Women are UGLY but MEN are HIDEOUS!

There is something fundamentally different about an ugly woman and a hideous man. I don’t know when I first noticed it, but I remember eventually realizing that women are allowed to be ugly in a way men simply aren’t. An ugly woman can still somehow become beautiful.

Give her decent lighting, fix her hair, put some makeup on her face, make her laugh at something and suddenly the whole fucking situation changes. You start thinking, perhaps she isn’t ugly at all. Perhaps I’ve been unfair. Perhaps those eyes are actually quite nice. Perhaps I could live with the nose. Men don’t receive this kind of diplomatic immunity. An ugly man is not merely ugly. He is hideous. He looks like somebody’s punishment. There are men walking around this planet whose faces appear to have been assembled during a power outage.

Their mothers probably kissed them on the forehead and told them they were handsome because mothers are legally obligated to lie. The rest of society has no such obligation.

But there comes a particular period in a person’s life when these distinctions become irrelevant. It usually happens when you’ve been alone for too long. Not the pleasant kind of alone where you read a book, make coffee, listen to music and convince yourself that solitude is a sign of intellectual superiority. I’m talking about the other kind. The ugly loneliness. The sort that crawls into bed with you at night and makes you reach for your phone every five minutes despite knowing perfectly well that nobody has messaged you. You scroll through Instagram until you’ve seen photographs of people you haven’t spoken to since school, people you don’t even like, people whose lives appear to be moving forward while yours is sitting on the fucking pavement with a cigarette in its mouth. You watch couples walking around outside and begin to resent them for committing the terrible crime of having somebody to eat dinner with. You become irritated by happy people. You begin to suspect that every restaurant table occupied by two people is a personal attack.

And this is when your standards begin to deteriorate.

It happens quietly. Nobody announces it. There isn’t some humiliating ceremony where a priest comes into your bedroom and says, “I’m sorry, son, but your standards have officially collapsed.” You simply notice a woman you wouldn’t normally find attractive and, for the first time, you don’t immediately reject the possibility. You look at her a little longer. You find yourself thinking that perhaps she’s not so bad. Then you notice something else. She has a nice voice. She laughs at your jokes. She replies quickly. She remembers some insignificant thing you mentioned three weeks ago. She sends you a message when she gets home. Suddenly the woman who, six months earlier, would not have survived your completely ridiculous standards is now sitting in your head rent-free while you’re lying awake at two in the morning wondering whether she actually likes you.

Loneliness is fucking diabolical like that. It can perform cosmetic surgery on people without touching their faces. A woman you once thought was hideous can become beautiful because she made you feel wanted. A man who looks like he was pulled from a burning building can suddenly seem charming because he listened to you complain about your day. This is one of the great humiliations of being human: attraction is not nearly as sophisticated as we pretend it is. We like to imagine ourselves as these complicated creatures searching for beauty, intelligence, humour, chemistry, compatibility and all the other shit people put in dating profiles. Sometimes we’re just horny. Sometimes we’re bored. Sometimes we’re depressed. And sometimes somebody sends us “good morning” three days in a row and our stupid little brains decide that this must be love.

I know because I’ve done it.

I’ve flirted with women I probably wouldn’t have looked at twice when I wasn’t lonely. I’ve sat there typing messages with that disgusting little grin on my face, pretending I was merely being playful when really I was starving for attention. I’d throw out some flirtatious comment, she’d respond with something equally suggestive, and suddenly I’d be walking around my room like a fucking idiot. I’d replay the conversation. I’d wonder what she meant by a particular emoji. I’d analyze the punctuation. If she put two kisses at the end of a message, I’d practically start shopping for a fucking coffin because clearly I’d found the woman who was going to kill me. This is what loneliness does to the brain. It takes the smallest scrap of affection and turns it into a fucking prophecy.

And then, because you’re lonely, you give yourself permission to cross lines you wouldn’t normally cross. You flirt harder. You make jokes you wouldn’t usually make. You tease her about her appearance. She teases you about yours. You both know that neither of you is exactly winning any beauty contests, but there is something strangely comforting about being desired by another person who has also apparently lowered their standards to the basement. You start messing around, sending stupid messages, pretending you don’t care. The whole thing becomes a strange little ecosystem of mutual desperation disguised as humour.

The worst part is that you can actually start liking her.

Not because she suddenly became beautiful. She didn’t. She’s still got the weird fucking haircut. You’re still not entirely convinced her nose belongs to the rest of her face. But now you’ve learned things about her. You know what makes her laugh. You know what pisses her off. You know which songs she plays when she’s sad. You know she gets nervous before important phone calls. You know she hates being ignored. You know she once cried in a supermarket because she couldn’t find something she wanted and was too embarrassed to ask anyone for help. You know all these pathetic little details that have nothing to do with beauty, and somehow they make the person in front of you seem less ugly.

Then you realize something rather unpleasant: perhaps she was never the ugly one.

Perhaps you were.

Not physically. Spiritually. Emotionally. Whatever fucking word you want to use. Loneliness had made you ugly long before you noticed hers. It made you selfish. It made you desperate. It made you judge people based on whether they could provide you with enough stimulation to forget your own emptiness for an evening. You were looking at another human being and calculating whether they were attractive enough to temporarily cure the fact that you hated being alone.

That is the truly fucked-up thing about loneliness. It doesn’t merely make you want company. It makes you bargain with yourself. You begin saying things like, “She’s actually really nice,” when what you mean is, “At least somebody wants me.” You tell yourself that looks aren’t everything, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to believe until you realize you only started believing it after running out of attractive people who wanted you. You convince yourself that you’re being mature, open-minded and emotionally evolved, when in reality you’re lying in bed at three in the morning staring at your ceiling because the woman you were flirting with hasn’t replied for forty minutes.

Forty fucking minutes.

You have become pathetic.

You check whether she’s online. Then you check again. You wonder whether she saw the message. You delete the message and immediately regret deleting it. You write another message and delete that too. Eventually you put your phone down and tell yourself you’re not going to look again. Five minutes later you’re holding the fucking thing.

This is where the ugly woman and the hideous man become equals.

Because underneath all the jokes about faces, bodies, haircuts, noses and teeth, there is something much more embarrassing than ugliness: the desperate need to be chosen.

Everybody wants to be wanted. Even the people who pretend they don’t. Especially them. There is a particular warmth that comes from knowing someone is thinking about you when you’re not around. It doesn’t matter how attractive they are. It doesn’t matter whether your friends would approve. It doesn’t matter whether some imaginary panel of judges has decided that you could “do better.” When you’re lonely enough, being wanted by another person becomes more valuable than being admired by ten strangers.

Maybe that’s why people end up together in the first place. Not because they found the most beautiful person in the room, but because they found someone who stayed. Someone who answered. Someone who laughed at the stupid shit they said. Someone who didn’t immediately walk away when they saw all the miserable, disgusting little pieces underneath the personality.

And maybe that’s the cruel joke.

You spend your youth worrying about finding someone beautiful, and then one day you discover that beauty is useless when you’re eating dinner alone. You can have the most beautiful woman in the fucking city standing ten feet away from you and still feel like shit if she doesn’t want you. Meanwhile, the person you once considered completely hideous can sit beside you, make you laugh until your stomach hurts, and suddenly you don’t care about the shape of her nose anymore.

You just don’t want her to leave.

And that’s when you know you’ve fucked yourself.

Because somewhere between the flirting, the loneliness, the filthy jokes, the late-night messages and the terrible decisions, the ugly woman became beautiful.

And the hideous man, for once, stopped looking in the mirror.

Just FYI, This post is satrical.