Eye of the Beholder

With regularity, I am confronted by various personal ad placers who accuse me of being shallow or superficial because I require a photo of someone first, before I will explore any potential relationship. There are many reasons I require this, not all of them about attraction, but for the purpose of this particular sore spot, I will address this as if it is exclusively an attraction issue.
 

The distinction to be had here, is that I don't place ads to find friends. I have plenty of friends. I am seeking a lifemate. Therefore, the attraction factor is crucial. I don't know how anyone else defines the difference in friends and partners/lifemates/lovers, but for me, a lifemate is a friend, whom you also make love with, share a home with, and a day to day life with. This is a person I want to go to sleep with each night and wake up to every morning for the rest of the life of the relationship (one always hopes this is a very long time or until non-homicidal death do you part...essentially, I mean it's until the relationship no longer serves both of us in any beneficial way). Thus, it would be helpful if I was attracted to that person.

That being said, placing importance on appearance and attractiveness is not a reflection of my shallow, empty soul. It is a function of nature, a biological fact that is in place for clear and profound reasons. But this is an initial indicator to me, and not the end-all be-all (refer to previous blog entries ISO: In Search Of and Sour Milk From the Cyber Teat-or check out my book, ISO). Now, I might be attracted to some drop dead gorgeous model, and then she might open her mouth and converse with me a moment, and I might discover that she is selfish or cruel or unwilling to evolve, and that attraction can go right out the window. People can become more beautiful as you get to know them. This is the sometimes inexplicable chemical dance that takes place in the human brain. I make no apologies for it.

Experience has shown me that when people don't want to share a photo of themselves in the milieu of dating and romance, they have something to hide. And why do they feel a need to hide? Because they know they don't meet some supposed societal criteria of what beauty is? Probably. But then we get into the quagmire of defining beauty. One definition of beauty: Beauty is the phenomenon of the experience of pleasure, through the perception of balance and proportion of stimulus. It involves the cognition of a balanced form and structure that elicits attraction and appeal towards a person, animal, inanimate object, scene, music, idea, etc.

One may see a beautiful tree, and a beautiful flower and like the flower better than the tree, but the tree doesn't become jealous of the flower. They are each beautiful in their own way, just as humans are. However, i am under no obligation to be attracted equally.

if two people are not attracted, or one person is attracted and the other isn't, it means they are not suited to each other. It's not a make-wrong, nor a harsh judgment, but a reflection of natural brain response.

So some of us were not born "beautiful." Maybe there's a deeper reason for that, too. If you believe in reincarnation, perhaps in past lives we were beautiful and it kept us from learning things we needed to learn. Perhaps we were on the other side of that attractiveness coin and we misused it and need to have the other experience. Most likely it is simply a matter of probability based on the combination of genes and chromosomes. This is not really the point anyway. The point is, someone will always be attracted to anyone.  Whatever the reason is for the bodies we end up with, this cannot be pawned off on everyone else. We are what we are. We attract what and whom we attract. I am not attractive to many people. So be it. There has to be something there that draws me--and it doesn't have to be classical beauty or a modelesque body. I probably won't find you attractive later if I don't find you attractive now. And until I have evolved to the point where I can be attracted no matter what someone looks like, (as some people have told me they are capable of doing) then I'm left with what I have to work with now--in this moment. And I'm being honest about it.

Eye of the Beholder