this piece is part of OPTIMISED LOVE, our first digital collection of works.
A man I love tells me that he doesn’t find me pretty.
He says, “you haven’t considered that maybe I don’t think you’re pretty. Maybe I’m here for other reasons.”
“Here” is in my life, and occasionally in my bed, and occasionally in my body. Mostly in my phone because he lives far away now, but he used to live somewhere where he could be in my bed and in my body more often and was. He has been telling me he loves me for years, the first time while he was inside of me, in my bed, in my life. He has never told me I’m pretty.
I say, “Is that the case? Do you not think I’m pretty? But you’re here for other reasons?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t think I’m pretty.”
“I don’t think you’re pretty.”
I had asked him before if he thought I was beautiful, and he said, “well what is beauty, really? Do I feel good when I look at you? Yes.” I resented his qualifications, mostly because he models part-time, and dated an influencer, and has mutual friends with Bella Hadid, and he can easily acknowledge their beauty; It slips off his tongue when he talks about them, eyes lighting up as though their beauty is a beacon reflecting off his memory of their image. He cares about beauty. He lives in beauty. Once I told him, “You know, Bella Hadid doesn’t actually look like that,” and he was surprised, and Googled “Bella Hadid plastic surgery,” and said, “oh, I guess this kind of work is more common than I thought.” Of course, he knows many people who have had work done. Of course, the sacrifices these people make in pursuit of a certain genre of beauty doesn’t mean that they “don’t actually look like that,” because they do, actually look like that, they just bought it instead of growing it on their own. There are things I buy to look more beautiful, too. After he tells me he doesn’t think I’m pretty, I wonder if buying those things is a waste of my time.
He models part-time, and his friends are models. He is an “anti-capitalist.” He is a “Queer Leftist” who has read all the books, including Eastern and Western philosophy, and has divorced himself from attachment to Earthly concerns such as the need for external validation and also making money, which is why he works part-time writing copy for a marketing agency and asks his parents to pay for his flights back to the States to visit. Good things come to him because he has refined his way of life so thoroughly, not because he is handsome enough to model part-time and because he has a way of making you feel special, like the most special person in the world other than him, that you two can live in a perfect duet of specialness in which you circle around each other in mutual divinity until he has what he needs and moves along. No, it is because he knows what he wants and he is not attached to the outcome, he is disciplined and contained, he is divine on his own. He quotes Krishna instructing Arjuna, “We are entitled to our labor, but not to the fruits of our labor.” He is in love with the process. He never waits in line at Berghain. Things always work out the way he needs them to.
I am wondering about narcissism. There was a period of time where I was fed a lot of content about “narcissistic abuse” on Instagram, from accounts with names like “healing.after.a.narcissist” and “myexisanarcissistandimadeitout” that would oscillate between posting pseudo-factual lists about what they labelled narcissism and inspirational quotes about what they labelled recovery. None of it was beautiful—all of it was accessible, both to consume and to produce, text wedged into Canva templates that echoed either the kitschy, melodramatic posters hung in your high school guidance counsellor’s office, script text running across a blazing sunset, or the post-modern abstracted graphic design of a tech company that thinks people are made up of clean lines and primary colors.
I don’t know why I’m fed this content, except that I do, that the algorithm knows something I’m not yet willing to acknowledge. Or maybe I think I know more than the algorithm—I read it all as “research,” because I’m “interested in the discourse,” in how we pathologize behaviors that inconvenience us, in how we are trying to make sense of love. Jane Ward talks about the “heterosexual repair industry” and I quote her all the time, thinking about how we attempt to medicate and treat the underlying failures of heterosexual connection as though the whole system doesn’t rely on women loving the people who oppress them and men loving the people they’ve been raised to hate. The sudden burst in attachment theory discourse, and narcissism discourse, and twin flames and manifestation and online love advice is really just an extension of an old habit, one where we pretend that nothing is broken but ourselves. If we fix ourselves then the system will work as intended, which is to say it will work to bring us happiness.
These accounts are misdiagnosing everybody, I think. They create a compelling binary in which the people that hurt you are bad because there’s something inherently and unresolvedly wrong with them, narcissist as synonymous with “bad guy” and you as synonymous with “hero.” It’s all so vague, I think, and subjective, and these posts with lists like “Early Signs A Person May Be A Narcissist” and “4 Sure Signs You Are Not The Narcissist!” are just trying to reify a new system in which the reader can be certain they are never in the wrong. We’re trying to diagnose away our problems, pathologize the people we love rather than taking responsibility for our own contributions to a failing dyad. These accounts act like anyone can be a narcissist except, of course, the reader; they act like narcissism is everywhere and at once localized specifically in the people that wrong you. A relationship takes two, I think, and remember when he said to me “I’m not hurting you, you’re hurting yourself against me,” and believe him.
