Fri 18 Apr 2008
I’m sure there are some people out there who are confused about whether they’re attractive or not. But I bet most of us have a gut-level feeling about our looks.
It doesn’t matter (to this question) whether our feelings are based in reality or not (whether there’s such a thing as objective beauty is a subject for another question). I’m just interested in hearing from people who consider themselves — who feel themselves to be — attractive.
It may be hard for such people to fess up, because doing so sounds conceited. But I’m hoping that at least some people will get over this. I’d really love to hear thoughtful answers.
As for me, I’ve never felt attractive. Let me clarify that a little. I’ve certainly felt that specific people have liked the way I look. And that felt good. And it might have even briefly made me feel attractive. But still, at my core, I never felt that their assessment was correct. I’ve never been able to sustain the feeling that I’m attractive.
At worst I feel ugly. At best, I feel average. I’m a little ashamed to admit this (though I doubt my confession will surprise anyone), but my self-assessment has had a huge impact on my life. Not a day goes by when I don’t, at least once, think about my (lack of) looks. I compare myself with other people (and usually come off the worst); I covet other people’s beauty; etc.
Even unrelated traits tie into my body image. Instead of thinking, “I’m smart,” I think, “Well, at least I’m smart.”
I’m not trying to garner pity. Truth is, in my 40s, all this stuff bothers me much less than it did when I was younger. But I can’t deny that it had a significant role in shaping who I am, how I relate to others, and how I feel about myself.
There’s tons of literature about people like me. But I never hear the other side. I’m really curious about what it’s like to have a general feeling that you’re attractive. I can’t imagine what that would be like. I wonder how it would impact a person’s life.
Please note that I’m not talking about “how good it feels when my boyfriend tells me I’m good looking” or “how charged I get when the ladies look my way.” I can understand that. I’m talking about a general, every-day feeling: what you think about yourself when no one’s there and you look in the mirror. And how that affects you.
Posted by grumblebee
I think I’m attractive, but I don’t know what it’s like to not feel attractive, so I don’t know what the difference is.
I think a lot depends on how you look at yourself. I am obese, but I get a lot of “you have a pretty face” comments. Back when I was more depressed, I felt awful about my looks all of the time. Now I can accept that I am pretty, and even feel pretty when I get dressed up. However, unless I *am* all dressed up with makeup on, I don’t much like to look in the mirror. If I’m washing my hands at the sink and there is a mirror over it, I will often stand to the side so I don’t have to look into it. I suppose your question is a bit like something I wonder; being obese, I often wonder what it’s like to be thin.
This question is interesting - I have a friend in her 40’s who I think is so pretty… I would love to be as beautiful as her. Yet she thinks she’s not pretty at all. I tell her she’s pretty and she usually brushes me off… occasionally I can get her to accept the compliment and say thanks. Of course, sometimes when she tells me I’m pretty I don’t always want to accept it either.
I’ve had different times in my life where I’ve felt attractive. It feels good to know you look the best you can. When you’re dressed up in that perfect outfit, hair done just right, and you know you look great, it feels wonderful.
Times I’ve felt unattractive have been when I’ve fallen into the dark hole of comparing myself to others. Right now I can either say I’m a short dumpy middle-aged woman or I can say I’m a sexy mature French woman with curves. As long as I stand up straight and focus on my good qualities, I’m okay. If I watch a movie and wish I looked like a 20-year-old starlet, I’m in trouble.
Do you remember at time when you accomplished something worthwhile and how that felt? That’s got to be 100 times better than feeling like you look good, because it came from within, not some random gene selection and whatever pop culture says is the flavor of the decade. I remember my accomplishments a lot more than I remember going to a party and having people tell me how nice I looked.
Think of yourself in this hypothetical situation:
You think you were born the wrong sex and wish you were otherwise. Everyday you feel bad about your looks and your body. Although you have a fairly good looking body for your biological sex, you despise your physique.
And think of yourself in this hypothetical situation:
You are percieved ugly by most people, yet you are delusional, and you think that you are extremely good looking, and even think infact some film stars are in love with you because of your good looks.
