Unattraactive vs. Desperate

There are studies that show that people that are more receptive to everyone (i.e. the will date anyone) are themselves considered less desirable.  

There are two major possible explanations for this.

1. The less desirable people know they are less desirable (at least unconsciously) and therefore have lowered their standards and are willing to date anyone.
2. The loose daters are known to be loose and this is a turn off - i.e. they are desperate and no one wants to date a desperate person.

There is probably a bit of truth to both of these ideas, but I strongly believe that #1 is the more powerful effect.   Option 2 postulates a lot of unproven assumptions.   It requires most people to be poor at concealing their desperation, most other people to be good at detecting it, and it also requires that no one  likes desperation.  The last is a very hard assumption to believe - particularly as many attractive men don't care how desperate a woman is and many women take pity on desperate men.

Option 1 on the other hand has assumptions that look obvious to me.  Clearly some people are less desirable (i.e. rude, cheap, ugly, broke, short, mean, etc.) and almost everyone can compare themselves with others and realizes how poorly they do, and it is a fairly easy thing to lower your standards.

Far easier to lower your standards than to improve yourself (short is almost impossible to improve, but the rest are not easy things to do either).

Often the effect is not a conscious choice.  Men start out trying to date only the hotties.  Then after we have been rejected by all the 10's, we move on to the  9's.  Then on to the 8's.

If we one night we get nowhere even with the 8's then the next time we go out, we start at the 9's, move to the 8's, move to 7s.   This keeps happening until our date attempts are successful.   We never consciously lower our standards, we instead slowly find ourselves with lower standards.


Similarly, a woman that gets hit on by 6's, 7's, and 8's, may start out rejecting all because she thinks she's a 9.  But by the end of the night when she realizes no 9's have hit on her, she may accept an 8.     As this happens time and time again, she may eventually start out by accepting all 8's. 

In other words: humans learn from the past.  It may in fact be our defining characteristic.