I don’t believe in diagnostics, but I am wondering about narcissism. Diagnostics are a tool of modernity, I think, designed by industrialists to optimize our work performance. Henry Ford made towns where his workers would live, and he would interview them about their sex habits to determine if they were “expending unnecessary energy” when they could be on the assembly line, and scientists created categories like “heterosexual” and “homosexual” and “onanists” which was just their word for people who masturbate. I don’t believe in diagnostics like those quotes that say “remember, psychiatric disorders are determined by your failure to behave like a white man would,” because when they invented homosexuality they invented it as a disease, same with onanism. I know that narcissism, like many other diseases of the mind, was invented as a disease of attraction. Freud thought that homosexuals never grew out of their adolescent self-obsession, that when they wanted to have sex with another man it was because they wanted to have sex with themselves, like the eponymous Narcissus gazing in the mirror. In love with the self.
This is obviously not true, I think, he is not a narcissist, nobody is. There is nothing wrong with confidence, with self-promotion, everybody has an Instagram, it’s natural to want to be seen. I want to be seen, which is why it was so thrilling to be with him, to be with someone so beautiful—to validate my own seen-ness when people watch as we walk down the street, when people tell us we look good together. We could be on that street-style Instagram, we look like one of those fashionable couples wandering through Williamsburg on the way to or from the thrift store or brunch and I’m ashamed to want it, and I’m ashamed that he knows I’m thinking it, that everybody probably thinks it when they’re with him because he’s so beautiful. He is never ashamed because he doesn’t need to be, because he doesn’t need to want beauty—he already has it, given to him by luck but metabolized as if by fate, by divine intention. He needn’t feel anything other than the pulsing glow of adulation.
The DSM-5 lists narcissism as “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy” that can lead to a disruptive sense of entitlement (645). Those with Narcissistic Personality Disorder are inclined to view themselves as exceptional and deserving of special treatment while at the same time struggling to value the contributions, abilities, and emotions of others. They approach relationships transactionally, with a keen eye for partnerships that will benefit them professionally, socially, or otherwise; when a relationship no longer serves them, a narcissist becomes cold and disinterested. This is a psychological mechanism developed to compensate for an “invariably fragile” ego and an inability to cope with their own lack of control.
After he tells me I’m not pretty, my friends ask me: “do you think he’s a narcissist?” I don’t know what to tell them, because I don’t believe in diagnostics, and what is “narcissism” anyway, can anyone really define it? And it turns out the DSM-5 has, but I don’t trust it because he and I aren’t so different, and I believed him for so long when he spoke of his own excellence, and I’m afraid my obsession with proving myself to him was no better than his obsession with confirming his own superiority. I am wondering about narcissism, and I’m thinking about those narcissistic abuse posts, how sometimes they are videos of people, theoretically “experts,” speaking to their camera, which is to say, speaking to no one, a mirror that echoes their own ideas back to them. I’m thinking about the cameras, everywhere, the panoptical banality of contemporary life, how everyone can be an expert now.
There’s a video I saw on Instagram, from one of those accounts where love and beauty can be manifested, where the girl talking to the camera says, “everyone is a mirror of you. If you change what you’re sending out, they’ll change what they’re sending back.” Everyone is a mirror of you and so if you think you’re small and ugly, people will treat you like you’re small and ugly, and if you don’t love yourself, no one will love you. Everyone is a mirror of you and so if you change your behavior, you can metaphysically change how others behave toward you. Once after showing him a picture of a guy I had slept with he said to me, “you know, Becca, you’re always fucking Sevens.” I was always dating beneath me, he said. I should be “doing better.” I wondered why he cared so much—or if he truly cared at all. I wondered if part of his embarrassment, his shame, his reluctance to love me, was when he saw the company he kept. Everyone is a mirror, and I wondered if he didn’t like what I reflected back at him.
There are mirrors all over my house, and all over the restaurant where I work. After the man tells me he doesn’t think I’m pretty, I look at them differently. When I was in high school I was always staring in the mirror. I would look and look, at my thighs and my belly mostly, radiating hatred at my own reflection as though the heat from my stare would either burn my fat away or immolate me in the process, freeing me from the mortal coil wherein I had to care about things like how big my thighs were while also studying for AP Calc. I didn’t know what I looked like. But I knew that there were times that I looked at myself and felt I had accomplished something, usually after a boy had kissed me or the scale had dropped a few digits, and that there were times that I looked at myself with that red-hot glare, too big, far too big, monstrous.
