I’ve been with my boyfriend for about a year now and he keeps putting me down, especially about my appearance and the way I look and it’s making me feel bad about myself and lowering my self confidence. Thing is I know I am attractive and I get a lot of male attention. But he seems to want me to believe I’m ugly and unattractive.
I’ve recently lost a lot of weight and I’m proud of my results and we were on a walk the other day and he grabbed my hips with both his hands and said “oooh look you’ve got love handles!”. This made me feel really bad about myself so I challenged him on that and he said ‘it’s not an insult it’s a compliment it means you’ve got shapely hips’
Then another time I was talking to him about teeth and going to the dentist and he said ‘you need to get adult braces because your teeth overlap at the front’. I felt so self conscious of my teeth and now whenever I smile I want to cover my mouth.
On a separate occasion I was looking at gym clothes and showed him this gym top I really liked the look of. I showed him the picture of what it looked like on the model and asked what he thought of it and whether I should buy it, and he said ‘it looks good on the model but I don’t think you’d pull that outfit off well like she does’. And then I told him I felt offended by that and he just started to laugh.
Another time we were both out for dinner together and I was having a self conscious day about my body and not feeling confident wearing a particular dress which was tight around my stomach and showed some fat. Then he didn’t try to support me he just said ‘you just need to tone up at the gym, I’ll show you how to do that’. Bearing in mind, I’m the lightest weight I’ve ever been.
He also likes to choose what I wear but all the outfits he picks out for me are granny dresses and don’t flatter me or show off my curves. He always seems to have something bad to say if I dress revealing.
Why does he keep insulting my appearance and making me feel bad about myself?
