There’s a huge difference between accepting something and believing something. While maturity and practice make women better at accepting compliments, very few of us actually believe them.
Women, for many unknown reasons, will believe almost any negative comment you say about them, but never anything positive.
Maybe it’s from years of being told the sun shines out of our ass from men just trying to get into our pants, or maybe it’s from the ridiculous amount of beauty standards the media places on us, but we’ve developed a compliment repellent armor, and it’s been deflecting them for years.
Why is it one bad comment will remain with a woman for the rest of her life, yet a million good ones will go in one ear and out the other? Why is it we always remember the bad and never the good?
As Carrie Bradshaw brilliantly stated, “Why is it we only believe the negative things people say about us?”
I think it boils down to a major insecurity complex ingrained within the female mentality, to the insatiable need to be completely and utterly perfect while simultaneously knowing we never will be.
So when we get a compliment, we assume it must be a lie. How can I be beautiful? I have cellulite. My thighs touch. My nose is bent. My ears are too big. I can’t be beautiful, I’m not perfect.
When we’re exposed to airbrushed models and celebrity “It Girls” with nothing but time and money to eat organic, work out and pay for plastic surgery, we hold ourselves up to that impossible standard.
We are told they are beautiful, they are perfect, and we’re the second-rate version, the imperfect second-best.
In order to change this damaging mentality and inability to receive a compliment, we must locate the root of the problem. Why is it, exactly, women never believe they're beautiful?
If men will lie about anything, why should we believe their compliments?
It can take a girl a long time to realize men say things they don’t mean.
Whether we learn it young or a little too late, eventually every woman is faced with the sad fact that everything a man says isn’t true -- or worse -- he’s saying it to every other girl he passes.
Once a girl realizes this, there’s no going back. Like children losing their innocence, all the beautiful things they once knew as true and good are now tainted. Everything a man says is now void, and every compliment is just second-guessed and assumed to come with a motive.
If the girl next to me is beautiful, how can I be?
"Another woman’s beauty is not the absence of your own."
This is a saying every woman should repeat to herself every morning. Because if they don’t, the world of beautiful women will push down every good thought every single woman has about her own worth.
I don’t know if men do this the way women do, but if a woman sees another beautiful woman with a type of beauty she doesn’t have, she quickly forgets her own beauty and yearns for that woman’s.
Everything she has is negated, and her worth is diminished to nothing but a second-rate runner up.
Why do we do this? Why do we assume just because one woman is beautiful that we can’t be? Why can't one woman's beauty just remind us of our own?
If I have flaws, how can I be beautiful?
Since when did one “flaw” ruin an entire being? When did one stubbed toe define an entire body? When did we start putting so much emphasis on our weak spots?
Hell, most of a woman’s “weak spots” aren’t weak at all. They are the things that distinguish us, the things that make us unique individuals in this mass marketed beauty clone war.
Cindy Crawford said, “Isn’t it ironic that the very thing that made me most insecure turned out to be my trademark?”
It’s weird how we can accept other women’s unique points and “flaws” as trademarks and defining characteristics, yet when we have to point them out on ourselves, we downgrade them to imperfections.
Frida Kahlo revolutionized the unibrow because she decided to let it be her trademark, not her weak spot. Flaws are only flaws if you let them be.
If everyone's beautiful, then what meaning does the word have?
Maybe we're desensitized to the word. Maybe we need to come up with something women aren't used to hearing every day. Maybe we need to bring back the word to its elite status.
A lot of women don't believe it anymore because they hear men using it on every woman who passes (not that every woman isn't beautiful, just that it should be used once you understand and truly appreciate her inherent beauty).
Instead of the ultimate compliment, it's just the average pickup line. Women need to realize, however, that just because it's being used more doesn't mean it's less true to her.
