“Women Don’t Use Looks When Selecting a Partner.”
It’s becoming increasingly popular to say this, except it’s not true, we do, just not in the way men do
If I had a dime for every person who said that women don’t use looks when selecting who to date, I would be rich many times over. I even often say it myself, except I always add the caveat, not in the way that men do.
That is an important caveat and is something that has become lost in the discussion about the part looks play when women look for a partner.
Looks do matter, just not in the way they do for men. This is why dating apps work so well for successful men, but suck for women.
That means we do use looks, and anyone who tells you otherwise is talking rubbish.
Looks matter to women — but not like they do to men
I find my partner attractive, but I certainly could tell you many men who I could have dated over my partner who I found more physically and aesthetically pleasing.
I didn’t date them, I selected my partner, who was older and less physically attractive, but still attractive.
This is what it means when women say that looks don’t matter, it means that they matter, as in we need to feel some attraction physically, but unlike men, we aren’t going to just pick the man that is the best-looking option available to us.
For us, our shallowness is truly in selecting a man who is intelligent and has ambition because such a man can provide resources, and our evolution has favoured selecting a man who can provide resources.
It may sound like that is not as shallow as picking somebody based on their looks, but it is. Anyone who says otherwise is probably blind to their own bias and shallowness. Dating inevitably is shallowness, that’s the way natural selection works, we use shallow methods and then through those methods, use non-shallow methods.
In a way, love is like walking into the ocean, it starts out shallow but the further you walk into it, the deeper it gets. However, the difference is unlike with oceans where you can just jump in at the deep end, with love you always have to start in the shallows.
But when it comes to looks, men are shallower, and for good reason, that is how the male attraction system works, it has evolved to use appearance to help a man select the best option out of his available options. Ours has not, ours has evolved to pick the best provider and protector of those we deem worthy of being an option.
In a way, you could say that men have evolved to use looks to select a partner, whereas women have evolved to use looks to reject a partner. That means looks don’t mean “yes I will date you” to a woman, but they can mean “no, I will never date you.” So, still “shallow”, just a different type of shallow.
To understand why this difference exists, you have to look into the past.
The truth of attraction is in the past
A woman can receive sperm over and over again without any time restraints. In fact, if we want, we can truly be what the porn industry likes to call “cumsluts.” Fill us up one after the other and let the best sperm win.
The only thing that limits our ability to receive sperm is a lack of men to provide us with sperm.
The story is different for men. Not only is the number of times a man can ejaculate very limited, a man can only put out top-quality sperm once every 2 to 3 days. That means even if a man ejaculates more than once over a three-day period, the sperm from the second load will be of lower quality, and if he goes a third time, it will be even lower still and so on.
This really matters when it comes to understanding why men have evolved such a great skill for being able to pick out the one woman they want to date based upon looks alone, whereas women have not. And it really is a skill, it staggers me how good men are at just knowing the right woman to date based solely on her appearance. It’s like they know who we are and our compatibility simply by looking at us.
There is a good reason why. A very good reason. Being able to do this gave men an evolutionary advantage, as such, the better men are at using looks alone to select a partner, the greater the evolutionary advantage they gain over their fellow men.
Think of it like this, a man’s sperm is limited, which means if he has options he has to be very selective over which option to not only give his sperm to, but to give his best sperm to.
If we go back millions of years to when males still competed to be an alpha and the winner got to take all the available females, all the males had as tools to select a mate was the appearance of females — because we had not evolved language and speech yet, far from it.
This matters because in this world, the winner needs to ensure that he creates the strongest offspring possible, which means he needs to mate with the best option.
But how does he ensure that he does this when all he has is the appearance of females?
The answer is to use the appearance of females.
For example, let’s imagine there are four females, all fit and healthy and good-looking. You would imagine that in such a world, it wouldn’t matter which female our alpha male mated with first.
Wrong. Just because the females are all fit and healthy and good-looking does not mean that one will not provide a better genetic match than the others.
This is where men evolving the ability to instinctually read women’s DNA simply through their appearance comes into play.
By subconsciously analysing each female based on her appearance, and then internally computing which female will lead to the strongest offspring should he mate with them, a male gains a massive evolutionary advantage over his fellow males.
This is because such a male will be able to give himself the statistically best chance of having the strongest offspring because he would know which female to mate with first and give his best sperm to, and then which female to mate with second, then which one third, and so on.
The male need to do this is even one of the main reasons why women evolved permanent breasts. Men needed to work out a means to identify the youngest female, a female with non-saggy breasts would have had fewer children i.e. meaning she was younger, so firm breasts equal younger female.
When we evolved to stand on two feet, this process likely led women to eventually form breasts as a permanent feature, because permanent breasts are more likely to be firmer than breasts without fat reserves.
Yes, those bouncy things on our chest truly most likely exist as permanent features because men wanted to work out which of us was the most fertile i.e. youngest.
So, on every level, the male necessity of needing to work out which female to mate with when they had options, and only having looks as the tool to be able to do this, inevitably, led to the men who were the best at using looks to work out who was best to procreate with being the winners of every generation.
This means with each generation that passes, men get better at using looks to select a partner, which means with each generation, women’s looks become even more important to men.
Which yes, I know, means paradoxically, men using looks is not superficial, it’s intelligent because they have the tools to use looks to work out who is the best genetic match. So, looks truly do help men work out who is best to date.
That’s why men are so obsessed with looks. But it is why women are not, selecting a man based on his appearance does not give us an evolutionary advantage, it only gives men one.
This is because when we have had to choose one male from a list of options, it has always been and remains smarter for us to pick the most capable protector and provider, because the most capable protector and provider would and will even today be better able to keep us alive during pregnancy and help us keep any offspring alive.
As such, unlike men who have evolved looks as a means to say yes, you are the one for me, the only reason we have evolved to use looks is to say no, not you.
Final words
When a woman says she doesn’t use looks, she is not saying that looks don’t matter, they do, what she is saying is that looks aren’t going to make her say yes, him, he’s who I want to date, to be able to say that we need more.
When you understand that, you understand the different ways men and women have evolved to select a partner, and why dating apps suck so much for women, but not successful men.
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