@Sub-Zero,
Still a mystery to me.
A lot of attraction is still a mystery to me.
You walk into a train station and a beautiful girl looks at you, and is obviously attracted. If you walk up and talk to her she is way into it. If you text her she comes on the date. When you invite her home she falls into your bed. When you ask her to keep coming over she turns into your girlfriend.
Why was she so into you from that first moment, before even you met? Was it because of your hair? Clothes? Posture? Walk?
Well, maybe. But maybe not. Because that same thing use to happen to me when I had a fat face and a beer gut and sloppy clothes and a $12 haircut. Or at least, the initial meeting did... I did not know what to do with women back then. But the initial attraction was exactly the same.
Fundamentals are part of it, because the better those get, the more often this will happen to you.
But there is also something else happening aside from that.
If you look at most couples, you will notice 75%+ of them have strong facial similarities. Similar face shapes, nose shapes, eyes and mouths, etc.
To the point where nowadays I will see some rich or famous guy, and notice the woman he is with, and say "Whoa, why did he choose HER? He could've chosen a girl so much prettier than her... that girl is not really attractive at
all..." then I will look at their faces and realize they look a lot alike.
And people are attracted to other people who look like them.
While the girl is not attractive to me, there is a good chance she is
beautiful to
him.
So probably when they saw each other there was an initial attraction due to facial similarity.
Might well be when I was a schlubby guy the girls who were responding to me were girls facially similar to me (unconsciously for us both).
Might've been an MHC gene thing.
Or something else subconscious that neither of us were aware of.
Some girls like the guys who have a little extra padding (just like there are guys who like girls who are a little overweight).
I had a girlfriend I got when my fundamentals were still pretty bad (still had my gut and crappy clothes and haircut, though posture and voice were a bit improved), and once I'd improved a lot more, one day she told me she probably would not have dated me if I was like this when she met me because she would've felt like I was out of her league. This girl was very beautiful (even once my fundamentals were good), and was also quite prideful, so not a self-esteem thing at all... but she and another confident beautiful girl I was friends with each separately told me they preferred to date guys who were impressive but not super impressive, because they felt like they could not "keep" guys when those guys got too impressive (and I guess maybe that was an accurate feeling, since ultimately that relationship did end).
"Why do people want the mates they want?" is such a layered subject it is completely impossible to nail down any one specific thing or even handful of specific things as predominant causes.
Chase