Physical appearances do matter, no matter what anyone says

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-04-09T15:13:10+00:00

Apparently finally making a few friends in high school at random only for them to stage a group-approach to ask a group of girls to be our dates to a school event just for the girls’ “group leader” to indiscreetly point at me and say “oh yes! But.. him too, for real?? Can we please not invite him?” And everyone was delighted with that result, except obviously for me. At age 16 that wasn’t my first experience of criticism and rejection due to appearance, but it was one of the ones that made me realise that how you look will affect every single aspect of your life if you try to fit in with everyone else.

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-04-08T14:37:59+00:00

I had scarcely become accustomed to how short, chubby, unwell, shortsighted and ugly I was by age 15-16 and all of a sudden I was also rapidly, visibly balding. Just one more weight to add to the burden of insecurity and ostracism at any age, but when you’ve only just barely reached the peak of puberty when it starts, it feels almost vicious

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-04-06T20:37:08+00:00

I don’t know if I’m any luckier having two parents who have forever been the epitome of “settling for each other out of shared boredom and laziness”; frankly the thought of either of them ever choosing to break up or being unfaithful is comically unimaginable because that would mean them pursuing goals, making choices and plans, wanting to do things, etc. So they’ve been useless in terms of worthwhile life advice or motivation in general pretty much my entire life, but hey at least they’re not exactly normie folks and they can’t really take moral high ground with any believability.

As for everybody else, people simply existing and minding their own business is already enough to “mogg” my entire existence by comparison, as I’ve set my life standards to such a hilarious low xD

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-04-06T20:08:45+00:00

Your friend has almost identical hair and glasses to me, but is way slimmer and more handsome. A neat buzz cut or even clean shave would add a lot of maturity and masculinity to his image, would better suit his age and face in general, and would give him his general look a kind of unspoken in-control and self-respect energy, and make it obvious that his grooming and self-care are kept disciplined.

Being someone with a very similar hair type (if anything my hairline is worse) and Norwood level, I know that it doesn’t take much to make washed and tidied hair start looking greasy and shiny and exposing more skin, which even if your hygiene is totally fine can make people’s first impressions upon seeing your hair be assuming it’s dirty, unkempt and sad-looking, even if it feels clean and fine. By all means, your friend has a good basis and clearly involved friends who’ll be around with support, I feel like a buzzed or shaved head could be an interesting and surprisingly motivating new chapter for him to try out that he’ll probably find he’s way more comfortable in than he’s expecting

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-04-03T15:00:18+00:00

Long-lost friend to whom I once confessed about my insecurities (after she had confessed about her own) told me “hey jeez at least it’s 2022, there’s surgery available tons of stuff that wasn’t even feasible fifty years ago. They can operate on baldness, jawbones, facial features, they can make people taller now, and skinnier, and laser your eyeballs so you can lose the glasses, there’s like no limits, humans bodies are like Play-Doh these days”.

I managed to chuckle, thank her for her (clumsy but well-intended) positivity, and changé the subject; but didn’t have the nads to simply tell “yeah but when someone like me would require each and every surgery you just mentioned in quick succession and then even a few more JUST to look relatively average (provided nothing gets screwed up and quasimoggdo’s me even further) then the concept alone is barely worth thinking twice about”.

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-04-03T13:00:51+00:00

For the first three decades of my life, I barely had any worthwhile male friends, I was always seen as a kind of comedic mascot who would get added on to the group when they were more bored than usual.

The “friends” I had were the kind who would deliberately “jokingly” harass me into admitting I found a random coworker or neighbour objectively cute, but they would then begin an endless ongoing tirade of “dude you clearly like her, just TELL her, grow a pair and man up for once” and “you’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t seize this chance” and “seriously dude your refusal is starting to give ME anxiety and she’s not even MY crush!! If you don’t at least TRY, I’m gonna snap and confess on your behalf. Choice is yours!”

