How can I feel better about myself in a world obsessed with physical beauty?

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Dear Hera,

For the majority of my life I have been seen as an uggo. Like, no one has found me attractive due to me having a slight facial difference I was born with, and being awkward due to being neurodivergent. I am in my 30s and have never had a boyfriend. 

I have tried. My former friends tried to set me up with guys in school and college but boys didn’t find me pretty enough. It was quite devastating watching my friends grow up, lose their virginity, get married and have babies, while I stayed involuntarily celibate. 

My sister suggested I try dating sites, but men took the piss or only wanted sex, and my therapist told me I was “forgettable” and that’s why guys didn’t want me. I guess I’ve been lonely and desperate because my new role has become “placeholder” to guys I meet at supermarkets or voluntary centres or art classes. These men approach me, show keen interest, ask me about myself, tell me about themselves, they get possessive of me, wanting to know where I go, what I do and feel upset if I even look at another male. Everyone around us thinks we’re going to date, as the men publicly declare they’re going to take me on holiday or somewhere nice, but they never do. When I ask them why they don’t want to date me, they get angry, really screaming in my face in disgust at the mere suggestion. When I tell them I will never speak to them again, they literally get tearful or are appalled when I tell them they are using me, and they beg for me to still talk to them. I return. And the same thing happens for the next two or eight months, until I can’t take their “hot/cold” anymore. Then I leave. 

When I secretly look them up online years later (they never give me their phone number), I discover they are now married, or engaged to girlfriends they met not long after I left them, and they are gushing with Shakespeare sonnets about how beautiful and loveable their partner is, who looks nothing like me. I feel so hurt and betrayed and stupid and no one I know knows what to say to me. 

I feel so pathetic, at home pining for dudes that moved on the minute I left. I feel embarrassed, especially when I see them on the street, and they smirk at me and kiss their partners in front of me to rub their rejection in my face. 

Hera, how do I feel better about myself? My therapists have made me feel worse by telling me I expected too much from handsome, young men, and some women in my life tell me I’m punching above my weight….

Yours sincerely,

Pisces Dreamer

Dear Pisces Dreamer,

Here are some things which are true:

• Genetics is a lottery, and the way you look affects the way people treat you
• Hot people get preferential treatment both in & out of the bedroom
• Dating is already hard enough, and the current app-based sexual panopticon only makes it harder
• It sucks to be ugly in a world obsessed with physical beauty 

Things which are also true: 

• Love isn’t reserved for hot people, nor does being hot guarantee you a meaningful romantic connection
• Romantic love is not the only kind of love
• Our romantic lives only represent a fraction of our experience on this planet
• Beauty is (genuinely) in the eye of the beholder
• Even if you have a face that only a tractor could love, it doesn’t exclude you from having a rich, and meaningful life 

I won’t pretend that looks don’t matter. I do think, for what it’s worth, charisma is a lot more important than people give it credit for, and people’s aesthetic preferences are much vaster and more varied than mainstream dating discourse would have you believe. But I don’t think pointing this out is necessarily helpful, because it’s equally hard to summon vast internal reserves of personal charisma out of nowhere, especially if you’ve been struggling with feelings of shame and self-hatred all your life. 

I don’t know how you look, so I’m simply going to take you at your word and assume you’re not conventionally attractive. 

It sounds like you’ve had to deal with a lot of shitheel behaviour and mixed messages from men. There’s no shame in wanting love, and I can completely understand your feelings of grief and frustration. For the record, your looks might have absolutely nothing to do with how these relationships have played out. But even if they did, I’m not here to give you relationship advice. Instead, you ask a more interesting question, which is how to feel better about yourself.

Let’s say a Netflix award-winning virus ravaged the globe and instantly wiped out every man on the planet. Let’s say you were a strictly heterosexual woman. If you knew that romantic love was completely and permanently off the table for you, what would you do? What would a good life look like? What sort of things would you pour your time and energy into instead? 

I’m not saying you should give up hope. You can’t switch it off like a faucet, even if you wanted to. But I do think there can be something paradoxically liberating in surrendering to your circumstances. It seems to me like your distress about this one aspect of your life is keeping you stuck. Is there a way you can allow yourself to mentally subtract love from the equation long enough to imagine a life in which you could be ugly and single and still find profound meaning and joy? 

Even in a worst-case gender apocalypse scenario, there are plenty of things to live for. Friendship, community, creativity, family, study, work, travel, books, music, miniature dogs riding small trains at the park. Even pain can be interesting – the pure experience of being alive in the world and bearing witness to the spectacle. 

For the record, I don’t think this is an easy mental leap to make. Maybe you need some time to properly grieve the life you didn’t get to have. To mourn the version of yourself who was born with a body like Cindy Crawford, and had more dates than you knew what to do with. Bury that girl and visit her grave whenever you need to. Then, summon up the courage to say: Fuck it! I’m going to do my best to find a way to make my situation bearable, to build a rich and fascinating life, even if it doesn’t look like what I originally envisioned. To fiercely advocate for my own happiness and sense of purpose. To risk being ugly and loveless and enjoy myself anyway.  

I don’t know what a good life looks like to you. Spending more time with friends? Getting obsessed with some arcane and esoteric point of historical religious dogma? Seeing the world? Making big ass quilts? Maybe you’ve been so bogged down by what you haven’t had, you’re not sure what you actually want. If so, make it your job to find out.

There are plenty of miserable people in relationships, and plenty of happy single people. There are hauntingly beautiful women who are killed in their 20s by jealous partners, and odd-looking individuals with unquenchable reserves of joy and enthusiasm in their hearts. Nothing lasts forever, good or bad. Healthy people can become sick. Beautiful people can become ugly. Death comes for us all in the end. 

I’m sure there are many people in your life who would say they think you’re beautiful, but I won’t belabour the point because this is not a body positivity workshop. What I’m trying to say is, even if you are “ugly” it’s not the end of the world. Your body doesn’t have to be a perpetual well of shame and misery. It can simply be the dull but serviceable station wagon you use to haul your soul around in. 

Sometimes, when you’re stuck bemoaning the circumstances of your life, it can help to stop for a moment and think about the staggeringly vast diversity of human experiences, everyone who has ever drawn breath on this planet. Peasants, kings, monks, babies who drowned in swimming pools, heretics burned at the stake, Victorian leech doctors, Kenneth Branagh, the second worst warrior in Genghis Khan’s personal army, the woman at the supermarket with the Flintstones tattoo, Rod Stewart’s mum, the 56-year-old blacksmith from Norwich doing Meatloaf on Stars in Their Eyes. We are all hostages of fate, beholden to biological and historical circumstances beyond our control. It is not fair, and it cannot be helped. People may not have the same problems as you, but there are infinite reservoirs of misery and joy in this life, and not all of them are written plainly on people’s faces. 

What do we do, when we’re dealt a shitty hand? I think all you can do is grieve your losses, and then use every ounce of creativity, resilience and self-compassion at your disposal to find a way to rise to meet the challenge of your life, like it’s a question you were born to answer. 

I hate to be that person, but the paradox is real: if you can build an amazing life, it might make it easier to find love. But even if you do, and love doesn’t come, at least you’ve had an amazing life.

It might take you a lifetime to find some measure of acceptance and peace. But don’t waste your life mourning the person you might have been. Take up the problem of your life as if it were a challenge not a punishment, and see what happiness you can wring from it.