attractiveness). Thus his character (mental attractiveness) should mean more to someone checking him out than his bodily health (physical attractiveness).
• People who reject another because of his appearance (physical attractiveness or lack thereof) but do not at all consider his personality (mental attractiveness) in this decision, all have the same beauty standards, meaning that those rejected by one, will also be rejected by all.
• Judging another based solely on looks (physical attractiveness) is a bad thing because it ignores that better part of a whole person.  It ignores his personality (his mental attractiveness).
• There’s a prevailing expectation that people should be able to love another regardless of how physically pretty or ugly.
• People can choose who they desire, and so can be faulted if they refuse to date someone physically unattractive to them.

Well, it’s unclear as to whether someone’s mental powers are any less susceptible to the effects of aging than are their physical bodies. In fact, the brain (mind) I would argue is subject to the same forces of aging that the rest of the body is. Why would it not be? It’s a part of the same body after all.  It draws energy from the same blood supply that other body parts normally associated with physical beauty do. The brain grows tired when pushed too hard just as do the legs. The brain functions erratically, or stops functioning altogether when deprived of oxygen, calories, and nutrients; just as do breasts, arms, and feet.

Aside from being the place where a person’s higher mental functions occur, the brain is no different than the rest of the body in terms of what can happen to it over time. Damage to the brain such as found in head injuries, may do more harm to a person’s mental being than say, a blow to a leg would.

The brain therefore, is perhaps the most fragile organ in the body because it does so much, and can thus be damaged very easily even by an injury to a very small part of it.

The physical body may grow old, and that they say, makes physical beauty transitory and thus not a good commodity upon which to base a love relationship. But the brain can grow skeptical and forgetful too as it ages. It can become too rigid in its thinking, refuse to accept new knowledge, and the brain can be irreversibly made less attractive by traumatic experiences; experiences that leave the rest of the body unharmed so long as there’s no direct physical trauma applied.

Does the brain’s susceptibility to more catastrophic injuries make it less of a good measure of a man than his visible physical attributes? I think not. But nor does this make the body less of a measure either. A person’s rationale may escape him eventually through the use of alcohol or from his chronically poor choices of foods. Perhaps dumb is forever but smartness is certainly not. One may be smart in her twenties but quite dumb in her sixties just as one may be thin in his thirties but quite obese in his seventies. People once considered very intelligent often lose their mental faculties over time; they lose their memories and cognitive abilities as diseases like atherosclerosis and Alzheimer’s run their courses.

So the brain suffers no less from the process of aging than any other body part.  Aging does not exempt the brain. Thus those cerebral qualities (mental) that people regard as the better measure of a man than his apparent physical attributes, can be just as short-lived as that sexy set of six-pack abs (physical) or those wonderfully proportioned curves (physical).

Exercise the body and it thrives and looks nice. Exercise the brain, and it too thrives and produces an attractive personality. But allow either of these to go limp for too long and both will wither. Thus in my view, the brain is no more impervious to the ravages of living than is the rest of the body.

So why would the personality, which emanates from the brain, be any greater a measure of a person’s attractiveness than any other physical part? In the end, every part of a person dies, including the brain. There’s nothing about the brain that makes it any more permanent than any other part of the body. So I just don’t get why people put guys down for liking other body parts in addition to the brain.

The mind (mental attraction) is certainly not always the better part of the person than the rest of her body (physical attractiveness). Some out there have some pretty simplistic or ugly minds; whether they’re visually beautiful or ugly (physical attractiveness). There are some whose minds are such that, rather than getting into deep conversations with them, I’d just as soon hold hands, and say nothing at all. I appreciate a good mind when there’s one around. But if it’s not there, it’s not fair for anyone to expect me to relish it.

