What is Ugly-Hot, Really?
I met this girl at a party. She followed me around all night and we hit it off, but she was too hot for me to believe that she could be into me, so I let her leave without trying anything.
I got her Instagram earlier in the night and as she was leaving, she told me to message her when I visited her hometown next. Then she just never followed back or answered my message. How badly did I fuck up?
You didn’t—she might have been interested in you for that night but changed her mind later. It’s also possible that your intuition about her not really liking you was right, maybe she felt awkward at the party and saw you as safe, so stuck close by.
My sense is that women aren’t going to write you off if you don’t make a move, particularly during the first meeting. If she was interested in you in a longer term capacity she would have followed up with your more direct expression of interest later on.
I was raised in a Christian community. I'm in my 20s now and have since left the church... Life's been pretty good ever since, but I'm continually depressed by the secular dating scene.
It feels extremely superficial and objectifying (for women AND men). Honestly, I'm considering returning to my religious roots just because dating felt more genuine there. If I'm going to have to put up with an ideology I disagree with, I may as well choose one I'm familiar with, right? Thoughts?
Very long ago, back when Default Wisdom was just an advice column and not a catch-all for whatever stray thought floated into my head, I had a co-writer.
He was in the same boat as you—came from a very religious background, had grown accustomed to a long courtship process, and found the secular dating scene disorienting.
From what I understand, even when he found someone who was willing and able to respect his boundaries, there were certain cultural nuances that were difficult to recapture or explain to someone who hadn’t grown up in his community. He was a really nice guy, and when we talked about his post-religious life, I always got the distinct impression that he was still “culturally faithful,” even if he no longer believed in that particular expression of religion.
So, I’m going to tell you what I’d tell him:
You have four options.
1) You can date people who are ex-religious and had the same problem you did, but left the church amicably.
2) You can rejoin your faith and take the L on certain lifestyle restrictions, if you feel like the sacrifice is worth regaining that community.
3) You can find a new faith with a theology that better speaks to your needs and see how that feels.
4) You can try being very clear and intentional in your dating app profiles (or when you meet someone in person) and see how much mileage you get out of being honest from the jump. Of course, people lie, but honesty is a surprisingly good filter.
To me, it ultimately depends on what the religion is, why you left, and how happy being outside of that community makes you. If you left because you were miserable, why return to that? If you left because you thought the grass was greener and it turned out it wasn’t, maybe faking it isn’t such a bad idea. It all depends.
I will also add, to the fourth point, I feel like my own secular dating experience hasn’t felt superficial, though that might just be by my own standards. For me, being honest about looking for something longterm has helped.
As an aside, I feel like I’m noticing more and more people express some kind of casual dating fatigue. My sample size might be biased, but from what I’ve been able to observe, there’s something about COVID that’s left a lot of people wanting more meaningful connections, both in their friendships and romantically.
What aspects of female attraction don’t involve the man’s physical appearance? Or how can a conventionally unattractive man become more attractive?
I think the thing about dating apps is that they don’t allow a man to use his personality in quite the same way.
Ultimately, there’s something pornographic about swiping left or right. It’s feeding off our most base desires, and those desires don’t necessarily map to what we’d generally be attracted to. I know it might sound far-fetched, but I do encourage people to think of it through the lens of pornography. It’s a fantasy, and it might be a fantasy you’d kill to indulge in, it’s not all you’d be willing to accept, and in most cases, might not be what you’d exclusively want, save for a few edge cases.
That said, I think over a certain threshold, personality can do a lot of work.
I’ve been viscerally attracted to people who are not just “conventionally unattractive,” but objectively pretty ugly because they’re funny or have a lot of domain knowledge or are especially unique or interesting.
You also shouldn’t underestimate how much leverage simply being comfortable in your own skin gives you. It’s true that conventionally attractive people need to put in a lot less effort, but all I can really say to that is so what? Ugly people, particularly ugly men, can cultivate status, humor, aloofness, a good sense of fashion, intelligence—any number of things—and come out on top.
It takes practice, but it definitely can be done.
Have a question? Drop me a line at defaultefriend@gmail.com or send me a question on CuriousCat.