'She's ugly,' put nicely

The therapy-speak-ification of everything

There’s a meme going around about how people now blow off ex-friends and so forth with these reasoned explanations about how they’re just in different places at the moment, where everything’s both vague and over-explained. If someone doesn’t want to hang out with you, and they just… do not make plans to do this, then you will eventually get the message, or rather can tell yourself that they just forgot. Everyone kind of gets this, which is why when we find ourselves in the rejecter’s spot, we simply refrain from hanging out with the person. If we’re reasonable. Or maybe we genuinely are too busy and did forget, which does happen, and which is why the plausible deniability here is so plausible. Point being, what is not plausible deniability is to sit someone down and enumerate exactly why you find them such a loser, such a bore.

I don’t generally newsletter twice in one day—a day with plenty of other work, with feeding my family mediocre ‘Mexican’ food for dinner—but oh, the material. First, there’s the Savage Lovecast caller who thinks he did his now-ex girlfriend a service by telling her he was not attracted to her when they first met:

Phoebe Maltz Bovy 🐩 @BovyMaltz

"I foolishly thought it was a heartwarming story that my physical attraction to her grew as we bonded in other ways." This @fakedansavage caller is the love equivalent of a "heartwarming" news story that's just bleak.

It gets worse. It’s that he wasn’t attracted initially because, in his explanation, at the time, he adhered to shallow societal beauty standards. So it isn’t even just that he’s telling her that he, personally, has a type, and his love for her forced him to transcend it. It’s that she is An Ugly and needs to know this.

And then he has the nerve to want credit for his honesty! Dan Savage of course speaks the harsh truths to this caller that goodness knows he needs to hear.

What interested me about this call was, at first, that it was so odd to hear a straight man claim that society asks people generally to get past their initial revulsion and date someone for their personality. Who has ever, ever asked this of a man? Sorry but this is something asked of women. Straight ones especially, maybe, because of this idea that a woman is wasting a prime opportunity to find a man if she rejects the ones she’s not attracted to. In any case, while there are absolutely men out there with women they’re sort of meh about physically, but whom they’re into in other respects, this is not demanded of them. He seems to want a gold medal for not dating a supermodel and then silver one for letting her know she’s plain, or maybe reverse the medals?

But then I realized there was something else, something weirder, going on here.