It’s more important to me that my SO finds me attractive than vice versa. Whether I’m objectively attractive or not is irrelevant, as long as my partner feels a physical attraction to me for whatever reasons, and makes me feel attractive in their eyes.
It doesn’t matter much, I’ve found, whether I find my SO physically attractive. As long as I don’t find them actually repulsive, I’m good to go, because horniness is what makes me want to have sex, and the appeal of my partner is based more on their mind and personality than how physically attractive they are.
I really like this question, great OP, F-P. Although it wasn’t framed this way, I think the most entertaining way of thinking of this problem is as an allocation problem.
You have 100 “x attracted to y” points to distribute across you and your partner, but to make it interesting, a 50/50 allocation is one where you’re both sort of “meh” in regards to being attracted to each other, not where you’re both actively attracted to each other. Values below 50 are negative attraction.
No, how do you allocate the points? I’d definitely put more than fifty on my partner’s attractiveness to me, because that’s the side of this debate I’m on, but how much more is the balancing act and question.
I definitely wouldn’t do 50/50, because what’s the point of a drab relationship full of “meh,” where the best you can aspire to is you both vaguely tolerating each other?
A lot of folk seem to be fighting the hypothetical entirely and saying what’s the point of a relationship / allocation scheme like this at all where both sides can’t “win,” but I think folk with philosophical objections to the premise should go to happier threads with no sacrifices to be made, because empirically in the real world, there almost always IS an imbalance like this in relationships just like there’s income imbalances, cooking skill imbalances, ambition imbalances, power imbalances, and whatever else.
While I agree at the start of a relationship, attractiveness can change during a relationship. While my wife apparently hasn’t aged a day in 40 years of marriage, I know some women from college (a few who I used to date) who aren’t nearly as attractive today as then. Though they might seem more attractive to their spouses.
My ex-wife was a good woman, but just the wrong one for me. While physically she was fine, we were on different wavelengths and I just wasn’t that attracted to her as a partner. I didn’t get divorced for a long time since I grew up with this thing about how evil divorce was and she never really did anything wrong, but it just didn’t work out for me. Eventually, I got a divorce which really broke her up because she had been very much attracted to me.
Umm, this sounds like exactly the kind of questions I asked in middle school before I’d really gotten to know any women (let alone fallen in love with one).
After decades of courtship and marriage and raising children, issues like “Is this person attractive?” just don’t figure into daily living. Or are way down the list after things like “How can we compromise on this subject?” or “How can our mediocre social skills work together when raising our kids, and not immediately force them into therapy?” or “Do we have the same values and goals in life?”
Come to think of it, that last one is MUCH more important than attractiveness. Somebody once said “Love isn’t two people looking at each other, it’s two people looking in the same direction.”