My sister is with a guy who just turned 60. He's good looking and in fantastic shape. He's kind, smart, observant and has a wide circle of friends.
Just before they started dating, he went to an energy healer we know. He asked her why he hadn't ever been able to find a loving, committed partner, despite being objectively hot and a good catch.
She replied, "you aren't in your body. You're hovering above and to the right of it."
It was true. Lots of people with a concatenation of trauma deal with it by exiting themselves from their physical presence.
He started regularly meditating on being in his body. A month later, he and my sister went on their first date.
She says there wouldn't have been a second date if he hadn't been palpably grounded.
Which is what Polly's beautiful rant is describing how to do.
"Do you want them to be answering your question, or making a statement of their own volition?"
"So stop forming yourself into a question mark. Stop asking for more from the wrong sources."
This is the gold right here. I spent *so* much time trying to be the answer men were looking for. The last one even asked me to try to make a case for myself and our relationship.
You don't have to sell yourself or prove your worth. Leave these guys to double tap on IG while you attract people who appreciate who you are, three-dimensional, and in the flesh.
I had a boyfriend for a while - one I was wildly attracted to - who once said to me, “I’m like some obscure, bitter Italian liqueur: most people aren’t into me, but those who are, are *really* into me.” And I thought, ‘hot damn, that’s the attitude I need to cultivate.’ And I have tried to! But as Heather notes, it’s always a work in progress.
Now I have a vague feeling I have told this story on here before... well, I’m getting old, I repeat myself sometimes. Just makes me an aged liqueur, I guess. 😅
Focus on the guys that do see and want you. Pick out the funny, smart, kind ones and go on multiple dates with them where you do fun, collaborative activities together, especially activities that make you both feel a bit anxious. Focus on the fish in your own pond rather than the pretty ones in the pond over. The right guy for you will think you’re amazing.
Also be careful your stories haven’t placed limits on how you present yourself. Sometimes women who don’t see themselves as conventionally attractive don’t allow themselves to wear clothes/makeup/hair that their pretty counterparts will. It’s like they surrender to the idea that looks is not their thing. You may inadvertently be signalling that you aren’t interested in attracting a partner. It sounds like you want to connect with your sexy side. A good place to start is by experimenting with clothes/hair/makeup.
Thank you as always, Heather. Your advice here reminds me of a snippet from a response you gave on an older letter that has stuck with me since I read it:
"When you are dating men, love yourself first and last."
Decentering from men and their arbitrary values is critical in learning, understanding, and appreciating who you are and what is important to you. That way, you'll know to focus on only the very few men who value you the way you do yourself and you won't pursue and ponder the men who don't.
Snippet that hit home: "When you crave approval and acceptance from others and you linger around anxiously waiting for it, it erodes your sense of self and unsettles the ground under your feet. "
No joke, my vision blurred and I cried a bit. I felt seen. It me, as the kids say (do they say that anymore?).
Perfectly encapsulates part of the dynamic of my life and the fraught nature of the situationship in which I was involved, until last month when I ended it. I was never going to get what I needed from him (approval/acceptance) and yet I kept going to the hardware store for milk when I knew damn well they didn't have any, and never will.
I love this. Thank you for answering this letter. I went through a similar situation with my best guy friend that I'm still trying to make sense of. We had the most amazing friendship - so, so much laughter - like, laughing to the point of tears, frequently - shared interests, we would talk for *hours*/day for years on end, even had a (very fun but also, obviously, very fraught) physical relationship for six months. But he could never get himself to "feel romantically." Eventually we had to stop speaking.
What's hard for me is not being able to get angry at him for it. He gave a few reasons for why he thought a relationship would be hard (e.g., my anxiety issues, which is more than fair) but mostly he was just "afraid of hurting me." I also know I'm not his physical type, but I'm also not exactly an ogre. Anyway, a lot more complicated details but I find it so challenging to not shame my intensity/anxiety/body for this huge void in my life. It feels juvenile to need to have someone to blame to make it okay, and yet...I wonder if it's healthy to try to conjure more disdain when guys do this?
