Marry the Woman Who Is Most Attractive When She’s Least Attractive
Physical attraction matters. It is just as hard to imagine pair bonding with someone you hold a great deal of psychological affinity for but are physically repulsed by as it is with someone you are physically drawn to but have no common ground psychologically. I would even go so far as to say that infatuation and, to a degree, lust are necessary components of healthy romantic love and bonding. You have to want to look at and be around your partner. You have to want to touch them, to merge with and mold into them, both physically and emotionally. It’s an essential part of bonding, with sexual intercourse itself being the apex of this process.
Authentic physical chemistry probably also reveals natural genetic and biochemical compatibilities between partners—but I’m no biologist, so don’t ask me.
One of the obvious dichotomies between the masculine and feminine romantic experience is that men over-emphasize the importance of their physical attraction to women, and women under-emphasize it. For the crudest of men, a woman being sexy or beautiful enough to capture their attention and earn social envy from their peers is enough to warrant attempts at pair bonding.
Many women, on the other hand, have barely even explored their own capacity to experience lust toward the men they find physically attractive. One has to imagine how desolate the dating scene must be for entire generations of women to grow up not knowing it’s possible or permissible for them to have preferences in this domain, something they see as crude, improper, and reserved solely for the bestial masculine psyche.
What is the value for a man in seeing an attractive woman? What is it about the experience that makes him feel good and incentivizes him to act? Excitement about the possibility of receiving her attention? Perhaps becoming the object of her lust? Seeing her naked? Or even eventually having sex with her? All are fleeting pleasures. There is a deeper level of appreciation for feminine beauty that is lasting and calm. There is a woman who will bring you peace when you look at her. The novel excitement of attractive strangers will probably never go away completely—but it will hardly be noticeable compared to how The One makes you feel.
Greatly complicating the matter is that modern man has been spoiled and, to a large extent, corrupted by constant exposure to manufactured feminine attractiveness. We are reared into a world of sexual super-stimulation that hijacks our senses by giving us more of a good thing than would be naturally possible. It’s the high-fructose corn syrup of sexual aesthetics. We don’t know how to process it all.
Modern artificialities create the possibility that you might not know what the woman you see every day actually looks like—only the mask and tailored persona she adopts before she leaves the house every morning. You might not know how attracted to her you really are. You might only know the image she has crafted, which she probably picked up from generalized beauty standards in her local culture.
In the worst cases, she will surgically alter herself to look less and less like herself and more and more how men like you have told her she ought to. Is she making these drastic changes just “for herself,” as so many women will claim? Or because she has been inundated with cultural ideas about what it means to be beautiful?
I once fell in love with a woman who looked at least five times as attractive to me without makeup, like how she looked first thing in the morning as she’d just risen from bed, compared to how she usually painted her face outside for the benefit of strangers. I only found this out during the first time she stayed over at my house and I saw her morning face before she had a chance to prepare it for public viewing.
The version of her face she made up for the world to see was fine, to be sure. There was nothing wrong with it. It was an amalgamation of traits she had been influenced to think were beautiful in her environment and that most people would respond positively to. But it was not a face that was an accurate representation of her. When I saw how she really looked, who she really was in her natural state without the glitz and glamor she hid behind, I knew it was a face I would want to wake up to every morning, a face I would want to see evolve and grow for decades.
How could I have ever felt that way about her public, artificial face? Any other generically pretty girl could put the same effort into looking approximately the same and satisfying the same general social requirements for beauty.
My love actually seemed offended when I told her that, to me, she was already the most beautiful she could possibly be before altering anything about her appearance. Any work she did would only detract from the exceptional state of our natural physical chemistry. I was already 100% attracted to her. I saw then that, to her, beauty was value she thought she was supposed to work for—a gift she crafted for my and the world’s benefit. Telling her that she was already the epitome of beauty to me without doing any of that work robbed her of what she saw as her feminine contribution. If only she could have seen that there was never a thing she needed to do to impress me or be the most beautiful woman in the world.
Makeup and clothing don’t have to be deceptive or inauthentic, of course. Most of the time, when I see someone wearing everyday clothes, it does little to influence my perception of what that person actually looks like. On both conscious and unconscious levels, I register that your baggy sweatshirt is just some cloth you draped over your body to keep it warm and covered or that a nice dress shirt and jacket are context-specific cultural costumes. But when women manufacture their appearance through expertly crafted adornments and decorations that change their face and body, they are engaging in social manipulation. They cease to look like themselves anymore because they want to fit a standard that the world will find at least generally pleasing. It’s socially advantageous for them. They are simultaneously victims and perpetrators of the unreal world that grows more hyperreal every year.
It’s the difference between casually playing a video game and being plugged, unwillingly and unknowingly, into the matrix. One slightly heightens reality for the purpose of entertainment; the other supersedes reality for the purpose of deception.
In the course of sharing a life with someone, you will see them in moments when they have not prepared their appearance: no makeup or fancy dress to craft the specific image designed to attract you. You will see them at their worst, just as they will see the same from you. If you are only attracted to them at a manufactured best, you’re not really attracted to them at all. I see no why this should not be considered an integral part of the “for better for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and cherish always” element of traditional wedding vows. When you cannot help but still be drawn to them in physical form, even when it is not obvious that you should be, and even when no other men notice the beauty that you do, you will know you have found miraculous physical chemistry.