There's a story I tell over and over again.

When I first started in the dating industry, I was preparing to go to L.A. to a dating seminar.

Before I left, my boss held a meeting to discuss what I'd accomplish while I was there.  One of the issues he brought up was my appearance.

I was preparing to meet one of the "big guns" in the industry, a guy who made more money than all of us small fry combined, and it was imperative that I impress him in order to have any chance at partnering up in joint ventures.

My boss asked me how I was going to present myself.  I said that I hadn't thought about it.

He explained, earnestly and innocently, that I should, because the guys I was about to meet were going to look at me and ask themselves, “Am I attracted to her?”

If the answer was no, then I was not going to have any credibility.

How can an ordinary-looking woman teach others to be irresistibly attractive to men, after all?

Doomed to Averageness

I'd like to say that I took his comment for what it was worth.  There's a reason that media darlings hire stylists, and it's because appearances matter.  Your looks are what get you invited onto television rather than being confined to print publications.  Appearances have even won (and lost) presidential races.

But his comment came at the wrong time in my life for me to assess it with a grain of salt.

Every time I woke up and looked at myself in the mirror, I thought, My hair looks awful. I’ve got all these blemishes. My nose is really the wrong shape, isn’t it?

If my success as a relationship expert was going to come down to my appearance, I was going to lose every time.

My boss was trying to help when he suggested things like straightening my hair, wearing more dresses, or wearing more pink.  He was trying to get me to personally experiment with the dating advice I was reading.  After all, every dating expert worth her salt knows that men are attracted to feminine women.

I wasn't - and never had been - a particularly girly girl.

I come from a family of short and dumpy women. If they’re born with a few extra inches of height, they shrink. If they manage to stay skinny through high school, they gain weight after marriage. Fashion sense is limited to sale racks of the few shops available in the one-and-only mall.

Women in my family don’t need to be beautiful.

They’re too busy helping their menfolk pull lambs, feeding the hay crew, or putting on a Sunday dinner spread. They’re busy raising kids and washing heaps of laundry and canning garden vegetables all summer.

They dress in what’s comfortable. They run a brush through their hair and forget about it. They enjoy coming back in from the garden, muddy and tired and sunburned with an armful of cabbage.

I didn’t learn "how to be a lady" from my mother. I didn’t learn how to walk in high heels until college. I didn’t wear skirts until I had my first office job in my late twenties.

My favorite period of my life were my two years in a village in the Andes Mountains, where I had to guess what I looked like by piecing together the reflection in a tiny cosmetic mirror, because there were no mirrors large enough to see myself. Did my lack of attention to my appearance keep me from meeting men? No. I had boyfriend and affairs aplenty, and the stories to prove it.

But now that I was supposed to be advising other women in dating matters, it suddenly mattered how I look.

How Much Do Looks Matter?

It's true that looks matter to men.  Evolutionary Anthropology 101 tells us that men seek young and beautiful mates, while women seek tall and wealthy hubbies.  It's in our genes.

But it's not true that women without the right "look" are condemned to being old maids.

Just look around you.  Most of the women in the world are completely ordinary looking, and yet they all get guys.

Only a fraction of a fraction of the US female population can dream of being a supermodel, and yet somehow the rest of us find loving, good men who love the way we look, talk, and act.  Appearance can’t be the whole story.

And it isn’t. Guys love women in all their shapes and sizes. Just being female is enough for most.

However, most men will admit that they prefer a woman who takes care of herself: eats right, exercises, keeps her nails trimmed, styles her hair, and pays attention to what she wears. They believe that a woman who pays attention to the exterior details will also pay attention to the details where they count: in the bedroom.

Appearance and sex are inextricably linked in the male mind.  Men love attractive women because of their fantasies of what these women will look like naked.  If you're confident with what you look like naked, you're already ahead of most women in the appearance stakes.  It's not how well you conform to a beauty ideal that matters most; it's how great your body looks and feels in the height of passion.

