If personality did not matter, everyone would want to be with someone attractive. Don’t lie. Sure you want someone who is going to make you laugh, someone who is smart enough to know what is actually going on in the world, someone with a great personality. But you also want someone nice to look at every day. Because if you are dating someone, not just sleeping with them for one night, chances are you might see them close to every day.

I don’t have a problem admitting this, neither do others apparently. But there are plenty of people who might takes offense by my next comment. That I refuse to date anyone I don’t find immediately attractive.

I know that right off the bat that sounds incredibly shallow. And that many will say people are more than the looks they were given, which they have no control over. I know all of this because I have heard this from a good amount of friends (mostly men) in my life trying to convince me that I need to give some people a chance because they seem like great good looking guys.

The thing is, as often as I listen to the advice of my friends, I am not listening to this advice.

For a while I truly contemplated doing so, thinking that if I had not found a genuine relationship and stumbled upon too many bad ones maybe this had something to do with it – writing off people too quickly based on physical appearance. But the fact is not that I landed into less than perfect relationships because of how the people I dated looked, it was more that their other qualities they began to show throughout the time we dated did not compliment my own.

Truthfully though, one of my boyfriends was what you would call “extremely conventionally attractive.” He modeled for two years and got regularly complimented on his looks, I will admit reluctantly but truthfully, more than I did. Was this the reason I dated him? No. But I would be lying if I said it was not something I noticed, alongside his charming personality, when I met him.

Another boyfriend of mine was a relatively normal to attractive guy. But it was this man, ironically, who I thought was extremely attractive when I was first saw him. It was him who I thought was the cutest thing in the entire world. And no one could convince me otherwise on that.

Both were men I ended up dating and both if you can believe it were people that when I was with never matched up against anyone else. I never for a second wanted someone physically more than I wanted them. Bradly Cooper himself could have walked by while we were out eating dinner and I still would think he was maybe on the same level as my exes. That may sound over the top but I absolutely promise you that was exactly how I felt in the company of these men.

Realizing this rather ridiculous statement has led me to believe why I would ever settle for something that is not that feeling?

It’s not that I am looking for a Bradly Cooper, rather that I am searching for someone who to me is just as good looking, who appeals to me in a way where I am captivated and intrigued instantly. Where yes I realize that logically there are more attractive people out there in the world, but none would compare to the man I was in a current relationship with.

And that attractiveness I seek out in a man can come in so many different forms, as it has before. Some of the people I liked were what you would call cute, others hot, there were a few who just had something enduring about them I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

But in accepting a date with someone I don’t find attractive, not in any of the ways I just mentioned, is only going to lead me to eventually re-realize that they don’t make me feel the way other people have already made me feel.

Honestly, does anyone want to feel as if they are not good enough or that someone had to take weeks or months to develop physical attraction to them when they could so readily have it with other people? That is not to say I do not think that physical attraction cannot grow the more you get to know someone and realize personality contributes, and is largely part of, the whole package. This is just to say that if there is nothing there in the beginning there will be nothing there in the end either.

Maybe adapting to find an individual physically appealing might work for others. But it does not work for me. And why should it have to? There are hundreds of thousands of available men in the world who I might find an immediate physical connection alongside an intellectual one. Why settle so soon?

Too often we take the politically correct way out, thinking that we owe someone something even if we do not like them immediately. That we owe chances. But we are humans, and as much as we are every other emotion we have to be passionate too. And the person I want to kiss, have sex with, and love needs to be someone I like staring at. Plain and simple.

That doesn’t mean that they are what you the general public would think is good looking. I have gone out on dates with people I was into that other friends well…just didn’t get. I have said no to people that others would love to date. It goes both ways.

But one thing remains the same. Somewhere within the first four minutes of meeting someone, after a handshake is exchanged, I 100% know if I could ever see myself making out with them, dating them, etc.

I guess I should try speed dating.