Investigating Relational Attraction & Success…
So, I’ve been preoccupied lately with trying to figure out exactly what people get out of romantic relationships. Basically, this consists of watching the interactions of couples, and taking mental notes about types of relationships vs. the body language and demeanor of the subjects.
Maybe that sounds bizarre, but that’s how it really is for me. I see humans as subjects. I see romance as a social experiment. I have no practical reference for a “successful romance”, so I am mentally compiling observations to find out what other people think makes a successful romance.
This is not to say I think I’ll ever be a part of a successful romance. Realistically, that is a highly unlikely scenario. To be in a successful romance, I’d have to actually be attractive and “worth the risk” to some hapless male. I can’t actually imagine that at this point in my life. I can fantasize about a faceless boyfriend and the qualities I’d like in “my” man, but I can’t imagine any of the people I meet in my life as being “boyfriend material”…
The main issue is that I’m not attracted to anyone. I find males and females equally sexually unattractive. Some humans are symmetrical enough to look “pretty” to me, but it’s in the same way a landscape looks pretty. It is pleasing to my eye, but it doesn’t hold any significance for me. I don’t find those people more interesting or attractive. Realistically, humans are just human. I think everyone looks fine the way they are, and that’s why false modifications look garish to me, no matter how subtle. It is the personality that is interesting and attractive to me in any human.
It is no accident that I am more often attracted to male humans. My brain’s blueprint is most similar to that of a “normal male”. Thus, my interests and thought processes and beliefs can largely be classified as “manly” in a social context. I am okay with this, because I don’t think gender has anything to do with one’s personal preferences, and I just naturally have comparatively few “womanly” interests. So, I’ve generally had male friends and boon companions my entire life.
One problem with this is that males tend to think I have romantic feelings for them or am open to sexual advances just because I talk to them or pay attention to them. I learned relatively early that this was not something I find pleasant. That attention and falsity and attempted bargaining is disturbing and repulsive to me. Yet, I still prefer male companionship. So, my male friends through life were either gay or had a specific range of attraction that I did not fit. This was purposeful on my part because I am not interested in manipulating males with attention. This is entirely too easy to do with those males who vie for female attention and favor with the hopes of “earning” sex. This makes me very uncomfortable.
In school, people often called me “gay”. To this day, I’m not sure why they thought that. I suspect the culprit was the behavior of spurned males and their necessity to blame the female for a failed advance. It never bothered me, because it made people leave me alone, but I never really understood where they got this idea. I thought certain boys looked handsome and could imagine kissing them without feeling repulsed, but didn’t try to make any real kissing happen because I wasn’t actually interested in doing anything more than talking to them.
As a teenager, I found this lack of attraction disconcerting, because I knew that wasn’t “normal”. At that time, I was trying very hard to look normal, so I let males act upon their attraction. I found myself dreading and feeling quite disgusted by the advances of the males who “liked” me. It wasn’t that they were disgusting people, I just had no interest in them on any level above friendship. Even if their faces were pleasant, their touch was an irritant, their kisses were bland and uninteresting, and their pheromones smelled wrong and off-putting. I learned to suppress my natural instincts and body language of distaste so that I could affect enjoyment. That’s how I was able to pretend I was a normal vivacious young woman.
I’ve only met one male in the thousands of males I’ve ever met who “smelled right” and whose advances were welcome to me.
Unfortunately, that was not the male who wanted to marry me. At eighteen, I got married because a guy asked. I pretended my way through the marriage, doing what “successfully married” people do so that it would look good… until I couldn’t do that anymore. So, this is how I ended up as a three-kid divorcée with no clue about romance and only a vague idea of what I’d even like in a romance.
I truly doubt there will ever be a “successful” romantic relationship in my future. I just don’t have that kind of luck. For my version of a successful romance, these factors are a necessity:
a) mutual attraction
b) mutual friendship
c) male is capable of coherent discussion
d) male willing to engage in meaningful interaction (including emotional expression)
e) male has similar interests
f) male is neither stereotypical nor shallow in his expectations of a mate
g) male is not possessive
h) can agree upon mutually satisfactory terms of partnership
That list pretty much guarantees I’ll never have a socially “successful” relationship. I am unwilling to compromise myself and my feelings just to pretend to have a happy relationship.
Still watching other people to see how they pretend, though. It is very interesting.