Self Perception.

[swestrup]

Don't you just hate it when you start to realize that a flaw that you dislike in someone else, is also a flaw that you have?  This happened a week or so ago for me, and I've been meaning to post about it, but never got around to it before.

There was a study that I read that said that most women who are interested in meeting someone new at a party will tend to not eat much, or at least not let prospective new boyfriends see them eat. So, when the sociologists polled men, what did they find most attractive? Thin women with hearty appetites. So, the best strategy for a woman to interest a man turned out to be to eat lightly whenever he wasn't looking, and to eat heartily whenever he was, which was the opposite of what they were doing.

The sociologists did more studies and it turned out that other women are put off by a thin woman who's eating heartily, and so most women were subconsiously acting in a way that they would find attractive in themselves, even though men look for something different.

At first I was thinking that that was pretty short-sighted on the part of the women, not to have realized this already. My second thought was that I do the exact same thing. I have NO idea how women judge men. I've never been able to figure out why some men are considered attractive to women, and others are not. Despite this, I've always thought that I was completely unattractive because, basically, I would never date me, given the choice.

Now, having realized that, I still have no idea what makes men attractive to women and were I still shopping around for a mate, this realization would have done nothing to optimize my search strategies. As is, it made me realize that I am even less qualified to judge my attractiveness than I realized (and that I should not therefor automatically assume that I'm unttractive), and that it is far more tricky to spot and avoid hidden assumptions than one might at first suspect.

Comments

[lasher.livejournal.com]

hahha. I wish that I was one of those women with finely tuned social receptors... at least in the romantic area.... i make the mistake of taking people at their word and assuming "what you see is what you get" and that people say what they mean. probably because that is how i operate and i just cant really fathom people being any other way. unfortunately, i have found out the hard way many times, that people DONT always say what they mean... or change their minds quickly or something. though in retrospect, i realize while writing this reply... that i guess that i really do pick up on things with people sometimes... maybe the problem is that i choose to ignore it and want to believe that people are "good" and "honest" and all that Mary Poppins crap. hahahahah