Sorry, but it's not ALL a matter of personal preference, if it was then we would be seeing a whole lot more variation in what kinds of body types are consistently considered more attractive by the majority of people... and skinny may not always equal pretty or handsome, but in the eyes of the majority it does equal pretty or handsome more often than "chubby".
The majority of people do consider body types which correlate with, youth, vitality and health to be more attractive than those that correlate with old age and poor health. While age is not necessarily relevant to external body weight, health very often is, even in those who have just "a few extra pounds". When I speak of health here also I'm not just talking about the sort of health that people can control, because genetic health and traits such as facial symmetry and not having any obvious deformities are also more attractive to the majority of people. I'm also not saying that anyone with a few extra pounds has committed some kind of moral or social failure by not managing or even trying to lose that weight, "attractiveness to the majority" isn't the most important thing in life, there are various reasons that someone's weight might increase above the relatively low line of what is optimal for health and longevity, and various reasons why it might not be worth the effort of trying to counter this.
CoastTwoCoast said:
My boyfriend certainly isn't "settling" because I have a few extra pounds.
I wouldn't dream of suggesting that he is, I don't know either of you and I don't know your relationship.
I do believe however that a reality check is needed for those who think that weight or, as mentioned, even external indicators of attractiveness that are totally outside their control play no role whatsoever in the sort of person they attract, or indeed, as you say, in the sort of person that you are attracted
to. You say that personality means a whole lot more to you, and I don't dispute that is the case, BUT I do think it is highly likely that there are people that you have written off before fully getting to know them, OR given more of a chance to reveal more of their personality to you, based on external indicators of what you find attractive.
There are multiple studies suggesting that people's prejudice towards certain "undesirable" physical traits influences their perception of a person before they've even spoken a single word to each other, and a lot of this prejudice is largely instinctual and beyond our control. I think anyone, if they are being totally honest with themselves, would admit that they do judge people by appearance, to some extent, even if they have the self-awareness to try to suppress this instinctual reaction in themselves.
Given that this is the case it stands to reason that over a large enough sample size some of these innate biological prejudices would start to come through, and I think this is demonstrated in human society at large. Even though the standards of attractiveness and beauty currently being pushed by the media have been distorted to absurd and harmful extremes, leading to a proliferation of eating disorders, size zero models, steroid abuse, and other objectively harmful results... the possibility remains, even if it may be a somewhat uncomfortable one, that they tended this way rather than the other way (towards absurdly plus size models, and eating disorders based around overeating, for example) because of biologically hard-coded preferences in human beings, which generally lean away from the weightier end of the scale (excuse the unintended and bad pun).
Anyway, (just to relate this back to the OP...) for the
majority of people, because of the above mentioned hard coded prejudices that people hold, I think that it stands to reason that those who are overweight will be given less of a chance to reveal their personality to a potential partner.
Therefore, even we if take all other factors out of the equation (except for the, I think, almost indisputable fact that women generally have more options) there will be more overweight women ending up with less overweight men, than there are overweight men ending up with less overweight women. This doesn't necessarily say anything about any specific couple's relationship except as far as they make up a single datapoint in a statistical trend, BUT it is an (almost) indisputable statistical fact.
...one final point also, as I feel someone is likely to mention that in certain historical societies, being overweight or even "fat" was actually seen as MORE attractive - it's not actually relevant to this argument where the prejudice comes from, whether it comes from biology or from other undetermined factors in popular culture. All that matters is that there IS a prevailing prejudice, and that this influences partner selection in human society at large.
I should note also that I don't actually know for a fact that this trend does go the way it's presumed to go, as in, in heterosexual couplings, it happens more often that the woman is larger than the other way around. I'm not sure if there is any real data to support this theory either way, but I do think it is a reasonable possibility based on the other points I've raised... and if there was a prevailing cultural perception that being overweight was more attractive than not being overweight, I would expect this trend to be reversed.