Since the brain (mental attractiveness) is just another part of the body (physical attractiveness), it is just as subject as the rest of the host body is to change and deterioration.  So I believe that the mind (mental attractiveness) of a person is no better a measure of his overall attractiveness than his good looks (physical attractiveness).  Nature and nurture affect both and whatever desirable affects on a lover that the mind and body have, are largely granted by destiny, and either or both will eventually be snatched away too. 

Tom Hesley

A lady recently said that she would leave a man who desires a   tall, thin woman, even if she was thin herself.  Such a thin-seeking man, she said, would not deserve someone like her.  She seemed to believe me a bigot for wanting a tall, thin woman for dating.

I responded that it’s not a question of what the thin-loving man deserves; but rather, of what automatically turns him on, whether he deserves it or not; two very different concepts. If you date a thin-seeking man but deny him that in return, then perhaps you don’t deserve him.  Often, it’s those not so thin that object the most loudly to us tall-thin-woman seekers.

People leave for many reasons besides their lover gaining copious amounts of extra weight. Most of us have left for one cause or another. So does that make us all “the same sort of [bad] people?” Do we then become shallow and imperceptive? Perhaps so. But that generalization is useless because as you know, people in this group come from all walks of life. We all reject others on some basis. In fact, we all discriminate. So, why is a person who rejects another for being too fat any more offensive than she who rejects because her lover developed a foul mouth or started smoking?

She then argued that one who would leave a heavy lover would also leave them if they became blind or developed some other physical or mental ailment.

I countered: The inference that someone, who would leave a formerly thin lover, who gets heavy during the course of the relationship, would also depart if they lost their vision, is flawed. It’s probably more false than true in fact, because unlike a vision loss or the loss of other bodily functions (due to the onset of age, many sicknesses, and disease), we can control our weight to a great degree through the choices and amounts of food we eat, and how much we exercise. Lovers therefore, tend (and rightly so I think) to hold us to higher account for a large girth than they would if we developed an unavoidable illness that we cannot. To a degree, we can choose to avoid excess weight and other diseases that result from over-indulgence; though admittedly, the discipline to actually stay thin eludes many. That does not make it impossible however. We can, if we wish it strongly enough, get our weight down. People do it all the time. The bottom line: It’s a faulty leap in logic to assume that just because a person would jilt another for a controllable illness like obesity, that they would also depart for blindness, which could not be avoided.  Because I want a tall thin woman therefore, does not mean that I’d leave her at the first signs of illness. 

Then, she suggested that people should fall in love with   the insides  of a person, and   not  their slim waistlines.  Only a bigot she said, would only consider the person’s outsides when deciding whether or not she’s worth his love. 

I responded that the whole business of the outside of a person vs. the inside makes no sense to me. Why do people value a person’s insides more than their outsides? Why is it that in the minds of many, a person’s insides comprise a greater, more esteem-able part of the person than the outsides? Consider that a person’s insides are subject to the same ravages of living as their surface attributes. So the argument that you should like them for their insides because outer beauty fades over time, is also flawed.  In fact, with the onset of numerous brain diseases such as dementia, “the insides” as you call them, grow less attractive over time as well. Show me a heavy person who looks unhealthy on the outside, and I’ll show you the same person that lacks health on the inside. A person’s internals and externals are so inextricably cross-connected (like the left and right sides of the brain via the corpus callosum) that a whole person cannot exist in either one of them separately. So like it or not, the outsides arguably, contribute just as much to this   whole person   as the insides.  A person is not whole without both. 

Besides, the outsides tell you a lot about a person’s interior; just like the jacket flaps that succinctly summarize the pages inside a book. They don’t reveal everything to be sure. But the outside summary (the look and immediately observable behaviors) supplies enough details about the individual (overall health, preferences, habits, diet choices, education, hardships, and values), to allow enough of an understanding about the person’s insides to determine whether they’d be a good lover for us or not.  A picture really is worth a thousand words (at least!). Thus, the outsides are not this separate and excusable commodity that people who are insecure about their looks often insist them to be.