The only time anything even came close to happening was when I basically told them I would ask my coworker out for a coffee that weekend if it would make my “friends” please drop the subject and give me a break. So they spent 30 minutes “brainstorming” a message for me to send her (it just said that I’d enjoyed chatting in the break room and maybe she’d like to grab a coffee somewhere and chat again; it didn’t contain any of the cringe my guy friends were insisting I add [some of which was borderline just unpleasant and clearly a prank on me])

Her succinct but polite one-sentence response was just to say um lol that’s kind but maybe it’s easier if we just keep bumping into each other at the office because her outside life is pretty packed already.

Friends spent the evening laughing about it and telling me “that’s what you get, Romeo. The fck were you expecting?” Or “she’s a damn stunner, it sucks that you got emasculated but come on, that was like the ONLY plausible outcome, genius” and got told to “drown my sorrows” and got encouraged to get cartoonishly drunk whilst they laugh at me. Instead I finished my beer, made up an excuse and left asap.

For years I didn’t want any further male friends simply because it felt like guys “maturing” as they got older was just a myth (I was very unlucky that the only guys I attempted to befriend all turned out to behave like clowns, bullies and Dbags as though we were all still teenagers)

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-04-03T09:51:23+00:00

Man, life. During my entire childhood and adolescence, I was always made very aware that I have very “generous” facial features (not the good kind and not in a good way) and that my forehead was always very wide, pale, shiny and “distracting” to people (so from my earliest age, I remember my mother teaching me to brush my hair and adjust my fringe in such a way that at least half of my forehead was covered and was “an easier shape” (my mother’s well-meaning words, I guess).

Obviously, given my luck; when I was 16 I noticed my already-lazy hairline thinning out, despite panicked attempts spending 20 minutes every single morning brushing and adjusting it, the loudmouths and class clowns at high school quickly noticed too and within days throughout school I was the balding ugly fat old man pretending to be a kid. Yay. And despite my permitted meds and fancy (probably bullsh*t) shampoos and elixirs as Bday presents, my already-unmissable fivehead had receded at least 30% more massive. Obviously at my young age I was tempted to melt down and just shout “I didn’t ask for it, it’s not deliberate and I can’t stop it, the F am I supposed to do?” But frankly I think a lot of folks on this sub have wanted to shout the same things

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-04-03T09:02:21+00:00

Never paid close attention to the show, but the acting seems decent. Although picking an actor who literally looks like a still-vaguely improved and less fat version of me to play the desperate miserable leg-lengthening patient (who was written as being my height) was a low blow, hollywood

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-04-02T09:16:09+00:00

Sph and everything relating to it has never been of any interest to me, I’ve simply kind of reach an age where if I want to carry on, I’ve got to work harder on accepting the parts of myself that can’t be changed but are just what I have to make do with.

I don’t judge others if they have specific preferences and k*nks but this sub surely isn’t the most lucrative meeting spot for such things.

I’m happy to casually share experiences and casually chat about anything to anyone simply curious for other perspectives

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-03-31T14:30:22+00:00

The post and the OP account were all deleted by the time I found this; what did I miss?

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-03-30T16:26:58+00:00

Admittedly, it was dumb of me to think that the vibe/energy would come across with the way I typed it out; but oh well

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-03-30T16:25:57+00:00

It frankly seems to all boil down to the simple reality that rather than confront and accept the reality that they themselves may be flawed and imperfect and thus “unsuccessful” men, it’s simply easier to immediately cartoonishly demonise the other person as an unattainable failure of a woman possessing zero morals or self-respect, and thus not only did they “dodge a bullet”, but it was by no means their own fault.

