AWPATT II: June 5-10 (Thoughts 5-10)

AWPATT Hub

5 On more than one occasion, I’ve attended or been attended by someone as one or the other of us tried on clothes. This ought to be a natural and comfortable thing for us to do (not saying we would both be in the dressing room). And we ought to give deference to each other’s opinions. There’s a sense in which professional attire isn’t necessarily the other’s prerogative to determine, but in terms of modesty and appeal, since we want to look good for each other and not fundamentally for anyone else, our significant other’s opinion on our casual day-to-day wear would logically seem to bear the most importance.

6 I’m not even moderately attracted to someone with a loose lifestyle. Somebody with a history of partying, getting drunk/high is unappealing because of the level of cognitive stupidity required to be that way.

7 I don’t understand what could be appealing to girls about guys who misbehave or speak rudely to them. Those who tolerate it or even act charmed by it, I personally find myself very suspicious of. It’s a turn-off.

8 I certainly have ethnic preferences in beauty, but no one could call someone racist for thinking some people are more attractive – TO THEM – What is racially supremacist is when you say “black/white/asian/etc women are the most beautiful women in the world.” Now you’re not just speaking your opinion about personal preference, you’re insulting everybody by jumping from specific observations to generalities, and by making truth claims when the vast majority of what you’re speaking about is outside of your personal experience.
                It’s neat when I notice attraction to a very different looking person, but chances are cultural differences will prevent me from being able to marry “outside.” It’s not about how you look, it’s about what traditions (a culture of constant boozing every weekend such as where I live is counted as a tradition because it’s culturally transmitted) inform your identity and aspirations. The fact that how people look happens to overlap with how they behave is mere coincidence, and value judgments on the behavior don’t translate to value judgments on people who look more like that person than like you.

                In case you didn’t realize I was getting at this, I’m saying that most white people are uninteresting to me for cultural reasons, because of how much the things they value clashes with what I value. The difference between racism and being thoughtful is whether there’s the element of prejudice. Pre-judging something before having the facts is always stupid. Making an educated judgment about whether you approve of a person’s behavior (and in context, find them attractive as a potential partner) is never wrong. It’s common sense. It’s what people do, in every other arena of life.

9 She ought to keep a Journal. it’s good for several reasons, most importantly to work out/develop your thoughts, to reason through things and know yourself, and to be better able to be known.

10 If she doesn’t appreciate my efforts to be thoughtful and romantic, I don’t know how we’ll work out. If she has a “meh” reaction to my poems posted on this blog, for example, that’s pretty much a red flag. It’s just logic. If you don’t “speak the same romantic language,” you’re not going to connect on a personal level and you won’t be able to demonstrate love to each other in a meaningful way.

~ Rak Chazak

A Woman Provokes A Thousand Thoughts

May 31 marked the one-year point after moving back home after graduating college with a B.A. in Biology. I mused recently about how long it may be until I would no longer be a “single Christian guy,” and since this date is suitably auspicious, I decided to count 1000 days from June 1. This gets fairly close to my 27^th birthday by the conclusion of the count (which will give me a year until I’m 28, the age I arbitrarily decided when I was 15 or 16 that I should reasonably be able to be married by) . But more than just counting the days to an arbitrary point at which I will let myself begin to stress out if I haven’t found a fiancée, I figured it would be very neat if I could take the time every night to try to generate a concise, unique thought inspired by my mental conception of my future wife, and to post these from time to time as a sort of mini-journal scribbling. Each thought will have something to do with this woman, either in remarking about what appeals or doesn’t appeal to me, or in thinking about how I can prepare myself to be a good partner, or what our relationship would be like. After all, devoting the time to think 1000 thoughts about how to have a good relationship with the right partner is bound to be beneficial; at the very least, it couldn’t hurt, and it will be here for her to read when we’re still making friends—a useful thing in my opinion, since it would help her decide if I’m the kind of guy she wants to marry.

Expect occasional bulk uploads of my AWPATTs; the dates covered will be in the post title.

~ Rak Chazak

AWPATTS:
1-4
5-10
11-19
20-23
24-30
31-40
41-49
50-82
83-88
89-96
97-108
109-200
201-204
205-230 - Special A-Z upload231-247 - marrying younger, and dating advice
248-262
263-320 - comments on approaching dating and evaluating potential partners


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Single Takes

This one's more of a reflective journal entry.

There's a concept in attraction called "the double-take." Most of us know what this means. In the event that you don't, here's the explanation: when you look at something to perceive it, it can be said that you are "taking it in." This is usually said of beautiful landscapes, but applies equally well to beautiful things of any nature. When a person looks at someone, looks away, and feels compelled to look back at them a second time to get a better look, that's called a "double take." It usually is accompanied by funny facial gestures (if you happen to catch a person doing this) and a sudden snap of the neck, as the head swivels back in the direction of the person of interest.

Generally, the double-take happens because the impression you get of a person is ambiguous; you can't make up their mind if what you saw indicated that they are very attractive or very unattractive (and the irony is, consequently, that they're usually one or the other, not anything in between), and so, being naturally curious, you try to catch a better glimpse. This leaves you either unimpressed or pleasantly surprised, depending on which it was.

I've never noticed anyone 'do a double-take' while looking at me, however. But I've noticed something different, and that's what I call the "single take." Let me try to explain it to you:

Since the double take involves a person looking at (in the vernacular, one might say "checking out") another person once, and then doing it again after a pause, doing a single take would consist of only looking at a person once. So what makes it distinct from just your regular ol' garden-variety "looking?" 

It is my belief that girls have caught a glimpse of me out of the corner of their eye, causing them to wonder whether the shape moving about in the periphery of their vision is something worth seeing, and so they look to get a better view. But when they look away, they never look back. Whether this is because they determined I was attractive or repulsive is something that I toss around in my mind nearly every time it happens, and I think it will remain unresolved for the rest of my life, or at least until I'm engaged, when I won't care about what people in public think about me, and when I'll have no doubt what my beloved thinks of me.

So there you have it. Single takes are when someone sees you out of the corner of their eye and feels compelled to turn their head to get a better look at you. 

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Pardon me if this entry comes off as self-indulgent! That's not my intention at all. I simply figured that, since the purpose of this blog is to give insights into what your early-20-something male thinks about, that would naturally include mundane thoughts about women, romance and flirting, since these are things that I actually do think about. Now, I won't toot my own horn, because I recognize the pervasive nature of pride, but for the benefit of my readers, it might help you to know that I'm moderately attractive. (I know this empirically, having been told by a number of females in my age group.) This makes life more interesting and confusing for me, in my opinion, than it would if I was hideously repulsive or outrageously handsome, since there would be less confusion about what girls who make various facial gestures while looking at me might be thinking about. In fact, that's a great topic for another entry.

For older readers, this might be boring and I understand if you skip posts where I spill my naive musings about relationships. But I figured I would post it, all the same, for people to choose to read what interests them.


~ Rak Chazak