Some say I’m a bigot for wanting a tall, thin woman while feeling no desire at all for the others.  But I’m just taking care of me.  I know (though I did not decide this) the kind of woman that instantly melts my heart and takes my breath away, and I really like holding hands with someone who can do that.  I like it so much that I will not deny myself that pleasure; not even to escape the bigot label.  So if pursuing my heart’s desire (while avoiding she who is not) makes me a bigot, then so be it.  I don’t care.  I AM a bigot, and I freely admit it. 

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Prettiest Women Have BMIs Of 15 To 20
• Thoughts on Bigotry
• Tom’s Love Quest –> Outer Vs. Inner Beauty

Is it wrong to seek different things from lovers than what you can provide to them yourself?  Often, people accuse each other of hypocrisy when the accused harbor dating double standards.  Men, they say, want women of greater attractiveness than they themselves offer (average men want stunning women, heavy men want thin women, thin men want curvy women, dumb men want smart women, and so on).  Women likewise, want more attractive men (poor women want rich men, good girls want bad boys, the wheelchair-bound want those who can walk, et al). Double standards in relationships abound when one partner wants something from the other that he himself does not (cannot) offer in return. 

Since  no   two people offer   exactly the same   sets of desires and gifts in love, we’ll never completely get rid of dating double standards.  In fact, the whole desire / gratification mechanism upon which love affairs flourish, depends on the presence of dating double standards.  So it makes little sense to object to double standards in dating relationships, since they’re so ubiquitous and so   necessary.  While it’s fair to strive to avoid them when making public policy (as in dolling out medical care and other pursuits that serve the common good), eliminating dating double standards would destroy the very foundations upon which successful relationships rest.  Healthy romances rely on healthy amounts of double standards in relationships.Thus, holding a double standard in love is no character flaw because double standards in relationships cannot be avoided.

Also consider that people want what they want, regardless of what they offer in exchange.  You don’t just stop wanting the things you do just because the crowd thinks you should.  In fact, who among that crowd can rightly say whether a person actually deserves to get what they desire, except for the people from whom they’re seeking it? Ideally in a truly free society, people spend little or no time changing what they want, and all of their time working on getting it because, that’s human nature and it’s what makes the worlds of love and economics go around. 

Fishermen like steak but have only fish to trade for it.  So, should they renounce their desires for steak because they have no steak to give?  No. They ought instead, to find someone who’s willing to give them steak for their fish, rather than doing without steak altogether.  

Only if it turns out that absolutely no one who has steak wants to trade it for fish, would it make sense for the fishermen to give up their hopes of ever enjoying steak.  Here, the double standard of fishermen looking for someone with steak when they themselves cannot return it in kind is only “bad” when no trader can accommodate it.  It matters in no other respect than this, what the crowd thinks.  Likewise, if an average-looking guy desires dating top-notch women, he ought to be able to do so without crowd ridicule for holding a double standard.  It’s between him and the women he likes.  If a beautiful lady likes him back, then the crowd should support them and not act to sabotage them.  

Indeed by definition of the word   want,   we humans want what we have not.  The fact that we do not have it (deprivation) is one big reason why we want it in the first place.  If we had it already, then we would not want it.  So we cannot really stop desiring a person or thing unless we actually get it.  Repressing our desire for certain classes of lovers just to appease the double standard accusers   does not   eliminate the desire nor does it really eliminate the double standard in relationships.  Repression may in fact, intensify it (in that we sometimes desire more, the most forbidden people).  So it’s best to avoid purging a dating double standard by renouncing the needs that make it up. 

Further, we cannot easily change what we want.  While we can decide not to act to gratify a particular desire, again, the desire remains unchanged usually.  So it’s ironic that people offended at dating double standards would get so riled up at them, since the people they accuse of holding them cannot usually alter the particular desires that serve as premises for said double standards.