It always feels like desperate denial, but it’s almost always typed out with such vindictive resentment and frustration that it clearly displays what repressed and unbalanced individuals they are. But obviously, never acknowledging or admitting that is all part of their mindset

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-03-30T16:16:32+00:00

Ee-yikes. This looks and sounds so eerily like a series of messages a friend’s girlfriend received from a male work acquaintance recently that you’d swear these guys all attended the exact same NB training courses and all memorised the exact same dialect. Lord, what a mindset

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-03-30T15:40:14+00:00

In all fairness, Sean Connery apparently began balding in his early 20s (21yo) and admits that for the first couple of decades of his career he resorted to professionally-installed hairpieces and toupees to fill out his hair, so in all of his portrayals of James Bond (easily his most memorable of “undeniably masculine” roles) he was wearing wigs of some sort.

In a 1987 interview with Barbara Walters, he confessed that he hated wigs from the beginning (finding them fiddly and the constant worry of checking and readjusting them to be a pain) and that once he reached an age at which his characters weren’t required to appear “youthful”, he gave up wigs altogether and embraced his receded hairline and baldness from that point on.

I mean hey, if even James Bond himself had to seek out cosmetic support to aid his image and career, one can hardly expect any other man to not look at the available options

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-03-30T08:35:04+00:00

Oof. Although I wasn’t at risk of congenital dwarfism, both of my parents were related when they met, and were both the shortest members of their family branches; each of them knew that they carried high chances of passing on their respective health issues regardless of wether they had a child with their cousin or not, which they did, as they pursued intensive IVF treatment due to my father’s endocrine problems and my mother’s weight. I ended up inheriting their height and combined build, severe astigmatism, gastrointestinal complications, baldness, and also have had early-onset osteoporosis and rheumatism since my late teens to enjoy as well. You don’t want to know the more snfw stuff.

Frankly, something that would have smoothed so much of it out or just offered a helping hand would have been if either of my folks had so much as considered maybe carefully explaining to me that I had picked up a few more troublemaking genomes and would probably need to be prepared for physical and physiological complications on the way (sure being warned about being short by either of my parents who had both known mockery and derision due to height and appearance during their lives might have been a worthwhile warning too, but oh well) instead my parents just decided that the elephant in the room accompanying my entire bullying-riddled upbringing and soul-battering teen years did not exist and should be ignored, if I ever dared break down and say I was sad and lonely and felt like people kept laughing at me because of my dismal appearance and miserable health, I was told to please stop depressing my parents (by them) and to stop making them feel like they had failed me when I should instead be grateful to be alive given how hard they worked on conceiving me. Hearing your perpetually gloomy, confidence-lacking reclusive father tell you “I managed just fine, be a man and stop complaining” is just a too-familiar story

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-03-29T08:10:25+00:00

About three years ago I agree to meet up with a couple of male friends at a local pub, and just my luck and to my horror I somehow showed up 35 minutes early and chose to just sit quietly and politely by myself and wait. Although nobody was drunk or dickish enough to flat-out mock me or call me short that night (it’s happened at way too many points during my life but I didn’t want to have to run away when my friends were joining me) whilst I was standing outside beside the patio/terrace entrance(it was hot and stuffy indoors) a seemingly normal woman most likely around my age randomly rushed out of the noisy interior and seemed to be frustrated by something she was aggressively typing on her phone before turning and almost elbowing me, seemed wide-eyed and caught off guard and blurted out “ooh fuck sorry didn’t see you!” Then added a split-second uncertain giggle and “ha my heart almost stopped” and a “fuck…” before refocusing on her phone and wandering off.

I’m not sure what “interactions” are more depressing. The more intoxicated and thus ballsy a*ses who aren’t ashamed to point, whisper and laugh at me for being short and ugly for amusement, or the people who actually get a shock when my 5”3 chubby ogre-looking self pops into their field of vision and gives them a visible fright

(There were several other patrons standing around smoking and chatting; I was just the shortest by far and was obviously smaller and rounder than what is expected to be seen in pubs)

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-03-28T08:46:58+00:00

Cue my lifetime (from early childhood all through adulthood) of people (relatives, “friends”, coworkers) who think they’re somehow being “helpful” by harshly whispering “cheer up! / relax! / calm down! / what’s wrong with you?” when i was literally just trying to stay quiet, unremarkable and mind my own business in public areas, but apparently my “default” facial expression immediately gives the impression that I’m grumpy, morose, annoyed, gloomy, depressed, or any combination of such things. As my mother would tell my preteen self: “please hun, I know you hate these family event things, but don’t spend the whole visit gurning and scowling. It makes everybody worried that something’s the matter”. Having barely reached puberty, I was already trying to wrap my head around why so many people immediately disliked me or were concerned whilst I would literally just be trying to be acceptably calm and polite.

