[madnak]

Is it possible for a woman to be smart and skeptical, but not attractive? Hell, even a total bear with those qualities is something to write home about. But uh, if you really just want to have your cake and eat it too, you won't get a whole lot of sympathy for guys like me who put looks firmly in the "optional" category. Keep in mind that you're looking for a coincidence of attributes - and each attribute you add lowers the likelihood.

I mean, assume that 10% of women are "really smart" and 10% of women are "really sexy." In that case, only 1% of women are both. Now imagine you're looking for the top percentile of women in looks and brains - you've already narrowed your prospects to 1 in 10,000, without even considering deal-breakers and diseases and age and mental illness, etc etc. I say if you're looking for a combination of attributes that rare, then you should try to re-evaluate to some degree. Obviously it's not as simple as I'm making it out to be - I'd like to find a girl in the top 1% for intellect and in my general age range, but I will also be exposed to a large proportion of such women due to my habits and interests. The other traits I like also tend to correlate with intelligence, so my chances are decent.

But it's unlikely that beauty correlates with intellect, so you may be reducing your probabilities even further. Moreover, a super-smart and super-sexy woman, due to her rarity and desirability, will be in high demand. Do you have a similar combination of rare and desirable traits that make you competitive?

I say, limit your "required" attributes as much as possible - I just don't get along with people who aren't smart, but I consider that unfortunate. For the most part, leave yourself open to people of all different types, and hope to eventually love someone for their qualitative traits, rather than quantitative traits. The alternative is to settle, because if you're looking for quantitative traits with a 1 in 3,000,000 likelihood, you're highly unlikely to find such a mate through your entire life.