TooShyShy
Well-known member
I thought this was really interesting and sounds like what has been happening to me (me being the girl in the ''staring'' scenario
Tell me what you all think..do you experience this ever..men or women?
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Love Shyness - Beauty and the love-shy
This is part of a series on Love Shyness. The index can be found here.
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Chronically love-shy men have an unusually strong penchant for physical beauty. To be sure, virtually everyone loves beauty. However, one of the most significant findings of the study upon which this book is based is that beauty is quite a bit more important to the love-shy than it is to the non-shy.
This need for beauty which the love-shy feel is very strong as well as highly generalized. And it extends to such things as dogs, automobiles, music, natural scenery, as well as to women. And it clearly suggests a major reason as to why most love-shy men could never be really well satisfied—particularly since their own level of physical attractiveness tends to be at least somewhat below average.
QUOTE****I had to laugh at the last sentence given that I've accepted for a long time that I am of below average attractiveness.*****
The Need for Beauty
As I have indicated, the love-shy men studied for this research very seldom or never dated. They were all far too shy to assert themselves with women, and particularly with women whom they found attractive. However, they desperately wanted to date and to spend all of their time with just one opposite sexed partner whom they could love.
This desperation leads to fantasising and day dreaming about the object of their desires. Day dreaming constitutes a vicarious form of wish-fulfilment and gives unrealistic expectations.
I asked each respondent: "Compared to other teenagers at the time you were a teenager, were fantasies and daydreams more OR less important to you?" And zero percent (nobody) of the non-shys indicated that daydreams and fantasies were more important, compared to fully 87 percent of the older love-shys and 61 percent of the younger love-shys.
Who knows how many years I have spent day dreaming, something I do even to this day.
What do these day dreams consist of?
The fantasies enjoyed by these men typically entailed being warmly loved by very feminine, nurturant, non-assertive but liberal-minded women with long hair, beautiful faces, and very little or no make-up. They tended to fantasize women with a rather delicate, ethereal beauty, and with a gentleness and vulnerability that is not realistically likely to be found in today's world.
QUOTE*****Its kind of scary to realise that these private fantasises of mine are actually rather universal for love shy individuals.*****
How bad is the delusion?
But curiously, most of the younger love-shy men seemed to maintain a sense of optimism that they could or would somehow one day magically be able to win such a specimen without taking any positive steps on their own initiative.
I'm not sure I've ever been this delusional. Although it was always a dream for this to happen, I knew the odds of it happening were next to none. Having said that, without taking any positive steps of my own initiative, I was able to "win" much inferior specimens. (Keeping with the language employed). Therefore its not intrinsically impossible.
Their fantasies and daydreams revolved almost exclusively around the imagery of already having such a beautiful woman. Virtually none of the shy men ever spent any time visualizing themselves taking positive steps to introduce themselves or to otherwise allow themselves to become acquainted with available and accessible women.
This doesn't seem that surprising. Considering the former is something positive and locked-in, whereas the latter scenario is uncertain and potentially negative, its easy to understand why someone would rather think about something pleasant rather than something which could stress them out.
Clinical psychologists often recommend that shy people engage in mental rehersals in their mind's eye.
QUOTE*****Looking back - I highly recommend this tactic!********
A key theme of this chapter is to suggest that "real, live, accessible women" are not beautiful enough to meet the unrealistically stringent demands and needs of the love-shy. Simply put, the love-shy will not fantasize a female face that is not sufficiently beautiful to constitute a wish fulfillment.
I would say this conclusion is perhaps a little too harsh, however given the next piece of data - it's perhaps warranted.
A further illustration of this uncompromisingly romantic attitude of the love-shy can be seen in the pattern of response to this statement: "I would not want to date anyone to whom I could not visualize (fantasize) myself as being married." Fully 64 percent of the older love-shys together with 46 percent of the younger ones agreed. In contrast, only 4 percent of the self-confident non-shy men saw fit to agree.
I somewhat agree with this sentiment...
Again, most love-shy men would like to somehow magically bypass what many of them perceive as the cruel indignity of dating, and just somehow wake up one morning married to the esthetically lovely, beautiful girl of their dreams.
QUOTE****Well, yeah...******
What about the "average" woman?
The love-shy tend to feel more comfortable and they tend to converse more fluently when they are in the company of a less-than-beautiful girl than when they are with the type of girl who is so attractive that marriage to her is immediately visualized and envisioned. In essence, the closer a girl comes toward meeting a love-shy man's tastes and predilections in the physical (especially facial) attractiveness department, the more shy and inhibited he is likely to be in his efforts to converse with her.
To finish this section, I would like to highlight something rather curious that I never knew about.
Psychologists have known since the late 1960s that introverts tend to prefer small-breasted women, whereas extroverts tend to prefer those with large breasts. In fact, there appears to be a rather strong statistical relationship between how extroverted (outgoing) a man is, and how large he wants the breasts of his female partner to be.
Posted by Reasonably Aaron at 11:10 PM
Labels: love shyness
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