Anger is information, and getting curious about why you feel it helps you to uncover your real needs and desires. Taking refuge in disdain can feel self-protective and even inspiring and empowering at times. I think for me, understanding myself as powerful sometimes includes imagining myself as indifferent to the foibles of people who can't see me clearly. Of course I'm not truly indifferent or I wouldn't need mind exercises to feel good. But none of us are truly indifferent to much, even if we go through times when we can stay aloft and not get dragged down into the muck of this broken world.
Personally, I try to move away from blame in the case of other people's personalities and preferences. I can make jokes about what other people value that I don't value, or even take issue with it, but in terms of people I love or have loved, it feels better generally for me to move into a non-ownership and non-controlling position, one that says, "You like what you like and that has nothing to do with me. Pursue your desires and be happy!" I'm not in an open marriage but I still try to cultivate this attitude about myself and my husband, because it feels much more romantic and also relaxing in a weird way to make sure I'm honoring the growth of everyone I care about, even when it has some negative impacts on my life.
I often write about living your values and knowing what you believe in because I know how much strength and peace it's brought me, at times when I was getting obsessed or needy or rigid or even distant, to remind myself that the point of all relationships is to help each other grow and feel more joy. Now obviously it's easier to embrace this kind of stance when you're my age, your kids are a little older, and you're not dependent on anyone else in ways that make it hard to be free and easy about their choices. But generally speaking, I find that letting people be who they are and love whatever they love, even when you find it a tiny bit shallow or irritating, feels like a more soothing and also empowering way to move through the world.
So I guess my answer is that disdain can create healthy distance, but if someone is mostly faultless and also dear to you, the benefits of keeping your heart open, remaining compassionate, and forgiving them for their flaws -- whether they're actually in your life or not -- are hard to argue with. The more you forgive them, the more you forgive yourself, and the less you bring shame and blame into a world where most people are just doing their best to feel good with not a lot of help or guidance.
Thank you for writing all of that out, it makes a lot of sense, and got me thinking about the central issue.
If a person sees and loves me, but ultimately says "I don't love you *like that* - I don't want to spend my *life* with you" - it's reminiscent of how I sometimes feel about myself which is: "I love you, I can see that you try so hard, you have a lot of great qualities" -- *and* there's so much about you that annoys me and I wish would change, Jesus Christ!"
So if I *don't* feel anger or disdain or make a person who feels that way about me wrong, then it's like I'm saying their opinion of me is valid, and I'm rejecting myself in some way.
I understand what you mean, and I often used to feel like other people's ideas and feelings about me were a verdict on my value as a human being. I wouldn't have admitted that this was the way I saw things at the time, but it was sort of the basis of this dread and shame I carried around with me, and carried into all of my relationships.
One of the reasons I write about shame so often is that, before you reckon with your shame directly, it's almost like this force in your life that amplifies any and all negative or even neutral feedback. You're like a person who's tripping on drugs and thinks a Domino's ad on TV is telling you the meaning of life, in other words. Shame takes other people's very ordinary and not all that damning preferences and tastes and amplifies them to the point where you feel like a big loser who is irredeemably broken and will never be loved.
My personal experience is that the more I confronted the things that people don't always love about me head-on, the easier it became for me to accept myself instead of telling myself a warped story about how anyone who didn't like me wasn't that great to begin with. A lot of excellent people think I'm pretty meh or even deeply annoying or deluded. Plenty of people are not interested in my ideas and they do not find me charming at all. Ha ha BUT SERIOUSLY WHAT IS WRONG WITH THEM? The more I grew to accept that specifically when I'm happy and effusive and open, a lot of people won't love me or will find suspicious or untrustworthy. I have an intense energy and that's never going to go over well in this very intensity-averse world. But it's not just the culture: I prefer exuberant, garrulous, and sometimes obnoxious interactions at times, and a lot of very interesting, great people just hate that.
And Jesus, almost everyone alive doesn't want to spend their LIFE with me. I mean, taking "I don't want to spend my entire life with you" as an indication that you suck is actually hilarious when you think about it. First of all, many, many people don't realize it, but they don't want to spend the rest of their life with *an actual person with separate feelings and emotions.* They want to spend their life with a fantasy version of a person, and they'll keep looking for that fantasy forever, and rejecting anyone who shows signs of having strong opinions and passionate feelings and yes, flaws.
