A couple of months ago, my boyfriend was comparing me to one of his friends because we’re both blonde and have tattoos. I was feeling REALLY bad about my body image at the time for the first time in years (when I was younger, I used to struggle with anorexia, then binge eating disorder, and now I still kinda deal with dysmorphia— he knows all of this and he knew I was having a rough week with it), so I made a dumb comment. I said, “I think more people would consider her to be attractive than me.” He immediately said, “yeah, that’s true.”
Again, I want to reiterate that these days, I am pretty good about not putting myself down and my self esteem is usually solid, but that was a particularly tough week.
I know I set him up for that, so I was sad, but I wasn’t mad. But then he kinda sorta laughed and told me how ridiculous he thought it was that I was so sad when he was just stating facts. He said that she’s more conventionally attractive but that he PERSONALLY finds me more attractive, so I shouldn’t care. He started to comparing himself to some of his male friends and saying he thought they were hotter than him, but he didn’t care, with the implication that if he doesn’t care, I shouldn’t care if his female friends are hotter than me.
It may be silly, but I was messed up by that interaction for weeks. I have worked so hard to like how I look. That said, again, I blurted out the self-deprecating comment and it would have been manipulative of me to be angry at him for agreeing. However, he recently brought it back up again out of the blue, knowing it hurt me the first time, and attempted to rehash the whole thing, again comparing me to his hot friend who he says is “more conventionally attractive”. He didn’t understand why I didn’t want to talk about it again.
Am I too sensitive or is this not very kind/normal? I know I am very touchy about my appearance.
We’ve been dating for 7 months.