Am I Ugly?

If you watch my TikTok (which you should... @victoria_staff) you may have seen that I am taking a break from dating. This all was sparked by a desire to delete my dating apps. In all honesty, deleting the dating apps was less about the men and more about me.

Tik Tok

I love myself, I think I’m really funny and smart and I make fantastic food. I’m a damn treat. But I also know a lot of that is “self-love” rhetoric and in reality there is nothing about me that makes me better than anyone else. I think I’m amazing, but I also want to paint myself with an accurate brush. If we expand that honest opinion about myself, we’re going to talk about how I look.

I think I am a decent looking person. I would never make a child cry and scream “OGRE” in the street, but I don’t think I’ll ever be in a Calvin Klein ad (or any ad for that matter). I think there are days where I look pretty and days where I definitely do not. My mom once told me (in a very endearing way), “It’s amazing how you can be so cute but make yourself look so…not cute”. To be fair, I was eating Nutella on the floor of my kitchen in ripped sweatpants and one French braid instead of two (my arms got tired before the second one, so I was eating the Nutella to refuel).

However, I would never describe myself as ugly.

First and foremost, I don’t think anyone should describe themselves as ugly. It’s a gross word that should be reserved for cartoon witches and gargoyles. It’s unkind to call yourself ugly, and you should always be kind to yourself. Secondly, I don’t think anyone is truly ugly. I’ve never come across a person in my life and thought “wow, that person is really ugly”.

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I don't think anyone should describe themselves as ugly. It's a gross word that should be reserved for cartoon witches and gargoyles. ​

But I was using the Bermuda triangle of dating apps (Tinder, Bumble and Hinge) and Holy. Shit. Did I feel ugly. Which is RIDICULOUS. I’m in the best shape of my life, I haven’t had a pimple in 2022 and I’m really settling into the curly girl routine. If anything, I’m aging like a fine wine. But I was on these apps and I just felt ugly.

​The craziest part is that I was dating quite successfully. I was having great conversations, I was getting those sweet, sweet words of affirmation (my love language people get this), and I was going on dates. But all of this validation wasn’t enough to compete with the odd conversation that dropped or the person I didn’t match with.

In the spring, I had downloaded the trilogy from hell to get me out of my apartment and back into the game, and I was very successful in achieving my goal. But this healthy exercise of meeting new people and dating became kind of obsessive. I was able to settle down a bit in the fall, but those fucking notifications kept reminding me that a) I was still on the market when I didn’t want to be and b) that I was being judged on my looks and not everyone was happy with what they were seeing.

AND IT WAS SO HYPOCRITICAL. Sorry, I shouldn’t yell. It was so hypocritical because I was doing it too. I was engaging in swiping like the biggest bullshit game of Candy Crush to ever exist. It’s not that I regret having those apps; I don’t regret it at all. I met some incredible people, got some great stories, and wrote some killer songs. The experiences via the apps? Pretty good. The apps themselves? I’m pretty sure Satan birthed those out his asshole. So, in November I deleted them. I did not want to bring this negative energy into my 23rd birthday so I scrapped the battery draining dumpster fire and celebrated the holidays in peace.

However. I’m 23. I’m single. And a girl’s got to eat.
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I like dating and I like talking to people, and if you read some of my content from the fall, I’m looking for a “Right Now Person”. ​

Right Now Person

But these apps. The unholy trinity. It’s like someone poured a frat boy and a computer algorithm into cauldron and mixed it with bright primary colours and advertised it to people in their 20’s (I swear to Jesus, if I get one more TikTok ad for Bumble or Hinge I’m going to fly to China to have a word with Bytedance). I want to get back out there, I want to put a hiatus to my dating hiatus and I kind of want to redownload the apps, just in a healthy, more productive manner.
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I don’t think that they should be someone’s only method of dating, but they’re helpful, a useful tool in your back pocket. It’s hard to meet people during a pandemonium and I want to give myself every leg up should I decide to venture down this road. But I don’t want to go back to feeling unattractive.

I don’t know, maybe there’s no winning. Maybe I just reintroduce that chaos into my life for a couple months just to delete the whole lot in August and start the cycle again. Maybe I’ll actually have a healthy relationship with technology. Maybe this time it will be super fun and I’ll meet my Right Now Person (probably not this one). Maybe I’ll enter my villain phase.

No matter what happens, I’ll probably keep you all up to date here or on TikTok or on Instagram. So, keep your eyes and ears open, because it will either be a wild success, or this is the year I decide to become a nun. Who knows.

From me, with love, to you,

-Victoria