I'm going into detail here in order to illustrate not only that rejection isn't really that personal, but even when it is, it's not relevant beyond a gentle nudge to reckon with your shame and accept yourself for who you are. The more you accept flaws and unattractive and uncharming dimensions of who you are, the more you'll live in the real world with real people and become capable of falling in love with and aligning with and supporting those real people, in spite of their real, continuing, persistent flaws -- which all people have, always.
Ultimately you need to enjoy your own personality and live the way you want to live. I love getting obnoxious, opinionated, talkative, critical, and deeply weird, so I seek out people who enjoy these dimensions of who I am, at least some of the time, and I am a very good friend to people who might be experienced by others as very strange or even self-involved at times. I have strong preferences about who I want to spend time with, too, and I respect those preferences instead of constantly telling myself, like I did just a few years ago, that I *should* like people and hang out with them just because they wanted to. Saying no to friendships I didn't enjoy was "mean," and I needed to be nice.
Once you stop rejecting yourself and start respecting your own needs AND your own flaws, you don't encounter other people's opinions as rejections so much as preferences. And when people are insistent in stating THIS REJECTION IS ABOUT YOU, AND HOW FUCKED UP YOU ARE! TAKE IT PERSONALLY! Well, it's always a manifestation of how deeply they're locked in a shame-fueled pattern of rejecting themselves. People who don't give themselves room to breathe and live tend to become punitive about other people's preferences.
All of the above can sound like an elaborate justification for continuing to have a shitty personality, of course! That's just how it sounds to accept yourself. People will think you should stop that shit and become who they want you to be instead. But the truth is that you're the boss of your own life, and there's no objective verdict on you. If you're living your values and you know it, and showing up for the people who matter to you, and working hard to make the world a better place, that tends to really turn down the volume on other people's input and feedback. You trust yourself and feed yourself and it brings good things into your life.
But you don't want to spend the rest of your life with *anyone* -- AND you don't stop taking rejection personally -- until *you* want to spend the rest of your life with you. That's actually hard work! Loving who you are and respecting your own needs is difficult. It's not how most of us were raised. But grappling with your shame and accepting your own preferences are two steps along the path to loving and enjoying yourself for the first time.
Thank you, I really appreciate this. Ironically, it's also made me think about how challenging it can be for me to accept the flaws of others, especially in close relationships and friendships. There's usually a tipping point (especially with men) beyond which they can do no wrong, but it takes quite a bit to get there. I'm likely just as guilty in moments for what I accuse others of, and it's good for me to recognize that.
I adore this response. Something that has helped me understand this stuff better is reading Tressie McMillan Cottom. She explains that conventional attractiveness is social currency and men want to be with social media hots bc it actually makes them worth more in society than if they were with a non conventionally attractive woman. She also rebukes the idea that “everyone is beautiful!!” because particular types of beauty are worth more than others and we’re gaslighting people by telling them they’re beautiful when they are suffering real consequences for not fitting into the beauty standard.
Looks and chemistry (as Heather has noted before) are both overrated for long term relationships. This cuts both ways , naturally. The most attractive person in the world is the one attracted to you. That's the place to start. Find someone attracted to you Sexy! No doubt, there are people attracted to your smarts, and that will automatically improve any other qualities you have.
I love it when I get something wrong and only notice 7 hours later. I meant that a person attracted to you should be more attractive to you, than a person who is ambivalent. The overall goal, a person you find attractive who you are attracted to. Not that I know how to do that without a little luck.
Oh, and here's a gut check, if you find out somebody you might be ambivalent about likes you romantically, and instead of going yeah(!) you find them less attractive than before, that's telling you something about how you see yourself.
Have you read On Love by Alain de Botton? There's this quote that your comment reminded me of...
"There is usually a Marxist moment in every relationship, the moment when it becomes clear that love is reciprocated. The way it is resolved depends on the balance between self-love and self-hatred. If self-hatred gains the upper hand, then the one who has received love will declare that the beloved (on some excuse or other) is not good enough for them (not good enough by virtue of associating with no-goods). But if self-love gains the upper hand, both partners may accept that seeing their love reciprocated is not proof of how low the beloved is, but of how lovable they have themselves turned out to be."
