With Me For My Looks

Here's a problem that is rampant among ATVBT readers: a person is both very good-looking and also has a great personality. They want to find a partner who is not just with them for their looks. How can they do this?

The traditional solution (per rom coms, etc) is to start out looking extremely plain (but with a great personality), meet someone who is way out of your league visually but forced into your proximity for some reason, have them fall in love with your personality despite their initial indifference (hence proving they're serious about you), and then later have a glowup and also see their face go WOW so you know for sure they're also really into your looks.

I think this points at one of the core struggles of the not-just-with-me-for-my-looks problem: we have a weird relationship with things like looks, where we mostly want to be with someone who is 1) not just with us for our looks, but 2) still does extremely enjoy how we look. Even as an extremely gorgeous person who is fed up with people objectifying our gorgeousness, it would be disappointing to meet someone who loves us for who we are but then is like "yeah I mean I'm just tolerating your face because I love you so much." Conditional on them truly liking our personalities, we then do want them to love our looks, after all.

The second problem I see is embodied in the following thought experiment: suppose you're extremely gorgeous, and trying to find someone who isn't just interested in you for your looks. You try to achieve this by making yourself less attractive: wearing unattractive clothes, getting an unattractive haircut, etc. Are you now going to match with people who are interested in your brain (or soul, or spleen?) I think potentially not, you're just going to attract people who are still with you for your looks, at a lower level of looks.

I don't have a solution to this, at all. I think ideally we would encounter each potential partner simultaneously (but separately) in a realm of ideas and a realm of embodiment, and find out who we're attracted to in each realm separately, and then only discover later that Personality_t and Face_t (each of which you liked separately) belong to the same person, congratulations.

Of course, this all doesn't just apply to looks: there are other traits that people have which they want people to like about them, but don't want people who only like that about them. "Being rich" functions in a similar way, as does having a prestigious pedigree. It would be kind of interesting to figure out what ties together the traits that people don't want to be just-liked for; I don't think I've ever heard someone complain that "ugh, I think my date is only into me for my brain and personality, gross," and it would be fun to work out why.

The same basic problem applies outside dating. For example, suppose you have an organization that pays way above market rates. They want to pay well to get The Best People, but they also don't want to have employees who are only with the org for its money. But without extremely careful filtering on hiring, they're liable to end up with employees who are there for the super-high salaries, and it's unclear what they can ultimately do to stop this: if they pay less money, will they get mission-driven people again? Or just people who are doing it for the money at a lower level of pay? Again, I don't know what the solution to this is, I just know that it's a problem.