In general, I have found that less physically attractive people are on average a lot nicer to me without reason. This is true for men, even those who were in positions of power over me, and women. There are certainly bitches and assholes that are also ugly as fuck, but those have been the exception in my experience. Especially in relationships, I notice a ratio of almost 1-1 between how conventionally attractive the girl has been and how unpleasant she is to be around, how much she shit tests, how hard she tries to force me into the beta bucks category, etc.

After reading some recent posts about the importance of physical attractiveness and the psychological effects of other people’s perceptions the concepts were synthesized in my mind.

A person’s sexual strategy is directly proportional to how conventionally attractive they are, and how conventionally attractive this person’s object of attraction is. From an evolutionary perspective, this is a great trait.

This can apply on the relationship level. When a wimpy guy tries to buy a girl’s lust with gifts, time, and sensitivity, he is implementing a particular strategy based upon his situation. He views the girl as attractive, and himself as not. He thus tries to leverage some other advantage he has to, so to speak, win the game.

This applies even better on societal levels. You will find that traditionally unattractive people are almost always more invested in monogamy, whereas attractive people sleep around more. Evolutionarily, if you can make it happen, it is best to spread your seed around by having as many children as possible (which translates into a human desire for many sexual partners). The more children you have, the better the chance whatever genes helped provision those children will survive into additional generations, and so on. A side consequence of this is that this strategy places minimal investment in rearing any individual child. It would be foolish to put all of your eggs into one basket like that when you already have a bunch of other baskets laying around ready to go.

If you are conventionally unattractive, your opportunities for mating are severely reduced. Especially for men. Thus, if you want to have the best chance for your genes to be passed on into future generations, it is wisest to invest heavily in your only one or two children, giving them the best chance to be healthy and successful. To keep the same analogy going, it’s better to protect all of your eggs in one basket if one is all you have then to let the eggs lay around unprotected.

As you can see, there are both social (which is to say that changes affect success without necessitating a new generation be produced) and evolutionary (which is to say that changes affect success only when reproduction is occurring) forces at play. On a subconscious level, we are constantly gauging our estimated probability of reproductive success, and our strategy changes depending upon how we calculate it.

This is true for women as well, and for similar reasons (albeit women’s longer reproductive cycle tends to make them more hypergamous, and also makes them emphasize investing more resources per child than men). A young and pretty girl who gets approached and hit on all of the time is rightly going to assume that she can reproduce with her choice of men whenever she wants (until she gets old…), and her emphasis on monogamy and investing in her children will decrease. Queue entitlement, no need to develop a personality, and reduced value placed on particular relationships and interactions. This is why it is best to avoid settling down with people (especially women due to their rate-limiting reproductive cycle) who have a high partner count.

On the flip side, an unattractive girl is going notice that she has less options, and as a result she will have lower standards, put more effort into being pleasant, and invest more in her particular relationships and interactions. In short, she simply has fewer opportunities to invest in, and will necessarily invest more in particular opportunities as a result (Think of it like this: 10/2 distributed is more than 10/5).

I want to emphasize that these calculations happen at the subconscious level. Our ape brains are huge mostly so we can offload subtle social calculations to unconscious parts of our brain, saving the conscious portions of the brain for more demanding tasks.