I haven't, and thank you. I know of the author, but I feel as though I've only read excerpts or maybe an essay. I'm going to get that based on your recommendation, that quote from the book, and also because the blurb I found is very interesting. What a brilliant quote, so true, so right through the heart!
I've never related to being sexy, because of the passive, objectifying associations the word has in my mind. Sexual, on the other hand, sits perfectly in line with being a smart, powerful woman with an abundant life. It doesn't need some checked out guy to validate it. Audre Lorde's Uses of the Erotic is such a good description of what a fully integrated sexuality can do.
"Make it your practice not just to reassure yourself, not just to quiet your anxious mind, not just to refuse to berate yourself for not taking some supposedly perfect shape, but to elevate what you already are."
I've been working really hard at those first three things, but elevation, oh my goodness. I want that so much AND it seems so scary to imagine letting go of whatever's holding me back.
This post really resonated with me. I am someone who spent the first half of her life feeling ugly and “not enough” and feeling lucky to be in committed relationships with men at all. It took major work for me to challenge that nasty inner critic (that came from who-knows-where), remove the clouds from my eyes, and see the beauty that I really possessed. Thank you for writing this.
It’s an interesting topic for sure. The tricky thing is: none of us can help what we’re attracted to. So there’s that. Also, I’ve always found that the harder I want someone the further away they seem to move. Some weird, inexplicable law of the cosmos it seems. It does often seem broadly speaking that there’s sort of a correlation between traditional/conventional physical beauty and...how shall we say this...less brains. Not always, obviously. But the prettiest women often do seem to not be the sharpest. Probably it’s the same for men. All this aside: There are plenty of men who dig intelligent, sharp women. There’s something very attractive about that. And we often want what we can’t have. I do feel intimidated around women smarter than me...but I also find it to be a juicy challenge. When you find a woman with beauty and brains it’s just magical and dangerous 😳
My sister is with a guy who just turned 60. He's good looking and in fantastic shape. He's kind, smart, observant and has a wide circle of friends.
Just before they started dating, he went to an energy healer we know. He asked her why he hadn't ever been able to find a loving, committed partner, despite being objectively hot and a good catch.
She replied, "you aren't in your body. You're hovering above and to the right of it."
It was true. Lots of people with a concatenation of trauma deal with it by exiting themselves from their physical presence.
He started regularly meditating on being in his body. A month later, he and my sister went on their first date.
She says there wouldn't have been a second date if he hadn't been palpably grounded.
Which is what Polly's beautiful rant is describing how to do.
"Do you want them to be answering your question, or making a statement of their own volition?"
"So stop forming yourself into a question mark. Stop asking for more from the wrong sources."
This is the gold right here. I spent *so* much time trying to be the answer men were looking for. The last one even asked me to try to make a case for myself and our relationship.
You don't have to sell yourself or prove your worth. Leave these guys to double tap on IG while you attract people who appreciate who you are, three-dimensional, and in the flesh.
“The last one even asked me to try to make a case for myself and our relationship.”
*Fuck* that guy. That is all xx
I had a boyfriend for a while - one I was wildly attracted to - who once said to me, “I’m like some obscure, bitter Italian liqueur: most people aren’t into me, but those who are, are *really* into me.” And I thought, ‘hot damn, that’s the attitude I need to cultivate.’ And I have tried to! But as Heather notes, it’s always a work in progress.
I am fighting the urge to change my bio to “some obscure, bitter, Italian liqueur”. Thanks for sharing this 👏
Now I have a vague feeling I have told this story on here before... well, I’m getting old, I repeat myself sometimes. Just makes me an aged liqueur, I guess. 😅
As another aged bitter liqueur who repeats herself? Worry not, this one bears repeating!
Focus on the guys that do see and want you. Pick out the funny, smart, kind ones and go on multiple dates with them where you do fun, collaborative activities together, especially activities that make you both feel a bit anxious. Focus on the fish in your own pond rather than the pretty ones in the pond over. The right guy for you will think you’re amazing.
Also be careful your stories haven’t placed limits on how you present yourself. Sometimes women who don’t see themselves as conventionally attractive don’t allow themselves to wear clothes/makeup/hair that their pretty counterparts will. It’s like they surrender to the idea that looks is not their thing. You may inadvertently be signalling that you aren’t interested in attracting a partner. It sounds like you want to connect with your sexy side. A good place to start is by experimenting with clothes/hair/makeup.
