These Little Things

At https://letterpile.com/poetry/Sweet-Little-Nothings-Poem , reading a short post by Janis Leslie Evans (remember https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2022/08/new-book-review-recollections-about-race.html ?), I saw this list of things readers loved about their Significant Others: 

"

• 0% Laughter
• 33% Smile
• 0% Quirks
• 50% Conversation
• 17% Humor

" 

There are other good things at the page, including a Stevie Wonder song for those who can listen to it; if you add your answers to the survey it'll become more useful. Currently the size is too small to amount to anything. 

My take? The list is too short.

Most of us meet a lot of attractive people if we live long enough, and we may observe some things about our preferences that may be useful to science some day, For instance, are you consistently attracted to one physical type, or do you seem unconsciously drawn to someone as different from your ex as possible? Are there similarities under the difference? My pattern comes closest to "conversation," but I think "character: would be a better word.

I never got into boy-craziness the way some girls do. I empathized with those girls' inevitable humiliations and, when I started feeling attracted to boys, recognized that it was not True Love and the best thing would be for nobody ever to know which boys those were. This only meant pretending to be asexual for years when I was not asexual, but at least looked young enough to limit people's reactions to that know-it-all "Oh, one day, dear..." 

They weren't bad men. They weren't good men. They weren't any kind of men at all, when I knew them. They were high school boys. No sensible person seriously wants to get close to a high school boy. Not that high school boys can't be likable, but you have no idea even what they're going to look like ten years later. .

So there's no benefit in talking about the things that caught my half-grown eye in high school, except that most of high school boy "culture" was a turn-off, for me. Swearing, spitting, gross-outs, the whole "nobody tells me what to do, except the group to which I slavishly conform" teenaged thing, turned me off then and turn me off still.

It might be worthwhile to mention the things that convinced me that men, or even the men some teenaged boys were becoming, were worth a little more serious consideration. Without any privacy-violating discussion of who, where, and when...

I, personally, look for High Sensory Perceptivity in close friends, male or female. A majority of people don't have this hereditary trait and don't look for it, so it's almost irrelevant to this discussion. Among people over age 50, however, it does tend to make the difference between people who are still looking for new adventures and second or third careers, and people who just want to settle down and be "old." The physical HSP trait tends to favor the development of the character traits mentioned below, but they're worth spelling out and celebrating individually.

I liked the gift of diplomacy in a school friend before I liked it in my husband. Both of them studied people and could think of the perfect thing to say to break up a fight before it started. Few people have this gift. I wanted to lose no chance to learn from those who do.

I really did like the loyal, persistent friendship of some men who didn't seem attractive at first, and yes, it did make them seem more attractive. Well, that and the fact that the gangly one grew into his feet, and the one with the gruesome mess on his face eventually accepted the fact that his facial hair was never going to form a real beard, and so on. This effect did not make thinking about a physical relationship with the ones who looked like relative feel less icky, nor did it make the problems of international marriage seem less off-putting, but I think young men should know that being a good friend is an attractive quality. Especially if you don't react to any suggestion that a young woman appreciates your friendship with "So now can we flop into bed?" You still have to wait for evidence that any little twinkle of attraction we may have felt has not been stifled by thoughts like "But he's the wrong age, type, ethnic background, or he looks like a relative, or we don't totally agree on this or that." If and when she decides such things don't matter, you'll know. Don't ask.

I like fortitude in men or women. We did not all grow up with Drill Sergeant Dads who found us in a state of shock beside the road and yelled "Why didn't you stand in the road and turn that mule?" Some of us had parents who might have been "sensitive" about the possibility that a child would have been afraid of being trampled by a bolting mule. I don't mind sensitivity but I wasn't really taught to cultivate it, myself. If you're with me when a building catches fire I do sort of expect you, "you" being any reasonable person over about age six, to move children and disabled persons out of danger and help fight the fire; you can always cry later if you want to. There is a time to feel the fear, or the weariness, or the disgust, whatever, and do the right thing anyway. I like people who understand this. I don't find that males actually have more fortitude than females; if anything the opposite seems to be true, but I find it attractive in men.

"Sensitivity" has sometimes been associated with a man's willingness to cry in front of women. I think the misreadings of the data on this question have been wild. A man does not lose respect by "seeming more like a woman friend" if he cries. There was nothing effeminate about President Reagan's tears when the Challenger was lost. There was nothing effeminate about President Clinton's tears when a haircut ran over schedule, either, but there was something infantile. Neither a man nor a woman loses my respect by crying when someone has died. Neither a man nor a woman loses my respect by crying in physical pain. Neither a man nor a woman loses my respect by crying at celebrations of life's passages where everyone claims to be so happy for the baby, bride, graduate, etc., and everyone feels old. Both men and women lose my respect by crying when they've done something stupid, instead of apologizng and trying to make up the damage. 

