Many people miss an important truth when it comes to relationships that are started based upon looks and appearance. The odd thing about physical attractiveness and all of its foundations being based upon symmetry, health indicators, and in the case of a number of people: even surgical operations and make up, is that physical attractiveness is something we exhibit a limited degree of control over. We can render complete control, though, over our ability to interact with people in a certain way during conversation, to engage with them socially in any sort of fashion we choose. But your physical attractiveness is something that you are born with. The important truth, however, I refer to, is that physical beauty is able to be drastically manipulated in the mind; beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder because it can be reconditioned.

My being a rationalist, however, has left me in recent time to admit a small part of the evidence regarding beauty. Beauty, to some degree, is something that has a default setting. Part of the reason so many people are being conditioned to find some things beautiful appears to be, from the evidence I have seen, truly that some things genuinely are naturally beautiful! However, most of the time beauty is something that we are tumbling toward during our daily lives when it has been mixed up in a state that lies somewhere between natural and conditioned beauty. One site that probably demonstrates this remarkably well, is the dating site BeautifulPeople.com. It is a dating site that allows people to filter through their potential matches purely on the basis of their appearance and get this: you have to be voted in in order to even stay on the site!

I am a big fan of a book called Survival of the Prettiest by Nancy Etcoff. I found it sitting on a bookshelf of my dad’s years ago. Etcoff describes in meticulous detail the various universal concepts of human beauty and what we will find attractive outside of any sort of conditioned factors and the number one item she cites, along with many other authors at this point, is symmetry. That is, how much one side of your face and body match the characteristics of the other side. That is interesting, however, because I have often been a fan of very slight asymmetry myself and perfect symmetry is damned difficult to obtain! Heck, every single female I will end up staring at has one breast larger than the other and a hair style that no doubt demonstrates a degree of asymmetry.

Forget about all of this for a moment because I want to talk about something that should really be the overall message being spread throughout society today. I have dated a number of girls at the time of this writing: some “ugly” some “skinny” some “fat” and so on. I have dated a couch potato, a hot dancer, an slender actress, a chubby smoker, an almost stick thin smoker, and the list goes on in combinations. The most interesting and indeed painful thing that I experienced during any of it is the social stigma that goes along with being together with a girl who was “unattractive” by societal standards or expectations.

Much of the time, my “friends” at one time or another (though obviously they were not that great of friends at all), were making judgments about what value the girl I was dating at the time based on whether or not she was physical attractive. For the girls that were stunningly gorgeous, I was rewarded with praise and their saying “good going, Scott, you better not screw things up with this one!” One of the sweetest and nicest girls I ever dated was considered overweight but some people I introduced her to appeared to make a judgment call based upon nothing more than her appearance to them. Maybe I am imagining this but here is what I know for sure – I was never bothered by any of the girls’ appearances I dated. If I was bothered, I never would have dated them, much less had sex with them!

And one thing always happened but before I mention it, I should first mention a series of experiments that have been done in the field of psychology. They have found that by simply making a facial expression that is associated with a specific emotion, you can then trigger the actual emotion. So if you smile and hold that smile, you may end up feeling just a little bit happier. If you make an angry scowl, you may end up feeling more anger. It is simply because of associations that have been constructed over time in your brain’s pathology related to physical actions or stimuli and the emotions those things have been paired with. An interesting exercise I would encourage any supposedly “romantic” guy to try is the following.

Find a girl you deem ugly, or mediocre at best who is crazy about you. You do not have to be a fan of her appearance but you probably need to be a fan of her personality. Maybe she is someone you put in the ‘friend zone’ for all those years but she has been orbiting you, remaining loyal, during all that time. I guarantee you that the day you throw away all of your old presumptions about her and actually just work up the courage to look her deep in the eyes for several seconds and then move in for a kiss, your opinion of her will change. You will almost instantly feel more attracted to her after the fact. Or, try just hugging and holding that hug for a long time (and no patting the back, friends don’t pat). Relax and feel the warmth of her body and match her breathing. Close your eyes if it helps.

Physically intimate experiences, under the evidence I know, can be induced. Attraction can also occur after you have purposefully shifted the context and you will literally no longer see that person as ugly or even unattractive in many, many different cases. Your mind and brain have the ability to drastically shift the overall energy and color of an experience to reflect something far more deeper and far more positive than any sort of disgust or contempt you may have for their appearance. It might sound crazy but I am literally encouraging people to second guess their opinion of “ugly” people when it comes to dating. Yes, guys, kiss the “ugly” girls sometimes!

Having said that, though, I should also make another important point that is also equally worthy of recognition. Girls that typically have a good body and a stunning appearance instantly when you see them are generally more competent about their health and well being than ones who are not. That assumes, of course, that your perceptions of body image are not drastically distorted (and with both men and women this has been found to happen). It is more difficult to stay skinny and muscular or skinny and toned than it is to remain fat and unkempt and for that reason the more motivated are generally, genuinely, more attractive than the unmotivated and incompetent.

Along with this, it is also true that the girls you find horrendously beautiful beyond your controlling the feeling are those that generally have a better genetic match for you than ones who do not (and this applies to both genders, so girls: that applies to you when attracted to guys too). Scent is another big one, particularly for girls, if a guy smells strangely wonderful to you without any cologne then chances are he is an okay pick for a mate (at least physically). Given how much I work on my appearance and my general social image, I probably am going to be most compatible with a girl who does the same.

But it would be terribly foolish for you to turn away someone who could be a part of your life as a lover just because you or your “friends” thought to them to be physically ugly. Just as we are taught in almost cheesy movies like Shallow Hal, it is best if we do away with our presumptions and choose to connect with a person’s soul. The soul, after all, is more at someone’s core than their outer shell and their core is what we should love and care about.

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