Thank you as always, Heather. Your advice here reminds me of a snippet from a response you gave on an older letter that has stuck with me since I read it:
"When you are dating men, love yourself first and last."
Decentering from men and their arbitrary values is critical in learning, understanding, and appreciating who you are and what is important to you. That way, you'll know to focus on only the very few men who value you the way you do yourself and you won't pursue and ponder the men who don't.
Snippet that hit home: "When you crave approval and acceptance from others and you linger around anxiously waiting for it, it erodes your sense of self and unsettles the ground under your feet. "
No joke, my vision blurred and I cried a bit. I felt seen. It me, as the kids say (do they say that anymore?).
Perfectly encapsulates part of the dynamic of my life and the fraught nature of the situationship in which I was involved, until last month when I ended it. I was never going to get what I needed from him (approval/acceptance) and yet I kept going to the hardware store for milk when I knew damn well they didn't have any, and never will.
I love this. Thank you for answering this letter. I went through a similar situation with my best guy friend that I'm still trying to make sense of. We had the most amazing friendship - so, so much laughter - like, laughing to the point of tears, frequently - shared interests, we would talk for *hours*/day for years on end, even had a (very fun but also, obviously, very fraught) physical relationship for six months. But he could never get himself to "feel romantically." Eventually we had to stop speaking.
What's hard for me is not being able to get angry at him for it. He gave a few reasons for why he thought a relationship would be hard (e.g., my anxiety issues, which is more than fair) but mostly he was just "afraid of hurting me." I also know I'm not his physical type, but I'm also not exactly an ogre. Anyway, a lot more complicated details but I find it so challenging to not shame my intensity/anxiety/body for this huge void in my life. It feels juvenile to need to have someone to blame to make it okay, and yet...I wonder if it's healthy to try to conjure more disdain when guys do this?
Anger is information, and getting curious about why you feel it helps you to uncover your real needs and desires. Taking refuge in disdain can feel self-protective and even inspiring and empowering at times. I think for me, understanding myself as powerful sometimes includes imagining myself as indifferent to the foibles of people who can't see me clearly. Of course I'm not truly indifferent or I wouldn't need mind exercises to feel good. But none of us are truly indifferent to much, even if we go through times when we can stay aloft and not get dragged down into the muck of this broken world.
Personally, I try to move away from blame in the case of other people's personalities and preferences. I can make jokes about what other people value that I don't value, or even take issue with it, but in terms of people I love or have loved, it feels better generally for me to move into a non-ownership and non-controlling position, one that says, "You like what you like and that has nothing to do with me. Pursue your desires and be happy!" I'm not in an open marriage but I still try to cultivate this attitude about myself and my husband, because it feels much more romantic and also relaxing in a weird way to make sure I'm honoring the growth of everyone I care about, even when it has some negative impacts on my life.
I often write about living your values and knowing what you believe in because I know how much strength and peace it's brought me, at times when I was getting obsessed or needy or rigid or even distant, to remind myself that the point of all relationships is to help each other grow and feel more joy. Now obviously it's easier to embrace this kind of stance when you're my age, your kids are a little older, and you're not dependent on anyone else in ways that make it hard to be free and easy about their choices. But generally speaking, I find that letting people be who they are and love whatever they love, even when you find it a tiny bit shallow or irritating, feels like a more soothing and also empowering way to move through the world.
So I guess my answer is that disdain can create healthy distance, but if someone is mostly faultless and also dear to you, the benefits of keeping your heart open, remaining compassionate, and forgiving them for their flaws -- whether they're actually in your life or not -- are hard to argue with. The more you forgive them, the more you forgive yourself, and the less you bring shame and blame into a world where most people are just doing their best to feel good with not a lot of help or guidance.
Thank you for writing all of that out, it makes a lot of sense, and got me thinking about the central issue.
If a person sees and loves me, but ultimately says "I don't love you *like that* - I don't want to spend my *life* with you" - it's reminiscent of how I sometimes feel about myself which is: "I love you, I can see that you try so hard, you have a lot of great qualities" -- *and* there's so much about you that annoys me and I wish would change, Jesus Christ!"