Finally, since desires cannot in any largely practical ways be altered, a person’s best bet at fulfillment is to actually   gratify   his love desires; not renounce or repress them.  He should seek to delight his desires as long as he has them and as long as doing so hurts no one.  Why?  Because if people don’t get what they want in love, then they’re unfulfilled and will probably remain so for as long as the desires persist.  Lacking individual fulfillment imposes costs to society as well. 

So, seeking someone who compliments us (offers things we do not (cannot) offer in return) may make us hypocrites.  But so what?  It’s better to be dubbed a hypocrite and accused of maintaining a dating double standard in a relationship, than to live a forever-longing life. Thus, dating double standards are okay.  Without double standards in relationships, there would be far less reason to have a relationship in the first place.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Definition: Offensive Dating Double Standard

Let’s illustrate the greater power of   perfect 10’s   by considering a group of one thousand males from all walks of life, all gathered together to judge females. The ladies under consideration walk on a model’s runway before all the men.  The men then vote whether or not they’d take each woman out. In this scenario, we’d expect that a hundred of the thousand men would say they’d want to go out with a woman rated at a one. For fives, five-hundred men would date her, and for our most able-bodied female, since she has a nine point five rating, 950 men would date her. The higher her position in the pecking orders (as indicated by her attractiveness rating), the more men would wish to date her.  So she’d get to pick (peck) the man she wants   before   women of lower attractiveness ratings.

It’s a short stretch then to infer that for a given stranger, the perfect 10 produces the highest degree of romantic gratification in a lover, while the 1 produces just one tenth as much. The 10 generates way more of the pleasing, animal sensations (love lust) in a lover than does the 1, and this phenomenon has pronounced positive effects.  Obviously then, the perfect 10 enjoys mostly the high side of any romantic   power struggles   and power imbalances she might encounter.

Studies suggest 10’s to be better gratified in love (as well as better able to gratify another) than those rated lower. The more attractive the person, the more likely he or she is to be fulfilled in love.  Thus, assuming that these tens mate with other tens, their relationships are healthier over all – less infidelity, less abuse, more willingness to cooperate with and tolerate one another, more lasting and stronger passion, and so on.

People (including other 10’s) value 10’s more as a result.  Thus, they disrespect and dismiss them less. The 10’s therefore generally wield more power than the 1’s, 5’s, and 6’s.  So people are less likely to cross them. Life over all is certainly easier in love for a perfect 10 as she’s likely to rarely if ever be on the losing end of a power imbalance in a romantic relationship, and probably wins most power struggles she comes upon. 

The 10 would thus have more prospective lovers from which to choose. Obviously, the woman with 950 men wanting her has more choices available to her, than the one with just 100 suitors. So, the perfect 10 need compromise less. Because she’s   more desirable to more men, her ability to attract highly desirable males is greater than that of less striking females, as   more choices available   generally implies   better choices made. There’s more cream at the top of a bigger vat of milk, just as more top-notch ladies would be found floating in the group of 950, than in the group of just 100. The perfect 10 female thus, has greater access to the best men than those not so perfect, and this gives her a decided advantage in most any power struggle with a lover.

Studies also suggest that relationships work best when power is balanced or when the man has slightly more control; that is, when the lovers respect each other with near equality and with minimal subordination. Ideally, neither one dominates very much in ability or knowledge or good looks for that matter.  Certainly, neither participant could be said to completely rule in a healthy union. Power struggles would thus occur with both less frequency and less severity.  The healthiest relationships are true partnerships, where each person has near equal influence in matters of significance.

We might expect therefore, that the near-perfect 10 would tend to date other near-perfect 10’s (those in her own league, so to speak).  Why?  Because not only would more perfect 10 males want her, but also only other perfect 10’s would generate in her the same level of desire and respect for them that she does in them for her, and this would equalize the power imbalance that results from attractiveness deficits, and curb any incidental power struggles as well.  Only with other 10′s would such debilitating power imbalances not exist. 

