Maybe it’s weird, but I am just not that attracted to people as an adult. I remember being a teenager. I had a different crush every week, it seemed. In middle school, I liked so many people. I don’t even think I could name them. I often thought people were attractive even if I didn’t like their personality. It’s just how it went.
In high school, I suppose that slowed down but only because I was talking to more people online. I noticed attractive people less in person as I focused on the personalities I got to know through chat, IM, email and phone calls.
Even as I watch movies or porn, all of which are full of people that are generally considered to be universally attractive, I find myself looking for people who are attractive to me.. and not finding them. I can even hop on to live sex cams sites like LiveX.com and shrug, unimpressed at what others would find as beautiful cam models. I can literally look at all the porn on Tumblr — and there is a plethora of it — and nitpick every single photo that I come across. I have to remind myself not to do this. It’s just plain rude. (On the other hand, clean your damned room before you take those selfies).
This makes online dating a bit hard. I can scan through dozens of photos and be relatively unimpressed with any of them. When you consider the general lack of effort that most people put into their profiles, you understand how this is frustrating for me. I guess I look at one of two things: do their profiles make me smile or do their photos make me drool? Typically, neither proves true.
This leaves me feeling a little shallow. In fact, my friends haven’t been slow at all to call me such. Do I just have ridiculously high standards when it comes to people? to bodies? to makeup? to presentation? If this is the case, how can I possibly expect to find someone when I wouldn’t meet my own standards?
I guess I am not sure what I am looking for. I’ll know it when I see it, right? It’s not so much something that’s only in the visual. It’s a big picture thing. It’s in the ambiance and the facial expression. And as I’ve found out, I can be wildly attracted to someone who doesn’t display most of the physical traits that I find attractive, and it can take me years to discover this.
Sleepiness and a fever have made this post ramble more than I intended. I shall end here and perhaps return at a later date with more clarity.
when dating age 54 to 59, I was religious about my profile, editing it after every coffee date. What was it about her I liked/didn’t? How did I present myself that I liked/didn’t. Who am I in this dance here? What do I want? How hard do I want to play.
Plato said: “You can learn more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”
You’ll do OK dear. Get well and ask yourself how bad you want it. And just what is the “it” that you want.
All the best.
I’ve gotten this way too in my late 20s. I blame it on biology. I think women get pickier as they get older as primal instinct. I’m not terribly interested in having kids but I think on a instinctive level, I’m on the lookout for the best possible mate.
Sorry for posting again but my lady and I were talking about two dates I had years back. One was a 40 min coffee. One was 21 hours including a naked sleepover. Attraction was the key. I had it with one, not the other. The loooooong date? I was attracted to her: mind, our conversation; our shared interest, that we were talking about sex and love and relationships, I was hungry, she was a “Sex Maven” who was published and famous. But we never had sex. Hmmmmmm. The point: attraction; even erotic attraction can happen or not on many levels, no?
I love your making us think about this.