Dating Is Not Just For Beautiful People
by Seduction Genie
Dating is not just for the beautiful people.
You would think it was obvious. But how many women justify their single status by saying, "I'm not good-looking enough to attract men"?
Personal appearance is the first excuse on the dateless woman's book. It is easy to justify your lack of a boyfriend by pointing to your lack of success in the genetic lottery. "Look, my parents didn't pass on the long-legged blue-eyed blond-haired genes, okay?"
Thank god it isn't true. Otherwise, appearance would condemn me to being an old maid.
I come from a family of short, overweight women. If they're born tall, they shrink. If they manage to stay skinny through high school, they gain weight after marriage. Fashion sense is limited to the shops available in a rural town, and the sales racks of those.
Women in my family don't need to be beautiful. They're too busy helping their menfolk pull lambs, feeding the hay crew, or putting on a Sunday dinner spread. They're busy raising kids and washing heaps of laundry and canning garden vegetables all summer.
They dress in what's comfortable. They run a brush through their hair and forget about it. They enjoy coming back in from the garden, muddy and tired and sunburned with an armful of cabbage.
I didn't learn how to be a lady from my family. I didn't learn how to walk in high heels until college. I didn't wear skirts until I had my first office job at 28. My favorite period of my life were my two years in a village in the Andes Mountains when I had to guess what I looked like by piecing together the reflection in a tiny cosmetic mirror, because there were no mirrors large enough to see myself. Did my lack of attention to my appearance keep me from meeting men? No. I had boyfriend and affairs aplenty, and the stories to prove it.
Now that I'm 30, I have much more to prove. I live in a decent-sized city of 300,000 and work in the very heart of the central business district, in a creative industry surrounded by twenty-somethings. How I look matters.
My boss told me a few days ago that when I go out and do seminars on dating advice, men are going to look at me and ask themselves, "Am I attracted to her?" If the answer is no, then I'm not going to have any credibility. How can an ordinary-looking woman teach others to be irresistibly attractive to men?
His comment threw my self-esteem into a tailspin. Every time I woke up and looked at myself in the mirror, I thought, My hair looks awful. I've got all these blemishes. My nose is really the wrong shape, isn't it?
If my success as a relationship expert had to come down to my appearance, I was going to lose every time.
But then I started thinking … most of the women in the world are completely ordinary looking, and yet they all get guys. Only a fraction of a fraction of the US female population can dream of being a supermodel, and yet somehow the rest of us find loving, good men who love the way we look, talk, and act. Appearance can't be the whole story. And it isn't.
Guys love women in all their shapes and sizes. Just being female is enough for most. However, most men will admit that they prefer a woman who takes care of herself: eats right, exercises, keeps her nails trimmed, styles her hair, and pays attention to what she wears. They believe that a woman who pays attention to the exterior details will also pay attention to the details where they count: in the bedroom.
Because seriously—and this is a fact that gets forgotten because neither gender wants to admit it—the only thing most guys care about is whether you will be good in bed. A woman who smells lovely, has shiny hair to spill over the pillow, and is comfortable with her body will attract men hand over fist, while a couture ice princess who spends hours on hair and makeup screams "untouchable" and finds that she intimidates all the nice guys and attracts only players.
The fashion and cosmetic industry have a vested interest in making us believe that our appearance is all that stands between us and the man of our dreams. The more they keep us chasing the holy grail of beauty, the more money they make.
And, of course, you can never be beautiful enough.
When my last partner and I separated, the only thing that I could think about for weeks was a comment he'd made to me once when we were upset at one another. I had mentioned that he no longer seemed to compliment me any more. Later, when we were walking down the street to a restaurant, he stated out of nowhere, "You're not a supermodel, you know."
And guess what I did? I murmured contritely, "I know." Of course a woman only deserves compliments if she's a supermodel; how could I have been so stupid?
So when the relationship ended I thought, "It must be because I'm not pretty enough for him." That was the easy answer. He wanted someone who looked like a supermodel, I don't, therefore it was my deficiency in the genetic lottery that disqualified me from girlfriend status.
Silly, huh? Yet I believed it. It was easier to think that than to think about the other possibilities. Maybe our relationship ended because he just wasn't that into me as a person. That would hurt much worse than being rejected for my looks.
It took the counsel of a dear, loving friend before I realized that a man who loved me wouldn't make cutting comments like that. She asked me why I would want to be with someone who only cared about my appearance anyway. Didn't I want a man who was proud to walk down the street with me because he loved everything about me, not just how I looked on his arm?
She was right.
I had to realize that losing weight and dying my hair and buying new clothes wouldn't magically bring him back. Nor would it magically bring me the man of my dreams.
She told me that to find the right man for me, I simply needed to create situations where my winning personality could do its work. Smile at more strangers, expand my social circles, get involved in fun activities, attend more city events.
Being pretty may bring more men into your life, she said, but they may not be the right ones. Chemistry is a matter of many things, including common interests, beliefs, and compatible personalities. It's not just about two mutually attractive people seeing one another.
We need to remind ourselves this every so often, especially when we see the women's magazines splashed with pictures of celebrity couples.
Dating is not just for the beautiful people.
It's for those of us who are average and ordinary in the looks department, too. That's because the majority of people in this world are quite average and ordinary, giving us a huge pool to choose from.
If YOU are going to spend the time and personal investment into making yourself irresistibly attractive to men, I have a word of advice. Don't just focus on your appearance and ignore everything else. I know that it's much more fun to buy new clothes and get makeovers than ask yourself some serious questions about the kind of energy you put out or the kind of relationship patterns you've established, but for your own sake it's essential.
Attracting your dream man is about much more than wearing the right clothes and memorizing the right things to say and how to say them. Attracting your dream man is about putting yourself out into the world in a positive, loving way, and having faith that the right man will be drawn to you as surely as a moth is drawn to flame.
Dating is not just for the beautiful people. Dating is for ordinary people. Dating is for ugly people. Dating is for everyone, because the statistics shows that we all will manage to find love and affection. About 90% of Americans will marry by the time they're thirty, and most will marry at least once in their lifetime.
Believe that dating is for YOU.
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