With less attractive men (the 6’s, 4’s, and of course, the 1’s), this perfect 10 would quickly become the ruling party, primarily because she has more choices of desirable men.  So there’s less reason for her to put up with low pleasure levels from those men less attractive than she is herself.

Any lower-rated man with more than rocks in his head would sense this implied superiority.  As such, if he truly wishes to keep dating the perfect 10, he’ll put her wishes before his own; sometimes at the expense of his self-esteem, sanity, and even his life. He’ll be relegated to an oppressive serving role as opposed to the healthier equal-partner role, because if he makes too many waves, his lady will, with ease, simply leave him and find another.  He’ll capitulate in more power struggles with her as well.  Not only does this self-imposed silence erode his self-respect. She will also soon grow bored with him as the push-over that he’s become; the push-over that he must be in order to avoid challenging her so much that she becomes irritated and leaves him.  So while avoiding power struggles may keep her in his life a bit longer, the far more lasting solution would be for him to somehow become more attractive.  Only then could he truly remove her edge, and enjoy true equality in their relationship.

It’s no wonder then that power imbalance spells doom in most any union. The less attractive man will leave because his healthy self-esteem prevents his enjoyment of being dominated. Or if he hasn’t sufficient self-esteem for that, he’ll lash out against his perfect 10 girlfriend due to his pent up anger of her pushing him around. Even if he stays without noticeable symptoms of frustration,   she   will likely leave simply because as stated above, she can do better.

In either case, when two lovers have sufficiently different attractiveness ratings, the more attractive one commands too much greater power in the association than the less attractive one.  This power imbalance spells doom for their relationship, because she’ll win all the power struggles except those that she doesn’t really care to win.  Indeed, perfect 10′s do indeed win more power struggles. 

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Asking For Help
• Blind Hardships
• Help From Sighted Lovers
• More Help For The Blind, Please!
• Power Imbalance: Blind Man Dating Sighted Woman

I believe in  and have insisted on the presence of love at first sight (LAFS) in my love relationships, because I’ve found that people   never   grow attractive over time, if they do not appear so in the first moments of first meeting them. Indeed, we should not have to sit and scratch our heads, weighing the pros and cons, and wondering, “Hmmm, do I really desire this woman?” Now we might ponder her trustworthiness that way, as we should; but not her sheer desirability. Love-at-first-sight represents an  instant recognition  on both conscious and unconscious levels, that the beheld woman might be a good candidate for further consideration as a potentially great lover. Love-at-first-sight efficiently considers the following:

• Her bodily shape (a great indicator of health, age, and vitality),
• Her body language (tells if she might be interested in us, her social status, and her overall manner (rough, gentle, sensitive, or oblivious)).
• How she walks and talks (good info on her breading, upbringing, and potential irreconcilable cultural and value differences).
• Her waist to hip ratio (hints at whether she’ll have greater or fewer complications during pregnancy).
• How she smells (tells whether she’s likely to be habitually clean, or dirty, or if she smokes or is diseased)
• How we react to her sexually (a cue as to how sexually satisfying she’ll be in the bedroom).

Now we’d rather avoid dating people to whom we’re not attracted, and love-at-first-sight guides us in this aim. If we only date those for whom love-at-first-sight is strong, we’re less likely to be disappointed once she finally removes her clothes.

Of course, love-at-first-sight cannot reliably be used as the only basis for eternal happiness, because it offers no guarantees. We can’t know for example, if we’ll want to marry someone tomorrow whom we’ve just met today, regardless of the intensity of the love-at-first-sight we feel. Women especially site this limitation as good reason for completely dismissing love-at-first-sight as a useful tool for detecting the most suitable mates. But whoever said that love-at-fist-sight works like a crystal ball? It does not. All it suggests is possibility, and nothing definite.

