PenteKing’s BodyBlog

…which, as my ex-wife was fond of saying, is a wild and dangerous time. Be that as it may, I was ruminating about the factors that attract one person to another. Oh, sure; there are those who will tell you it’s about intelligence and personality and inner beauty, and while there is a lot of truth in all of that, the plain fact of the matter is that, when you first meet a person, none of those qualities are evident. Those are all below the surface. What initially attracts you is the way they look.

Now, don’t get me wrong. This blog isn’t about attractiveness or society’s fascination with surface beauty. No, it’s something more than that. I think you are attracted to specific types of people. Take my brother’s preferences, for example. Every woman my brother has been attracted to share the same physical characteristics. They are uniformly short, stocky, with (to use Fern’s hilarious term) pendulous breasts and substantial buttocks. My other brother, on the other hand, prefers women who are just as tall and broad as he is himself. They are not unattractive, but neither would anyone say that they are pretty. My younger brother is repelled by my second brother’s taste in women and vice versa.

Now I provide these details as way of background and explanation. Both of my brothers, you see, look very much alike. They are both fairly tall, broadly built through the shoulders and chest, with almost no hips and scrawny legs. Their women, whether they realize it or not, have attributes they are lacking (that is, full hips and strong, sturdy legs). My theory is that they unconsciously seek out mates with physical characteristics they wish they had in themselves. In their offspring, they hope to create a "more perfect" reflection of themselves.

This may, of course, be total nonsense and balderdash, but I’ve noticed the trend in other of my friends (male and female alike) and while my sampling wouldn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny, it has a balance to it that I find refreshing. Who knows? Maybe we all seek that mate that "completes" us in some way. It may not be anything of which we are consciously aware, but on some level, we tend to seek out the same physical characteristics in all of the potential mates we consider. It is natural selection on a subliminal level that is buried so deeply it is nearly primeval. I wonder if there is any way of validating my theory. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could?

In re-reading this blog, the thought struck me - maybe my ex-wife was on to something when she said what she did.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.