Between strangers, yes. For social groups, people tend to stop seeing each others looks as they get to know each other. This is where people’s advice to work on your personality is necessary. If you’re out just expecting random people to approach you because of your looks, you’re going to be waiting around for a long time unless you’re blessed with the lucky quality of being born gorgeous.
If you go outside more you also notice that there aren’t a lot of gorgeous people in the real world. (No, Tinder, clubs and other places where people LARP don’t count as the real world.)
Exactly.
Honestly, if I was dating today, I probably wouldn’t select my SO based on looks, because let’s face it, we’re both getting older and a bit less attractive. But that literally doesn’t matter to me and I find them beautiful, because of the life we’ve spent together. I was initially attracted to them based on looks, but after some weeks, that really didn’t matter any more.
Likewise with friends, I probably initially made my friends based on looks, but I honestly don’t care what they look like anymore, they’re just my friends.
Wait, really? Whenever I spend more time at work or at home I tend to forget how many really attractive people are really out there. Whenever I go out after a long period of time I end up being positively surprised. I would also not look at Tinder as an example, but because of the opposite: people on tinder look much uglier than in real life. But then again, usually outside you don’t look at people for more than one or two seconds, while on tinder there’s loads of photos for you to examine every single flaw
I suppose everyone is different, but most people tend to agree that photos are often misleading in one way or another. Typically though, photos tend to flatten features and as you said, accent and display flaws for people to stare at, whereas in real life, people are “alive” and dynamic and you see that “flaw” was actually just an angle or photo-artifact, and people’s expressions can provide a sense of dynamic life and motion that most people find more agreeable on an aesthetic level.
But more than anything, face-to-face socializing is incredibly important because when you get to know someone, their appearance changes.
Not a deluding-yourself kind of way like some people think, but literally your sense of what you find appealing will change. This is why again, social friend groups are the best places to meet people, you don’t have to feel as insecure about your appearance if you can socialize and make friends, people will associate you with positive feelings, and you them, and you will all become familiar and attractive to each other in one way or another.