The fashion and cosmetic industry have a vested interest in making us believe that our appearance is all that stands between us and the man of our dreams. The more they keep us chasing the holy grail of beauty, the more money they make.

And, of course, you can never be beautiful enough.

Dumped for Not Being Beautiful

I'll never forget a breakup that happened five years ago.  My boyfriend at the time split up with me, saying that we were just too different.  But the only thing that I could think about for weeks was a comment he’d made to me once when we were upset with one another. I'd mentioned that he no longer seemed to compliment me any more. Later, he blurted out, “You’re not a supermodel, you know.”

And guess how I answered?

I murmured contritely, “I know.”

Of course a woman only deserves compliments if she’s a supermodel; how could I have been so stupid?

So when the relationship ended, I thought, “It must be because I’m not pretty enough for him.” That was the easy answer. He wanted someone who looked like a supermodel, I didn’t fit the bill, therefore it was my deficiency in the genetic lottery that disqualified me from girlfriend status.

Silly, huh?

Yet I believed it.

It was easier to think that than to think about the other possibilities. Maybe our relationship ended because he just wasn’t that into me as a person. That would hurt much worse than being rejected for my looks.

It took the counsel of a dear friend before I realized that a man who loved me wouldn’t make cutting comments like that. She asked me why I would want to be with someone who only cared about my appearance anyway. Didn’t I want a man who was proud to walk down the street with me because he loved everything about me, not just how I looked on his arm?

She was right.

Losing weight, dying my hair, and buying new clothes wouldn’t magically bring him back. Nor would it magically bring me the man of my dreams.

She told me that, to find the right man for me, I simply needed to create situations where my winning personality could do its work. Smile at more strangers, expand my social circles, get involved in fun activities, attend more events.

Being pretty may bring more men into your life, she said, but they may not be the right ones. Chemistry is a matter of many things, including common interests, beliefs, and compatible personalities. It’s not just about two mutually attractive people seeing one another.

Dating Is Not Just for Beautiful People

We need to remind ourselves of this every so often, especially when we see the women's magazines splashed with pictures of celebrity couples.

Dating is not just for the beautiful people.

How many women justify their single status by saying, “I’m not good-looking enough to attract men”?

Personal appearance is the first excuse on the dateless woman's book. It is easy to justify your lack of a boyfriend by pointing to your lack of success in the genetic lottery. “Look, my parents didn’t pass on the long-legged blue-eyed blond-haired genes, okay?”

But attractiveness is so much more than looks.

That's where, I think, my boss got a bit confused.  I didn't have to be attractive to ALL men in order to prove my effectiveness as a dating couch.  I just had to have a warm, winning personality that set people at ease.  Being a warm and friendly person gets you many more dates than being a couture-clad ice queen, after all.

So believe me when I say:

Dating is not just for the beautiful people.

It’s for those of us who are average and ordinary in the looks department, too.

The vast majority of people in this world are average and ordinary, just like us.  We have a huge pool of potential mates to choose from.

Newsflash: Average Men Find Average Women Attractive

So if any of you reading this are going to spend the time and personal investment into making yourself irresistibly attractive, I have a word of advice:

Don’t just focus on your appearance and ignore everything else.

I know that it’s much more fun to buy new clothes and get makeovers than ask yourself some serious questions about the kind of energy you put out or the kind of relationship patterns you've established, but for your own sake it’s essential.

Attracting your dream mate is about much more than wearing the right clothes and memorizing the right things to say and how to say them.

Attracting your dream mate is about putting yourself out into the world in a positive, loving way, and having faith that the right person will be drawn to you as surely as a moth is drawn to flame.

Dating is not just for the beautiful people. Dating is for ordinary people. Dating is for ugly people. Dating is for all of us, because the statistics shows that we all will manage to find love and affection. About 90% of Americans will marry by the time they're thirty, and most will marry at least once in their lifetime.

But dating is not for me. ;-) I'm a married woman these days.

And I still don't wear pink.