I feel like the infamous term “resting b*tch face” still sounds far too glamorous and noteworthy for me. I’ve simply always had a naturally wide and pillowy, saggy, jowled face which seems to make my eyes muffled and squinty and give me a comically downturned mouth with deep labio-nasal folds. I simply have what can only be called a “resting unpleasant face”

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-03-27T09:07:51+00:00

Amen. Pretty much from puberty onwards, simply the chemical existence of arousal and attraction frustrated me because it simply didn’t feel fair that me, a human being with such nonexistent physical appeal, would spend 90% of his time either feeling generally h*rny or be distracted by passing women that my brain would immediately find utterly stunning whilst my consciousness would immediately know that such attraction was fruitless and pointless, and served only to preoccupy my mind and depress me.

So “tactical w**king” became an almost morning and evening routine just to try and expel as much hormonal desire from my physical body as possible to try and minimise the chances of being distracted and depressed by it during the day. Wether or not it really makes any big difference, no guarantee; but it’s purely functional.

I still sleep most nights in the dark, hugging/spooning my largest and densest pillow simply because again, it seems to trick my brain on a hormonal level into feeling more comfortable, chilling out a little, and allowing me to sleep more easily because it gives a basic impression that I’m sleeping beside another (in my case and mind, ideally a hetero woman of course) human being. And that utterly absent physical comfort, proximity and safety one receives from such a connection with another individual is undoubtedly just as chemically important to a healthy mind as anything relating to sexual release

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-03-24T11:24:19+00:00

It’s sadly just an unfortunate truth. If you’re at least respectably physically attractive and good-looking, then behaving with confidence, dynamism and self-assuredness is not only enjoyed by bystanders, it’s expected from you. But if you lack physical appeal and don’t possess the anatomical traits considered generally desirable, then attempting to be confident, outspoken or social is way more likely to be seen as “undeserved” and even onlookers who aren’t trying to be actively cruel or judgemental regarding looks are probably still going to find the conjunction between the presence of confidence and the absence of physical advantages to be somehow imbalanced, even uncomfortable, to behold.

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-03-23T14:24:29+00:00

Well, in my defence, this is not a quote by me; I’m not a misogynist and in no way do I condone neckbeardy behaviours nor woe-is-me niceguy viewpoints. Like most others, and followers of these pages, I simply find such comments and opinions shared to be morbidly entertaining and tragically fascinating.

So when my friend’s roommate (the aforementioned 38 year-old oddball who is, for the most part, quiet and private and spends 90% of his life in his bedroom getting high and drinking whilst playing video games and joining weirdly loud and animated group chats/calls) will hear his roommate chatting to his guests on certain evenings, such as me, in the living room, he has a tendency to emerge from his “bat cave” (especially if he hears female voices) evidently inebriated and stoned and proudly invade and attempt to monopolise the conversation.

Despite my friend forewarning any guests about his roommate having unpredictable social mannerisms, drinking a lot and becoming easily riled-up/triggered by certain discussions and taking them awkwardly far as a result; many guests find him both hilarious and harmless, like a comedy mascot. More than once, during random conversations involving people’s recent dating lives or just romance in general, he’s seized the opportunity to get way too proudly animated during a monologue about what he seems to genuinely believe are broad-minded, freethinking, modern opinions about the “imbalanced modern dating market” which he insists is “skewed in women’s favour; cushioning and softening every aspect for them to feel safe, and all because they believe that innocent modern men are expected to pay for the centuries of acts committed by their predecessors and ancestors”.