I stopped looking at myself that way when a nutritionist told me I was starving myself. That was when I learned that the mirror never shows you the same thing twice. I was always looking for some kind of truth about myself—some quantifiable fact I could use to determine whether or not I was “good enough,” to accomplish whatever I wanted to accomplish, which was probably just being better than the people around me, though I conflated betterness with skinniness. But finally I learned that there was no single truth in the mirror, just shifting, shifting images, and if my makeup was smudged.
I told the man about this once, and he said, “you know, it’s weird—every girl I’ve ever dated has been anorexic.” I felt good, for once, having something in common with the willowy girls he showed me in pictures, those gaunt, radiant women he’d loved before me. The true embarrassment of it all, of course, was that despite the starving I still didn’t look like those women—he once told me I “wasn’t his usual type.” All we had in common, at the end of the day, was a desire to eat ourselves bare, digesting our own muscle like there was a predator picking at our flesh without ever breaking skin, our own determined self-abnegation manifesting as cell autophagy and organ failure.
He is a living, breathing person, and not a metaphor—but it’s hard not to feel that relating to him was like sinking into the two-toned portal that is the Internet. Everything brighter, more important, signifying everything, and at once radically misunderstood, shifting, algorithmic, built to extract while making you feel that you’re the one consuming, making you feel guilty about your consumption. He was comparing, always comparing, always putting me in reference to the models, telling me what I could do better, blaming me for my suffering. He liked to look at me, but didn’t think I was pretty.
That’s why, after all, it was so easy for me to believe him. He didn’t think I was pretty—neither does the Internet, where no one can be pretty enough, no one can be everything enough. The Internet was built to make us feel bad about ourselves. People who feel bad about themselves buy things, and also are placated into believing it’s their own fault they feel so bad, so it’s convenient for big companies to make you believe that the problem lies within you, that the problem isn’t the comprehensive reduction of your selfhood into letters and numbers put in direct mathematical competition with Dua Lipa’s letters and numbers, who he also knows. She’s quieter than you might think.
It’s so easy in this paradigm to sink into the hole of self-righteous self-absorption, to believe that we deserve whatever we want. It’s built-in, it’s the only religion we have: the religion of self-fulfillment. Christopher Lasch writes in The Culture of Narcissism that we don’t have a future, so instead we act like our only project is ourselves—like we’re beholden to no one. But that’s an impossible myth—we all need each other. There’s no such thing as a person without anyone else. I tried to explain this to him once, how he believed he was the sun but how no one is the sun, how we’re all moons reflecting the light of each other. Everything he derived meaning from was derived from someone who came before him or walked alongside him. But my self-definition was just as superficial as his; I was so desperate to know this beautiful man found me pretty.
I loved the narcissist, and it’s impossible to reduce him to the one-dimensional bad guy of the late-capitalist, therapy-age infographic. My narcissist suffered, believed what he was saying. He wasn’t manipulating me on purpose, and I believe that, just as easily as I believe that I’ve cared for people I’ve hurt, I’ve refused to give people I love what they want.
He is a living, breathing person, but he’s also a story, just like I’m a story to him. He’s frozen in time and space and I’m remembering what it felt like to fall asleep tucked into his torso while another girl waited for him at her apartment. I’m remembering what it was to be loved by someone so cruel, and to love back ardently. The things I wanted when I loved him are not what I want now. But part of me still wonders what he’d see if he looked at me—part of me wonders what he saw back then. Am I beautiful? Am I pretty? Do you want me more than you want the other girls, am I useful to you? I wanted so badly to be pretty, to be perfect, to have the control over him that he had over me. I look back and I consider how perhaps there’s nothing a narcissist loves more than a narcissist.
𝓫𝓮𝓬𝓬𝓪 𝔂𝓸𝓾𝓷𝓰
Becca Young is a writer, multimedia artist, and waitress based in Brooklyn. Her work focuses on love, labor, sex, gender, passion, meaning, sexy lady robots, and the Internet, about which she has a lot to say. Her writing has appeared in Blood Knife magazine, Polyester Zine, and CURSOR, and on her blog bbyland. You can find her on Instagram at @becca.y_ or on her website, bbyland.com.