And now think of this:
You are considered ugly by most people, and percieve yourself ugly, and feel bad about it because you believe ugly people are not loved and worthless.
Would the problem be your body, or how you percieve it?
Actually, i’ve been thinking about this recently. I’ve been lucky to age well, but in my teens and twenties I never considered myself the least bit attractive. I expected men to like me for other reasons rather than looks, and usually dated men who were more my friends than some grand romance. I married a man who told me during the course of our marriage that he did not find me beautiful, and was kind of embarassed to be seen with due to my lack of “hotness” (we are no longer married - for other reasons).
Within the last year I’ve had two people bring up to me how hot I was in my twenties, in a non-taditional way. Both assumed this was a known quantity to me - like too bad I had married so young and didn’t take advantage of my looks more - very weird to hear, like an alternative reality to how I’d seen things.
So now I’m trying to get my head around inpressing on my kids who look like me,that they are attractive (I think they are)and to try not to assume others are disparaging me, as I have habitualized. It really effects how you move thru the world, so I find this an interesting question.
I have always thought that those who are “beautiful” have a much easier time in life, and i wonder how my life could have been different.
(no regrets though, just speculation)
If I’d have had the looks to go with this silver tongue I really could have gone places.
I figure pretty people rent a lot more space in their own heads about their looks (good and bad — smart pretty people are probably rightfully annoyed at being intellectually underestimated and stupid pretty people are probably obsessed with their own looks already). So it all evens out. Unless you’re stupid and ugly. Then you have to survive on cheerfulness, willpower, and hard work.
At least that’s how I rationalize it, being a man of decidedly average looks and intelligence.
I figure pretty people rent a lot more space in their own heads about their looks
Interesting. Thoughts about looks occupy a whole city block in my head.
I’m not rich, but by most measures, I’m successful. I have a good job (which I like), a good marriage (to a beautiful woman), and many hobbies that are engrossing and fulfilling.
Still, I think about my looks. I think about them every day. I would like to be taller, more masculine, etc. I can’t imagine those feelings going away. They’ve always been with me.
And it’s hard for me to imagine a pretty person thinking more about his/her looks than I think about mine. Maybe they think the same amount — but just different sorts of thoughts.
Grumblebee, if you read any number of interviews with pretty people who are famous, a lot of them had self doubts about their looks and continue to do so - in fact, look at all the Oscar winners and they are not all gorgeous people, they are talented people. And if one thing goes wrong with their looks, they might freak out about it. If I get a pimple or gain a pound, I’m okay with that. People don’t look at writers, after all, they look at their words.
When I connect with people, I connect with their spirit and their attitude and I literally don’t see their “looks.” I was once attracted to a short bald fat man who just exuberated life, humor and confidence, and I found him very sexy. I have never been attracted to strictly speaking “beautiful” people, who look like Roman statues or Brad Pitt - I may say, he’s got a pretty face, but I am not attracted to him. Dustin Hoffman is pretty short, so is Tom Cruise (not that I find him sexy, meh).
I was friends with a statuesque model once. We’d go out and play pool and she knew she was hot and she knew she could crook her finger at guys. But she never knew if they liked her for who she was inside, because they were always so busy looking at her outside that they never took her words seriously. I’ve had that experience too, people only looking at my form and not my substance. So I’d be trying to discuss something intelligent and they’d ignore it in favor of my looks. Having grown up reading Greek plays and discussing Tennyson, it gets old having guys go “oh, so you read books? I read a Stephen King novel once.” Ugh.
My husband is not bad looking, nor is he the 100% beautiful man-thing. He is not super tall, he is average. He is not thin, neither am I. Yet we both think the other is good looking and sexy, so it’s not a superficial thing, it comes from within.
What is masculine in today’s society? I just had a shitstorm on my blog because I was talking about Dr. Phil’s show on pick-up artists and all these guys were saying, “hey, we’re here too and we have feelings and we’re being taught self-confidence by these programs” and I had to back down and realize that men have these issues too, not just women. I truly never empathized with men worrying about their looks before, I just figured they dealt with it. Now I realize they all don’t deal with it, they just suffer in silence because it’s not manly to talk about it.
