24 Stories Of People Experiencing “Pretty Privilege”

7.

“Get conversation without much effort. If an unattractive person is at a venue and doesn’t know anybody it can be a lonely experience. If you are attractive, people will try to make conversation with you all the time. I know plenty of attractive people who are not at all interesting but have tons of friends because everyone wants a good-looking person around them.”

—u/_forum_mod

“I was overweight for most of my life until I got cancer and lost about 90 pounds. I never had the experience of being chatted up by a stranger, in general not just in a flirty way, though I went to bars alone often (was a big fan of dive bars with live music). After I went into remission, I started trying to live my life again. The very first thing I noticed is how much strangers suddenly wanted to talk to me.

It actually made me nervous at first. I almost thought people were mocking me because it was just such a switch-flip. Nothing about me other than my weight changed. My personality and sense of style didn’t change. I’m skinnier, but knowing what I looked like before, I also look more sickly. It’s not like I got hot, I just got thin.

Meanwhile, one of my closest best friends was always skinny — she started taking antidepressants and gained weight, and she had the exact opposite experience I did. Suddenly nobody wanted to talk to her. Before, when we went to bars together she’d get hit on and I’d get ignored. Now it’s the opposite. It all strikes me as very unfair. She wasn’t just skinnier than me; she’s also more sociable and way funnier, but it doesn’t matter because I almost died and that made my body smaller, and apparently that’s more valuable somehow.

I guess i should be glad that people want to talk to me now, but there’s something humiliating about knowing people are only doing so because the worst experience in your life made an arbitrary physical change to your body.”

—u/1wildandpreciouslife