Awhile back I had a conversation with friends, which brought up what I thought was an interesting question…

If a young man, seeking to date, wants to know what would make him more attractive to women, should he ask his women friends for advice ? Or should he seek advice from male friends who are especially popular with women ?

One friend replied that asking women what women like would make more sense.
But another friend argued that while women could tell him what they found attractive, a popular man, who presumably dated different types of women, perhaps could advise what consistently worked in terms of attracting them.

What do you think makes more sense ?

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MethDozer · M

Both totally need to ask both.
Same goes for women.
There's strong value of course in asking the group your targeting. However ask men what they want in women, and women what they want in men and you will get a lot of reactionary ideals that don't actually exist in the real world practice on top of a lot of highly personalized qualities. I hate to say it because it often gets skewed into a toxic and insulting quip, but there's some grain of truth in the expression "none of us actually know what we want or are looking for". So you poll one sex or the other and build perfect general mate bases on those qualities alone, and 9x out of ten they will agree they are perfect on paper but the perfect candidate is then ignored by most or all.

Attraction is too nuanced. Also a lot of what any of us humans say that we want isn't true really. We believe they are true so it isn't a lie, but it comes from reaction of the annoyances of over-indulged qualities in past experiences. We are all much, much ,much better describing accurately what we don't want than what we do want.

JMHO.