empathy and attraction
i was just jotting down a quick comment on red-cedar’s blog post about attraction, but my comment was getting a little long so i thought i’d just post something here and track it back. Here’s the part i was replying to:
“and i didn’t have an immediate physical attraction (though that means very little for me, because i find physical attraction something that grows as i enjoy spending time with a person).”
i really liked hearing this, because i think along the same lines. Physical attraction, for me, is something that grows and changes as i get to know a person. The way a person acts influences my physical attraction to them…it’s sorta interconnected. Especially important is someone’s smile. When i try to think back to past relationships and recall a person’s physical beauty, the memories are always of smiles and laughter. When and why someone smiles is also part of it.
sometimes i’ve had some rather bizarre situations where i try to describe the physical beauty of a lover to someone, but then they’re sorta shocked when they actually meet the lover i was describing…the beauty i was seeing and describing was not there for the person with no relationship. it’s there for me because it’s intertwined with the rest of my knowledge of the person.
I think we get way too much training from society about how to distill someone down to a sum of body parts, though. we have to learn to consciously work against that, to see someone as a whole person. When we find ourselves attracted to someone purely on some bodily measurements, we have to fight it and try to work in the aspects of their personality taht are interesting. Similarly, when we meet interesting people who don’t match the current media definition of beauty, then we have to learn to think about their character traits as adding beauty. we need to train our minds to see someone as beautiful because of all the things that makes them who they are. ideally, i think it should be impossible to think of someone as beautiful when you don’t know them at all. There isn’t one neutral standard of ‘natural’ physical beauty anyway, so we should stop pretending.
Ride hard, ride free
June 17th, 2005 at 08:36 am
Are flowers not beautiful until you know whether they have a tap root or a bulb?
You have to admit some people are hot. popculture is strongly biased towards body parts but that doesn’t mean a person’s body isn’t an important aspect of beauty.
We do have eyes. I see things I like to look at. It’s unhealthy to deny the way a person looks and moves just like its unhealthy to ignore a person’s character. A balance between the two seems ideal.
June 17th, 2005 at 08:42 am
uh so in conclusion I agree with you. except that i don’t see anything wrong with thinking someone is beautiful before I know them. They look beautiful. That’s a good start :).
June 17th, 2005 at 08:45 am
damnit. now i don’t know what to think. thanks for headache. jerk.
June 21st, 2005 at 17:53 pm
ya i agree that media and pop culture have made a bit of a mess of the “attraction” thing. however i don’t see much point in “fighting” your emotions, or putting too much grief into “training” our minds to be a certain way. i dunno, the whole “self-improvement” thing is just not worth it imo.
but perhaps i’ve read too much into what you’ve said. i guess what bugs me is: if you’re always beating yourself up because of feelings and/or emotions that you have, but you don’t think are rational to have… well sooner or later you’ll be beating yourself up for beating yourself up!
June 22nd, 2005 at 10:57 am
more on physical attraction
i just thought i’d jot down a few more thoughts on an earlier posting, now that i’ve had a few comments back. thanks, matt, for questioning my statements, and asking about criticising our emotions. I think that a lot of people (men in ou…