How To Be An Attractive Man
Learning To See Without Comparison
No one is the best judge of their own attractiveness. The self lives from the inside out, while beauty is always judged from the outside in.
What we feel as familiarity, others see as novelty; what we take for granted, they might find remarkable.
The truth of the body, then, lies somewhere between the mirror and the witness.
A man’s opinion of his own form is shaped less by what he sees than by what he has been told to see. Compliments, criticisms, and casual remarks become a quiet architecture of perception.
Over years, this scaffolding can harden into identity: “handsome", “plain", “too thin", “too soft". These words outlast the bodies that inspired them.
Yet none of them describe what it feels like to live inside a body—to wake up in it, to move through air and gravity, to feel hunger, tiredness, pleasure, pain.
That experience is beyond language and therefore beyond judgement. It is intimate knowledge: not how you look, but how you are.
The Practice of Peace asks a man to return to that intimacy. To see himself not as he appears, but as he experiences.
Here, attractiveness becomes irrelevant, because it was never his to measure. What matters is the relationship between his awareness and his form—the quiet understanding that this body is not a performance, but a partner.
Age, too, becomes part of the conversation. The changes of time are not betrayals but biographies. The way the skin folds, the way muscle yields, the way light sits differently on the face—these are expressions of endurance.
To notice them without judgement is to recover a sense of gratitude: the body has not aged at you, it has aged with you.
When a man lets go of trying to see himself as others might, he becomes more available to genuine intimacy. The tension that once guarded him—the inner critic always asking how am I seen?—begins to dissolve.
He can be touched, held, witnessed, without needing to edit himself. The body ceases to be an object and returns to being a place: a lived, imperfect, and truthful home.
The body is not what you see reflected. It is what keeps looking back when no one else does.