Why don’t you just reframe yourself as a deep thinker? All of your questions are very interesting, as well as deep, and they force other people to think. A lot of women would find that very attractive, and obviously one does if you’re married. If she loves you, who cares how you look? If anyone tells you you’re too short or not good-looking enough, they’re not your friend anyway, as we say in Maine, tell them to piss off.
Marie Mon Dieu, I thank you for your kind thoughts. I don’t want you to take this as dismissive, but I’m not looking for any kind of solace. I know this question could be taken as the plea of a troubled soul, but that really wasn’t my intent in posting.
It’s true that once I was deeply troubled about my looks. I’m not any more. I have no cause to complain about my life. I’m blessed in many way. Back when I WAS deeply troubled, I never would have posted something like this. Back then, I was too wrapped up in myself to care about how “the other camp” felt. In fact, someone told be that beautiful people had their own problems and concerns, I would have said, “Feh! I’d like to have THEIR troubles.” But I’m now comfortable enough in my own skin that I can see people as people. We ALL have problems and concerns.
So please take my question extremely literally. I’m not looking for reassurance. I’m not looking to discuss anything about me. All my verbiage about myself — perhaps too much — was meant for one purpose: to say that I KNOW how an unattractive person think (or how someone who sees himself as unattractive thinks). I’m curious (in the calm, unemotional, scientific sense) about how a beautiful person thinks.
I know, I know: I said I think about my looks many times a day. I do. But those thoughts rarely trouble me. They’re pretty automatic — they’re vestiges of a teenage obsession. In other words, once I thought, “I’m ugly” and then my next thought was, “I’m worthless.” I still have the “I’m ugly” thoughts, but now they’re usually followed by “so what.” Even if you’re troubled by my “I’m ugly” thoughts, please let me wrestle with them by myself.
I’m still waiting (in vain?) for someone who feels he or she is attractive to comment in a meaningful way. What was it like growing up? What’s it like now? When you look in the mirror, what thoughts occur to you? What feelings?
Marie Mon Dieu, I know many hollywood stars are scared of little blemishes — and of growing old. I’m sure many beautiful people (and plain people) have those fears. But I doubt that all pretty people — all the time — look in the mirror and feel terrified. There must be SOME people out there who feel attractive (at least most of the time). What’s THAT feeling like: to feel attractive?
I mentally kept track of a few thoughts yesterday as I glanced in the mirror. They weren’t very interesting: “My glasses are crooked,” “Oh good, my hair looks fine today,” that sort of thing. I think I’m attractive, but it’s not like I stand in front of the mirror going “Oh yeah, I’m hot.”
Maybe that’s the difference between feeling attractive and feeling unattractive. I look in the mirror and am satisfied with what I see, so I feel attractive — and that’s it, there’s nothing more to think about.
Or maybe I’m just really shallow.
TCITL (great username, by the way!), that makes sense. If I’m politically incorrect for a second and think of non-attractiveness as a disability, then why would a “non-disabled” person think about it? I don’t look in the mirror and think, “Yay, I can walk! Yay, I can see!”
I never thought of myself as attractive during school and late teens. In fact, looking back at photos, I wasn’t. Since then, I guess I’ve grown into my body a little more and come to learn that for some (not all) people, I’m attractive.
Generally it doesn’t make much of a difference. If I’m out at night though, I’m much more comfortable with myself and confident with others than I was five years ago, and I think part (not all) of that is because I feel better about how I look now.
I have a friend who can be fairly cynical sometimes, and he occassionally makes remarks like “I don’t have a chance, not with twirlypen and OtherHotFriend around getting all the attention”. It makes me fairly uncomfortable, especially because he’s generally better at meeting and going out with woman than I am.
It feels powerful, like you can do anything, at anytime and get away with it. The rules don’t apply to you, because as good looking person, people love being around you, with you, so they’ll forgive a lot.
Having that power can be like a drug, you always want it or crave it, so I’m not surprised that some people go to extraordinary lengths to keep their beauty.
