You Don't Have Trouble Making Female Friends Because You're Too Hot

Take it from me, someone who used to have trouble making female friends: women are not all jealous of you.

Since starting this Substack and writing about my difficulties making friends, especially as a child but also into young adulthood, I’ve bumped up against one theory over and over again: what if women have disliked me for no good reason at all, and they’re simply jealous of me for being hot?

Your words, not mine! Many of you have suggested that my social ills are a product of being too hot for my dorky personality (I concede my social skills were bad for most of my life, but my hotness, if it exists, is irrelevant.) Without getting into the nitty-gritty of whether I’m actually that hot, because obviously a lot of this is subjective and the only opinion that matters is my husband’s, you’re just going to have to take my word that especially in my teens and twenties, I was what one would consider “reasonably attractive”—not a model, but cute and in very good shape—and I struggled to make female friends.

Does that attractiveness explain why women typically haven’t liked me? Is this why, when I worked at a big tech company, I was the most hated woman in the office? The clues are all there: I’ve never struggled to make friends with men. My husband’s friends have all liked me. Women have, at times, spread baseless sexual rumors about me (shoutout to the girl who told my husband, right after he met me, that I was a “huge slut.” I would never be so forward as to directly ask him to rail my brains out, but you really helped us move things along.)

But I don’t think that’s it, and I don’t think this is the answer for many other decent-looking, yet friendless women. But I get it. It’s extremely tempting to assume it is.