Hi Ugly,
I just turned 25. My long-term partner and I broke up recently, and I’ve been going on dates. My problem is I hate my skin. I have large pores, acne scarring, chicken pox scarring. Every time I meet someone new, I feel scared that they will find me hideous and think I catfished them. I’ve also been zooming in on pictures of my skin and looking at it in different lighting, which is worsening my insecurity.
Rationally, I know men probably won’t mind, because my previous partner – who had perfect skin! – still found me beautiful. And nobody I’ve gone on a date with has seemed to care so far. But I still criticize myself for it over and over again. How do I get over this?
– Not A Catfish
Back when I was on the apps, I’d upload slightly unflattering photos of myself: an up-close, no-makeup selfie; a wide shot in a muumuu the size of a small circus tent. I wanted to meet men who weren’t primarily interested in looks. Bonus: in person, I exceeded all expectations!
I’ve found love two, maybe even three times this way – the last one stuck – despite the fact that my skin, like yours, is marked by acne scars, visible pores and a smattering of old chicken pox pits (plus the burgeoning wrinkles of a woman 10 years your senior).
I call this the Inverse Catfish Method.
If it seems like I have a neurotic need to diminish myself first before a man does it, well … guilty as charged. After reading your question, Not A Catfish, I’d say we have this in common.
How did we end up this way? Aside from, you know, living under patriarchy, internalizing the male gaze and unconsciously inhaling the lessons of beauty culture like so much secondhand smoke.
For me, it was my ex-husband. A few months after we got married, he started making comments about my skin: suggesting I wear more makeup, telling me to “go on medication already” when I broke out. This charming new habit coincided with his decision to join Donald Trump’s mailing list and purchase a pack of “Make America Great Again” plastic straws as a “joke” to rile me up. Coincidence?
I wonder if something similar is contributing to your insecurity. You’re wading into the dating pool when the most powerful men in the world – and Kid Rock – are arguing that women exist to serve men; that our faces should be optimized for beauty, our bodies optimized for breeding. And it’s working! Data shows gen Z men are embracing regressive gender roles and leaning right. The resulting dating scene is reportedly in a sorry state.
There is a possibility that some men are looking for a barely sentient Stepford wife with skin like glass, like a screen, like an inanimate object under their thumbs. But there are also many men who want a real, live, regular partner. On subway seats, in coffee shops, across candlelit tables, I see people with scars and spots and dark under-eye circles being held and kissed and loved like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Because it is! You don’t have to fix a single thing about your face to find that.
It strikes me that becoming obsessed with your skin started with a change in your romantic life.
In Love: A New Understanding of an Ancient Emotion, philosopher Simon May writes that the loved one can give us something essential we can’t generate alone, like the feeling of being truly understood or “safety from a paralyzing source of insecurity”. Love “empowers us by intensifying our sense of existence and also humbles us by bringing to light our ontological smallness”, he says. It expands our world and puts the little things, like acne scars, in proportion.
But when love is lost, it shrinks the world – to the size of a pore, perhaps. It may “tear us from the familiar moorings of an ‘attachment’ or undermine our self-esteem”, according to May, leaving us “less able to be present” and scrambling to prove we still exist. We reach for something, anything, to anchor us.
Cue: hyperfixation on your face. Which makes sense! Skin is solid. It senses the outside world and confirms you’re in it and of it. It’s also the focus of countless beauty industry ads that claim attaining clear, poreless perfection will finally make you the real you, the “best version of you”. Sometimes, they even frame skincare as a replacement for love. See Cutocin, a brand that markets its Social Exchange Serum as an alternative to the oxytocin-releasing effects of, well, social exchange.
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But it isn’t.
More from Jessica DeFino’s Ask Ugly:
I could tell you that making peace with every last epidermal divot is an inside job – to love yourself first, that no product or partner can help you. But I don’t think we’re meant to love, heal, or even become ourselves alone. Humans are communal creatures. We need each other.
I’m not saying you’re doomed to spiral about your selfies until a boyfriend appears. The perspective-shifting power of love that May describes applies to non-romantic relationships, too.
Family, friends and communities can bring us a similar sense “of an ethical home, of power over our sense of existing and of a call to our destiny”, he says. “A work of art, a vocation, a god, a new country, even a landscape” can inspire sublimity, too – that feeling of being both empowered and humbled. So stare at a sunset instead of the mirror. Put down the phone and pick up a guitar. Go to a museum! Volunteer! Take a mini road trip with your mom! Find God in the mosh pit of a punk show!
Make your world bigger, and soon enough, your scars will seem appropriately small.
One last tip: Data from Pew Research Center shows only one in five partnered adults under 30 first connected with their current partner online. Some of the above suggestions double as great ways to meet potential partners in real life – no anxiety-inducing online avatar necessary. Delete her. Be free. But if you continue online dating? Give the Inverse Catfish Method a go.