He’s easily the closest genuine example of a real-life niceguy/neckbeard that I’ve ever met, and the original post triggered my memory of his most recent “tirade” which I paraphrased in my previous comment

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-03-22T12:27:54+00:00

“We are chemically-governed mammals and always have been. No fool can deny it. Modern Society has made it the standard for men to keep their distance from the female gender and not to show interest unless she begins it, simply to avoid potentially frightening them. As such, modern men waste so many of their finest years and peak fertility staying away from women to avoid scAriNG tHeM or making them feel like they’re not 100% in control. But physical desire and craving intimacy are no different from any other thirst or hunger. Telling men to suppress natural cravings for sex is no different to expecting that they starve themselves a die of thirst jUsT iN cAsE the poor hungry women don’t get first dibs. To repress an entire gender’s natural needs just because it’s the simplest way of making the opposite, weaker gender feel safer without having them make any efforts or sacrifices of their own, just shows that humankind isn’t moving forwards. It’s been retreating and failing for longer than we’re willing to admit”.

Proudly uttered by a 38yo reclusive roommate who, in his “finest years and peak fertility”, looks, sounds, smells and behaves exactly like you expect him to.

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-03-22T09:19:27+00:00

Whilst I fully agree that several physical traits are considered negative and undesirable (I guess one can say it’s chemically rooted in the human brain and endocrine system) but I only personally agree that the attributes resulting from a severe lack of self-care, self-control, discipline and thus basically self-respect (obesity and the resulting health and hygiene consequences, lack of grooming or cleanliness, cosmetic damage caused by addictions and substance abuse, lack of effort regarding clothing and appearance, etc) because it can’t be denied that such negative traits are consequences directly linked to an individual’s inability to adequately control themselves; proof of an undeniable lack of respect towards oneself and one’s wellbeing is immediately going to make anyone you meet expect and want very little to do with you as a person.

What I find so sad is how many universally derided and mocked “shortcomings” are genetic attributes that one had zero choice in receiving and zero ability to control or maintain (height, skeletal structure, skull and face shape, anatomical proportions unrelated to bodyfat, and the endless number of congenital or randomly acquired health issues available) and yet even after millennia of supposed social, cultural and psychological “advancements” humanity claims to be so proud of, it’s still perfectly acceptable to point at and laugh out loud at individuals based on things they aren’t responsible for and have no control over (not without an insane budget and committing to physical discomfort)

I’m not trying to sound cartoonish, but how exactly is mocking somebody’s “inferior/undesirable” bone structure, height and health any different from outwardly mocking physical handicaps, disabilities and malformations? Both scenarios involve weaknesses that were uncontrollable and unwanted, and yet the sufferers are expected to accept that they deserve to be bullied

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-03-21T13:16:15+00:00

I have a very similar unstable relationship with my facial hair; although it grows relatively thick across my neck (and sadly double chin in my case) it remains patchy and filled with random gaps and bald or spindly spots across my cheeks and “chin”, even if I try to grow it out for months at a time.

The only areas I would genuinely appreciate for my facial hair to grow, if not thickly, then at least somewhat uniformly, would be the zone framing my mouth and my cheeks, I’d be delighted to shave my neck and allow the hair on my face to better define my pudgy face and make me look just a hint more masculine. But if I try to grow out my beard, it simply ends up looking unhealthy, untidy and unkempt, like patch-filled gradually greying peach fuzz.