I like a cheerful disposition in men or women--the kind that comes from regular digestion and plenty of outdoor exercise. Clowning, I think, can be left to the professionals. I like friends who see the funny side of things. I like sharing a laugh. I don't like guys who can't be serious, or who can't laugh at jokes they didn't crack themselves. Mine, or a relative's, or Dave Barry's.

I like a beginner's mind, eager to learn, even and especially in people who also have a gift of teaching (which is another thing I admire in men or women). Some men really should have been told, earlier in life, that nobody's going to want to buy them new luxury cars if they get stuck in "I KNOW how to drive" and handle every car as if it were the clunker they had in college.

Related to the beginner's mind is the spirit of humility, as Christians call it, that gives men respect for others. Men crave respect from their wives. Women want to be able to respect their husbands. One reason why it doesn't happen is that men have picked up the stupid idea that they're supposed to wheedle and haggle and push for "more" on a date. When women can't just step back and take a long breath, but have to say "No" and "That's enough," that lovely cozy feeling of being able to relax and trust someone else to know what's best just evaporates. Another reason is that men act on stupid ideas, like the idea that they can get what they want by shouting and interrupting and refusing to listen, or the idea that anybody but themselves is going to do anything about their dirty clothes or dishes. No matter how much a woman wants to follow a good leader, following a man around to pick up litter is a different thing and the two things may be mutually exclusive. No, men get respect by giving it. And this doesn't even always start with the woman herself. I remember losing all interest in one guy just by waiting on his front porch and hearing how he spoke to his mother.

Another key to winning respect is honesty and reliability. A man can break a date, say, once in five or ten years, without losing my respect, if he can prove he was in a hospital or a courtroom. If he was in a hospital sitting up with his grandfather, that might even be a point in his favor. But if he can't plan and control his own daily schedule, he has no business making dates. The whole purpose of dating is for a man to win a woman's trust so, if he says he'll be somewhere at one o'clock, that does not mean 1:01.

I like self-control in men. (Women, too, actually.) The world is full of droolers and gropers. I like having a little time to feel attracted to a man and wonder whether it's mutual. Not so long as to build up a crush on a man who's not even interested, but definitely months rather than days should come between the first lunch date and the courtship rituals. 

I totally cannot resist synergistic work with a man or woman, the cooler passion C.S. Lewis called philia love. That was the sole attraction of one young man who was never in the same place for long, but wrote and called me for years. Improbably, he and I worked as a team--moving furniture, of all things. If we'd been in furniture moving as a business the relationship might have lasted. I think synergistic teamwork, if only in bed, is essential to any long-term relationship of any kind; at least, for me. A lot of middle-aged men, who think of "work" in terms of jobs they never liked much, will say "I'm done with work! I'm looking for a playmate!" I call them Insane Admirers. As far as I'm concerned, if we're not a team it's no use even trying to be a couple.

It's trendy and idealistic to say that age, "race" or ethnicity, money, etc., don't matter so much as people's feelings about each other. Perhaps they shouldn't but the problems associated with differences can affect people's feelings more than people like to admit. Age differences are likely to raise issues about health care and disability. Visible "race" differences make a couple conspicuous and sometimes unpopular. Differences in "background" can be merely entertaining, and then again they can create harsh judgments. Feminism liberated young men from being judged solely as sources of money, for which they should be more grateful than they seem to be, but it also allowed men to judge women as economic assets too. All such practical considerations, and all the traditional roommate questions about when to get up in the morning and when to open windows, deserve long hard thought before people make commitments--including the commitment of physical intimacy. My husband and I were so different no matchmaking service would have considered introducing us. Only after we'd been best friends and Partners for Life through a few years of sharing hard work, road trips, and the care of each other's sick relatives, did we consider that one reason for loss of interest in all the demographically correct and quite attractive people we'd been dating might be that we were each other's beshert. I was happy with "Mr. Impossible," and he seemed happy with me, but marrying across the barriers of age, nationality, color, income, connections, religious affiliation, and political party is not something anyone should do on a hormonal whim.

Believing as I do that every healthy body is beautiful in its own way, I liked my serious boyfriend's leucistic skin, with its freckles, and my husband's melanistic skin, and then as I got to appreciate my Significant Other I thought "Thank goodness, we're in the same color category." But it's a common, if not the majority, category in my home town. What made the man so attractive was a quality older people in Virginia would have called "being a gentleman," in the specific sense of having a social conscience. Others turned to him for help in an emergency, and he helped, without a second thought. I like that quality in a man.