On Being Unwanted

Being ugly is a hindrance, not a life sentence

An Outkick the Coverage collected laments about their dating experiences, or lack thereof, from some of the ugliest people on the planet, the people of Reddit.

• no one asking for date lol

• try and get on a dating app, realise you need to post pictures of yourself.. feel ugly just looking at yourself, so nevermind.

• F*cking hinge requires 6 pics before you can even swipe on people. Like can’t I just at least try with the 3 decent pics I have?

• Constant battle of gaslighting yourself that you look good and realising you don’t every time you open Snapchat

• Dating? I’m invisible

• Being held to a far higher standard than attractive people. You have to be near-perfect in everything non-appearance-wise to get the same treatment as an attractive person who puts in even lackluster effort. And any flaws that you have will be much less likely to be tolerated. And because people see much faster with their eyes than they listen with their ears, many people will reject you due to your looks before you've even ever had a chance to show them what kind of personality or character you have.

• You’ll get dropped all the time with no explanation. Or just the fact that you get treated like you’re beneath them/inferior A lot of people will make it obvious that they aren’t attracted to you, but at the same time try to lie and say they are to make you feel better, and it just gets weird. We’d much rather you be upfront if there isn’t any attraction-it hurts but hurts less then being flat out lied too to save our emotions. We are people, we can tell. You don’t get the fun stuff like flowers or dates. You kinda get the bare minimum. Some people try to hide you or make public appearances minimal. Sucks

• I'm an unattractive woman and I don't feel frustration about dating. HOWEVER, I feel frustration when someone disrespects unattractive women in general. I mean, you don't have to feel attraction for someone, but you don't have the right to disrespect that person neither.

• I'm currently too scared to go out on a date because I'm afraid the guy I'm talking to will fake an emergency or something and leave.

• Going on Tinder and then progressively lowering your standards until you start getting matches, then being unattracted to the people who are in your league.

• What's a date?

• When people say something along the lines of "even if you’re not attractive, you can still get dates if you have a personality or you’re funny or you’re interesting" I don’t have a personality, I’m not funny and I’m boring. And they tell me to work on that but also to be myself

• I date people on my level so none really. I find fellow ugos to be fun and kind and nice.

• There won't be a second date after the first one.

• Being unattractive

• You know that feeling of being giddy when you are talking to your crush? Knowing that you will never have that affect on someone

• Constant rejections. And I mean constant. To the point where you go from 'someone who fails sometimes' to 'a failure'. It's a bit like being fat.

• People assume I have no/a bad personality when it's simply difficult to get a girlfriend when you look so.... eugh! I'm so tired...... so tired.

• People always say if you're not handsome you should be funny or interesting, but what if I'm just regular? Sure I can say something funny every once in a while but I'm not a comedian. I feel like I'm a really stable, balanced guy who is perfect BF material but often I don't get enough time to show my biggest strengths.

• Meeting people who genuinely enjoy talking to you online but don't want your physical presence. Not even restricted to just dating.

• Getting literally zero dates in the first place

• I walk by the bar and no heads turn

• When people judge you by your cover, forgetting the book might actually be great...

• You only get to date other unattractive people

Now, with the admission that these are men and women who are operating at a disadvantage, the two things I pick up here are a) fear and b) an obvious lack of effort. I understand the reality of being a non-player in the dating game, because as the youngest, smallest boy from elementary school through ninth grade, I was a complete non-entity as far as the girls were concerned. And it didn’t help that in seventh grade, when I switched to the private school from which I eventually graduated, I was placed in the math class for advanced eighth graders, which only exacerbated the size differential.

Now, obviously, ugly is different than young. I always had at least the hope of catching up to the norm, which finally happened when I was 15, although I never reached the six-foot-height that I expected given the height of my father and my uncles. C’est la vie; one must make do with what one has. If you’re 5’9”, that rules out most runway models, which still leaves all the swimsuit models, the fitness models, and the cheerleaders, right?

But ugly is just one attribute. If you’re ugly, then you have to make up for it in some other physical fashion. You can roid up and get huge; a significant percentage of gym bunnies love massive guys and they clearly don’t much care how pretty their gym monster is. Or go stylish, or focus on making money, whatever it is, you have to compensate for your flaws.

The undeniable fact is that most unattractive people are lazy. They simply can’t be bothered to make themselves attractive in ANY way, and they would rather wallow in their lonely misery than either a) make the effort or b) lower their unreasonable standards.

There is no harsher judge of women than the man who could never, ever score her.

Attraction, like water, finds its own level. I was good-looking in my day, but women seldom found me stop-and-stare attractive like they found my three brothers, all of whom were models. But I compensated for my relative shortcomings; I lifted more and harder, I put more effort into my activities, and I pursued more interesting endeavors. I drove a flashier car. And, most importantly, I knew my limits and didn’t seek to exceed them; when I sat next to Miss South Carolina at a banquet, I didn’t even consider taking a shot.

I also declined to take a shot at a Miss Minnesota of my acquaintance, although in that case it was because I had gone out with her prettier friend and workout partner. She was all right, she just wasn’t someone I would have chosen to represent our fine state. That’s the point at which you realize that the social transformation is complete, when you meet a literal beauty queen and think to yourself, nah, I’d rather not take a shot.

The point is that it takes time, continuous effort, and brutal realism about what one has to offer the opposite sex if one is walking onto the field at a disadvantage. I am, as is often pointed out by my critics, nothing very special from a superficial standpoint, so obviously if I was able to attract interest from highly attractive women, an ugly man should be able to do so from women who are considerably less ugly than himself.