Comment by moshegramovsky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moshegramovsky | Hacker News Reader

I look a little white, I look a little Middle Eastern. When I was young, I absolutely hated how I looked. I was bullied. Taunted. Tormented. I wanted a nose job. I wanted different hair. I wanted a different build. But as I got into my late 20s, I started to get a lot more attention, and I realized that a lot of people found me attractive. For reference, I look a lot more like Yehuda Amar (an Israeli chef) than Michael Aloni (Akiva on Schtisel).

It's true that being conventionally attractive made my life 1000x easier - it's almost like the trees lowered their branches to make the fruit easier to pick. I'm pretty sure it made it easier to get a mortgage and a job and definitely a partner. But I still think about what my life would be like if I had a different nose, different hair, different build.

Even in my late 40s, I still get a lot of attention from much younger women. A few weeks ago, a woman, maybe 25, openly flirted with me while she made my cappuccino. This has happened many times before, but I never make a move.

All I could think was how repulsed she would feel if she ever saw me naked. Or how fast she would disappear if she saw my crooked upper teeth. Or all my gray chest hair. Or my hairy back. Even if I played ball and gave her my number, even if she thinks I'm handsome, older-and-wiser, I just could never get past how I feel about myself, and see myself, relative to her.

Maybe it won't come as consolation but a lot of very beautiful people suffer from the same. Like how people who are already skinny can very well be hit by anorexia.

Used to being beautiful all their lives, one day there's a chink in the armor: a wrinkle, a white hair, a stretchmark, that same feeling you have starts to sink in. The emotional impact might be worse than for people who had a lifetime to be at peace with how they look like.

This seems to be the author of the article [0]. Your first reaction is probably that the real picture doesn't match at all the picture you built in your mind while reading the article. I hope that helps you realize you are not alone in feeling that everyone else must be thinking of you what you think of yourself. They're probably not.

[0] https://muckrack.com/grazie-sophia-christie

Definitely recommend any “nude” cultural stuff you may find. It empowers you with self acceptance and body(ies) awareness.

Germans calls it FKK [0] and it’s a think our civilization would highly benefit to incorporate. Also if anyone visit Belgium/ Netherlands, highly recommend an afternoon in a nude sauna garden. (For those wondering, no sex involved neither allowed). Naturist beaches in other places are great too but a bit harder to get when you’re a “beginner” : they tends to be public space that are also frequented by clothed-people and you may find yourself weird to undress among them, the first times at least.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freikörperkultur

We have a similar path from how we were growing up vs getting better as we got older. One benefit I saw from being an overweight, out of shape, nerdy kid growing up is that I learned not to worry about what other people think or say.

"Let it pass like water off a duck's back." became a little bit of a mantra until I truly wasn't worried about it, even as I age.

Accepting that, if people wanted to be with me they would. If they didn't, I didn't want to waste my time with them. Trying to get somebody who didn't like me to like me, ceased being anything I was concerned about. Prior to hitting this point, I'd had multi-year crushes in high school on a couple of girls who were nice and friendly but just weren't interested in me.

After having this realization, it made it a lot easier to date because you can ask people out without fear of rejection. If somebody said no, great! That saved a lot of time. Don't take it personally.

The other thing that young men definitely have to learn is the gossip pipeline. Don't participate in it, but realize it is out there. Word got around in college that I "wasn't looking for a serious relationship" and it made it a lot easier for me to date. Turned out that a lot of young women worry about overly clingy men if they go out one time and then decide not to pursue it further. There's a lot of pressure on women there. People even tried to set me up on blind dates.

Eventually, I met my wife of 20 years so far.

The act of simply going on a lot of first dates is fairly validating in and of itself. Learning all of this stuff added to my own confidence too. But the absolute first step is simply self acceptance. Control what you can control, don't worry about what you can't.

And to be clear, control what you can control means that you can control improving yourself (diet, exercise, grooming, mindset, humility, faith, education, courtesy, reliability, family relationships, etc). A lot of self acceptance advice suggests that you shouldn't be trying to get better. I'm not suggesting that at all. We can all improve and we can all be better for the people we care about. That's a big piece of showing we care.

From my experience I found most ‘perfect’ looking people when getting to know them better a bit boring, bland. Perhaps it’s this lack of struggle or soul searching that made then slow down their growth in other dimensions. Many of these folks suffer most when getting older and their looks fade.

I prefer the company of "ordinary" people. I have always avoided beautiful women, even if they fancied me; I wouldn't want to become jealous. Also, I've found some (not all) of the beautiful women I've known to be be rather shallow, as if "beauty is enough".

To be clear, the women I've loved weren't really ordinary; they were intelligent, eloquent, kind, and beautiful in their own way.

Is it that good looking people are boring or most people are boring and you do not have enough of a sample size?

Being good looking takes a lot of work and time. Time that cannot be spent doing other things.

Grooming, keeping up on trends, working out, shopping, etc. It's takes hours weekly at a minimum.

So it's easy to let it take over your personality if it becomes a defining characteristic. Especially for women because often that is the societal expectation. If you're pretty that's enough.

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