The next night, I had a lovely dinner with my room mate for his birthday and when we got home, I mentioned to him that I had been going on OKCupid. He was excited about this and wanted to help me post some pictures that would actually show how pretty I was. I was annoyed by this- I didn't want to post pretty pictures of me, I didn't want people looking at me as if I were pretty. I have no idea why I don't want people looking at me like I'm pretty, I just know that I don't. But we went on my profile anyway.
Even with my photo, I still hadn't gotten any messages, and I noticed that I was disappointed that the guy in the South Bay hadn't even messaged back to say thank you for messaging him. My room mate ignored all of that and went straight for the collection of photos under the heading "Who's looked at you."
"I don't want to see that!!" I thought to myself. "That's all the people who looked at me but didn't message me. That's all the people who rejected me!"
But my room mate was interested in seeing the photos so he clicked on them. The first picture was of a guy with his shirt off, standing on the beach, with what I thought was a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
"Gross!" I said. "I don't want a guy who's profile picture shows a cigarette all hanging from his lips."
"Hold on," my room mate said. "Just give it a chance," and he zoomed in to see that it was a lollipop and then he commented, "He's got a great body."
"That may be your body type, but it's not mine," I remarked.
"Okay..." he said and clicked on the next one.
I found the next guy even less attractive and said so to my room mate.
"Wow!" he said. "You haven't even looked at his other photos. Maybe he has better ones..."
"No thanks," I said. "I mean c'mon, if that's your profile photo? If that's his best one? What kind of effort is he putting in to this and how attractive could he be?"
And then my room mate answered back, "Well, apparently he didn't make the best judgment in deciding which photo to put up as his profile. You did the same thing- your photo isn't flattering of you at all..."
And then I got quiet and watched as my room mate scrolled through the rest of the photos. I noticed how quickly I had become cranky about all of this- how quickly I had become defensive and turned this all around, how ready I was to criticize my room mate's taste in men.
"What's going on?" I asked myself. "How did you switch from hoping to get a message to wanting to reject every single photo you see?"
And then I realized that I was seeing all those people who had "looked" at me (and not messaged me)as people who had rejected me and I was evaluating myself based on their level of attractiveness. As I watched my room mate scroll through photos of people who I found unattractive I felt less and less attractive myself. If these people, who I thought were undesirable, were rejecting me- who was I? I was the bottom of the bottom.
We looked through a few more photos and I followed my room mate's lead- giving each photo a chance and trying not to see these people as anything other than someone who had looked at me. It didn't last very long. I was still pretty cranky and the internet was slow, so we decided to call it a night.
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