Fixing the Picker: Part IV, Physical attraction

Looks may be the first thing we notice about a person we are dating, but it needs to be last on the list of how to pick someone for a lasting relationship.  Looks change as people age.  We gain weight.  We lose weight.  We lose hair and go grey.  We get busy at work and can't get to the gym as often, or out in the sun to get a tan.  We develop allergies to various beauty products or develop higher priorities than beauty.  We get sick and end up with lasting scars after recovery.  We lose breasts to cancer and tight skin to pregnancies.  We start limping after a sports injury or get a scar from a accident.  We get wrinkles after years of sun exposure.  A life, well lived, starts to show up.  Changing looks are part of adding experience and improving in other ways.  For these, and many other reasons, the attractiveness of our potential mate needs to be the last priority. 

One of the important "other" reasons, is that when we are focused on a person's looks, we become blind to the more important things.  If we feel the pull of physical chemistry, we start trying to make excuses for the other things that should be red flags to us.      

Remember, certain assets that are considered attractive simply do not occur in nature, as often as they appear at the country club.  The hot redhead likely spends a significant amount of time in the beauty salon and the man who has kept his quarterback's physique well after his college football days were over, likely spends a significant amount of time at the gym.  Enhanced breasts, lipo, cute little upturned button noses, collagen and botox come with a price... and you will have to live with this price... your loved one will be in surgery and/or recovery for a few weeks a year. Super muscles and super performance at the gym also comes with a price, and anyone who tries to tell you that their steriods do not affect their psychological make-up is simply wrong.

Even supposedly healthy habits come at a price.  Many vegans find that their hair starts to thin.   

Be sure you're willing to live with the price... the side effects of the things you pick.

I know women who are very physically attracted to the macho, gym rat look, and they enjoy the manner of an arrogant man.  They choose based upon this look, and regularly find that they have picked a job hopper who treats waitresses like dirt and is estranged from their family.  They are surprised at repeatedly finding themselves in relationships with poverty-striken but attractive men who are jerks behind closed doors. One such woman friend of mine has decided not to date at all, rather than find herself with another man who keeps losing jobs because he prioritizes his gym time over work. 

I have clients and friends who repeatedly pick barbie princesses.  they like the look and love it if she needs a big, strong man to rescue her from the messes she's gotten int.  In one situation, a friend of mine who was about 50 met a woman in her 40s who had "kept herself up".  He was blind to her faults.  

At age 45, every one of her ex boyfriends and husbands had fatal flaws such as... one was physically abusive, another was gay, another had herpes, another was a cheater, another was bankrupt, another was a criminal who lied about it, another was a drunkard, another was a stalker ... and on & on.

          She was a cutie. She had taken her inheritance from her Dad's estate and enhanced her breasts, smoothed her stomach, turned her thighs into little sticks, bleached her hair nearly white. She was quite the bombshell.  She represented herself as being an “engineer”, and because we were a social group, no one really bothered to check up on this.  One party, she met my husband.  She wanted to charm him with how wonderful she is.  I am very lucky that he likes me better, so he was not interested in the cutesy little flirting things she was probably trying.  But he is an engineer, so he tried to engage her in a conversation one evening about their common type of work, what kind of engineer was she, what type of work, etc… and it turned out that she was a receptionist in an construction firm whose bosses often told her that she had learned a lot about their business, and that she should finish her college education and consider becoming an engineer.  They occasionally trusted her to give answers on minor issues to clients.  But her college career consisted of having attempted community college several times but never finishing any of her coursework and actually getting credit.  My husband, who was able to put aside her looks, had found one of her flaws that would have been fatal to a relationship with him, in the space of one 10 minute conversation. 
          If only another one of our friends had been able to do so.  Superficially, she was cute, had a great career, and a dating history that deserved being rescued from.  There was not a man she had ever dated within the group, who didn't have to leave the group in embarassment or anger, after being faced with the barrage of nasty gossip that she would start about them after a breakup.  This was a group of adults who had known each other for decades, and who frequently dated and broke up over the years, learning to lie with each other in peace if the relationships ended.  But never when one of HER relationships ended.   She worked hard to develop an aura of a woman who was repeatedly approached and loved by men who were all seriously flawed, and it couldn't possibly have been her fault because every one of their flaws were different from each other.  She was the perfect damsel in distress.

This friend who should have known better, started flirting with her at one party after one of her breakups.  He was sure he could do better than her previous boyfriend, who had turned out to be a stalker (or so she said).  He had a good job and a good work ethic, and he was able to maintain a reasonable distance until the time when the relationship deserved more.  A group of our friends took him aside and reminded him of her issues, but he ignored it because she was so cute and he was sure that, armed with information about her issues, he could avoid them or work around them.  My friend went ahead and dated her.   When they broke up, her story about him was that he was entirely incapable of performing in bed, that she had suggested Viagra and any number of solutions, and he refused. Poor guy. He stuck around the gang ONLY because he had dated other members of the group knew this woman’s story to be a lie.  

He has, happily, adjusted his picker, and I’ve not heard of him dating women who were superficially attractive while having serious flaws that prevented a good long term match.  Having learned his lesson, he looks at a woman's history before and moral fiber before he checks out their looks.  Which is the smart way to do it.