As someone that has been a strength athlete, and part of fitness communities for many years, I have never seen a real world instance of someone becoming generally less attractive to the opposite sex, or having trouble finding partners due to lifting weights.
Building noticeable amounts of muscle is much harder than most people who haven’t tried to do so assume. The “grotesquely muscular” men on, e.g. bodybuilding magazines are essentially fake, and not something that really happens to people that lift weights, except for a few minutes in a staged photo that requires months of preparation. To get like that you need a combination of massive doses of steroids, weight training and perfect dieting as a literal full time job, and one in a million genetics… plus a combination of crash dieting and severe dehydration aka “water cutting” to time a photo or contest for a specific day. Even those guys just look “fit” during a normal day with normal clothes on.
Your average person that does hard strength training seriously say 2-4 times per week, but still eats mostly normal foods, and avoids steroids will get much physically stronger, but will rarely look extremely different from how they did before. They might look slightly healthier and more attractive, but often won’t even be immediately noticeable as athletic, not alone “having huge grotesque muscles.”
For muscle mass to be very visible you also need really low body fat, at least in the 10-15% range, and maintaining that long term without losing the muscle is really difficult. A young ~6′ tall adult man with normal genetics won’t be able to be that lean and be over about 190-200lbs, which means they will appear more ‘skinny’ than muscular if wearing clothing.
As someone that has been a strength athlete, and part of fitness communities for many years, I have never seen a real world instance of someone becoming generally less attractive to the opposite sex, or having trouble finding partners due to lifting weights.
Building noticeable amounts of muscle is much harder than most people who haven’t tried to do so assume. The “grotesquely muscular” men on, e.g. bodybuilding magazines are essentially fake, and not something that really happens to people that lift weights, except for a few minutes in a staged photo that requires months of preparation. To get like that you need a combination of massive doses of steroids, weight training and perfect dieting as a literal full time job, and one in a million genetics… plus a combination of crash dieting and severe dehydration aka “water cutting” to time a photo or contest for a specific day. Even those guys just look “fit” during a normal day with normal clothes on.
Your average person that does hard strength training seriously say 2-4 times per week, but still eats mostly normal foods, and avoids steroids will get much physically stronger, but will rarely look extremely different from how they did before. They might look slightly healthier and more attractive, but often won’t even be immediately noticeable as athletic, not alone “having huge grotesque muscles.”
For muscle mass to be very visible you also need really low body fat, at least in the 10-15% range, and maintaining that long term without losing the muscle is really difficult. A young ~6′ tall adult man with normal genetics won’t be able to be that lean and be over about 190-200lbs, which means they will appear more ‘skinny’ than muscular if wearing clothing.