Some clichés are true more often than not, but are not true for everybody. Don't automatically think that they apply to you if someone lays one on you.

  1. "If I can do it, anybody can."

No matter how easy or mundane the task, there are some people who won't be able to do it no matter how many times they try. There are people who have failed it again and again. They're a small minority, but they exist. They just don't have the horsepower. Sad but true.

Same goes for getting a MOTOS. Yes, everybody gets somebody if they're will to take anybody, but to get someone you find attractive...that just is unobtainable for a tiny fraction of the population. For whatever reason... physical... mental... situational... or a combination of the above, they can't or won't do it. In addition, "can't" and "won't" are essentially the same thing with regards to results.

  1. "You're not unattractive; you're just saying that because you have low self-esteem."

This is usually true among the "oh woe is me; I'm so ugly" crowd. Look at the pictures of the people who post here or in a similar group. If these are representative, then low self-esteem is rampant here. The strong majority are not "ugly" by any stretch of the imagination. In my experience, strongly unattractive people in the age category of 18-45 and who have no hope of improvement through weight loss are rare. (I'm discounting people who are sexually unattractive because of advanced age. That's a different kettle of fish.)

But...this isn't always true. Just like a small percentage of the people here really are unattractive, so it goes in real life. Some people are ugly. Comeliness may be a bell curve with a few in the beauty range and a lot in the middle... but there are people at the bottom, and just because they recognize and say it aloud doesn't mean it's not true.

  1. "You need more confidence."

Again, this is usually true. In my experience, confidence really helps. When a boss throws me into a new task that I've never done before, it helps to go into it with a reasonable measure of confidence. What's the alternative? Freaking out and getting overwhelmed, then giving up.

However, confidence alone will not help where there is nothing to base it on. When people say this, they are really try to quell that inner voice shybies are cursed with that cringes at any perceived embarrassment in a conversation or approach ti a MOTOS. Taken in this context, they are correct. However, thinking that "confidence" will somehow erase insurmountable physical hurdles is naïve.

  1. "Attractiveness is subjective."

This usually comes freighted in phrases like "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and similar bromides. But I believe there is a fundamentally objective baseline for what we think is physically beautiful as a people, upon which we drape our own likes/dislikes with regards to physical looks. Usenet legend Daniel "The Danimal" Mocsney put it best in a thought experiment... take 100 random males aged 30 and 100 random females aged 30. Take a battery of photos of each. Then ask each to rate the MOTOS from 1-100. If looks were truly subjective, the rankings would be random.

But we all know they won't be. Some folks will be consistently in the top ten, some in the bottom ten. Most will be jumbled in the middle. Now, personality and money jumble the picture further, but looks are a powerful correlating factor when it comes to matching, as any rigorous and dispassionate empirical survey will show.

Another example: consider checkout lane magazines and the pictures of attractive ladies on them. Disregarding the ephemeral fashions, makeup and hairstyles, these ladies are all fairly similar in a couple crucial ways-they are young, slim and have smooth complexions. (Helped, of course, with flattering photography.) That is the objective baseline of female beauty. The other things that overlay it are subjective window dressing. Therefore, female beauty is both objective and subjective. I think it obviously follows that male handsomeness rhymes.