It’s been said that sitting on a fat wallet will make you look much taller.
I am also fat, bald, & have three young children (as a plus, I’m pretty tall). I was front-and-center on these facts on my voluminous online dating profile. The only mis-truth on my online profile was understating my income to avoid gold diggers (although it did say I worked as with corporate computing systems so there is some implied income there… I might not have been as successful if I said I worked at McDonalds).
I, too, am overly intellectual, a bit of a know-it-all, and definitely geeky. I went out with on girl who successfully used the word “grok” correctly in conversation and I nearly swooned. (She also accompanied the word with a brief look through her bangs that let me know she was checking me out for my reaction to the word. A test of sorts, I suspect.)
I dated very successfully as a 40-something until my marriage a couple years ago. As drachillix so nicely put it, there’s a fine line between “perv and putting the pussy on a pedestal” and I, too, found that leaning to the perv side was more successful. However, I’d probably phrase it as “sexually assertive” and it paid back fairly well.
I think women read the assertiveness as confidence (though it was, to a point, a fake-out job on my part) but liked it. I think it’s probably safe to say that most women don’t want to date a wuss. As relationships wore on, some of the artifice would drop, my geeky side would emerge more and they’d either appreciate it of not.
Hate to say it, sometimes marketing yourself works and sometimes you have to be a bit artificial in the opening volleys of the match. It’s not that you have to lie or adopt some entirely different personality. However, if you know you tend to be a know it all or you tend to dominate conversations, then intentionally dial it back at first. Try to deliberately listen or try to avoid the phrase, “Well, actually…” when some not-quite-accurate “fact” is presented.
Years ago I used to be pretty serious introvert and I deliberately tried to defeat what I saw as a negative personality trait. It’s almost like acting.
I remember once that Ricki Lake said (of her talk show) that she wasn’t really a talk show host. To her, she was a actress playing the role of a talk show host. In that way, I wasn’t really an extrovert but I pretended to be one. After a while, I learned to do it more genuinely I don’t think anybody today would use the adjective “introverted” to describe me.
Finally, for those that are, shall we say, “larger than average”, especially women, I would opine that attractiveness is so much more than just measurements. Attitude, movement, laughter, and so much more are important for true attraction. I make a distinction between “beauty” and “attractiveness” and think the latter is so much more interesting.