my husband and I met on match.com. we both listed ourselves as bigger, but of course chose flattering pictures. we met, fell in love, and are still together. still fat, too. in fact, my husband confessed to me after we met face to face that I was heavier than my pictures led him to believe. he also confessed that I was more beautiful as well. he's been with me from high 200's to low 300's to mid 200's back to high 200's. loves me no matter what.

I was at a 28 bmi for most of my 20s and had interest from what I perceived to be a lot of men but i noticed a steep decline when I got up to 32, it was very noticable. However being nice and making an effort to look nice, in my opinion, would be all you would need to attract the right kind of guy. Confidence sure does help the process im sure.

My highest BMI ever was around 25.5 (juuuust shading into overweight) and my lowest was 20.4.

I've dated at both and everywhere in between, but I rarely get people randomly approaching me in public to ask me out, even at bars and such, because I don't particularly want the attention and tend to have very closed body language.

Getting asked out is all about openness. If you hold yourself open, smile, flirt, make eye contact with strangers, you'll get asked out no matter what your size. If you don't seem interested, few people will show interest in you.

A Kuwaiti man hit on me every time I went to the Sultan Center supermarket in Kuwait City when my BMI was 50. An Indian man hit on me at the same weight when I shopped in his shop at the fabric souk.

After I moved back to the US and had lost some weight, African-American and Mexican-American men started hitting on me when my BMI was about 46. Philippine-American women in a nightclub were hitting on me one night in San Francisco. I was at a BMI of 44.

I now live in my hometown in Central California. BMI of 43. Middle-aged European-American men don't seem to notice I'm a woman, but the more technically-astute ones do like to talk shop and joke around with me. Married men will freely talk to me when their wives are my friends. I'm safe.

On the other hand, I seem to be attracted to big men in the overweight category. I'm just not interested in dating at this time.

My marriage has only gotten worse as I have lost the pounds!

Thankfully I am not losing weight for my marriage but for my own well-being!

I'm having to work at both.

Okay, I'll be the one who calls the B.S. card on this topic. Having been slender and overweight while having self-esteem issues being at either extreme, I can say that being slender definitely attracts the majority of men verses being overweight. Talking purely on physical attraction and sex (not relationships), being a slender woman trumps being an overweight woman. It is what it is. It is unfair, but it's the truth!

Everyone has a different definition of what being slender is (i.e, BMI, weight/pounds/stones, waist size, etc.). I wasn't confident when I was slender yet many attractive to average looking men approached me because I was slender. Now that I'm overweight, I rarely get any attention from men.

I don't buy this whole "confidence is what attracts them" mentality at all.

Hmm, well at a BMI of 32.3 I very rarely was asked out or hit on. Once I got down to a BMI of 29.5 I would once in a while get hit on if I was dressed up nicely and had my hair and make up done. At around 27 it increased a lot and at 26.8 I started dating again and got asked out a lot. It stayed at the same level until recently. Once I dropped to a BMI of 23 its increased greatly. I think the personality stuff is interesting though because I was actually much more friendly, confident, and out going when I was at a higher BMI. I also dressed really nice(was better off financially then) and always was done up so I think how I presented myself is the reason I was still asked out fairly often. Now I'm much more insecure and less friendly. I dress down more too and am not as done up with hair and makeup but I get asked out all the time. I think in my case it really is simply because I'm slimmer since sadly I think my personality has gotten worse :/

If you only care about the number of men asking you out, or if you want only men with perfect looks and lots of money and/or the drive to make lots of money (who are looking only for equally beautiful and equally money-focused women), you're absolutely right.

I'm awesome. I'm educated (master's degree), I'm wicked funny, fun to be around, considerate, open-minded, creative, damned sexy, dress as nicely as I can, playful, confident, a little adventurous, but fairly conservative morally (not looking for kinky sex), and don't care a fig about money beyond meeting the barest essentials of a roof and working vehicle, and I'm attracted to men of varied attributes. I don't expect physical perfection and a whole lot of money. I'm a bit nerdy and geeky myself, and don't mind if my guys are geeky nerds or even uber nerds.

When I was dating (before I met my incredible husband) my expectation of men were pretty flexible and simple - non-abusive man whom I found interesting who shared at least some of my interests. If he was into sci fi and fantasy books and games, BONUS! If he didn't look kinda like a toad, super bonus (but I did date some very unattractive men who were very sexy to me, because there nerdiness was compatible with my own).

If you want a chubby-chasing Brad Pitt to come knocking on your door, you're going to have a very long wait, but if you just want a nice guy who might have some pudge of his own, or a receding hairline, or less than perfect teeth or lousy car and thin wallet or some other non-hollywood traits, there are plenty of men who don't mind a woman who is fat if she has other great qualities.

My thinner, prettier friends dated more, but there dates weren't better according to MY standards. They dated more men, more conventionally attractive men, and men with more money and nicer cars, but they also dated more abusers, molesters, ath-holes, control-freaks, cheating, two-timing, lying bath-turds.

