t3nder_v1ttl3s

I don’t know. There’s a saying “nothing succeeds like success”. So I would say that a person “knows” they are attractive because they have had success in relationships with people they find attractive. Failure to attract someone leads to doubts about one’s own attractiveness. Family and friends don’t count because you assume they are feeling obliged to say you are attractive but there is no possibility for a relationship there. What you want is for someone you find attractive and with whom you could have a relationship to “validate” your attractiveness by admitting that they think you are attractive. I’m not sure if that helps you but honestly I understand how you're feeling.

I think there are two dimensions to attractiveness. There’s how other people view us and there’s how we view ourselves. These two are not independent of each other. People who generally have good self esteem and believe themselves to be attractive are usually people who have been made to feel attractive by others. For instance, the girl that every guy flirts with and hits on. She’s the girl that guys always ask out. She probably has no issues with how she sees herself because her attractiveness is evident in the way guys so obviously pursue her. I think it’s the same for guys too. Guys that girls throw themselves at and are all over all the time, guys that get asked out or approached or have tons of success with women have higher self esteem and feel they are attractive. Again it’s validated by the fact that women are actually interested and demonstrate that interest by pursuing a romantic relationship of some sort. If you are someone that no one has ever shown the least amount of interest in it’s very hard to consider yourself attractive. There’s no evidence that you are because no one ever wants you in a way that validates your attractiveness. This leads you to automatically assume you are not attractive. This in turn affects how you interact with people that you are attracted to. If you spend years as a dateless wonder or someone that never gets attention you become desensitized to the subtle signs that usually indicate interest. This means you can’t tell when he/she is flirting and showing interest. It’s even worse if you’ve ever gotten all the right signals but then been rejected. You become conditioned to ignore those signals because you associate them with pain and rejection rather than acceptance and genuine desire. This is also why someone who is not used to getting attention will usually cling so tightly if and when they find someone that actually is interested and pursues a genuine relationship with them. It’s as if they found that one true gold nugget in a landfill of dirt and fool’s gold. I guess the answer to your question is ultimately you know you are attractive because someone takes enough of an interest in you to want a romantic relationship with you and actually makes this known to you. Until then, you will probably never feel like you are really attractive because we all need our attractiveness to be validated by someone else.