Naturally, it can feel powerful in a good way. If you feel attractive, you feel confident and your body language shows it, which shapes how others react to you. It can be part of your inner strength to help you through the rough spots.
I’ve come to the reasonable satisfied conclusion that I’m an okay looking guy. I don’t think of myself as either particularly attractive or as at all ugly; I’m just, you know, an aesthetically unremarkable guy, with a little bit of the Jesus/hippie thing going on what with the facial hair and the ponytail. Comfortable, basically.
My wife thinks I’m cute. I consider this a stroke of very good luck.
I’ve had this conversation with a friend of mine, who is quite beautiful and shapely and attractive by most anyone’s standards. She finds it hard to trust new potential friends, especially guys, because she has so often found that they are only interested because of her looks. Whether they’re looking to get into her pants or just trying to join the “beautiful people” group or whatever, enough people have wanted to know her solely because of her looks that she is wary of letting anyone get to close.
Further, after years of being known as “the hot one,” she has to some extent learned to define her own value in her head that way. As we get older, and inevitably less attractive, she’s dealing with a bit of an identity crisis. If she’s not “the hot one” in our group of friends, who is she? What is her value? And after all these years of making the effort to amplify her beauty, what if she just didn’t want to wear makeup anymore, or didn’t want to spend time finding clothes to accentuate her figure? Would we even like her anymore? Of course we would, but it can be hard to believe that. When others define you by your beauty, you start to do it yourself, too. And then you’re left without a definition, if/when your beauty fades.
The worst part of all this is that she’s an incredibly intelligent, principled, sweet person, and so many people ignore that in favor of noticing her big eyes, her big whatevers. Certainly I envy her sometimes, but if I’m honest I’d say her looks cause her at least as much emotional distress as mine cause me.
Objectively I’m an unremarkable looking woman. I’m certainly not ugly, but I am also not “hot”. I can say for certain that most of my female friends are better looking than me. (Also, I live in NYC, and am in the lowest portion of the bell curve for extensive personal grooming, I’m sure.)
But some days I get up and look in the mirror before I leave for work and I think “damn, everything is working today”. My hair is how I like it, my clothes are flattering, my boobs look great… And I leave the house with confidence; I’m in a good mood, I smile at people, I enjoy the music on my ipod more. And with that, I notice that men glance at me more, clerks are nicer to me, etc.
I think that for me, looking good (at least in my mind) begets confidence, which begets increased pleasant interactions with others. I imagine that if I were of above average looks, this would happen more often. Of course, maybe it wouldn’t, and I notice it on my “good days” because it’s a rare occurrence. But it’s how I imagine a truly attractive person goes through their life.
I’m no great beauty, but I’m not quasimodo either. Lately, I’ve gotten more attention from interested parties than ever before, and it’s been from people who knew me first for my personality, and then found my looks at least an adequate supplement to further their interest.
It feels personally reassuring and existentially unsettling. By that, I mean to say that it’s nice to know that I have a “type” and that the people who are into me are people I could get into, and that I never need concern myself with the possibility that I’m tilting at windmills, pining for attention from those who don’t think well of me. But the relativism to it is finally hitting me, since I’ve, as I said, up until recently, thought of myself as an aggressive and likeable person who can get what (and who) I want but not likely to turn a head, and have gotten a taste of something like small-fish syndrome by the onslaught of, well, 35 year old men. They’re in cahoots, I tell you.
So, surrounded by people who like me for me, I feel attractive, in other words. This is also true, it delights me to say, of all the other five people in my immediate circle of three couples. Oh dear one day we might wind up in a some big orgy, so approving are we of one another. It makes me certain that finding one’s niche is the best way to feel attractive, and that finding it really begins by defining yourself first. Seems to me that it boils weirdly down to context, for the vast majority of us, and really, it’s a wide, wide bell curve, and it’s comfortable to ride the middle. Of course, a little self-delusion in the positive direction never hurt anybody! ;) I’m beautiful, I’m beautiful, I’m beautiful, dammmit!