First impressions

In response to yesterday’s post, Dagmar said: “A beautiful body doesn’t attract me, only a beautiful mind does.” I think she was referring to the cliché that first impressions are about appearance.

But I don’t think that is true. There are a lot of objectively beautiful people out there, but for the most part we don’t find them compelling. There is actually something off-putting for many people about seeing a vacant soul within a beautiful shell.

The great movie actors capture us not because of their looks — although they generally (though not always) look quite presentable — but because we are drawn in by something about their movement, the way they speak, their facial expression, a light in their eyes.

Then, having seen them perform, we associate the way they look with beauty, and so we come to view their appearance as the epitome of attractiveness.

I think this is also true in our personal lives. We are each far more intelligent than our conscious minds and our cultural limitations generally permit us to be. This intelligence allows us to acquire a vast amount of information about another person’s essential being in the very first moments that we meet them. But we have neither the language nor the skills even to understand that we have acquired that information, let alone to fully process it.

It is this knowledge — derived not from some voodoo magic, but from the full functioning of our own brains — that can cause us to be instantly attracted to another person. It is not their physical appearance that attracts us. Yet we will persist in believing that it is, because the truth seems preposterous.

8 thoughts on “First impressions”

  1. I think there is a lot of truth to what you’re saying about this “subconscious intelligence”. However, if I look in my own life, many of my best friends were not people to whom I was immediately attracted. I came to appreciate them as I got to know them and interact with them over time. I’m not sure what to make of that.

    BTW, Olivia Fox Cabane has some interesting things to say about that “subconscious intelligence”: http://askolivia.com/. One of her tenets is that charisma can be learned and that body language plays a big part. She also talks about how crucial first impressions are and that you basically get about 2 seconds on first meeting when people judge you.

  2. Well, Ken, as much as people work on the look of their bodies and as long as beautiful people get better paid jobs. There must be something in it. A whole industry is built on it. Starting with the magazines, showing photoshoped female beauties, cosmetics, ….
    And as long as people are discussing the looks especially of female politicians, there is still something very wrong.
    Or to quote Susan Sontag (with Annie Leibovitz in “Women”)here:
    “Nobody looks through a book of pictures of women without noticing whether the women are attractive or not. To be feminine, in one commonly felt definition, is to be attractive, or to do one’s best to be attractive; to attract. (As being masculine is being strong.) While it is perfectly possible to defy this imperative, it is not possible for any woman to be unaware of it. […] Woman are judged by their appearance as men are not, […]”
    It is something that men might experience not that often, or did anybody come up to you after a talk you gave and told you, you looked beautiful? Or made some remarks about your long legs? Nobody would dare to do that, right? And me, I could go on and on with this list.
    Don’t get me wrong here, I love my body and I don’t want to hide it. But I don’t want to be reduced to it or judged by it, too.

  3. Susan Sontag also said: “I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces `intelligence.'”

    The commoditization of a shallow and reductionist idea of attractiveness may help the consumer economy, but people still fall deeply in love with partners who will never show up in one of those cosmetics ads. So clearly the advertising version of reality is missing something essential.

  4. Yes, the advertising reality is missing something essential, but we still live in a world where teenage girls want their breasts done for birthday, where women attend botox parties and far more girls want to become models than scientists.
    First impressions are about appearance, when it comes to getting a partner, a job, getting more money.
    I still remember the story of my former PA. She was brilliant in her job, spoke several languages, but wasn’t really good looking. After I left Berlin for Stuttgart, she had to look for a new job and it was really hard, since mostly men were looking for a PA and they didn’t hire here because of her being not a beauty. They actually preferred to hire somebody less qualified, but good looking.
    You might say in love it is totally different, then I would “love” to believe you. But I somehow don’t. It might be different for you, but if it is so for you, you might be the exception and not the rule.
    And when I am talking about a beautiful mind, I am definitely not talking about intelligence, at least not in a formal “Mensa” way. And perhaps I was only using a cliché in using those words. 😉
    Otherwise I was describing a sad reality, a sad reality about women and how they are looked at in our society.

  5. Dagmar, what you are saying is very important and very valid. Yet also, you and I are speaking to somewhat different topics. When I am in love, the person I am in love with is beautiful, even if everybody I know believes I’m crazy for thinking so.

  6. Well, yes, here we are. And is sexual passion in any way related? Does sexual passion work without being in love?
    Great circle – back to square one. 😉

  7. When I am in love, I feel sexual passion, and when I feel sexual passion, I believe I am in love.

    Needless to say, there is a world of potential trouble in the space between “I am” and “I believe I am”. 🙂

  8. Is there a way to measure love?

    I strongly believe it is ok to love for a night, a week, a year, for a lifetime… As long as you do.

    A very good and very wise friend of mine once said, we all want to be loved and when you try to hold back and when you are afraid of being hurt, you are only left needy after having sex.
    He is right.

    So I would suggest, to get rid of check lists, to get rid of the search of the one and only true love and to keep in mind not each and every love needs a happy end. 😉

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