More specifically, love-at-first-sight is, in my view, a necessary first step in building a long-term fulfilling relationship; especially for males. Men are more likely to achieve maximal satisfaction in love with ladies they initially deem absolutely stunning and thus, where there’s a strong initial attraction.  Unfortunately, women who only move men to feelings of trusting and comfortable friendship will typically never become the highly intriguing or explosive lovers that so many of us are looking for. 

While we can’t know based on love-at-first-sight alone that a relationship   will indeed work out,   we can rest assured that without love-at-first-sight, it will likely fail. Or, if it succeeds, then it will for the wrong reasons.  The relationship born of friendship will have started on those same shaky grounds that will not sure up over time. The presence of love-at-first-sight does not assure that we’ll be able to achieve lasting and gratified intimacy with the candidate, although it helps immensely. It’s hard therefore to imagine couples lasting very long who did not feel love at first sight early in their associations.

Further, by definition, the magnetism of love at first sight appears immediately.  Yet contrary to popular belief, these initial love feelings typically can last indefinitely, so long as the combination of variables that founded love-at-first-sight doesn’t change much.  These include personality, behavior, habits, physical appearance, health, and so on.

It’s interesting how so many women believe that that the shorter the time that love takes to appear, the less substantial it is. Easy come, easy go they think.  But I would argue otherwise — that the more quickly love lust appears (as it does in love-at-first-sight), the greater the chances of the attraction lasting a very long time. You’ve heard the saying that the quicker they fall, the harder they fall. This is so true in love.  My experiences with   [First Love]   make that crystal clear in my mind. I fell immediately, and stayed in love for decades.  Indeed love-at-first-sight began every one of my own long-term love interests. 

So you’ve probably guessed by now that I believe strongly in love-at-first-sight, and recognize how essential a component it is in attaining lasting satisfaction in love.  I would never begin a new love relationship without it.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• The Lovelorn, Antisocial?
• The Pitfalls Of Pity Love
• We Don’t Live Happily Without Love
• Why Resist Love At First Sight?

References

• Love-At-First-Sight   definition on Wikipedia

Dear [Mentat],

People expect to see folks of like attractiveness together.  They talk and act in ways that encourage that, and   without pity   for the less attractive person, society discourages the stunningly beautiful, fully  sighted woman   from dating that ugly loser guy. When one partner is very much more attractive than the other, the public shuns and sabotages such unions. They (intentionally or not) behave to undermine associations between differently attractive people, employing everything from off-the-cuff, innocent but diminishing comments, all the way up to lying and backstabbing. Through these tactics and others, society in large degree, dictates the   pecking order, without pity for those it casts out.

You remember when I was seeing  [Emmy], that young woman twenty years of age, and how that guy Bob in Philly went behind my back, trying to convince her not to date me? He obviously was trying to cut in front of me in the pecking order as he saw it, and he felt that he had every right to do so.  Plus, it wasn’t just him.  So too did a few women try to talk her out of me, when I visited Buffalo in 2004. Their typical comments to her, without pity or compassion for my feelings, and without ever having met me, much less knowing me, were:

• You’re too good for him.
• You need to find yourself a   hot   guy.
• You don’t want to be seen with an ugly guy like Tom, do you?
• You could do so much better, and you deserve to.
• He’s so lucky to have someone like you because ladies of your caliber wouldn’t usually pay him any mind.
• Any old man would want a young chick like you, just like Tom does. So his love isn’t anything special.
• I bet all he wants is your body, since you’re so beautiful.  He’ll never really love you therefore.
• Why he’s so ugly that he couldn’t get one date in five years. But you. You could have a great lover every night if you weren’t wasting your life with him.
• You’re a popular girl. But he’s a nobody.
• What could he possibly have to offer you?
• You’re strange if you see anything in Tom.
• Tom’s a nice guy, yes, but you could have so much more fun if you picked a more attractive and manly fellow.

You get the idea. When someone manages to butt ahead in the pecking order line, others standing there do their best to pull him back to where they think he belongs; like crabs in a boiling pot of water that pull those back down who attempt to escape. Like them, it seems that cultural forces work hard to make sure we don’t get someone any more attractive than we ourselves are.  Indeed, society dictates the pecking order, and does so without much pity for those it muscles or shames out of desirable relationships.

