You ever had a crush on someone back in the day, see them now and go "what was I thinking"?
This happens to me when I rarely open up Facebook. I'd see someone I was obsessing over in the 10s, and now I just wonder what I was ever feeling with them. It's not like something happened and they're massively different, they're more or less the same. Really the world changed a lot and I'm not the I used to be.
I'm not dating anyone new now. But if I had to judge someone as hot, they would have many of the following characteristics:
left of some soft (Marxist, Anarchist, hell I'll date a decent socdem)
mask wearing
vegan
high empathy, worry about the suffering of others
reader
actively organising something in their community
To be honest, I had a pretty basic taste in dates back in the day. If anything, this should be a self-crit.
Gonna go against the grain and say: not really...no. There are people I wouldn't pursue now due to incompatibilities and/or that know well enough now in hindsight to know their shitty qualities out way their positives...but I still kinda get what I was thinking at the time. In some cases, at the time I was interested it was because back then I was a different person.
I think if anything the way my perspective has changed is that I started to open myself up to people that back in the day I would have written off more quickly. Like with my current partner for example I think I probably would have just noped out the first time she talked about her obsession with skin care routines and how often she visits Sephora...but now that I'm not an angsty/shitty twenty year old I get that's just the thing she geeks out about in the way I geek out about nerd shit.
This is how I feel. I always find it a little odd when people reflect on their past negatively or with some kind of confusion. Like, you don’t know what you were thinking? You don’t have access to your own thoughts???