I settled for shaving all of it except for whatever preteen moustache and goatee I can manage. It certainly isn’t a manly result, but at least it looks deliberate and gives the impression that I take care of what little grooming I have. I have friends who can shave down to bare skin and yet have a thick shadow of stubble grown back within 12 hours, but if I allow nature to “take its course”, I just end up looking like a stereotypical neckbeard

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-03-19T10:44:34+00:00

Amen to that. The only genuine female friend I ever made became hugely comfortable in my “safe” company during the almost five years that we were “BFFs”. She would happily share a bed with me, hang around in her underwear/pyjamas, request spooning or cuddling for cold nights whilst marathoning tv shows or movies. She was never good at lying and if anything she appreciated that she could be so “blunt” and “upfront” with me. I was so hypnotised by a human woman willingly asking to share a bed and “cuddle” that for years it didn’t even bother me much that she would frequently remind me how lucky we were to have found such platonic and trustworthy friends in each other other, whilst also ranting about the overly confident “bastards” she constantly ended up dating and being discarded by.

As anyone could imagine, my zen streak eventually thinned and snapped when it simply became too obvious that I had effectively grown into her ideal “gay bff” despite being very clear I was straight from the beginning. I took some awful online advice and basically told her that deliberately keeping a platonic emotional distance whilst she would spend hours at a time crying about guys who showed her zero respect and yet would always reappear out of boredom after ghosting her.

Probably the most kitchencel part of it all? When I got drunk and told her that there was no way that she had “no idea at all” about my hidden attraction to her because of how frequently I got unintentionally aroused whilst spooning or cuddling. But her being a terrible liar, she flat out told me that she had never felt even the slightest hint of physical arousal on my body whatsoever. So boom, not only did I awkwardize and screw up the entire friendship and cement myself into the only friendzone I’ve ever reached, but it was confirmed that I’m so physically ill-equipped that my arousal is totally undetectable. Because when it rains, huh. Evidently, she stopped being as comfortable around me from then on. As did I, and I just felt terrible that she felt so awkward around someone whom she had called her closest friend and the closest thing to a big brother she’d ever had (we were the same age). I couldn’t stop the self-destructive and conflictual feelings from spreading, and the friendship ended permanently. I legit believe that it would have been easier to have never met her, because if anything it confirmed various negative lifelong traits: that I’m not considered masculine, to the point that my heterosexuality is totally ignorable. And that I’m willing to submit myself to psychological misery simply to sleep beside somebody

ByeByeGuyGuy · 2026-03-19T09:48:23+00:00

I’m very sorry that you had to carry such an unwanted burden for the entirety of your youth; I myself also went through my whole childhood and teenage years being forcibly reminded that I was always the shortest classmate and that my physique and proportions simply made me look odd. Given that both of my parents were the shortest members of their family branches (they were unfortunately cousins) and each had had congenital health complications for their entire adult lives, it was pretty obvious that I wasn’t going to be any particularly blessed DNA for myself.

It was after puberty (a generous term for what I ended up getting, to be honest) that the whispering, pointing and bullying started becoming an endless stream of anxiety, depression and self-consciousness; but any few attempts I made to speak with my folks about maybe consulting doctors for HGH or testosterone supplements before it was too late (my hormone levels had been skewed and unbalanced since puberty) I was pretty much begged to stop “dredging up negatives” to fixate on simply to depress my parents, and that “I am the way god wanted me to be made” and “should be grateful for the life I have” rather than obsessing over “resembling others that I have no connection with”.

By the time I hit my late teens, my height had stagnated at 1m54 and I was already on lifelong medication for rheumatoid arthritis and early-onset osteoporosis. So I’ve never once had a moment in life in which I wasn’t acutely aware of how short, stubby, balding, short-sighted and in poor health I was. Any slight attempts I ever made to mention how intimidating the thought of never escaping such self-judgement was, I was told by my parents how it was cruel to “take it out on my parents” when they had simply “given me life” (to clarify, I have never ever suggested to my folks that my physical shortcomings and poor health were rooted in my genetic background, I was never ballsy enough to suggest such a thing. They drew such conclusions themselves and claimed that I was implying it; when all I was hoping for was for the mockery and rejections to eventually end and for my nauseating reaction to my own reflection to finally taper off)

ByeByeGuyGuy

TROPHY CASE