Now back to our sighted woman and   blind man   discussed earlier   here.  Since the sighted woman is a 9.5 out of 10 in terms of attractiveness, then in light of the discussion above, she’ll produce more romantic gratification in any fellow (including the blind man) than the blind man will in her. I’m assuming here that any romantic advantage a perfect 10 has, occurs mostly at level three in Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. This may be fallacious, I know. But I need to do it for a moment to make my point.

Now, our highly attractive sighted woman is only about forty percent as likely to be gratified romantically by the blind man because he’s only about forty percent as attractive as she is (He’s a 4 and she’s a 10). So in this simple and admittedly stilted scenario, the blind man will benefit much more in a romantic sense from the attractive sighted woman, than she will benefit from him.  This assumes that society doesn’t meaningfully thwart their relationship. Also, since the pretty sighted woman has more latitude in selecting more attractive men, I’d expect that if she’s not as gratified as she could be, and at the same time, has the power to become more gratified, then why would she stay with the blind man? 

Maybe she pities him. Maybe the needs that   she   is looking to gratify through her involvement with the blind man aren’t as much level three as they are level five. Specifically, she wants to gratify her self-actualization,   growth needs   of showing compassion to a soul who yearns for it.  But the blind man on the other hand wants to gratify his  deficiency needs  of love. In short, she primarily wants to   give   in order to self-actualize herself, while he wants primarily to   get,   to quench his thirst for love. His need to receive love is thus, more urgent than her need to give it.  Thus, we have the asymmetry I spoke of earlier in my  Power Imbalance: Blind Man Dating Sighted Woman   piece. Can this sort of symbiotic relationship work in a healthful way? Intuitively, it seems not, though this would bear more complete investigation later.

At any rate given all this, I doubt that asking women to form attractions based on the compassion a blind man might inspire, will work any better than other attraction strategies that require no compassion. Sighted women probably won’t be moved by the blind man’s pleas.  But even if they are, their family and friends will probably discourage them, just as   [Emmy's]   friends dissuaded her above, from going out with me.  They may pity love the blind man.  But only without pity will they truly love him in binding, romantic ways. 

Even if the sighted women answering the call to pity are so moved to love the blind man, I’m not sure most men of conscience could really let go sexually, because he’d doubt if she’s really enjoying the sex too. If the blind man ever suspected that they weren’t, then I doubt he’d enjoy it either. Now the sighted women might get some thrill at level five from making love to the blind man, insofar as they would be performing a good deed; doing a great thing that few other women would be “big enough” to do. But I’d wonder as do you, if that would be truly enough for these women over time. I personally would just feel guilty and self-conscious getting off, if I thought that she wasn’t experiencing the same degree and type of carnal joy.

Even if a sighted woman is moved to love a blind man, she’ll probably end up dominating him and holding her superior attractiveness over his head without pity; implicitly if not blatantly. I wouldn’t want to be on the short end of that power imbalance or to feel the sighted woman pulling my heart along as I run in the dirty road behind her, gasping for air while eating the dust from her boots. It’s no fun doing your best, only to have some beautiful woman say that you’re not doing well enough, or that you should be doing something different.

E. G. Marshall, on the CBS Radio Mystery Theatre, summed it up well, saying:  Should a man pick a woman more capable [attractive] than he, then he gets humiliated. If he picks someone less capable, then he gets boredom. Thus the real challenge is to pick someone truly equal to ourselves. I just hope that I’m capable of finding long-term satisfaction with a woman of equal attractiveness to my own.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Power Imbalance: Blind Man Dating Sighted Woman
• Asking For Help
• Blind Hardships
• Help From Sighted Lovers
• More Help For The Blind, Please!

References

• Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs   definition on Wikipedia