So if I *don't* feel anger or disdain or make a person who feels that way about me wrong, then it's like I'm saying their opinion of me is valid, and I'm rejecting myself in some way.
Lots of great kindergarten logic :)
I understand what you mean, and I often used to feel like other people's ideas and feelings about me were a verdict on my value as a human being. I wouldn't have admitted that this was the way I saw things at the time, but it was sort of the basis of this dread and shame I carried around with me, and carried into all of my relationships.
One of the reasons I write about shame so often is that, before you reckon with your shame directly, it's almost like this force in your life that amplifies any and all negative or even neutral feedback. You're like a person who's tripping on drugs and thinks a Domino's ad on TV is telling you the meaning of life, in other words. Shame takes other people's very ordinary and not all that damning preferences and tastes and amplifies them to the point where you feel like a big loser who is irredeemably broken and will never be loved.
My personal experience is that the more I confronted the things that people don't always love about me head-on, the easier it became for me to accept myself instead of telling myself a warped story about how anyone who didn't like me wasn't that great to begin with. A lot of excellent people think I'm pretty meh or even deeply annoying or deluded. Plenty of people are not interested in my ideas and they do not find me charming at all. Ha ha BUT SERIOUSLY WHAT IS WRONG WITH THEM? The more I grew to accept that specifically when I'm happy and effusive and open, a lot of people won't love me or will find suspicious or untrustworthy. I have an intense energy and that's never going to go over well in this very intensity-averse world. But it's not just the culture: I prefer exuberant, garrulous, and sometimes obnoxious interactions at times, and a lot of very interesting, great people just hate that.
And Jesus, almost everyone alive doesn't want to spend their LIFE with me. I mean, taking "I don't want to spend my entire life with you" as an indication that you suck is actually hilarious when you think about it. First of all, many, many people don't realize it, but they don't want to spend the rest of their life with *an actual person with separate feelings and emotions.* They want to spend their life with a fantasy version of a person, and they'll keep looking for that fantasy forever, and rejecting anyone who shows signs of having strong opinions and passionate feelings and yes, flaws.
I'm going into detail here in order to illustrate not only that rejection isn't really that personal, but even when it is, it's not relevant beyond a gentle nudge to reckon with your shame and accept yourself for who you are. The more you accept flaws and unattractive and uncharming dimensions of who you are, the more you'll live in the real world with real people and become capable of falling in love with and aligning with and supporting those real people, in spite of their real, continuing, persistent flaws -- which all people have, always.
Ultimately you need to enjoy your own personality and live the way you want to live. I love getting obnoxious, opinionated, talkative, critical, and deeply weird, so I seek out people who enjoy these dimensions of who I am, at least some of the time, and I am a very good friend to people who might be experienced by others as very strange or even self-involved at times. I have strong preferences about who I want to spend time with, too, and I respect those preferences instead of constantly telling myself, like I did just a few years ago, that I *should* like people and hang out with them just because they wanted to. Saying no to friendships I didn't enjoy was "mean," and I needed to be nice.
Once you stop rejecting yourself and start respecting your own needs AND your own flaws, you don't encounter other people's opinions as rejections so much as preferences. And when people are insistent in stating THIS REJECTION IS ABOUT YOU, AND HOW FUCKED UP YOU ARE! TAKE IT PERSONALLY! Well, it's always a manifestation of how deeply they're locked in a shame-fueled pattern of rejecting themselves. People who don't give themselves room to breathe and live tend to become punitive about other people's preferences.
All of the above can sound like an elaborate justification for continuing to have a shitty personality, of course! That's just how it sounds to accept yourself. People will think you should stop that shit and become who they want you to be instead. But the truth is that you're the boss of your own life, and there's no objective verdict on you. If you're living your values and you know it, and showing up for the people who matter to you, and working hard to make the world a better place, that tends to really turn down the volume on other people's input and feedback. You trust yourself and feed yourself and it brings good things into your life.
But you don't want to spend the rest of your life with *anyone* -- AND you don't stop taking rejection personally -- until *you* want to spend the rest of your life with you. That's actually hard work! Loving who you are and respecting your own needs is difficult. It's not how most of us were raised. But grappling with your shame and accepting your own preferences are two steps along the path to loving and enjoying yourself for the first time.
