Dear Pretty Girls On Facebook

Heyyyy ladies,

I just want to say, no matter what is said in this letter, we normal people have nothing but the utmost love and admiration for you. Any strange (or occasionally mean-spirited) things we may engage in are only a result of our festering jealousy over your ability to look so unbelievably good on a forum where physical beauty accumulates “likes” and supportive comments like an open jar of honey will attract flies. We are but lowly serfs, basking in the glow of your un-photoshopped loveliness, getting a contact high from your e-popularity.

I guarantee that, on more than one occasion, a girl you know either vaguely or intimately in real life has taken a picture (or several) from your near-endless supply of professional-quality profile pictures and shown it to another girl on some chat program and been like “What the fuck? How beautiful is this girl? I can’t stand it.” If you’re a particularly nice person, the displaying of your photos will likely be accompanied with, “And she’s so fucking nice, you can’t even hate her. Ugh.” This sharing of your more choice snapshots will promptly be followed by the other girl in the conversation now showing a photo of her own friend, one whose physical beauty and staggering ability to take a good photo also need to be confirmed to be fully believed. It’s something us uggos do to bond from time to time — it’s as benign as it is immature.

Though, at the same time, you must know. On some level, after the thirtieth profile picture in a row that looks like it was taken off the cover of some best-selling chillstep album that accumulates dozens of likes and comments along the lines of “OMFG YOU ARE SO PRETTY H8 U,” you have to know that you are a Pretty Facebook Girl. You have to know that people from all over your friends list are falling in love with you left and right, all while simultaneously feeling an intense bitterness over how God chose to give you so much in the looks department while giving others among us so staggeringly little — all painfully exacerbated by being on a forum that all but tells you in no uncertain terms exactly how good-looking the rest of your friends perceive you.

Pretty Facebook Girls, you are the unicorns of the social media world. Your life is a blur of candid photos that somehow come out looking like something that would win a week’s competition on America’s Next Top Model, and other girls subtly remarking on how cripplingly jealous they are of you in comments that are meant to look joking. (Pro Tip: When your friend from middle school writes something along the lines of “OMG CAN YOU PLEASE JUST DIE ALREADY YOU’RE MAKING THE REST OF US LOOK BAD <3333," only about 78 percent of her is kidding. There is a secret part of her that occasionally, masochistically looks at your photos while blindly stuffing her face with Doritos, marveling at how good you manage to look in everything from a sequined "going out" dress to your school sweatshirt, with no makeup on.)

This isn't creepy, though. She's a totally normal person, no emotional problems or anything. It's just that your photos and presence on a social medium we navigate every day just remind us as to how sub-par even our most generously filtered photos can be. We know that you are most likely a very good person who is not deserving of the strange rituals and thinly-veiled jealousy that surround you, but such is the steep price of such significant beauty. As has often been said, God doesn't give with both hands. And yes, it is quite possible that you bring out the worst in us, but what are we supposed to do when constantly presented with photographic evidence of our own physical inadequacies? Even if you are no longer a close friend of ours, we will leave you on our friends list for years on end, lingering there to be occasionally creeped on because you inspire in us the same guilty pleasure as looking at pictures of delicious food we could never possibly cook ourselves. It's no big.

Just know that we love you, and have a complex relationship with scrolling through your photos and wondering how anyone's boobs can look that good in a bathing suit.

Kisses,

Average Girls