Themeattics

I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously revived, great and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

This week has been busy as all hell, so when I say I didn’t intend to write this article, trust that. I was planning to make a bit of a throwaway post about how my one-hour-a-day Beeminder goal has been absolutely blown out of the water due to everything I have to do (I’m 12 days above the threshold right now), but every now and then something comes along that you just can’t ignore.

Living on the internet brings me to all sorts of weird places. Its fun in that those places can spur ideas or conversations, but it can also lead to a warped view of society and give people an easy means to feed into their worst natures. Look no further than Twitter or, in the spirit of this post, OnlyFans.

Again, this is going to be a bit of a weird one. Most of the time I have my position down and am just rambling about it. Now I get to ramble about something I haven’t quite figured out. I’ve seen a lot of talk about OnlyFans dropping its explicit content and the people rushing to argue both sides of the change. Being a happily married Catholic with three kids, let’s just say this place isn’t my wheelhouse and I’ve mostly ignored it until I read some of the discussion around it. I’m not about to come down on either side of the morality of the place – you can guess that, and it’s irrelevant to this topic. What got me, what really brought this post on, were the income numbers.

Did you know there are women on OnlyFans who are making literal millions a month? Hell of a career, but where’s that money coming from? Well, it’s from people who are desperate to feel wanted by someone they find attractive. There’s a term for these people – simps – and the more I fell down that rabbit hole the more depressed I got. It strikes me as an incredibly sad state of being and, as a friend of mine said when I started talking to him about it, they’re more or less Incels that have yet to lose all hope.

Now, ok, that’s another tangent I don’t want to fall down. Not here to call people out or lay blame. What I’m here for, five paragraphs in, is to discuss attraction. You see, this whole thing got me thinking – is our understanding of one another so off kilter that we can’t see how parasitic, dehumanizing, and backward this whole interaction is? Men who have given up on real women to pay for easy attention. Women who have given up on real relationships for easy riches. Is that what we’re about now? Everything being easy and sterile?

There’s so much bemoaning online about the difficulty of attraction. And, sure, it might be a challenge, but why do we expect it not to be? This is another person’s attention we’re trying to capture. People are never easy. Not when they’re real. That’s part of what makes it great – the constant need to improve to keep things vibrant.

I’ve asked a few people since this came into mind, and I’ll ask all of you as well – how attractive do you find effort?

When this idea jumped at me, I immediately thought that was the answer. Effort is the key factor of attraction. Statistically, women are most attracted to men who are successful in their industry or have achieved stability, which is an outcome of focused effort. Also statistically, men are most attracted to women who put a great deal of effort into their appearance. Look, I don’t make the studies. In either case, both are clear outcomes of effort. Beyond that, for me personally, I’ve always found the high degree of skill in a craft that comes from effort to be attractive. Musicians, artists, athletes – the dedication and focus that it takes to excel in these fields always got me. A few of my closest friends agreed, but one brought up a great point.

Sure, effort is great, but people who put eight hours a day into competitive gaming aren’t exactly lining up the ladies. And, he’s right. Even when that IS their job, and they make good money from it, there’s a barrier there. Which got me thinking, maybe it’s status that’s attractive? In order for a woman to maintain a certain degree of physical appearance, she has to be in a favorable situation that grants her the time to do that. Women back in medieval fiefdoms weren’t exactly tending to their eyeliner. And, at the time, it seems there was a penchant for favoring slightly more… let’s go with voluptuous women than the types we seem to favor now. And that was certainly a case of status – the only women that looked like that were royalty and could afford to lounge about and eat. On the opposite end, men’s place in industry and level of stability are obvious status checks. Celebrity, also, is a great status indicator and that seems to bring a lot of attraction.

This friend gave me what he termed the “Meaningfulness Index,” and in a fit of pure nerd I had to put it in here. Effort Diminishing Returns * Social Acceptance * Quality of Life Value. That, he said, is how we determine whether something hits the mark of attraction for effort. Put an hour a day into working out? That’s a fairly small amount of time, so it avoids diminishing returns. Keeping fit is certainly highly socially acceptable, and it improves one’s own quality of life, so that hour is a great value to attraction.

FULL ON nerd stuff. I love it.

How in the hell does this all link together? Glad you asked, you single individual who made it this far into my absurd rambling. While there are certainly other factors to it, if you’re having trouble going out and finding a partner, take a minute to think about what it is you’re doing with your life. What do you spend time on? What do you put effort into? Is it something that your ideal partner would find compelling? If it isn’t, do something else. Stop complaining you can’t find someone and become the person they want to find. We’ve been fed a lot of “everyone has to accept you for who you are,” and while that’s a great idea in abstract, truth is they won’t. They don’t. You have an ideal, so do they. Simple as. Stop simping, put your money into a socially valuable hobby, invest it, get a gym membership, whatever. Better yourself. You’ll feel better, and I don’t care who you are, someone who looks like they’re at a good place in their life is always going pull attention.

TLDR; get a hobby, git gud.