I dated fewer men, but men of a much higher caliber (by my standards at least) than my friends. I didn't accept dates with anyone who asked me, but only men who met MY exacting standards. Great or even good looks and income were not on my "must have" list, but my first and most firm criteria was "must treat me like I am as valuable and important as I treat him, and must not expect me to be a doormat, sexual or otherwise.

When hubby responded to a personal ad I placed, neither of us were overwhelmingly sexually attracted to each other - that came later after we realized that we each had all of our "must have" qualities we were looking for in a mate.

Hubby happened to be quite fat himself, but if he wasn't going to reject me for my weight, I certainly wasn't going to reject him for his. And when I realized he had everything else I wanted (and he discovered the same) it was a no brainer.

Confidence isn't everything. You're probably not going to attract a millionare playboy on confidence alone, but there are plenty of men who either prefer or don't mind dating heavier women, so if that's what you want, your SOL, but if you just want a nice guy who is open-minded about a girl's looks, there are plenty of those.

Maybe not enough for a different man every week (unless your standards are REALLY, REALLY low), but you don't need to find hundreds of men, just one. He doesn't have to be perfect, or even absolutely perfect for you. You just have to be good to each other and good for each other.

Great guys who aren't beauty and thinness-obsessed really aren't all that scarce, though many of them are not-gorgeous and shy, and that's where confidence is the biggest asset.

Same. I'm not talking about quality of men - that is a separate question, but if OP is straight asking about men in general asking me out - when I was bigger, I was the "safe/attainable second choice" choice for a lot of jerks "oh she'll be grateful for any lewd behavior" or totally invisible.

When I'm thinner I get hit on when people are interested in me. Now maybe they are all jerks, maybe not, but I find that I get hit on differently and I don't try any harder or appear any more or less confident. Just the reasons for hitting on me seem to change.

I, ah, well, guh!
No guys look at me! But I'm still fat. But yeah it sucks knowing that when that does finally happen, the next guy who comes along will only like me for the way I look after I've made progress. :S He never would have given me the chance before. That doesn't feel too good. I don't want a guy like that. Only way to insure that is to stay single forever!

SINGLE LADY FOREVAAH!!!! WHEEEE!

Okaayyy.. I don't get the whole thing about specifying the different races and cultures of men (and women, no less!) that hit on you.

So you are implying that only the ones who are "desperate" (aka the ethnic minorities) are the ones that are attracted to you despite your size? And that otherwise, you are "safe"??

Hmmm...

I think she's saying that other cultures have different ideals of beauty. I've read that America's obsession with thinness is not the norm in other countries.

I read the phrase "I'm safe" to refer to the sentence before it: The married men she knows are not worried about their wives getting jealous of them paying attention to their "fat friend."

I don't think anything malicious was meant by the OP.

Amen! That does seem the way to go...

I think I was around 26 when it first happened to me.
Keeping in mind that my lowest BMI before that was around 27-28 and I had just come down from 33 so it definitely could be attributed to the confidence factor.

That is one way, but it's not the only way. There are other options, but they may require that you not wait for some guy to randoml come along and show intetest. You may need to be the hunter, rather than the hunted.

There are guys who aren't that into looks or who have very flexible preferences in that regard, but these usually aren't men with the looks, confidence, charm, and money of a movie star. They're not all "losers," not by a long shot, but they have a pretty normal set of flaws, just like the women they're attracted to. They may be shy, or nerdy, or balding, or short, or even chubby themselves.

I met my hubby through a personal ad I placed. I knew for sure he was "the one" when I saw photos of the women he had dated in the past. Some were thin, some were fat (I was the fattest), some were brunette, some were blonde and they all had different jobs, hobbies, and talents. A couple were even gorgeous (one blonde in particular was model perfect, physically).

I saw that he really put his money where his mouth was, when he said looks weren't all that important to him.

With my hubby, when I met him, it wasn't lust at first sight for either of us (Love at first sight isn't possible, because you can't love a person you don't know), but we were quickly drawn together as friends. I was a bit put off by his appearance initially. Very tall (which I liked), but fat (I had no right to judge there) with long hair, a mustache (ick) and leather vest over jeans and a t-shirt. The "biker" look didn't appeal to me, but as I fell in love with him, the "biker look" I hated sort of transformed into a giant ogre-viking look I began to love (the movie Shrek helped with that, as we adopted the characters as our cartoon alter egos).

We don't have an "our song," per se, but the Shrek movies (and all the songs in them) are "ours."

If you want "deep," in a partner, you can't expect to find them, except by doing a whole lot of digging yourself. If you want a "too good to be true" partner, odds are you're SOL, but if you want someone who can accept imperfect (by societal standards), you have to accept imperfect too.

You also often have to give up the societal expectation of the man making the first move. These types of guys really aren't all that rare, but they're not so common that you can wait around for them to find you, and they're probably not hanging out in bars or other traditional meeting spots. To find them, you need to be looking for them, and be willing to break some of the traditional dating "rules" and expectations.

I know my husband will love me, even if all of my hairs and teeth fall out, because that's what I went looking for and didn't settle for anything less. I had to give up "model-gorgeous, superstuds" to get that, but to me, that wasn't much of a sacrifice.