I was reading an article about attraction, and one man who called himself ‘bisexual’ said he was attracted to many women of all kinds, thin or curvy. He was also attracted to some men, but mostly sharp looking, snooty looking ‘unavailable’ types with blonde hair, under age 30. He doesn’t know why this is, he is not a sex hound lusting after any male with a pulse, no matter how well-built. He wants a blonde male partner under age 30, and no one else will really light his fire than this one ‘type’. Women, he was attracted to a wide variety of pretty youngish women (and even then, seemed to date blondes if only because there are so many of them. ) Ever hear of such a thing?
I can relate to that, the women I was most sexually attracted to didn’t correlate very well with the type of women I was emotionally attracted to. I did eventually outgrow that. I think mine had a lot to do with early sexual experiences.
I had an incredibly specific type for most of my life. Brunette, blue eyes, fit but with some curves and full breasted. Think Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman. I was with a number of them, married and divorced one and could barely tell them apart sometimes but I changed recently. My current girlfriend is a blonde Episcopal priest that has the pretty but nerdy look going and I am extremely attracted to her as well. I decided to go more towards personality and values and it has worked out well so far.
Don’t get me wrong, I would still love a young Lynda Carter lookalike but other considerations have greatly superseded that and having a pretty, blonde priest that is a great personality match is a different type of turn-on. I could never claim with a straight face that I could be attracted to anyone. The range is still pretty narrow but at least I expanded it a little.
I’m glad to hear it can be done - changed from a particular look to another , that is. I was wondering if it indeed had to do with early experiences. I myself never seriously sought out a certain type when I was dating, because frankly the pickings were slim. But I had deep crushes on men with that certain appearance from an early age, and if I had found a look-alike I would have thought I’d hit the jackpot. I realize that character and personality are much more important than surface looks.
We were invited to a party last summer to celebrate a friend’s son’s engagement. When our friend introduced me to the bride-to-be, I said, “yeah, we’ve met a few times already.”
My friend hurried me away. Then she explained that I’d never met her. The women I’d met were two past loves, and all three could pass as triplets. He had a “type” alright!
Moved to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I’m a straight male, and IME women are more likely to have a strict “type” than men are.
If a woman tells you she likes, say, tall, blond cowboy-type men, and you introduce her to a really attractive man who is short, well-built, Mediterranean (IOW, noe of the things she likes), she will probably say, “He’s really good looking. But… not my type”.
OTOH, if a man tells you he likes tall, thin, blonde country girls, and you introduce him to a beautiful, short, busty Mediterranean woman, he will likely flip over her. If you remind him of his stated preferences he’ll say, “Well, yeah… but look at her!”
Men often have a “type”, but we seem to be more drawn to the degree of a woman’s attractiveness. If she’s beautiful enough, we don’t care about what “type” she is.
IME it’s turn-OFFS that are more likely to be set in stone. The physical type that will turn our heads seldom correlates to the people we date or marry.
I have one male friend who is seriously squicked out by large breasts. I don’t see him ever getting past that, no matter how much he liked a woman. I know another guy who can not be turned on by a gamin figure. (Think athletic, flat-chest flapper types.) He says they don’t look like adult females to him, and he gets weirded out at the thought of getting sexual with them.
I keep trying to get these two together, they’d be the ultimate wing-man duo. LOL!
I’m not sure I agree with you, here. When he sees the short, busty Mediterranean woman and says “look at her”, it doesn’t mean he’s changed his ‘type’, it means he was wrong about what his ‘type’ was. You describe her as “beautiful” as if that word has some universal, objective meaning. All it means is that she’s your type. If the other man flips over her, it means she’s his type, too. Maybe it’s the shape of her face, or the way her bottom teeth show just a little bit when she smiles, or the way her hair dips down over her eye. Someone else would look at this woman you call beautiful and say “who, her?”
There are plenty of women that the rest of the world seems to swoon over that don’t do a thing for me, and vice versa. I don’t find it to be a case of changing my type; rather it’s a case of constantly discovering what my type is, even if I can never put it into words.
I always wished I was a certain type ( think Marilyn Monroe) but, alas I was not. I am really light blond alright, that’s where the comparison ends. I seemed to have attracted short, bald Pervy types more than anyone else. So when Mr.Wrekker, a medium height, hefty, toughy type liked me, I grabbed on. It has worked out well. I think I’ll keep him.
As a female, I feel like it’s the other way around.
I’m fairly flat-chested but have great legs. Now, I have heard it said that there are men who are seriously into big-breasted women. But while I dated dozens of different men in my day, they all said they were “leg men,” and a few even expressed distaste for large breasts. Surely, if men were all that flexible in their tastes, I’d have attracted a few men for whom I was an “outside the box” attraction?
Anyway, I don’t think my sample is particularly reliable, but I’m not sure anyone’s personal experiences are going to be all that generalizable.
Every individual has a Type or two that they are attracted to.
Every individual has the ability to: a) be aware of their physical Type; and b) choose to center on it or allow it to be one factor among many. I’d say we’re all on a spectrum.
It is interesting that this thread is up around the same time as that other thread “Ya gotta date the sexy” which asserted that you must be sexually attracted to your partner for it to last. It’s a balance.
There’s such a wide variety of ways that women can be physically attractive that it’s hard for me to imagine being mostly attracted to women of just a few physical types. Even just considering the four women I’ve fallen in love with during my lifetime: my wife looks nothing like the other three, nor did they look anything like each other.
Very similar in deeper ways, though. There’s something in me - almost like a ‘black box,’ it has so little to do with the conscious ‘me’ - that definitely has a ‘type,’ and is able to recognize it way before I’m consciously aware of what’s going on. But physical type? Unimportant.