User blog comment:Ben109/Score One For Ben!/@comment-1220117-20110318102646/@comment-1874924-20110318170910

"All the good ones are taken" is an ancient lament, Chimmy, so you're in good company. In like vein, my wife once told me why she and her best friend never had boyfriends in school, describing the situation as, "the boys we liked didn't know we existed; and the boys who liked us, we wished didn't exist."

My own problem was a little different. I was simply too timid in approaching girls. I didn't have my first date until I was in college, and I didn't even ask a girl out for the first time until the summer following my 9th grade year. (Granted, the times were different then, but still...) I have since learned that my problem is apparently a common one among men: being "too nice" and ending up in the "friend zone" because they don't understand attraction.

As for too many of your prospects being obsessed with looks, this is an even more common situation, especially in adoloescence. (People tend to relax their standards as they get older, if for no other reason than that the alternative is to "price themselves out of the market".) The simple fact is that, with men, it tends to be mainly about looks.

I recall a study of speed dating that illustrated this point. For those of you who don't know how speed dating works, a number of "in the market" men and women are brought together and are paired off. Each person talks with his partner for a set time before moving on to the next prospect. The time you have with each prospect is brief (typically 3-6 minutes) so first impressions are very important. After everyone has run through all the prospects, each participant lists the people whom s/he would like to follow up with. If a man and a woman happen to choose each other, then phone numbers are exchanged. Anyway, the study found that most men had certain minimum standards for physical attractiveness (which varied from one man to the next, of course) and selected virtually all women who met that standard. What this means to a girl like you is that you don't necessarily have to be "the cream of the crop"--you just have to be "good enough".

I'll confess that I valued looks as highly as the next guy when I was in school, but I've always had a particular weakness for the "little brown mouse" type.