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One of my favorite side effects of my Year of Overthinking my Sexuality is what I learned about the differences between aesthetic and romantic attraction.
Did you know you can think someone is pretty, or cute, or handsome, without liking them romantically? Yeah! Maybe that's common knowledge, but I sure didn't know until I went down the rabbit hole of researching asexuality. The result of that extensive research and the discovery of separate terms for separate kinds of attraction is that I now feel much more comfortable finding people attractive.
The curly-haired boy on my cross country team? Cute. The woman with the braid carrying her child? Very pretty. The short kid I keep passing in the halls? Gorgeous. The big lady I ran into at the grocery store? Breathtaking. It's made me realize that the vast majority of people in real life actually look really good. Very few of them perfectly fit what I've been taught to see as conventionally attractive, but so many of them have faces I long to just . . . look at. I swear, ninety percent of the girls I know from church are prettier than any model I've ever seen. Most people, maybe even all people, are attractive in a very genuine, very mundane, and very beautiful way.
I like feeling like I can say someone looks good without implying that I like them. And I like admitting that if I'm honest, everyone looks good.