I had a crappy first date once. It wasn’t even the crappiest of first dates. It was annoying and short. The guy seemed weird from the get go and was weirdly picking my brain about whether he should go meet up with his friends for the rest of the night. I told him he should and he responded by telling me he couldn’t because he didn’t understand how taxis work, or something. It doesn’t matter. We mutually just were not very interested.

However, being young and immature it wasn’t good enough for me to have a mutually not very fun experience. I texted him after the date and asked what had happened, since he’d been pretty aggressive prior to that. He responded that, on second thought, he didn’t find me that attractive.

Is that a jerk thing to say? I feel like yes, but I also appreciate that it’s difficult to be honest, so I appreciate it on some level.

It’s been a few years, but I still think about this date sometimes. I remember right after this happened everytime something was off with a new guy, I’d wonder it he also was not attracted to me. How could someone be attracted to you and then lose it so suddenly? Did my hair go flat?

How do you recover from such a devastating ego blow?

He could have told me I seem fake or that I seem robotic and it wouldn’t have bothered me one iota. I have a lot of confidence in those areas and I would know his claims aren’t true and he must be reaching or covering something else up. But when it’s an insecurity you genuinely wonder about… it’s hard to pick yourself back up.

Do you ever really get over it? Or does it just lie in wait for your mind to have a quiet moment that it can creep into and ruin?

I guess the bigger question is, what do you do when you have an insecurity. Another insecurity I have is that I don’t have a lot of common sense. This insecurity is going away because as I get older, I am learning more things and this comes up less frequently. But, how would you actually go about getting more common sense? Or, becoming more attractive? I was on a date, I was obviously doing the best that I could.

I think the only thing you can do about insecurity is to make yourself happy, which is hard to do with something like attraction. But if you are happy with the way you look, someone else’s criticism isn’t going to phase you. For instance, sometimes men tell me they wish I wouldn’t wear so much makeup. That doesn’t make me insecure, I understand I wear a lot of makeup. I like it and it’s my choice. It should also be my choice how I feel about all the other aspects of myself as well.