“Your husband is cute,” I told a friend recently. (People usually like to hear that their long-term spouses are attractive.) “Oh,” she said, “I don’t care about that. I’ve never cared about how people look and I would hope that he doesn’t care how I look either.”
I’m often told that looks are unimportant, that in choosing a partner you should disregard appearance and focus on their more profound and meaningful qualities: personality, character, intellect. Like most advice, this is an appropriate admonition for some. If you find yourself picking based on looks alone, if you’re often seduced into relationships with attractive but empty-headed, flighty or even cruel people because you are defenceless against a pretty face, then clearly, you should reprioritise. Likewise, if you’re overly concerned about what the world considers beautiful, if you expect your partner to conform to some external beauty standard, then you might need to reconsider. But the idea that physical attraction can be overridden or ignored in the choice of a partner seems wrongheaded to me.
There might even be a secret wisdom in your intuitive response to someone else’s physical presence. I’m increasingly convinced that some important assessments that our minds make are not accessible to conscious awareness. Evolutionary psychologist Rob Kurzban’s excellent (but misnamed) book, Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, provides many examples of such processes. I suspect these include not only instantaneous responses—the so-called Type A thinking that prompts me to leap back in shock when I spot the coils of a snake beside a walking trail—but more complex, multifaceted calculations. Perhaps the lack of physical attraction to someone is a signal that shouldn’t be ignored, a sign that you are not compatible at some molecular level, that your offspring would be weaker and less likely to survive.
But in any case, whether or not it’s appropriate or good that we are not attracted to certain people, for most of us, it’s unavoidable. And I, for one, find it extremely painful. It’s the cruellest irony. I am longing to meet someone, but just when I do meet a man who seems ideally suited in many ways—kind, sincere, ready for a relationship, intelligent, cultured, prosperous; someone with whom I have a great deal in common, with whom I could surely build a rich, enjoyable and comfortable life—that spark of physical attraction is stubbornly absent. Surely, I can’t help feeling, I can somehow generate it, if I stack those logs into a clever pyramid and scrunch up enough paper for kindling, I can coax out a lick of flame? But the kindling is waterlogged. Despite its well-deserved reputation for sunshine, no city is more stubbornly gloomy and sopping than Sydney amid a flurry of wet winter days, when one clattering downpour follows another. And despite my own greedy, open-mouthed and sticky-fingered pleasure in physical intimacy, no one is more stubbornly reluctant, more averse to sexual closeness than I am when my pilot light is out.
There’s a well-known cartoon about the double standards people—and especially women, generally the fussier sex—apply with regard to sexual advances from those they fancy versus those who don’t appeal.
I don’t think it’s quite right for the kinds of cases I’m talking about, though—unless the Human Resources department I’m calling is located within my own brain. I feel zero offence: all my annoyance is directed inward. Sometimes it may come across as a prickliness towards the person concerned, an inexplicably grumpy mood—but the real focus of my irritation is myself.
I’m keenly aware of my own disadvantages on the dating market as a 56-year-old woman. I’m also painfully conscious of how rare certain qualities I value are among my cohort—in particular, a love of reading. Anyone who loves books—even those who currently have little time for reading but used to read in the past—has a different outlook on life, a broader, richer, more intellectually sophisticated outlook. The traces of that are clear even after everything they have read has been forgotten, visible as a tide mark of water on silk, depositing a patina like the teddy bear softness of a favourite pair of jeans, creating a comfortable, inviting familiarity. Encountering such a person always makes me feel that I can relax, that I don’t need to explain myself, that even if we don’t have the same points of reference, haven’t perused the same authors, don’t share the same favourites, we both know what it means to see life through that prism, to have a parallel world of imagination to draw on, to know what it is to experience things twice: once in reality and once in description. And just as I can tell if someone is a good tango dancer without seeing them make a single move, just by the way they carry themselves and embrace their partners, by the posture of their body, upright yet perfectly relaxed, I can tell if someone is a reader before they have made any references to books or writers, in the way they talk, in the way they listen.
Can a meeting of minds ever become a meeting of bodies? Of course, this can happen. But I think that’s usually the result of overlooking or not realising a burgeoning physical attraction. When the body is quiet, indifferent, tardy, the mind can lead the way. Desire can be a slumbering beast, a sleeping beauty waiting for the glass coffin to be jolted and the apple in the throat dislodged. This is much less likely to happen when the body has already firmly pronounced its veto. William Godwin tells of having fallen in love with his fellow writer Mary Wollstonecraft (author of the celebrated early feminist work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1798) before he met her or even knew what she looked like, purely from her writing. The writer I most admire is Samuel Johnson. I am deeply in love with his perfect blend of sharp intelligence, devastating humour and profound compassion. But if Johnson came to life again and courted me, could I date him? Could I let this man whose words have been such an important part of my life, become so enmeshed with my memory and imagination, be intimate with my body? Could I have sex with Johnson? Frankly, I don’t believe I could.
A friend told me that she once stayed out late with an attractive but louche younger man and ended up on his couch, fully dressed still, but receiving a back massage from his well-oiled hands that had slipped up beneath her T-shirt. “I’ve got to go now,” she told him. “Stay,” he coaxed. “I can tell your body wants this.” “My body isn’t the boss here. I am,” she said. And left. I love that story and have thought about it often. I don’t buy the advice that you should always trust your body. As writer Helen Pluckrose once put it, “Of course I don’t trust my body. My body wants to sit on the couch all day, drinking wine, eating chocolate and smoking cigarettes. My body is an idiot.” Whenever I meet a man I otherwise like very much but do not feel attracted to, I’m reminded of just what an idiot my ‘body’ really is (or, in reality, some part of my mind that feels more intimately connected to bodily sensations and desires). But while I can stay off the couch and avoid daydrinking, this is an area in which its imperative commands cannot be disobeyed and its veto is too often absolute. This idiot rules me. I wish it were otherwise.
I guess your Samuel Johnson story makes you the opposite of a sapiosexual, which surprises me about you. But it sounds as if you're rather an incurable romantic, which also has its charms.
I know true beauty is internal, but I like it when some seeps out onto the surface.