Thank you, I really appreciate this. Ironically, it's also made me think about how challenging it can be for me to accept the flaws of others, especially in close relationships and friendships. There's usually a tipping point (especially with men) beyond which they can do no wrong, but it takes quite a bit to get there. I'm likely just as guilty in moments for what I accuse others of, and it's good for me to recognize that.
I adore this response. Something that has helped me understand this stuff better is reading Tressie McMillan Cottom. She explains that conventional attractiveness is social currency and men want to be with social media hots bc it actually makes them worth more in society than if they were with a non conventionally attractive woman. She also rebukes the idea that “everyone is beautiful!!” because particular types of beauty are worth more than others and we’re gaslighting people by telling them they’re beautiful when they are suffering real consequences for not fitting into the beauty standard.
Looks and chemistry (as Heather has noted before) are both overrated for long term relationships. This cuts both ways , naturally. The most attractive person in the world is the one attracted to you. That's the place to start. Find someone attracted to you Sexy! No doubt, there are people attracted to your smarts, and that will automatically improve any other qualities you have.
I love it when I get something wrong and only notice 7 hours later. I meant that a person attracted to you should be more attractive to you, than a person who is ambivalent. The overall goal, a person you find attractive who you are attracted to. Not that I know how to do that without a little luck.
Oh, and here's a gut check, if you find out somebody you might be ambivalent about likes you romantically, and instead of going yeah(!) you find them less attractive than before, that's telling you something about how you see yourself.
Have you read On Love by Alain de Botton? There's this quote that your comment reminded me of...
"There is usually a Marxist moment in every relationship, the moment when it becomes clear that love is reciprocated. The way it is resolved depends on the balance between self-love and self-hatred. If self-hatred gains the upper hand, then the one who has received love will declare that the beloved (on some excuse or other) is not good enough for them (not good enough by virtue of associating with no-goods). But if self-love gains the upper hand, both partners may accept that seeing their love reciprocated is not proof of how low the beloved is, but of how lovable they have themselves turned out to be."
I haven't, and thank you. I know of the author, but I feel as though I've only read excerpts or maybe an essay. I'm going to get that based on your recommendation, that quote from the book, and also because the blurb I found is very interesting. What a brilliant quote, so true, so right through the heart!
I've never related to being sexy, because of the passive, objectifying associations the word has in my mind. Sexual, on the other hand, sits perfectly in line with being a smart, powerful woman with an abundant life. It doesn't need some checked out guy to validate it. Audre Lorde's Uses of the Erotic is such a good description of what a fully integrated sexuality can do.
This really jumped out at me today:
"Make it your practice not just to reassure yourself, not just to quiet your anxious mind, not just to refuse to berate yourself for not taking some supposedly perfect shape, but to elevate what you already are."
I've been working really hard at those first three things, but elevation, oh my goodness. I want that so much AND it seems so scary to imagine letting go of whatever's holding me back.
This post really resonated with me. I am someone who spent the first half of her life feeling ugly and “not enough” and feeling lucky to be in committed relationships with men at all. It took major work for me to challenge that nasty inner critic (that came from who-knows-where), remove the clouds from my eyes, and see the beauty that I really possessed. Thank you for writing this.
It’s an interesting topic for sure. The tricky thing is: none of us can help what we’re attracted to. So there’s that. Also, I’ve always found that the harder I want someone the further away they seem to move. Some weird, inexplicable law of the cosmos it seems. It does often seem broadly speaking that there’s sort of a correlation between traditional/conventional physical beauty and...how shall we say this...less brains. Not always, obviously. But the prettiest women often do seem to not be the sharpest. Probably it’s the same for men. All this aside: There are plenty of men who dig intelligent, sharp women. There’s something very attractive about that. And we often want what we can’t have. I do feel intimidated around women smarter than me...but I also find it to be a juicy challenge. When you find a woman with beauty and brains it’s just magical and dangerous 😳
Michael Mohr
‘The Incompatibility of Being Alive’
https://reallife82.substack.com/
I just keep coming back to read this one this week. How life affirming. Chills!